What is Spirituality?
“What is spirituality?” is a question that is full of nuance and uncertainty. It’s a question my clients and I explore frequently in 1:1 sessions and workshops. The answer, like the question, is deeply personal and widely universal.
A recent Pew Research poll shows that 92% of Americans believe in something beyond the physical world, the existence of the soul, and something spiritual. That same poll shows declines in the religious landscape.
Those numbers didn’t surprise me. Rather, they confirmed something my spiritual mentors, spiritual director colleagues, and I have been seeing for years.
As people exit organized religion, they often enter their spiritual journey and can be unsure of where to turn. Some people turn to a spiritual director. And in spiritual direction, they wrestle with “the spirituality question” by exploring what it means to them.
Trying to Explain the Unexplainable
A few weeks ago, my partner and I started to watch Nobody Wants This. In the pilot, the two main characters share their understanding of God. Adam Brody’s character, a rabbi, says that “baked into the Jewish experience is wrestling with who or what God is or isn’t, not knowing.” Kristen Bell’s character replies, “People always seem so clear on what they imagine God to be. And I don’t know, none of it has ever felt right to me.”
Both of those lines spoke to my soul. Most of my spiritual journey has been wrestling with who or what God is or isn’t. I still don’t have 100% clarity 100% of the time. My definition of God and spirituality evolve as my lived experience evolves. Yet, despite this evolution, some parts remain constant.
One of those constants? I’m always searching for definitions to give words to what I can’t always describe.
St. Ignatius of Loyola’s approach to spirituality.
Pop Culture Helps Me Explain the Unexplainable
If you’ve been to any of my workshops, you know that I use pop culture figures to define spirituality. Sure, spiritual leaders have their own definitions of spirituality, and they’re useful. I find definitions of spirituality can have more impact and resonance when they come from unexpected voices.
k. d. lang’s “Constant Craving” speaks to something outside of our physical experience:
“Maybe a great magnet pulls
All souls towards truth
Or maybe it is life itself
Feeds wisdom
To its youth”
Kelly Bishop offers her definition of spirituality in The Third Gilmore Girl, which points to the importance of being open to possibility:
“[Spirituality is] a deep certainty that there’s a lot more to being human that this finite, mundane, earthbound world we live in, that we’re really part of a much greater cosmic whole that’s all around us. It’s up to us to keep our minds and our hearts open to the possibility instead of being so quick to shrug off what could be signs that we’re connected to higher dimensions than we pretend we are.”
My current hands-down favorite definition of spirituality comes from RuPaul Charles’s memoir, The House of Hidden Meanings:
“In my mind, religion simplifies complicated concepts so people can understand them more easily. ‘The devil’ is the ego; ‘God’ is a frequency that cannot be explained; ‘Jesus’ is a term for the potential we all have, the potential for us to transcend the physical illusion and to remember who we are, which is an extension of the God-force. ”
“That’s it!” I thought to myself as I read those lines. I felt seen and less alone as I read those words by myself with only my old English sheepdog curled up next to me.
Tears welled up in my eyes. Finally, someone said words I’ve known to be true for years. And of all places, it came from RuPaul, someone I have admired since the late 1990s.
God can’t be explained. Jesus isn’t the only person in the history of the world who is capable of transcendence and transformation. We all are capable of that.
Reading RuPaul’s words was a breath of fresh air because it confirmed what my spiritual mentors – including a Catholic nun – had been teaching me for years:
Spirituality and Religion are Not Always the Same
I have come to understand religion and spirituality as different things, although they might be the same thing for lots of people.
If religion is what we do, spirituality is who we are. Religion is an institutionalized practice guided by dogma and organized leadership. Spirituality is how we show up in the world for ourselves, others, and all of creation, outside of dogma and religious structure.
Do they go hand-in-hand? Sometimes. But not always, as the population of spiritual-but-not-religious, dones, and nones grows.
As I’ve come to understand it, spirituality is an individualized, co-creative relationship with the Divine. That relationship can be nourished in various ways through prayer, meditation, artistic endeavors, fellowship, walks in nature, and being with animals and the Earth.
My understanding has been formed by Franciscan and Ignatian spiritualities and cosmology. Long story short on cosmology: as far as we know, all the energy that has and will ever exist was created at the Big Bang. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. We are all connected by this shared energy. We = us who are here, all of life that is here, and every single living organism big or small that has come before us.
Franciscan and Ignatian spiritualities share a commitment to transforming the world through justice, peace, contemplation, and action with and for all of creation. Accompaniment is part of their mission in the world, particularly accompanying those marginalized by systemic and societal structures.
Seen that way, spirituality is also a responsibility to name, see, and address the hard, uncomfortable, and sometimes inconvenient root causes of systemic injustice we’ve inflicted on the Earth, one another, and ourselves.
“I used to think the top global environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address these problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation, and we scientists don’t know how to do that.”
Finding the Way Together
My understanding of the Divine and spirituality may always evolve, but those commitments are the foundation of my spirituality. Increases in connection, faith, hope, and love are how I understand my co-creative relationship with the Divine. It’s the ground I stand on when I accompany people in spiritual direction, build workshops and design trainings, and write scripts for speaking engagements.
That ground feels like goosebumps, a stirring in my heart, or a calming in my gut center. That ground is in moments when my clients or I exclaim to each other, “I just got chills,” “I was JUST thinking that,” or “You know, it’s funny you say that because that relates to something odd that happened last week.”
Those are the moments when I remember something greater is doing something I can’t explain or fully understand. That unknowing used to frustrate me – now I find it delightful. Those embodied experiences are little nudges from my connection with the Divine, reminders of, “Hey. We’re here.”
It's like the final scene in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. In that scene, Sarah, the main character, is reconnected with the characters who transformed her journey and, quite literally, accompanied her home. As she’s saying her final goodbyes to them, she says, “I don’t know why, but every now and then in my life, for no reason at all, I need you, all of you.”
To which they joyfully respond, “You do? Then why didn’t you say so!”
Commence dance party, my fellow babes with the power.
