Construct a Mature Spirituality
Spirituality is one of the most slippery terms of our time. What does it mean? How does it differ from religion? Are they the same, or are they in conflict? And how can we identify spirituality, especially a mature spirituality? And who is to say which is which?
To address these questions, we first have to raise the question of authority. Who is authorized to make these decisions — ourselves or someone else for us? And what if that authority is inconsistent with our own reality or that which lies deep within us? Historically, the authority lay in the tribe, informed by its elders, its ancestors, its venerable stories. That other tribes had equally compelling authorities, sacred traditions, and the like is only a problem if one asserts the superior truth of one’s own received authority and denies the received authority of the other. Or as Joseph Campbell wryly observed: myth is other people’s religion.
Sadly, most tribalism, up to and including the tumultuous religious wars of our own age, again demonstrates the core insecurity of this human animal, who cannot get beyond his own internal security management and falls back on the primitive defense that “I am right, and you are wrong,” or “My God is the true God, and your god is an imposter.” That we have been at this sorry spectacle of complex-ridden, tribalistic religious wars for the whole of human history says something about our general difficulty in accepting ambiguity or the premise that the only way to respect the mystery is to allow it to remain the Mystery — without seeking to privatize it, codify it, and make it one’s own. The hidden hubris behind such theologies is so overt that it is embarrassing to a thoughtful person, but one cannot overemphasize the power of human anxiety to commit the most appalling gymnastics of mind to justify anything.
What passes for popular religion in America, and many developed countries, is a rather pathetic encounter with the complexity of being human in an essentially unknowable universe. The largest religious groupings show up in two forms. One branch infantilizes its flock by making them feel guilty, reminding them how they failed to measure up to impossible standards of moral perfection. This stratagem is infantilizing because it activates the parental imagoes inside the head of most of us. Once evoked, this parental imago threatens both punishment and the withdrawal of approval, either of which proves devastating to the child. That such material is so easily evoked is an indication of how ineffective much parenting is—that the child does not feel a sense of personal worth and trust in the other. Such a dual betrayal of the legitimate needs of every person is repeated in pathologizing these “adults.” They may walk around in big bodies, but inside is the terrified, invaded child. Shame on those who exploit this human vulnerability!
On the other hand, there are those slick, coifed types who tell people what they most want to hear: that you can have your wishes granted by right conduct, right thinking, right practice. While this hubristic, opportunistic quid pro quo was blasted to smithereens millennia ago by the wisdom of Ecclesiastes and Job, what sells better today than the wish fulfillment of modern materialism, hedonism, and narcissism? Why wouldn’t any of us want to get right with the Big Guy upstairs, who can shower largesse upon our small lives? This “theology” is disguised boosterism, sales pitching, and motivationalism, and it ratifies greed, narcissism, and the desire for a stroll on easy street. What double trauma will these people experience when the real world happens again, as it always does, to refute the easy sales motivation of these slick promoters, for whom the only excess is the bulging coffers of their private fortunes? Shame on those who exploit this human vulnerability!
For any individual to construct a mature spirituality, it may be necessary to sort through the ruins of many great traditions, East and West, for they all have great wisdom embodied in their stories and exemplary figures. In the end, “the modern” is a person who understands that, for good or ill, the responsibility for spirituality has shifted from tribal religion to the shoulders of the individual. While this is an enormous freedom, indeed a privilege — a proffering of dignity to the human soul — it is also an intolerable burden for many. Such a person then has to ask what accords with his or her inner reality and reject what may speak to others but not to him or her. Never in recorded history has there been such a mythological crisis for so many; never in human history have so many been free to decide their path and what constitutes authority to them.
The human project is bathed in mystery: From whence do we come, whither to, and in between, what are we to do? These questions are universal and timeless. Each of us is called to address them for ourselves. If we do not, then we are either automatons serving the pressures exerted around us or have deferred our authority to someone else. Any encounter with genuine mystery, whether in the cosmos, in the intricacy of the atom, in each other, or even in ourselves, is an encounter with the radical other, so radically other that we will never know it for sure. If we did, it would not be the Mystery but a petty artifact of human construction.
