People today yearn for spiritual things but are less and less attracted to churches. Religion provides an organized way to delve into spiritual matters, but most people would rather wing it. Why call yourself Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, or Jew when you can simply be a spiritual person? This attractive idea suggests that we should be able to think these things out for ourselves and not have doctrinal beliefs demanded of us. I am a Jesus follower, but my church attendance is very sporadic.
Believers within the established religions might think people who call themselves spiritual are just being lazy. Maybe it is simply laziness, but several other possibilities present themselves. Maybe spiritual people admit they sense something but don’t know what it is. Perhaps they are also turned off by the hypocrisy of many religious people or the history of awful things perpetrated by believers. Maybe they previously held to a particular religion but saw too much bad stuff, like sexual abuse, power-grabbing, infighting, gossip, embezzlement, or unbridled hate speech.
I’ve come to respect people who both say they are spiritual and have put some thought into it. Their position is not utterly agnostic. They care about finding the best way to live and getting better at living that way. Trying to be good people is commendable, but they also admit that they suspect something more is happening. Maybe there’s a god. Maybe there’s some kind of benevolent force like in Star Wars. Whatever it is, they sense it and aren’t afraid to say so.
An attractive freedom goes with being spiritual. You don’t have to do much; no one expects much of you. The spiritual person might choose agnosticism. To be utterly unspiritual, such as with an atheist, takes some work. Since atheism is unprovable, the same as theism, it ends up being just another religion.
To be a responsible spiritual person, however, you’d have to spend a little time figuring out more about that feeling. What do you mean by saying that you are spiritual? This is a crucial question!
To begin, we need to define “spirit” and notice its connection to the uncertainty of belief. Here, I don’t mean merely religious belief. All humans engage in everyday beliefs to get by in the world. A million things about life are uncertain. We each, mostly subconsciously, gather evidence about things and workings, then choose actions that seem to give the best chance of success. Some actions come from calculations; some come from gut feelings.
Since spiritual people run around free of church doctrine, they are often wishy-washy about their spirituality. Are they just lazy? Is it merely shorthand for trying to be a responsible citizen or a “good” person without commitment? Some nature-loving people say it’s a feeling of connecting to the Earth and its creatures. Some more philosophical types say the connection is to whatever unknown power caused the Universe or the scientific laws that seem to undergird everything. Others say something outside of themselves seems to convey meaning to their lives and want to tap into it. Most people would probably say it is a feeling of connectedness, whether to other people, nature, or God.
Still, the label “spiritual” implies a belief in spirit. Spirit can be something entirely unrelated to religion. Take “team spirit” at football games. People feel connected when many other people think and feel the same way. It is encouraging and community-building. To be a respected member of a group is fulfilling, even if the group is not religious.
But if people are earnest about being spiritual, they will say that connectedness is more than people thinking the same way. Spiritual people seek goodness and positiveness, aligning themselves with ways that enhance life. People with group spirit can work together toward good things or bad things. Inner city gang members who steal and kill can be said to align with a spirit of evil. No spiritual person wants to be evil. They want to be a part of forces of positivity.
Is life-giving positivity an aspect of the physical world or the ordering of the Universe? If you suddenly found yourself falling into a black hole, you might not think so. But just because this speck of Earth is the only hospitable place we know of in a seemingly infinite Universe does not rule out that life itself is good and that scientific laws encourage life. An inherent life force is unprovable, of course. But if people feel it, even if they cannot pin it down, maybe they are entitled to explore this life-affirming intuition.
The Christian point of view is that a Creator has made everything. Their metaphors see God as a kind of person, maybe an old white-bearded, wise, and benevolent grandfather. One can accept this idea without being a Christian or by framing the positive force with other metaphors. Maybe this Creator is impersonal yet designed to reward good rather than evil. C.S. Lewis thought pantheism was the best alternative to Christianity.
Christians also believe in a “Holy Spirit.” But their metaphors about this can also get wishy-washy. I am a Christian, but I think we run into trouble if we imagine the Holy Spirit takes up space and moves around, here now and over there later. Just as non-religious spiritual people need to do, Christians should search for the best metaphors to describe their intuitions. Perhaps the Holy Spirit is simply the fact that the Creator made each sand grain and atom and is, therefore, present in everything.
Comparing metaphors about spirituality is similar to comparing beliefs. We know that some beliefs are simply wrong. We can kindly indulge a person who believes in their astrological sign and horoscope while also asking how constellations made of stars light-years apart from each other, which happen to look like something from our earthly point of view, can have to do with us. We can apply Occam’s Razor. Astrology is overly complicated. The events of my life cannot relate to which constellation appeared behind the sun when I was born.
I picked astrology as an easy one to dismiss. However, many other ideas about how a Creator might continue acting on things could be worth discussing. Some ideas may be easy to rule out, but as we look for better ones, we should retain humility and allow others to question and point out what doesn’t fit well. We should seek to find metaphors that fit better and better with reality. We can also benefit by accepting multiple metaphors!
Endless uncertainty in life forces us to believe things. Otherwise paralyzed, we take chances on what we merely suspect is true. Valid beliefs, however, must connect to reality. Anyone whose belief doesn’t match reality is vulnerable to all kinds of difficulties in life. Some wrong beliefs are relatively harmless. But a person who jumps off a cliff, waving their arms, believing they can fly, will meet a tragic ending.
No one can prove religious beliefs, one way or another. We don’t know if a God exists, but science cannot prove that one doesn’t. Some scientists believe God doesn’t exist, and they think they have enough evidence. But we all can believe whatever we wish, having decided what we count as sufficient evidence. So far, the scientific community has not weighed in on whether or not intelligence lies behind the unfolding Universe. Individual scientists may have made such claims, but they rely on their personal beliefs, like the rest of us.
Ordinary folks who identify spirituality with connectedness are precisely correct. As we seek communion with reality and the unknown creative intelligence behind it, we must avoid phoniness and deceit. We must compare ideas and hypotheses, rejecting those that don’t jibe with reality. We should retain humility as we imagine the Creator, acknowledging that a white-bearded grandfather may not be the best metaphor.
I think Jesus had real insight. He took ancient Jewish teachings and expanded them for the modern world. The cool thing is that his teaching was not only modern for his own time, but over two millennia later remains modern today. He affirmed the Judaic laws to love God with all heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love neighbor as self. These remained primary for Jesus. But he tapped into the deep creative force of life by teaching that we also need to love enemies. Jesus taught that life-affirming love sacrificially seeks the benefit of others before ourselves. He commanded, “do not judge.” Do not seek to supervise the behavior of others, but submit voluntarily to helping and serving them. Do not think you have the right to order the beliefs or actions of others. (Of course, societies have made reasonable laws to help somewhat control human behavior.)
Jesus would give these keys to successful spirituality. We should aspire to this pinnacle of love when comparing metaphors with others. If true spirituality is life-affirming, can you think of a better way than what Jesus described? Of course, one practical challenge to Jesus is whether sacrificial love is the best way to care for ourselves. The difficulty of sustaining selflessness is precisely why many people have not adopted the way of Jesus in the last two millennia.
But if we are evolving as humans, albeit at a glacial pace, is it time to entirely jettison spirituality? Or is it time to get more committed and jump-start this new millennium by finding better ways to align with a deeply infused life-affirming force?