What the Heck is a "Spiritual Quest"?

Over the weekend, I was accosted by an old friend for offering the choice of "spiritual quest" on my ABN poll of week before last (see ABN, March 8th). The irony is that this friend is a yogi, and yet he's rather conservative and, as conservatives are wont to be, cynical as well. My friend, admittedly a bit tipsy in honor of St. Patrick (or is it St. Guiness?), was incredulous that I would associate myself with spirituality at all, much less profess to be worthy of offering some spiritual insight.

My friend's take is that this blog sounds angrier and perhaps even nuttier than I mean it to be. I might write bile, as some pretty sharp-tongued wits of the past are my role models in such an off-the-cuff forum. I'll name a few in that guise: Henry Thoreau, Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken, and Edward Abbey. Maybe even Christopher Hitchens and Maureen Dowd. But in my mind, as I write, I am more wistful than outraged. Indeed, I think I've grown beyond being outraged, but I haven't grown beyond being perplexed. This is often a blog about being perplexed, about being akilter, at odds with the culture which churns around me. I write some outrage for the outraged and for readers who crave outrage. (Readers WANT voices besides their own, or, for heaven's sake, they wouldn't read.) But I also have, all along, written the softer side as well, quite often, really, compared to most blogs of political and cultural commentary. Humility, in writing, is prone to be drowned out by the very act of writing itself, which is always, to a large extent, about the writer and always self-motivated. Paid or not, writers (and perhaps especially obscure bloggers) write out of an ancient compulsion. We'd like an audience, but that may be a fantasy. We write for practice. We write to see what we'll say. We write to exercise our self-expression in public, no matter how small or large that imaginary audience might be.

The spiritual journey is also about self-expression, though it can be a much more inward form of expression than blog writing. The two activities are related, at least here. So I'll explore both in my attempts to explain further spirituality and the spiritual quest.

Where to begin. Perhaps I'd better take the opportunity to explain, first of all, what "being spiritual" is, or what I think it is, and also what a spiritual quest is. Thus I might make some reasonable attempt to explain (or is it defend?) my spiritual associations and aspirations.

This won't be easy. It never is. And blogs aren't polished doctrine. They're really more like running monologues or, if that seems a bit too parochial and self-serving, they're like dialogues we have with ourselves, our semi-private selves and our semi-public selves.

I can see this train of thought, The Spirit Train, going for some posts and maybe weeks, not all bnuched together but as the spirit moves me. Or I move myself.

First of all, and this is probably the most important distinction to make: being spiritual is not the same as being religious. Not at all. You can be a spiritual atheist just as you can be a clueless fundamentalist.

Spirituality is to religion what astronomy is to astrology.

That's a good line. You can quote me on that!

It is not necessary to believe in the supernatural in order to be spiritual. In fact, as I will sooner or later try to show, I think a good case can be made that piousness, religiosity, deepset beliefs and faith (which by definition is blind and requires a leap from reason and reality) go against the grain of becoming a master of spiritual matters.

Those who believe things which cannot be reasonably proved are prone to being stubborn, near-sighted and short-sighted. Faith is like a rut, a trench, and the faithful often become entrenched, prejudiced, harboring all sorts of grievances as well as feelings of guilt and fear. None of these are aids to becoming spiritual.

It is not that we need an open mind to become spiritual. We do need to distinguish between what is real and what is unverified, between what exists and what we hope might exist. Genuine, really wise spirituality very much deals with the here and now, with reality, with reason and with how things really are.

Think of some people you've considered spiritual or wise. Or consider some who history deems wise and insightful, proponents of what we might call virtuous grace. It's not that their minds are open to nonsense; it's that they exude and express both intellectual depth and emotional breadth -- and that in them, both work well together.

If I had to choose one attribute, one virtue that in the spiritual person shines above all others, it would be compassion. Not sympathy but empathy and not just through sentiment but through insight, not through guessing or sucking up to gain favor but through years of learning, years of philosophy.

Philosophy is the study of life, of this life, life on Earth as it is and as we perceive it to be and imagine it to be (and not be). And the spiritual person is certainly philosophical. Not necessarily in an academic sense. We can learn much from books, but when it comes to spiritual matters, neither books nor gurus nor classes nor outside instruction of any kind can take us as far as we need to go.

The spiritual person's world view is not that of a salesperson. Politicians and preachers and proselytizers of all sorts are salespeople. They've got a product they want to buy, and their product is propaganda. Spirituality is too worldly, too in touch with what we might call (and many do call) "the human condition."

And speaking of that condition, some things do seem to stay the same, and of course some things are always changing. The spiritual person is mindful of the things that tend to stay the same (nature, human nature) and the things that can quickly come to pass (fads, desires, feelings, possessions, relationships).

The spiritual quest is a long and winding road. Children seem to be born going along that road, but sadly, a lot of our spiritual natures are knocked out of us as we are raised, since we're raised not to be good people nearly so much as we are raised to be competent, raised to compete, raised to get ahead, raised to win and to breed winners. And so, in one way, the spiritual quest is about getting back some of those childhood virtues and focusing on them with a mature mind, with practice. The goal is expertise, to become known as a person who sees and understands things as they are and who expresses things as they are and reacts to things as they are with uncommon insight, with goodness and with grace.


More, much more, on this topic in the days and weeks ahead.