Spirituality has nothing to do with a walk in the woods

Regious Views, by Dave Kahle

Thinking about your spirituality? Wondering if there is something deeper and more meaningful for your life? You're not alone.

Millions of people feel an emptiness and recognize it as a lack of spiritual growth on their part. And so they search for something spiritual to fill that void. Unfortunately, many are searching in the wrong place.

I was recently contacted by the publishers of a Web site devoted to exploring spiritual issues for businesspeople. "Would I like to contribute some content?" they wanted to know. Before I answered, I viewed the site. The first article discussed the spiritual feelings the author experienced during a walk in the forest. Another discussed the spiritual connection he felt with other humans as a result of an exercise in a seminar. Spirituality, according to these writers, was an experience of solitude, an emotion, or a sense of one's similarity to other human beings. I declined the invitation. I'm not quite sure what the site was about, but I know it wasn't spirituality.

The site was another example of the trend to "dumb down" spirituality. Sort of like the political correctness trend. The more general and vague a concept is, the more people you can include in it, and the less meaning and power it has.

Spirituality at the turn of the century has come to mean, in the common usage, almost anything the speaker wants it to mean. Have a warm feeling as the result of a laugh you shared with someone? Must be spiritual. Feel a little introspective while out on a sailboat? Gotta be a spiritual experience.

Don't misunderstand my position. These are all valid and valuable moments. However, while all these experiences, and others of similar nature, may be warm, pleasant and even intuitive, they aren't spiritual. Provide people with a cheap substitute, and you often knock them off the quest for the better original. The ice cream store won't sell very much Haagan Dazs, for example, if they give away Dairy Queen.

So, if these kinds of experiences aren't spiritual, what is? Let's start at the source. There is a body of knowledge concerning things spiritual available to us. It's contained in the Bible. The information concerning things spiritual in the Bible is really quite clear, consistent and pretty simple. God is spirit. Anything having to do with God is spiritual.

God has, for His own reasons, lopped off and spread around parts of the "spiritualness" that originated with Him. In addition, God has imbued part of His spiritualness into human beings. There is a spiritual part of every human being. It's that part of us that lives on after our physical body dies.

We are all some part spiritual. And that part longs for completion by communion with its maker, in the same way that a male instinctively searches for a female that will complement and complete him and vice-versa. One of the most natural things in the world is to search for God. That's spiritual.

So, spiritual has to do with our search for communion with God.

Let's use this understanding and apply it to a commonly considered "spiritual" moment. For example, when we experience a feeling of connectedness to other human beings, that's not spiritual. Dogs, chimpanzees, and porpoises recognize a similarity to others of their species as well. That's just one member of a species recognizing another. However, when we experience a hunger for or communication with God, that is spiritual.

What's the point of all this? If you want to grow spiritually, you must search for communication with God. If you want to work on the "spiritual side of you," it must be somehow connected with God. You must find Him, and your spirit must intermingle with His. Any event which in some way moves you closer to God is spiritual. If it leads you in other directions, it is not.

So, if you want to develop the "spiritual side" of you, don't think that yoga, Zen, herbal concoctions, crystals, pyramids and past-life regression support groups and their like will help. They may be fun, interesting and good for you in other ways, but they are not spiritual.

Search for commune with God. One of the themes expressed throughout the Bible is this: If you seek God, He will reveal himself to you. That promise is repeated over and over. Moses recorded it in the earliest days of the Bible when he said "But if from there you seek the Lord your God, you will find him if you look for him with all your heart and with all your soul." (Deuteronomy 4:29). Too many people spend their whole lives in a quest for spiritual fulfillment and never meet God. Too often it's because they have been deluded with false ideas of what "spiritual" really is. They look for love in all the wrong places.

Dave Kahle's writings appear in magazines and publications around the country.