Spiritual Life

This is simultaneously an ideal and what I’m attempting to live out in this life. I am not always so sure of the reality of it; but I must affirm something and strive to keep it true. I hope for nothing less than to fully discover humanity and spirituality in this—though that discovery is sometimes painful if it’s complete. I speak below about scars and wounds, about how I heal and want to heal others. But it’s becoming clear to me that the deepest scars are those self-inflicted ones and the wounds we must first heal in others are those we have given them. Otherwise, these are all just pleasant words on a page. A spirituality that lacks that awareness and action is wholly destructive.
At one time, not so long ago, I would have described myself as a religious person. I was comfortable in that—not really proud or self-righteous, I just felt that God had blessed me by putting me in with the right people (it was a faith of polarities; everyone else was obviously wrong). I was at a time in my life where I needed physical and psychological order. I wanted to be in a place where I knew exactly what was expected of me and how others would react and behave in any given situation. This is something I’ve realised in retrospect and, had I known and been able to discern the underlying motivations at the time, I may have made different decisions. However, these were the decisions of dogmatic youth and perhaps to be expected in the life of a seeker.

“The quest for inner knowledge is rarely a popular one. It is too far afield of common interests and arouses the suspicion of those who fear and hate anything beyond their own horizons.” —Richard Smoley from Inner Christianity
What do you consider valuable? Is it something limited and precious or unlimited and boundless? Is it a thing that can be counted and sequestered away, hoarded and kept under lock, or not a ‘thing’ at all? What is the value of your spirit? What price would you put on God? Can we somehow lose either or are our essential possessions inseparable from us?

I finished an essay last evening for my Spiritual Activism Course; it’s entitled Blessings: The Beginning of Conflict Resolution. Here are some excerpts:
What is the root cause of conflict? Perhaps that is too large a topic to explore in a brief essay; What instead is the essential component of peace? When we hone peace to its “beginnings”, what do we find at the core? In many languages, a curse is considered the most powerful utterance available. Unfortunately, curses (or the words of conflict in general) also seem to be readily translatable into all dialects (and, for that matter, our curses are translated into the “language of nature” as our ideas and action have direct bearing on the environment). From local disagreement between individuals to vast conflicts between nations, the world is inundated with curses; yet, despite the richness of language, we lack ready words for harmony. This is partially a linguistic barrier; however, there is also little overarching structure that reaches across languages and ideologies to fill a common human need for blessing. I submit that most conflict is essentially language based and the point beyond a curse is often conflict.

I have never tolerated loud noise. As a child, I would cover my ears when someone was using a hammer or power tool; today I wear earplugs whilst using the vacuum. I’m just very sensitive to sound.

Urban environments are full of sound; they are not full of sound, of course, in the same sense that a forest is. The city is full of inescapable noise. This is mainly because cities have become places for cars to congregate and traverse, not places for people to live and walk about in. Pedestrians are usually pushed off to the side surrounding traffic and get secondary consideration.

I remembered an occurrence today; it happened a few years ago when I was leading a cross-cultural team in Bulgaria. We were waking through a mountain town on a very hot day and came upon an old Muslim woman. She brought us all cold water and chatted a bit with Vlady (our Bulgarian logistics fellow).
As we left, she said something that returns often in my memory:
“May all your villages be blessed.”

Noise, Noise, Noise, Noise.I am kept awake tonight.
Outside my open door
The inconsiderate television flares.
Its jitter crawling shadow slithers across the wall
Like a drive-in B-movie
Escaping its abandoned theater.

This society isn’t going to make it, is it?
The reservoir of our culture
Will only hold so much stagnant water
Before it overflows
Or bursts.