Tag: spirituality

Celebrating the Solstice

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Friday June 20th marks the summer solstice, the longest day of the year.  In Australia, New Zealand, and most of South America, it is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.  There they huddle before a warm fire at this solstice and celebrate the December solstice at the beach. Here in the Northwest quadrant of the globe, we have picnics and celebrate Fathers’ Day. Why Fathers’ Day? Perhaps because, inn Celtic mythology, the sun God is at the peak of his powers, even as the mother Goddess is pregnant with his child who will be born at the winter solstice. After the solstice, he begins a long descent into aging and death before being reborn in December.

The four sky holidays (equinoxes and solstices) are celebrated with bonfires—spring at dawn, summer at midday, autumn at dusk, winter at midnight.  Do these times of day remind you of Easter, (sunrise service), Fourth of July picnics (two weeks past the summer solstice), Trick or treat (five weeks past the fall equinox), and midnight mass (winter solstice)? If so, you have penetrated the Celtic roots of some of our non-biblical religious and secular customs of honoring the rhythm of the earth.

The ancient Celts, from whom many Americans trace their descent, observed eight evenly spaced holidays.  Solstices and equinoxes were dictated by the rotation of the earth around the sun, while the four cross-quarter holidays were earth-centered. Males were associated with sun and sky, women with moon and earth.

We modern humans are largely disconnected from these rhythms of earth and sky, with air-conditioned harvests and food from the grocery store that can be frozen or refrigerated.  We can eat blueberries and watermelon year-round even if it means shipping them long distance from Chile or other points far south. Change of clothing is one of the few acknowledgements we make of changing seasons as we swap coats and sweaters for t-shirts and bathing suits.

And yet the pull of the rhythm of the seasons is still strong. The urge to plant is evident in the spring, even if we are more often planting for beauty than for sustenance. Recreation moves outdoors in the warm summer months, while long winter nights are a time to huddle in front of the fireplace, alternating with snow sports in the short daytimes in more northern parts of the hemisphere.  We can try to insulate ourselves from nature, but we are in fact a part of nature and our bodies and hearts pulsate to its changes. We are also dependent on nature for all the resources that sustain us—food, and water, and electricity, and fossil fuels, metals and minerals,  plants and animals.

Each season brings us different gifts of both beauty and sustenance, challenge and opportunity.  If a single word unites these eight ancient holidays into a common thread, it should probably be gratitude.  Gratitude for rain and sun, soil and water, food and fuel, beauty and wonder. Eight chances to count your blessings and honor Mother Earth and Father Sky.  A joyous summer solstice to all my readers!

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Spiritual or Religious?

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Binary #5

This strange description of one’s relation to whatever considers to the sacred has become the most popular response to a question about one’s faith understanding. SBNR (spiritual but not religious) is one focused expression of the extreme individualism that has always been a hallmark of American culture. It means that this thing, this religion, this spirituality stuffs just between me and whatever I call or don’t call God, and I don’t need any help, any companions on the journey, any guidance or answers to my questions that I can’t find on my own.

The opposite of SBNR, which few people will openly admit to, is religious but not spiritual. 
Religious because I belong to a church or because I like the companionship of lik-eminded people or because I like ritual or because it seems important to belong to some kind of community and Kiwanis or Rotary just doesn’t quite do it.

This particularly binary reminds me of an old Latin joke.  A popular motto in Roman times was mens sana in corpore sano—meaning, a healthy mind in a healthy body.  But a more contemporary formulation is mens sana auf (or) corpore sano—take your pick.

I consider my relationship to the sacred as requiring both a private spirituality and an affirming, embracing, challenging community of people who are my chosen companions on my journey of faith. Not that I would necessarily have chosen all the ones in my present religious community. But even the people I find to be difficult do what a good religious community should do.  They affirm, they challenge, and/or they inspire. Some do just one, others all three.

I know that if you ask people what they think is the purpose of a religious community, you will get many different answers.  My answer came to me in response to a question from a  friend who wanted to know what I thought was the purpose of a sermon. I considered a few minutes and finally said, “to affirm, to challenge, and to inspire.” That’s also the purpose of a church, or mosque, or temple. Such communities have rituals that retell and reinterpret their shared stories as well as the stories that people bring to the gathering to share, to be affirmed, cared for—and challenged and inspired.

