What Is This Thing Called Spirituality?

A sermon delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation (Blacksburg, VA), January 22, 2006, by the Reverend Christine Brownlie.

Spirituality: What is it? What does it look-taste-sound-feel like? Do Unitarian Universalists really have a spirituality that is our own? Or are we forced to borrow from other traditions—traditions that some of us left long ago and might not want to engage with again? Does the growing interest in spirituality within our movement mean that we’re going to drop our historic commitment to reason? Or will it open us to a side of our humanity that has been neglected by our rejection of traditional religious language and practices? Is spirituality just a buzzword? A catch-all for anything and everything? Or does it describe a genre of human experience that crosses the boundaries of time and culture, and is important to our emotional well-being?

Spirituality is “in” and religion is “out” — or at least not the be-all and end-all that it once was. A growing number of Americans describe themselves as “not religious but very spiritual” — even though they belong to a traditional religious organization. Trendy magazines offer advice on ancient practices and their pages include lots of ads for all sorts of paraphernalia: clothing, mats, cushions, instructional tapes, books, and more. It’s become a major industry, a new and growing marketing opportunity. But let’s return to the basic question. What is spirituality, and does it have a place in our congregations?

I’d like to start by looking at what many of us think of as the alternative side of the coin: traditional religions. There are several hallmarks that separate then from spirituality. Religions are grounded stories or scriptures that are the basis for the creeds and doctrines of the faith. These creeds and doctrines have been developed over time by a series of believers, not just one person. Most religions include rituals and traditions that involve the veneration of a divine figure, that reinforce an important belief, or the commemoration of a significant event in the story of that faith. An example of a religious ritual that meets all three criteria would be Christian practices of baptism and communion .

Community is essential for the practice of religion. Fellow believers gather to worship, to support each other, and to keep traditions and practices alive. If a believer wishes to participate in certain rituals and traditions of a community, it may be necessary to go to a particular place to do so: a temple, synagogue, church, or other “sacred” space.

Religion usually includes a hierarchy of power and knowledge. There is a division between the laity or the people, and the clergy or accepted teachers. The clergy and teachers are entrusted with the truths of the faith, and one role of these authorities is to watch over the people so that they don’t stray into false beliefs and heresies.

These are some of the hallmarks of spirituality that work for me. Spirituality is rooted in personal experience and is focused on the inner life of the individual. Spirituality values experiences of emotion revelation, and intuition above strict adherence to doctrines and creeds or approved practices. The practices, images, and beliefs associated with spirituality may be based on the framework of a particular religious tradition but they may also be changed according to the desires and needs of the individual. I have seen Christian youth use chips and Coke for communion.

People who describe themselves as spiritual are not necessarily outside of formal religion. A believer in a particular tradition may have a deep spiritual experience during a traditional religious ceremony. But the creeds, doctrines, rituals, and theology of that faith do not tightly bind spirituality.

For those who describe themselves as “mostly spiritual,” the focus of spiritual development is the relationship between themselves and something beyond the material world that we live within. We may choose to call that something beyond “God,” “the divine,” the Self,” or something else that is descriptive, but not defining.

This sense of a transcendent something can’t be proven by reason or some method of logic. But don’t jump to the conclusion that spirituality is somehow anti-intellectual or against science. Throughout the ages, there have been spiritual seekers who also relied on rational thought, intellectual rigor, scientific discovery, and the advances brought about by the human mind as tools. These seekers simply see their spirituality and their reason as important but very different aspects of their lives and humanity.

Healthy spirituality is neither narcissistic nor an easy way out of the problems of life. Nor does it have to be a solitary pursuit. A follower of a spiritual path will often seek help and encouragement through reading, through conversations with a teacher or with a group of like-minded people. Many UU congregations have small groups that appeal to followers of a particular spiritual path that is based in Buddhism, Christianity, Wicca, Judaism, or just personal spiritual growth.

Some of us who are long-time UUs may get a little nervous when we hear people talking about spirituality. Many of us left the church of our childhood because we found the doctrines, creeds, and rituals meaningless and hard to accept. We can’t quite see how spirituality fits in with our values of reason, intellectual rigor, the responsible search for truth, or our Humanist roots.

