Recently I looked at the website of the Spirituality Practice. We find this advertises itself as a “Resource for Spiritual Journeys” and that is a good description. The home page contains a short article by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, who sponsor this website and are long-time writers in spirituality. The title for my inspirational piece is a steal of their title: What is Everyday Spirituality? I thought it might be a good time to re-visit a basic idea in my long years of writing on this topic. They are always helpful to me,
The first thing they say resonates with my own experience. They confess, “First, perhaps we should say that it is not the kind of spirituality we grew up with.” Me either! Elaborating, they quip “We were taught that spirituality was the part of religion that focused on the ‘inner life.’ It was something that you did in a special place or time.” Often it is contrasted with doing things in life---ministry and service. The monastic tradition often referred to the contemplative life and the active life. Monks were devoted to the former. All of us who are married with kids and work in the world are engaged in the active life. Our job is to figure out how to be religious or spiritual while being “a normal human being.”
Neither the Brussats nor I think this is a valid distinction. And neither do most of the monks I know. The same thing happened to the Brussats that happened to me. They began to read and study some things. As they put it, “As we became familiar with more traditions, however, we discovered that many of them encouraged people to engage in a search for the sacred (one definition of spirituality) as they went about the activities of their everyday lives.”
I admit I like this definition of spirituality. At least since college, I have been in search for the sacred. I am sure I would not have put it that way as a boy. Likely, I would have said- search for God. Of course, I have studied enough theology now to know that God is sacred. God is holy. And God is many other things. These are all descriptions of who God is and, sometimes, what God does, i.e. create. I learned that I, too, can become holy by sharing in the Presence of God and participating in God’s ways. This certainly does implicate service and ministry. And surely, our call is to do this in our own world---in the everyday.
The Brussats wanted to pursue this notion of spirituality of the everyday life. They are intrigued “how daily life can be a spiritual practice.” Thinking about this yields a couple thoughts. The initial thought is so obvious it can be overlooked. The everyday life is a given---at least until we are dead! We live every day or we don’t live at all. The question is whether that everyday living can become spiritual and whether it can be a spiritual practice? I want to say yes, and they do say yes.
They move to what I consider the key point in the little article. They suggest that we “recognize that spirituality is a way of life, and as such, it cannot be separated from our everyday activities.” They follow up with a quotation from John Shea, Catholic theologian. Shea tells us, “The spiritual life is, at root, a matter of seeing. It is all of life seen from a certain perspective.” This is such a rich vein of thought; it is worth pausing and parsing.
I love the idea that spirituality is a matter of seeing. This resonates with something Richard Rohr describes in his book, Everything Belongs. Maybe it is because I am a visual person. I learn best by seeing. I know some folks learn by auditory---hearing is key for them. And there are other forms of learning. However, seeing invites us unto a discussion of perspective and perceiving. To become spiritual means to acquire the perspective that we do it in our everyday lives.
The Brussats offer a string of words describing our everyday lives---waking, sleeping, eating, drinking and a host of more everyday words. They affirm that “Spirit suffuses everything…” this merely means that Spirit is everywhere all the time. Effectively, we cannot avoid the Spirit and the spiritual. What we can avoid is seeing it and perceiving that our lives are spiritual. Spirituality, then, is coming to see it. Again, seeing is crucial.
I round off this inspirational piece quoting them saying, if effect, what was just affirmed. They conclude, “so the spiritual life is simply life, wherever and whatever, seen from the vantage point of spirit.” On one hand, this makes spirituality and being spiritual easy. We don’t have to move to a monastery or go on a retreat. We don’t have to learn Greek and study the history of Islam. We have to learn to see!
It is deceiving because we know we already see. Clearly, the point is we don’t see the spiritual. It means much of our daily seeing is misperception. For example, we see beauty and think we are the sole creators of it. We have not seen the fingerprints of God all over this beautiful world. Maybe that is why kids are so good at it.
I appreciate this. It reminds me to spend a little more time seeing. Maybe I can hang out with someone with good spiritual eyesight and they can help me grow in this process.
Those of us who have read theology or, perhaps, those who are people of faith and are old enough might well recognize this title as a reminder of the late Jewish philosopher and theologian, Martin Buber. I remember reading Buber’s book, I and Thou , when I was in college in the 1960s. It was already a famous book by then. I am not sure I fully understood it, but that would not be the last time I read it. It has been a while since I looked at the book. Buber came up in a conversation with a friend who asked if I had seen the recent article by David Brooks? I had not seen it, but when I was told about it, I knew I would quickly locate and read that piece. I very much like what Brooks decides to write about and what he contributes to societal conversation. I wish more people read him and took him seriously. Brooks’ article focused on the 2016 contentious election. He provocatively suggests, “Read Buber, Not the Polls!” I think Brooks puts
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