Of all the binaries I have considered, and there are many more to explore, this is the one that I think works best as a both/and rather than an either/or. Without affirmation, we shrink. Without challenge, we cease to grow. Without inspiration, we drift. For a meaningful, purposeful, satisfying life, I need my congregation. And my congregation needs me. If there is a congregation in your life—the one that you attend or the one that you abandoned—but it doesn’t provide you with companions on the journey and affirmation, challenge, and inspiration, then perhaps you are in the wrong place, or perhaps you aren’t engaging this community with an open and well nurtured spirit.

Saint Patrick Meets Ostara: The Living of the Green

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It is no accident that Saint Patrick’s Day falls in the same week as the vernal equinox, the holiday called Ostara by the ancient Celts. Ireland is the Emerald Isle with, as Johnny Cash reminded us, its 40 shades of green. Ostara had other names, Oestre, Astarte, and, of course, Easter, yet another celebration of revival, renewal, and resurrection. (I once was asked by a seminary professor why Unitarian Universalists celebrate Easter. I replied with my own question. Why do Christians name their most important holiday after the goddess of the dawn?

Some of the customs of the equinox holiday have migrated to the moveable feast of Easter, celebrated in the Western world on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring Equinox. They are supplemented by ancient Roman and Scandinavian equinox customs involving eggs and rabbits, agents of fertility.

What comes to mind about Saint Patrick, besides green beer and shamrocks? You probably know that he was born around 400 CE in Britain to a Romanized Christian family. Captured by Celtic pirates, he was hauled off to Ireland and worked as a shepherd. He escaped, returned to Britain, studied for priesthood, and was ordained. He chose to return to return to Ireland as a Christian missionary..

Like many such missionaries, Patrick adapted the Christian story to the local environment—a rural, earth-centered culture, He used the shamrock or three -leafed clover to explain the concept of the trinity. He planted churches and monasteries all over Ireland. It is appropriate that his day is celebrated during the season of preparing for spring planting. Like so many other holidays including Yule), the celebration of Ireland’s patron saint was part of the bridge from the old Celtic nature-based religion to what the Irish called the New Faith.

Initially the New Faith was welcomed to Ireland as an addition, rather than a competitor, but eventually it became its own wayward version of Roman Christianity. Today there is a revival of the Celtic version of Christianity not only in the two strongholds of Celtic culture, Ireland and Scotland, but also in North America. That culture and that way of being Christian was earth-centered, non-exclusive, and egalitarian, with a particularly strong affirmation of women as full participants in the larger community. Women in early Ireland had the right to choose their spouses, divorce if they wished, get an education, own property, and enter many of the professions. Many of those rights were not available to women in this country until the late 19th century. (A nod to another annual observance in March, Women’s History Month.)

Even after Roman Christianity forced the Irish to end their practice of co-houses of nuns and monks who were free to marry, have children, and raise them in the faith, there was still always a Celtic underground that survives today in some of the ancient holy places, especially the Scottish island of Iona. There is much wisdom in dedicating this pair of holidays to the re-planting of that vision in our own hearts and mind, As as we begin the season of fertilizing and planting, we can celebrate our oneness with the natural world that nurtures and sustains us.

Note: I am indebted to historian Peter Tremayne’s fascinating set of historicall novels about Sister Fidelma for background on the customs of the Irish in the 5th and 6th centuries CE.

It’s Groundhog Day Again!

