Resolution

As the calendar turns today and we welcome not only a new year but a new decade, I find myself contemplating two questions, one ridiculous, and one sublime.

Here’s the ridiculous – how do Europeans, who live in a “checkless” society, know that it’s a new year? The constant reminder I used to have was writing the wrong year on a check.

Here’s the sublime question – what does it mean to be spiritual? And what is the relationship of spirituality to religion? I’d love for this to be interactive and hear from you. And I want to warn you up front that I am going to deliberately try to be provocative in what I write below.

It seems to me that the opposite of the spiritual is the material. The material world is what is seen, the spiritual world is what is unseen. The material world is our outside life, the spiritual world is our inner life. It helped me as I thought about this to think of the most openly materialistic person I’ve ever known. This is someone I have not had contact with in ten or fifteen years, but she would do things like write the purchase price of her new home on her Christmas cards. She wouldn’t have any problem violating social taboos about money and would openly tell you how much money she made or her husband made. She’s been married three times, each time trading in her husband for someone more interested in accumulating wealth. The thing that strikes me about her as I sit and think today is that she was open about what most of us do secretly. We calculate our net worth, worry if we have enough, and think about what we can do to get more. That seems to me the opposite of being spiritual, because it is fixing our minds and hearts on what is material.

Being spiritual involves qualities that cannot be easily measured. How does one measure inner peace, a loving attitude, serenity, calmness, balance, innocence or modesty?

Material things are to obtained, and the acquisition of them is always empty. They never satisfy. What is spiritual cannot be obtained, you can’t buy spirituality. It is grown over time.

My resolution for 2010 and beyond is to grow my spiritual nature and put to death my material nature.

I am having a hard time today seeing how religion contributes to that. Here’s what I mean. I can imagine some religious people who are very spiritual. Mother Theresa, Gandhi, Corrie Ten Boom, Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, the Dalai Lama, and Rabbi Abraham Heschel all come to mind. But I can imagine plenty of other religious people that don’t strike me as spiritual. Osama Bin Laden, for all accounts, seems to be a very religious person. There are plenty of other religious people that I can think of – some of course aren’t public figures but people I know, and I won’t list them, but three public figures I quickly think of are the late Oral Roberts, Joel Osteen, and Tammy Faye Bakker. Religion doesn’t seem to guarantee spiritual development. One can grow old, but one can always remain immature. I can also think of some very spiritual people who don’t follow any particular religion.

I’ve intentionally tried so far to be generic about religion. Now let me get specific and talk about Christianity, since that is my religion and the religion of most everyone who reads this blog. I’ll just make some statements and let you have at me.

Buddhism seems like a better religion than Christianity at developing spirituality.

Evangelical Christianity’s main tool for the development of spirituality is the quiet time, a daily 15 or 30 minute time of individual Bible study and prayer and perhaps journaling. Stanley Hauerwas, who makes a living by making provocative statements, said, “Individual Bible study should be discouraged because on their own people almost never get it right.” What I find astonishing is that someone can read the Bible daily for twenty or thirty years and not get that it is about so much more than “me and Jesus.” Or, specifically, my sins and the forgiveness of them. That seems more materialistically focused than spiritual.

The Bible is misused and poorly interpreted. For example, how can Christians seriously say to each other, “Song of Songs is a book about Jesus’ relationship to the church?” You must have never read the book to be able to say that with a straight face. Jesus wants to tell the church her breasts are the like the twin fawns of a gazelle?

What if someone said, “I’ve read the Bible every day for ten years, but only one book, Song of Songs”? What would you make of that?

Here’s the point – the Bible is so many books at once, and parts of it don’t seem to develop our inner life at all. Stanley Hauerwas doesn’t want people to quit reading the Bible, he wants them to read with the wisdom of a community, because a community can help us find what can nourish our souls in what seems so obtuse on the surface.

To sit down by yourself and daily read through something like Leviticus or Judges or I Chronicles or even Revelation doesn’t seem as likely to help your spirit grow as reading a really good poem, watching a beautiful sunrise, listening to rapturous music, embracing a loved one, sticking your hands into the earth, folding the laundry as an act of love, seeing a baby asleep, contemplating icicles, staying out of the mall, staying away from the television, eating better, or laughing really hard with a friend.

Go ahead and call me a heretic. I’m ready for it.