London Spirituality Network Blog

Learning to slow down. Learning to pay attention. It’s a difficult task for any of us, and it seems to be getting harder day after day. There’s a story that I often tell at the beginning of meetings when everyone is gathering and chatting about the traffic or the funny thing that happened in the office today, or complaining about the rush it was to get the kids fed before tearing out of the house. When I’ve been rushed and trying to get too much done and to be in too many places, it reminds me about getting someplace.

It seems that there was a traveller in Africa, who needed to travel a long distance very quickly with a great amount of cargo. He hired many men and one to organize them who spoke his language and theirs. They walked quickly from early in the morning until they could barely see, and then they would have a quick meal, rest, and be walking again as the sun rose in the morning. They did this for several days until they were within a few hours of their destination. All the men who had been carrying the cargo stopped, set down their burdens and waited. The traveller was mystified and not a little annoyed. “Why have they stopped? Why won’t they get up and keep going? We’re nearly there!” he asked angrily. “Oh,” said the overseer, “they say they must stop and wait for their souls to catch up with them.”

I suspect that there are those of you out there who know this experience well: you’ve arrived in body, but instead of being right here, present to this moment and what’s going on now, you’re making lists and rerunning your own little home movies of the conversation you had with your son yesterday afternoon or the argument you had with your wife this morning. Your soul hasn’t yet caught up with where you are.

This is one variety of insight that people are referring to when they speak of spirituality, a term that is as vague as could be, often difficult to decipher.

Just what is spirituality? Go into any bookstore and you can find shelf after shelf of inspirational books whose purpose is that of spiritual development or enrichment. There are whole shelves devoted to books on the study of angels, or the experience of angels. Our culture as a whole is trying to find something that gives us a sense of groundedness and wholeness. If it can’t be found in traditional churches, people will look for something that can do the job: books on simplicity, workshops on the soul, discussion groups, and all sorts of avenues and paths to find a centre in the midst of fragmentation and meaninglessness. Our lives are increasingly filled with details and trivial matters, it seems, and the pace gets faster and faster as the days go by. Many go looking for a way to find what can help them to be at peace, to find themselves, and to be connected to those powers that are beyond our ability to control or command.

Wendell Berry describes those powers and forces beyond our control well as he reflects on his father and his life. In a conversation toward the end of his life, his father acknowledges that he has had less control over the shape of his life than he had thought. “I have had a wonderful life, and I have had nothing to do with it.” Berry’s comment on his father’s exclamation is worth hearing:

when we choose

the way by which our only life

is lived, we chose and do not know

what we have chosen, for this

is the heart’s choice, not the mind’s;

to be true to the heart’s one choice

is the long labor of the mind.

He chose, imperfectly as we must,

the rule of love, and learned

through years of light what darkly

he had chosen: his life, his place,

our place, our lives.

The work of spirituality is just this work: that we learn through years of light what darkly we choose, each day, each minute. We learn to love our lives again and again and again.

What the spiritual seekers are trying to find are those practices and ideas that help them to lead better, truer lives. What they seek is a sense of groundedness to the powers that be.

This search is, in my experience, grounded in those qualities that need not call upon a god or goddess to be true and deep: a fascination with the human, recognition of our own responsibility for our lives and the world, and a belief in our capacity to change the world. The paths that seekers use are varied as there are people who search. They – we – seek the opportunity to discover and to create ways of being in the world that promote attention, thankfulness, and the possibility of transformation in the small moments where the deepest meaning lies. It isn’t an escape from the human, but a means for exploring human experiences of loss and grief, of hope and promise, of pain and helplessness, of the power of loving, and of the possibility of healing. It isn’t a giving up of power to a world that is unseen and unseeable, but rather the claiming of responsibility for our lives and our world, seeking to find those ways of living that focus our attention on what is most important. That focus is essential because what we do in the world, how we live expresses a hopefulness, and optimism that it is possible to change the world, and the capacity to make that change at its most powerful lies in the simple and ordinary works of our hearts and hands.

Ram Dass tells a story about being surveyed about helping. In a conversation that took some wild turns, he finally notes that he, and probably everyone else, is trying to make the best of a nutty situation. That, finally, is what each of us must do: try to make the best of what is handed to us in our lives, trying to make sense of our experiences, trying to live true to values that seem to be the most important and worthy. Our paths are diverse, using all the diverse tools available to us: wisdom and practices from ancient and modern times, the workings of science, the scriptures of our own lives, the companionship of community.