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This is my annual updated version a holiday variously known as the feast of Saitn Bridget, Imbolc, Oimelc (both Celtic words related to lambing), and Groundhog Day. I mentioned that the first of February was the only holiday devoted to housecleaning in an email to my daughter. Aha, she said that explains the backstory for the movie Groundhog Day. It’s like house cleaning. You clean, it gets dirty, you clean it again, it gets dirty again… A good story line for a movie! At least my repetition, unlike the movie, is only once a year.
Imbolc, Oimelc, or Groundhog Day, they all anticipate spring. It is one of the lesser-known cross-quarter holidays on the Wheel of the Year. In addition to Groundhog Day it survived as the feast of the purification of the virgin (Mary) after the birth of her son 40 days earlier. It is also the day devoted to Saint Bridget or Brigid. Bridget is the Triune Goddess in her maiden phase, converted to a Christian saint. The corn maiden from the previous harvest is brought out in her honor as a virgin once again, ready to encounter the Sun King reborn at Yul in a mating ritual of spring.
The purification part of this holiday was known in pre-feminist times as spring house cleaning. In ancient time among the Celts, Imbolc cleaning consisted of removing the Yule greenery from the home and burning it, cleaning up fields and home, and in Ireland, burning old Bridget wheels and making new ones. By Imbolc, most of us have taken down the tree and put away the decorations from Christmas, but if you haven’t, you can use Imbolc as the excuse for delaying it till now. After Imbolc, you are at risk of being labeled a lazy pagan if you don’t deal of the winter holiday residue.
Imbolc is approaching the end of an indoor time. It’s cold and still pretty dark, but it is the waxing period of light and warmth following the winter solstice. It represents a final stage of wintry inwardness before the crocuses and daffodils invite us to look outward again. Housebound, we must find our spiritual practice within that space. It is the late stage of the hibernating season as we prepare for the cycle of life to begin again.
Spiritual practice has enjoyed something of a resurgence in recent decades. A spiritual practice is anything that is centering, mindful, focusing, and connects you to the sacred in a very inclusive sense. Practicing patience with difficult people is a spiritual practice. Listening attentively is a spiritual practice. Eating mindfully is a spiritual practice. Meditation and prayer are traditional spiritual practices in many religions. But there is also a form of spiritual practice that invests the ordinary activities of daily life with significance in the way carry them out.
The essence of spring housecleaning as spiritual practice blends several Christian and Buddhist ideas. One is humility; no task is too menial that we are above it, as in Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. The second is mindfulness, to be engaged in the moment, to calm the monkey mind, to focus all our attention on the window being washed or the floor being swept. The third is letting go of attachment to possessions as an encumbrance on our spiritual life, passing them on to another use or another user. The spiritual practice of spring housecleaning can incorporate all three.
Housecleaning means two different things. One is the emphasis on clean, as in wash windows, polish furniture, remove cobwebs, paint, scrub floors, clean woodwork, dust the books. That’s both the humble and the mindful part. In the words of one contemporary Buddhist writer, “after enlightenment, the laundry.” The other kind of housecleaning is to declutter, simplify, recycle, let go of possessions no longer needed, like the greens from Yul in the Celtic tradition. That’s the letting go part.
For many years my Lenten practice, for the forty days that begin sometime after Imbolc and stretch to the floating holiday of Easter, was to wash a window every day. Then I moved to a smaller house, which taxed my ingenuity to find forty windows. I included car windows, TV and computer screens, mirrors. Friends helpfully offered their windows, but I did not wish to discourage their own spiritual practice. There is something very satisfying, very symbolic in letting the light of the returning spring shine through a clean window, but it means more when it’s my window.
A friend described a similar cleaning ritual, only she does it all on New Year’s Day. She takes each of her many books down one at a time off the shelf, dusts it (and the shelf), and decides whether it stays or goes. If books are a rich and meaningful part of your life, revisiting these old friends and deciding what role they still may play in your life and which ones should be shared with others is definitely a spiritual practice. This particular ritual embodies both humility (dusting). mindfulness (concentrated attention on the books and the memories and teachings they hold) and letting go (books to be passed on). This year I used my cocooning season, December 26th to February 1st, to declutter bookshelves, which led to one empty bookcase and about 80 book donations, plus a major cleansing of my Kindle.
So, as the daffodils and crocuses pop their leaves through the ground, as the groundhog in Punxatawny ponders his forecast, we can prepare to emerge from the hibernating season by renewing the spaces we inhabit. Like the bluebirds, whose house I have to clean very soon because they refuse to return to a used nest, let us be about the humble tasks of maintaining our habitats. Spring housecleaning only comes once a year!

The Case for Religious Community

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I like people who ask me good questions. I used to have a friend whom I hiked with, and she was a good questioner. An introvert, she thought carefully before posing questions.  An extrovert, I thought my answers out loud. 

One day I told her about a sermon I was working on, and she asked me one of her best questions ever. What is a sermon? she asked (being a lifelong non-church goer). What is its purpose?  After some stumbling around, I finally came up with an answer.  The purpose of a sermon is to affirm, challenge, and inspire, I said. But in reflecting on it later, I realized that the same purpose applies to the faith community at its best.  A church/congregation/synagogue/temple/mosque is the place where we go to be affirmed, challenged, and inspired.

Other kinds of communities can serve those same purposes. Civic organizations like Rotary of the League of Women Voters  Extended families. Builders for Habitat for humanity.  Groups dedicated to music, dance, theater. Anything that has a shared sense of common ground and common values and goals is a community. (The Latin roots of the word community mean building together.)  But religious communities are uniquely expected to embody shared values and beliefs that shape the way we understand ourselves and encounter the larger world.

Some of us are affirmed in our beliefs and/or values, others challenged, and still others perhaps inspired to articulate more clearly their own unique set of beliefs or values by our religious community experience. I remember a group of us crafting a mission statement for our congregation many years ago that resulted in an inspired ending offered by one member: We are grateful for the values that we share and the diversity that both challenges and enriches us. We are also affirmed by identifying ourselves as part of the shared stories of the faith tradition and of the individual community embodying and celebrating those stories.