We should not forget that our UU Principles and Purposes make reference to the nurture of individual spiritual growth. The statement that describes our sources of religious authority refers to the “direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.” I know that some UUs who read or hear those words believe that these poetic phrases don’t really say much to our Humanist values. For some, this spirituality thing is too fuzzy to take seriously. They see it as New Age stuff that has no place in our way of the spirit.

The truth is that this understanding of spirituality has deep roots in our Unitarian history. In my opinion, it’s high time that we re-acquainted ourselves with this part of our past. I would have us reclaim it as something that helps to bring balance to our shared life, especially now, when so many are expressing a need for “something more” in our services and religious-education programs. We don’t have to invent that “something more” ourselves. We don’t have feel that our way of the spirit is bereft and lacking.

UU minister David Robinson addresses this sense of deprivation with these words.

“Like a pauper who searches for the next meal, never knowing of the relatives whose will would make him rich, American Unitarians lament their vague religious identity ...”

Robinson goes on to say that many UUs express their longing for spirituality as a "feeling or hunger for a deeper inner life and a more profound experience of the world that we share.” He claims that

“We're haunted by the specter of our own superficiality, the uneasy feeling that life is sliding by and leaving no deep mark on us, that we're being cheated of some version of real experience that would add marrow to the dry bones of our daily routine.”

Some of us have devised ways of dealing with this hunger, but we've found it has a “curious persistence." According to Robinson, the irony and the good news is that as Unitarians, we stand on the richest theological legacy of any American denomination.

A large portion of this legacy comes to us by way of the Transcendentalist movement that was an offshoot of the early Unitarian Church. Think of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Ellery Channing, and Margaret Fuller. Like many modern Unitarian Universalists, they too complained that the Unitarian church of their day was overly intellectual, too focused on outward things, and not focused enough on the inward life. Like many of us, they longed for a deepening of the sense of soul or spirit and a connection to the transcendent powers of life. They too sought to discover their “true selves” and to grow that true self to the fullest expression of its unique potential.

The spirituality of the Transcendentalists was grounded in William Ellery Channing’s ideal of self-culture. A leading Unitarian minister of the day, Channing held that the goal of the religious life was the culture or cultivation of one's inner spiritual nature. Channing used these words in one of his sermons on this ideal:

“To cultivate any thing, be it a plant, an animal, a mind, is to make it grow. Growth, expansion are the ends of life. Nothing admits culture but that which has a principle of life, and thus capable of being expanded. He, therefore, who does what he can to unfold all his powers or capacities, especially his nobler ones, so as to become a well-proportioned, vigorous, excellent, happy being, practices self-culture.”

(Despite the male-focused language of his day, Channing made it clear that women were just as capable of self-culture as men.)

Channing believed that just as the potential for spiritual growth is limitless, a correspondingly endless self-discipline is necessary to achieve it. He taught that the fruits of self-culture were not just for the individual seeker. The virtues, strengths, and talents that flourish through self-discipline and self-exploration were to be carried into the world by working for the good of others. Channing and his followers were convinced that there was a profound link between self-culture and social action. Important reformers like Elizabeth Peabody, Dorothea Dix, and Horace Mann came from Channing’s congregation.

The Transcendentalists saw the work of self-culture as our story of salvation. This guiding principle was their foundations for their lives and pursuits, their methods of spiritual discipline, their experiments with utopian communities and their work in the social reform movements of the day. Feminist Margaret Fuller noted in her Memoirs:

“Very early I knew that the only object in life was to grow. I was often false to this knowledge, in idolatries of particular objects, or impatient longings for happiness, but I have never lost sight of it, have always been controlled by it, and this first gift of love has never been superseded by a later love.”

Their spiritual quest included practices such as journaling and other forms of writing, and reading. They were voracious readers of in many fields: philosophy, history, literary essays to world religion, and science. They studied foreign languages so that they were not limited to books published in English. They elevated the art of conversation to new heights through the Transcendentalist Club and the salons that Margaret Fuller and other women hosted for the ladies of the neighborhood in order to encourage their engagement with the world of ideas.

