I've been in a spiritual slump that has lasted all summer. I don't know exactly what brought it on (I have some ideas) but it has been a long period of cynicism, doubt, hardness, defensiveness. Beth sent me The Holy Longing (Ronald Rolheiser) as a birthday gift and reading it may be the start of a breakthrough. I said to Dan the other day that I'm glad that God is gracious because when I'm stubborn He reaches me through books even though the ideal would be for me to go directly to Him.
"Spirituality is not something on the fringes, an option for those with a particular bent. None of us has a choice. Everyone has to have a spirituality and everyone does have one, either a life-giving one or a destructive one. No one has the luxury of choosing here because all of us are precisely fired into life with a certain madness that comes from the gods and we have to do something with that. We do not wake up in this world calm and serence, having the luxury of choosing to act or not to act. We wake up crying, on fire with desire, with madness. What we do with that madness is our spiritualtiy.
Hence, spirituality is not about serenely picking or rationally choosing certain spiritual activities like going to church, praying or meditating, reading spiritual books, or setting off on some explicit spiritual quest. It is far more basic than that. Long before we do anything explicitly religious at all, we have to do something about the fire that burns within us. What we do with that fire, how we channel it, is our spirituality. Thus, we all have a spirituality whether we want one or not, whether we are religious or not. Spirituality is more about whether or not we can sleep at night than about whether or not we got to church. It is about being integrated or falling apart, about being within community or being lonely, about being in harmony with Mother Earth or being alienated from her. Irrespective of whether or not we let ourselves be consciously shaped by any explicit religious idea, we act in ways that leave us either healthy or unhealthy, loving or bitter. What shapes our actions is our spirituality."
"Teilhard de Chardin once said that God speaks to every element in the language it can understand. Thus, God lures hydrogen through its attraction to oxygen. God draws everything else, including each of us, in the same way. There is, in the end, one force, one spirit, that works in all of the universe. The chemicals in our hands and those in our brains were forged in the same furnace that forged the stars. The same spirit that drives oxygen to unite with hydrogen makes a baby cry when it is hungry, sends the adolescent out in hormonal restlessness, and calls Mother Teresa to church to pray. There is a discontent, another word for soul and spirit, in all things and what those things, or persons, do with that discontent is their spirituality."