A loving faith community affirms each of us in all our gifts and limitations, our sameness and our diversity, our strengths and weaknesses, because of – and in spite of – our uniqueness. It holds up a mirror to us so that we can see ourselves as others see us, and so that we can identify our gifts and passions, and then cultivate and express them both within and beyond that community.

A loving faith community challenges us to embrace and interpret its shared beliefs or values and stories and to reflect on what they mean to each of us. We are invited to consider how these elements of our faith tradition challenge and inspire us in terms of how we live our lives, what kind of work we do, how we relate to others, how we can use our gifts to bless the world.

A faith community always offers us the challenge of dealing with difficult people and conflict. You may not think of that experience as a gift, but it is only by working through conflict and accepting difficult people that we grow as a person and develop attitudes and skills that will empower us to work with difficult people and conflict in the larger world.

Finally, inspire. Some inspiration comes to us through our individual spiritual lives and practices, but the faith community also has a role to play. Spirituality is that sensation of awe and wonder and peace, the dissolution of boundaries that divide us from each other and the sacred. It can be evoked by walking in nature, kayaking on a lake, contemplative prayer, meditation, or other means. It can also be experienced in religious worship or ritual, by the words repeated or sung or heard as well as the silences and ceremonial acts such as communion or sharing the peace with others. In The Perennial Philosophy,Aldous Huxley described the “merely muscular Christian” as a person who attempts the impossible task of continuously ladling from a bowl that is never replenished. A faith community offers ways to replenish that bowl.

Faith communities of all kinds embody the virtues of hope, love, trust (another name for faith), gratitude, and humility. These are virtues or values shared by all faith traditions as well as by those who embrace no faith tradition. To affirm and practice these virtues is the purpose of both individuals and faith communities as we engage in the endless shared  work of building a better, safer, more just and sustainable world community.

Spiritual but not Religious?

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When Martin Luther, an ordained Catholic priest and a leader of the Protestant Reformation, left the monastery at age 49, he felt he had to live out his salvation in the world. But he didn’t give up on the idea of religious community.  He served a congregation, preaching and teaching and offering pastoral care and advice.  He also became famous for his table talk conversations with those who visited the Luther household, populated by a wife (an ex-nun) and their six children. In that chosen community, visitors worked out their own religious understanding in the company of others.  The idea of working out your evolving faith understanding in community is the core of the more liberal understanding of Protestant Christianity as a religion.  Salvation (or wholeness) is a lifelong journey.  We need companions to help us to stay on the path and at the same time explore new byways.

Now and then we encounter someone who is religious but not spiritual—someone who wants to be part of a faith community but has little or no interest in experiencing the sacred.  I remember one long-time member of my own congregation, an engineer with a very scientific mindset.  Every few months he would inquire of me, or sometimes of the minister, “Now, what’s this spirituality thing again?”  We would explain and he would nod, but it never stuck.  Another long-term member,was an elegant Southern lady and one of the few people other than the minister who dressed up for church.  She once announced loudly in a church discussion that she was a secular humanist.  I bit my tongue to keep from saying, No, you are actually a religious humanist, because you are here every Sunday! Recently my friend Pater Kandis and his co-author Andy Reese have written a book to make that very point, that humanists need religious community.

But it is the opposite combination that we encounter most often. How many times have you heard people say, “I am spiritual but not religious?”  The last person who said that to me was a Presbyterian friend  who served on her church’s social action committee but never attended worship. Spiritual but not religious is the new mantra, the ultimate in individualism.  My inner life is between me and God and I don’t need anyone else.  This attitude is confirmed by national reports of  declining church affiliation and attendance.. According to the Pew Report, the percentage of American adults who were religiously unaffiliated jumped from 16 percent in 2007 or 23 percent in 2014, and is projected to continue to increase.

So how is spirituality different from religion?  One definition of spirituality come from Unitarian Universalism’s first source,” direct experience of mystery and wonder.” Here are some other definitions, drawn from the University of Minnesota’s web site on Taking Charge of Your Well Being:

  • Christina Puchalski, MD, Director of the George Washington Institute for Spirituality and Health, contends that “spirituality is the aspect of humanity that refers to the way individuals seek and express meaning and purpose and the way they experience their connectedness to the moment, to self, to others, to nature, and to the significant or sacred.”
  • According to Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary, researchers and authors of The Spiritual Brain, “spirituality means any experience that is thought to bring the experiencer into contact with the divine (in other words, not just any experience that feels meaningful).”
  • Nurses Ruth Beckmann Murray and Judith Proctor Zenter write that “the spiritual dimension tries to be in harmony with the universe, and strives for answers about the infinite, and comes into focus when the person faces emotional stress, physical illness, or death.”

