Spiritual Journey
Ask your Spirit
If the world is in turmoil, it is because its people are.
What does your spirit say about this?
Ask It.
That only you can do, for you cannot enspirit for another.
The way of spirit involves us all in a vast common undertaking.
But it is your adventures to which your spirit invites you.
Listen, then, for your pain.
Listen, then, for your joy.
As these come to you through the embodiment of your spirit,
Listen for the others’
One or many.
This is deep listening.
Being silence.
Giving attention.
Being empathic.
Beyond the Imbalance is Spirit
Dive into the splash of turmoil, dissonance, imbalance, put down.
Beyond the splash is the deep of spirit.
Its space.
Yours….mine….everyone’s
Beyond the sound bites, the visual bites is the deep of spirit.
Its space.
Beyond the value disputes
Beyond the killings.
Beyond the cleansing and the dirtying.
Beyond the lifting up of cultures, ethnics, languages, regions, social classes, religions….
And the putting down.
Beyond the celebration of differences…
And the putting down of the common.
Beyond the celebration of the common…
And the putting down of differences.
Lies the space of reconciliation.
Lies the space of spirit.
How find it?
How know it?
How know if you have found it?
Uncover the criticals.
Go to the fundamentals.
These are the practices.
We Seek Our Soul, We Seek Our Spirit
We seek our soul.
Where was it lost?
We seek our spirit.
Where was it lost?
The corporation seeks its soul.
Where was it lost?
The business seeks its spirit.
Where was it lost?
This is no light loss.
This is no light thing.
But it was never lost!
That which is not lost is not be be found.
Soul belongs to the person.
Spirit belongs to God.
Neither belong to the corporation.
The government.
The school.
Policy.
Even the church!
Being Silence
This is a meditation
On being silence.
Not a reflection on being silence.
Being silence.
Thus, a practice.
To relearn the sound of the space where spirit dwells.
Silence has its own sound.
Silence is a space empty of noise
Yet full of the sounds of spirit.
The start of your journey
Is to know that sound.
How?
Listen for the silence.
Listen to yourself.
Listen for your deepest self.
Listen for your spirit.
Spiritual Poetry
Ours is not to know spirit as we know knowledge.
Ours is to be with spirit as with a leaf,
A tree.
A blade of grass.
A dog, soft and scratchy behind the ears.
A storm of rain.
A friend.
A lover.
A stranger.
Who are you with this day…
In spirit?
Spiritual Journey
The way of spirit is a journey.
It has started long before you were born.
It will end long after you are dead.
It is always with you, always within you,
Unique and special, the you within the you,
The binding of me, myself and I.
How can you have existed before you existed?
What manner of fetish is this?
How can you exist after you cease existing?
What manner of nonsense is this?
This is not a theology….but a practice.
Be with your spirit on its journey.
It will not leave you behind, aware only of your whims, knowing only your biography.
It will carry you back, carry you forward
On the endless spiral of its way.
Have you not lighted here, now, in this time and place,
On this very Earth, with this body, this family,
This heritage, this color and gender, this language,
This spirit?
Why?
Spiritual Reconciliation
Beyond individual and society lies a reconciliation of spirit.
Between the two, there is always a third. Discover it.
Let us search for the space of reconciliation.
How will we know it?
How will we find it?
How will we know when we have found it?
Reconciliation transcends the claims of the outer because it lives in spirit in the inner.
Reconciliation transcends the claims of the inner because it lives in spirit in the outer.
What does this mean?
Look into the mirror.
Look behind the eyes of your outer to the eyes of your inner.
Look into the eyes of your inner looking back at your outer.
Look to the eyes of your inner looking at your inner.
Look to the eyes of your outer looking at your outer.
This is a meditation of inward looking to the outward.
This is a meditation of outward looking to the inward.
What then is spirit?
The way the “New spirituality” is usually introduced tends to make it into a thing, an idea whose time has come, an object that we might manipulate to fit our ideology or religious beliefs and make serve our commands. For centuries, we have tried to do that with God. To no avail. Walter Brueggemann, an eminently practical theologian, in The Prophetic Imagination (1978) points out that God is free, unchurched, not just there hiding behind the alter, not “on call” like a surgeon sleeping on a cot in the emergency room, ready to bind up our wounds and address out grievances. Much to our dismay, God is free. So is spirit. We cannot capture our spirit and simply add it to our arsenal of problem-solving weapons, training protocols, or therapeutic techniques.
Is Spirituality a Fad?
The “New Spirituality” is a fad, captured by coffee-table conversation, late-night talk shows and management training. Typically, Americans are responding at a surface level, acting out of ingrained cultural patterns. If our problem is the lack of something we need, let’s go out and get it, buy it, make it, market it sell it, consume it…and eventually throw it away as the next chimera appears on our empty horizon.
But beneath these surface responses, a sea change is taking place. At the depths of our humanity, our culture, our civilization, our very presence on this planet, something authentic and transformative is at work. But no amount of intoning, proclaiming, advertising, marketing or generally publicizing will uncover it. We must learn to experience it at a depth unknown and untried by most of us. We must seek the right starting points of what may well turn out to be a new journey along an ancient path.
What’s Going on Here?
The words “spirit,” “spiritual,” and “spirituality” are on everybody’s lips these days. After centuries of absence from the language of getting things done, references to the spiritual have re-entered the popular mind. Leaders proclaim the need for a spiritual approach to everything from employee motivation to health care reform and the inability of our schools to educate many of our children. Editorials announce the need to bring spiritual values back into quality of-life decisions. The breakdown of the family and the high divorce rate are now blamed on the absence of a spiritual element in our most intimate settings.
For some, the new spirituality is like a psychological aspirin. Finding a real or make-believe spiritual path assuages the guilts, fears and pains that come from living in a world of social disintegration and personal upset. For others, the new spirituality is a rallying cry, bolstering their unwillingness to listen to any but their own version of God’s call.