We need to consider for a moment the phenomenology of the encounter with mystery. When we are in the presence of the genuine other, we are moved, shaken, stirred, attracted, or terrified, as the case may be. What arises from that phenomenological experience is the epiphenomenon — namely, the image that arises from the experience and generates our vehicle for relating to the transcendent other. The image and our understanding, however provisional, are not the Mystery; they are the by-products of the Mystery. Still, it is in the nature of human ego consciousness to fixate upon that image or that provisional formulation as a testimony to our need to demystify things, to understand them, perhaps even to control them. But in so doing, we reify, harden, concretize the image or the understanding, and in time are wed to the epiphenomenon, not the Mystery. So we codify and institutionalize our experiences, and the more we operate within these tertiary elaborations, however sincere our intent, the more removed we are from the Mystery itself. One of its more sinister consequences is thus the conviction of righteousness one possesses in denouncing the experience of others. As writer Anne Lamott sagely observes, we can conclude we have made our god in our own image when it turns out that our god hates the same people we do.1
These questions naturally require the sincere person to take Freud’s blunt critique of religion very seriously. He opined that most, if not all, religion is the projection of parental complexes and infantile relational patterns onto the blank screen of the universe. Equally, it is the effort to establish security in this perilous transit by positing an afterlife and a longed-for paradisal state. Freud may not be wrong, per se, if one examines the psychological roots of one’s own religious formulations.
But I think him not wholly right either. There is truly a place in the life of the human animal for wonder, curiosity, and openness to the fathomless otherness of the universe. This spirituality is found in the artist when she suspends her ego controls and paints the images that rise from unknown zones. It is found in the scientist reflecting on the intricacy of the molecule or the whirling planets and constructing an even better model than the one that served before. It is found in the parent holding the child in his arms for the first time, watching this fragile thing breathe on its own and knowing the whole human story is packed within and wishing to unfold. It is found every time we are drawn to encounter the mystery of each other and the infinity of possibilities that lie within us. We do not need another life, another universe, for this one is more than we can ever explore in our short dance here.
I submit to the reader that a mature spirituality will be found in the five following points.
First, it is the nature of the modern and the postmodern world that, like it nor not, one now has a responsibility that was once tribal. The flight from this accountability is a flight from oneself and deference to the received authority of others. So the first test of our trial-and-error process is found in the principle of resonance. Resonance means “to re-sound.” When we try on someone else’s coat, it may or may not fit, may or not accord with who we are, and so we readily change coats but do not accept anyone else’s coat without it feeling right to us. If something is right for us, it resonates. If it is not right, it does not resonate. We can will it to do so, and even convince ourselves, but it won’t pass the test of time. Often what seemed to resonate in the past ceases to do so presently, which is why so many have turned to the superficial and seductive images of secular society. But if something truly resonates within us, it is right for us, at least for now. Tomorrow will answer to tomorrow. Thus it is not with guilt or fear that we let go of yesterday’s conviction, but with honesty about whether or not resonance occurs. We do not choose that; the soul makes that decision for us.
Second, a true spirituality opens up to the numinous, a word that speaks to something approaching us, soliciting our engagement, not willed by the ego. This means that even traumatic experience can be and often is numinous, because it hits us with the radical mystery of the other and obliges us to reframe our sense of self and world.
Third, mature spirituality opens us to mystery, which means certainty is a luxury of the naive, the frightened, the obtuse. This means that I must live with more uncertainty than is comfortable, and however unsettled I may feel, to realize that I have no honest choice but to go on and engage life and death on their terms, not mine.
Fourth, a mature spirituality asks me to grow up. We all know that a frightened child, an adaptive history, makes most of our decisions. We all know with what timidity we approach our lives, with what “checking in” we question our decisions, and what infantilizing wishes for magic drive our imaginations. Growing up, at the least, means that we accept full responsibility for our lives. We are, all of us, still responsible for meeting our needs, not some magical other, someone who will fix it for us, lift the burden off us, explain what it all means, instruct us in what we are supposed to do, and if we are really lucky, take care of us so that we don’t have to grow up after all.
Fifth, our beliefs and practices are to be measured not by whatever solipsistic or seductive certainties they offer us, but whether they open us to mystery, deepen our engagement with the unfolding of our journey, and require us to grow up, live without certainty, yet conduct daily life with values that we do our best to practice.
In 1937, Jung gave the Terry Lectures at Yale University, and he concluded his three presentations by saying, “No one can know what the ultimate things are. We must take them as we experience them. And if such experience helps make life healthier, more beautiful, more complete, and more satisfactory to yourself and to those you love, you may safely say, ‘This was the grace of God.’”2
To that I might add that such experiences of the other are sometimes reassuring, sometimes terrifying, but wherever they oblige us to reframe our stories, refashion our understandings, and crack us open to the new, we are in the presence of mystery. While this is seldom easy or pleasant, it is the opposite of infantilizing, the opposite of ratifying our narcissistic agendas. It is in such encounters with the universe in its unfolding mystery that we either grow spiritually or diminish. We either embrace the mystery of this journey, or we run from it. And something within us always knows the difference.