Based on more than 30 years of psychological counseling and pastoral care, Howard Clinebell believed that humans have seven spiritual hungers. Human beings long to experience the healing and empowerment of love and renewing times of transcendence.  They feel a need for vital beliefs that lend meaning and hope in the midst of losses, tragedies, and failures., to have values, priorities, and life commitments centered in issues of justice, integrity, and love to provide guidance in personally and socially responsible living.  They want to discover and develop inner wisdom, creativity, and love of self and, develop a deepening awareness of oneness with other people, the natural world, and all living things.  Finally, they are seeking find spiritual resources to help them deal with grief, guilt, resentment, , and self-rejection and to deepen their experiences of trust, self-esteem, hope, joy and love of life.

Some of those longings can be achieved in isolation, or between spouses and friends, but many of them would benefit from a supportive community of fellow seekers—in other words, from religion.  Religion comes from the Latin word religio, which means the ties that bind us to one another and to the sacred. In general, it refers to an organized faith community with a shared story, shared values, and sometimes (but not always) shared beliefs, and rituals.  Regular weekly gatherings are a common practice of the three Western religions that trace their descent from Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The more liberal forms of the three traditional Western religions encourage exploration, personal spiritual development, and mutual support.  More traditional forms of Christianity may insist that their members affirm specific beliefs, such as the virgin birth, scriptural inerrancy, and Jesus died for our sins.  Conservative branches of all three religions may also require certain practices, such as keeping kosher, praying five times a day, fasting, or abstaining from work on the Sabbath that set them apart as people of a particular tradition.

The attitude of spiritual but not religious is reinforced by common misperceptions of organized religion, particularly in not recognizing the diversity within faith traditions. An example of these misperceptions comes from Aging Well by George Vaillant.  In explaining the limited participation of his aging subjects in organized religion, Vaillant writes, “Religion involves creeds and catechisms.  Spirituality involves feelings and experiences that transcend mere words.  Religion is imitative and comes from without; religion is “’so I’ve been taught.’  Spirituality comes from within; spirituality comes from ‘my strength, hope and experience’… Most religious beliefs involved dogma.  Spiritual trust involves metaphor…Metaphors are open ended and playful; dogma is rigid and serious…. Metaphors allow the truth of our dreams to become clearer with every retelling.  In contrast, dogma may insist that heretics be executed.” Anyone who read that caricature would be likely to go straight to spirituality, rejecting religion as a hindrance rather than an aid to spiritual development. It may well describe some faith communities, but it does not describe any of the three to which I have belonged.

Some of those who choose to call themselves spiritual but not religious are just loners. One friend who is very introverted confessed that she did not go to church mainly because it would be “full of people.” She is, however, open to attending meditation, even if it is in a group, because they won’t be talking!  Others who avoid church are refugees from bad church experiences, unwilling to give church community another try in a different congregation or even a different faith tradition. Many find the literal interpretations of the Christian story, or the beliefs, an obstacle, and do not realize that there are alternative forms of religious community where members are free to affirm those stories as stories, or as metaphors that are covey truth and meaning rather than a set of empirical facts.

Millennials so far show little interest in organized religion.  They are in a stage of their life between adolescence and parenthood, and may or may not eventually return to church but are presently satisfied with their casual companions, close friends and virtual communities. Still others of all ages are part of the growing army of the never-churched.  Raised without a faith community, they have no idea what it can offer to enrich their lives.  Whatever the reason, many of the unchurched, formerly churched, or anti-churched who call themselves spiritual but not religious feel that they have found a solitary relationship with the sacred that gives them strength and comfort, and they have stopped looking for anything more.

My friend Fran and I taught a class in downsizing and decluttering to older adults for  five years.  I jokingly refer to the class as weight watchers for your house.  Weight watchers, like other support groups with a common goal, provides companions and direction for those struggling unsuccessfully to lose weight on their own.  In our five week class we offered support and encouragement as part of a group facing a common challenge. A church is, among other things, a long-term spiritual support group. Yes, it’s possible to be spiritual but not religious, just as it is possible to be religious but not spiritual (to belong to a church solely for the community aspects).  But both the spiritual and the religious part of our lives will be enriched and deepened by having companions on the journey.

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