Contemplation was another form of spiritual discipline that these seekers valued. They reflected on their own human nature: what it was that gave value and meaning to human existence, how to know the good and to act on it, the beauty and wonder of the natural world, the idea of the divine, the agony of grief and suffering, the meaning of death. Thoreau and Emerson claimed that nature was the best temple for this practice and they took long walks in all sorts of weather. Emerson wrote

“Our feeling in the presence of nature is an admonishing hint. Go and hear in a woodland valley the harmless roarings of the South wind and see the shining boughs of the trees in the sun, the swift sailing clouds, and you shall think a man is a fool to be mean and unhappy when every day is made illustrious by these splendid shows. Then falls the enchanting night; all the trees are wind-harps; out shine the stars; and we say, Blessed by light and darkness, ebb and flow, cold and heat, these restless pulsations of nature which throb for us. In the presence of nature a man of feeling is not suffered to lose sight of the instant creation. The world was not made a great while ago. Nature is an Eternal Now.”

Margaret Fuller describes a profound experience in her Memoirs. She had been deeply sad, and had come to feel that as a progressive feminist, she was out of place in a world that did not value the contributions of women. Even her church did not offer any spiritual comfort. Near the end of a long contemplative walk, she had an unusual, mystical experience:

“I saw there was no self; that selfishness was all folly, and the result of circumstance; that it was only because I thought the self real that I suffered; that I had only to live in the idea of the all, and all was mine. This truth came to me, and I received it unhesitatingly; so that I was for that hour taken up into God. In that true ray most of the relations of earth seemed mere films, phenomena.”

These words might be startling, even off-putting for some of us. It may be that we can’t grasp what she’s talking about. That’s all right, as long as we don’t dismiss this account of Fuller’s experience as unacceptable because it does not fit into to our own experiences. Spirituality asks us to make room for mystery, for accepting that someone else’s longings and perceptions even when their experiences and perceptions are very different from our own. We don’t have to adopt what doesn’t feel true and right to us, but I believe we should be equally reluctant to limit someone else’s quest for the truths that speak to their understanding and longings

I think of spiritual experiences as similar to the experiences of listening to music. This is a form of expression that speaks to me, sometimes with profound emotion. Sometimes, someone I feel close to tells me that he or she doesn’t like a particular genre of music that I enjoy, be it jazz or gospel. I’m baffled by this, but I can’t argue with the truth of what they are telling me, because I’ve had a similar experience.

Last summer I visited my son Matt, who lives in Houston. He was eager to take me to a place that is special to him, the Mark Rothko Chapel. This is an interdenominational chapel that was designed to be used by the community, and it houses twelve of Rothko’s modern expressionist works.

We entered the main room. There were large canvass panels on each wall. The panels were entirely covered with paint: dark brown, deep gray, black, and a very dark purple. Color was layered over color with no suggestion anything recognizable. I sat, looking at each panel and I felt lost, uncertain. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to see. Matt had talked about the spiritual qualities that he experienced in this space, but I was feeling nothing. In the chapel guest book I’d read the words of visitors like myself, reporting deeply emotional experience as they sat in this space. Some said they were moved to tears. But I felt only confusion, and after a while … boredom.

As we were leaving, Matt asked me what I thought about this place and my experience there. I was honest and told him that I didn’t have much to say except that I didn’t “get it.” And then I surprised Matt and myself by saying that the next time I came for a visit, I would like to go back. I’m not ready to say that there’s nothing there for me — not yet. I know that spiritual experiences can’t be forced or predicted. I’m ready to sit in this space again and see if there is something there that touches my heart and soul.

What is spirituality? I like the words of the Rev. Charles Howe, who defines spirituality as

“An awareness of the potential presence of the holy, creative spirit in all people — a spirit that manifests itself in freedom, and in acts of justice, compassion and love; a willingness to be transformed or inspired by a mystical experience, a discovery, an experience of beauty, awe or love, or the inspiring words or actions of another person.”

I believe that our tradition offers us a form of spiritual discipline and practice that gives us strength to continue the work of personal growth. It encourages us in the quest for freedom and justice for all — even when the “realists” tell us that our cause is hopeless. Our spiritual vision gives us a window into beauty and wonder, when the realities of our life seem to block our view. It saves us from hatred, shame, and fear when the forces all around us would drive us into that prison.

If you would be a spiritual seeker, then cultivate that divine seed with you. Allow yourself to grow and bloom in unexpected ways. Be led by that transforming power of love and live in the Eternal Now!

May it be so!

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