I continue to find interesting ideas that relate health/wholeness with spirituality. In the approach that I find compelling, we experience the spiritual in the most common events of life. We go to church not (or not only) to be in the presence of the Holy, but to learn to find the sacred in the ordinary. This is grace, that each facet of living gives the opportunity for the learning that moves me toward health and wholeness and, as well, awakens me to my connection with the cosmos, i.e., to spirituality.

Living in the moment, the now, the precious present, is living with the sacred. Health and wholeness, inhibited by our hang-ups about the past and our anxiety about the future, come as a by-product of such momentous living. An approach to therapy that focuses not on cure but on transformation through self-acceptance is found in the writings of Jacquelyn Small (Transformers: The Therapists of the Future; Awakening in Time: The Journey from Codependence to Co-Creation) and Charlotte Davis Kasl (Many Roads, One Journey). Our childhood experiences, however damaging, are to be accepted for their contributions to who we are and how we got here. This statement by Michael Ventura, in Shadow Dancing in the USA, speaks of that process:

What has marked you is still marking you. There is a place in us where wounds never heal, and where loves never end. Nobody knows much about this place except that it exists, feeding our dreams and reinforcing and/or haunting our days.... Bloody, half-flayed, partly dead, naked, tortured, my mother really does hang on a hook in my closet, because she hangs on a hook in me.... My closet is full of hooks, full of horrors, and I also love them, my horrors, and I know they love me, and they will always hang there for me, because they are also good for me, they are also on my side, they gave so much to be my horrors, they made me strong to survive. There is much in our new 'enlightened' lexicon to suggest that one may move into a house that doesn't have such a closet. You move into such a house and think everything is fine until after a while you start to hear a distant screaming, and start to smell something funny, and realize slowly that the closet is there, alright, but it's been walled over, and just when you need desperately to open it you find yourself faced with bricks instead of a door.

In the language of meditation, whether Zen, Christian or otherwise, the emphasis is on awakeness, mindful awareness, openness, living in gratitude for the here and now. Every act, not just formal meditation, is carried out without anchors to the past or illusions about the future. There is just openness to the here and now, all of it, not who I should be but who I am now. To be always in a meditative or prayerful state is a way of living, a kind of mental hygiene, a path on which one grows in wisdom and compassion.

It is an illusion to think that the proper or natural state is to be without wounds, says Thomas Moore, in Care of the Soul. The concepts of original sin in Christianity and the Four Noble Truths in Buddhism are doctrines that human life is wounded in its essence and that suffering is the nature of things. They are metaphors for 'things are not the way we would like to have them.' And in that sense the doctrine of original sin does not lead to the need for sacrifice or redemption; it leads us, rather, to the deepest levels of fate and existence. (167) The soul, representing our depths, may present itself to us as often through our shadows as through our brightness. "Melancholy thoughts carve out an inner space where wisdom can take up residence." (141) And Moore advises that we not fight depression, but learn from it.

More from Moore, some quoted, some paraphrased: "Care of the soul... is an appreciation of the paradoxical mysteries that blend light and darkness into the grandeur of what human life and culture can be." (xix)

"The theological doctrine of incarnation suggests that God validates human imperfection as having mysterious validity and value. Our depressions, jealousies, narcissism, and failures are not at odds with the spiritual life. Indeed, they are essential to it.... The ultimate marriage of spirit and soul.... is the wedding of heaven and earth, our highest ideals and ambitions united with our lowliest symptoms and complaints." (263)

Moore says that any subject, pursued far enough, has a sacred dimension -- a theology. "The small things in everyday life are no less sacred than the great issue of human existence." (290)

"The soul of religion ... is a daily involvement in mysteries and a personal quest for a corresponding ethic." (291)

Live ordinary life artfully, intuitively, Moore says, being willing to surrender a measure of rationality and control for the gifts of the soul. (300)

"... spirituality does demand attention, mindfulness, regularity, and devotion ... (and) some small measure of withdrawal from a world set up to ignore soul." (211)

"Spirituality ... needs ... deep intelligence, a sensitivity to the symbolic and metaphoric life, genuine community, and attachment to the world." (229)

Remembering that I began this quest by seeking definitions of all things spiritual, these words seem written directly for me: "The intellect wants a summary meaning -- all well and good for the purposeful nature of the mind. But the soul craves depth of reflection, many layers of meaning, nuances without end, references and allusions and prefigurations.... This practice suggests an 'archetypal' reading of the Bible, regarding its stories not as simplistic moral lessons or statements of belief, but as subtle expressions of the mysteries that form the roots of human life." (235)

Comment: I have lived with the assumption that if I can understand something I can control either it or my response to it. But "letting go" is not just letting go of the illusion of control, it is also letting go of the illusion of understanding. Everything is just as it is, sans understanding, sans control. It calls for mindful awareness, then acceptance. This is what life as a journey is all about -- a path of experience as gift for our wisdom (which is different from understanding). Understanding has its uses, but it is an illusion to believe that by understanding "it" I have grasped the real meaning of "it."

The Fundamentalist illusion is, I think, that some one formulation is the whole truth. The issue is not a matter of Christians vs. pagans, insiders vs. outsiders, not even of truth vs. non-truth, but of layers of meaning. In dreamwork, according to Jeremy Taylor, each dream has several layers of meaning, including the surface meaning, the personal meaning, the social meaning, and the archetypal meaning. So, I assume, does each experience -- as well as each piece of scripture, each poem, each musical composition, each work of art -- carry within it layers of meaning, not true or false, but suited to us where we are. And there are learning loops, by which lessons learned at one level contribute to learning at other levels, because all are connected in a totality. I think we learn at greater depth as we develop meditative skills of mindful awareness. We have the potential for finding deeper levels of meaning.

I want to turn now to a book about the development of mindful awareness and its power to be a transformative part of one's daily life: Ordinary Magic: Everyday Life as Spiritual Path, edited by John Welwood. It is a collection of essays by spiritual teachers, therapists, and creative artists. Some paraphrases and quotations from it follow:

There is a deep joy that comes when we stop denying the painful aspects of life and instead allow our hearts to open to and accept the full range of our experience: life and death, pleasure and pain, darkness and light... a joy that comes, not from rejecting pain and seeking pleasure, but rather from our ability to sit in meditation even when it is difficult and open to the truth. The work of practice begins by allowing ourselves to face fully our own sadness, fear, anxiety, desperation -- to die to our limited ideas about how things should be and to love and accept the truth of things as they are. (italics mine)

                                                                          -- Jack Kornfield, 281

In a chapter by Joanna Macy, "The Greening of the Self," the self is understood as a metaphor for personal survival, self-preservation, self-approval and self-interest. She proposes that we replace that Ego-self with an Eco-self, co-extensive with other beings and the life of the planet. She speaks of this as a spiritual change that will generate a sense of profound interconnectedness with all life.

Macy says this new idea of Eco-self is happening now, because of (1) the danger of human annihilation as we greedily and violently act toward humankind and the environment, (2) science, in the forms of systems theory, cybernetics, and new paradigms that stress the interconnectedness of all, and (3) the resurgence of non-dualistic spiritualities. In the latter connection, she mentions Buddhism and Creation Spirituality, and she finds grace and synergy in this process. Her chapter ends with the following words:

We know that we are not limited by the accident of our birth or the timing of it, and we recognize the truth that we have always been around. We can reinhabit time and own our story as a species. We were present back there in the fireball and the rains that streamed down on this still molten planet, and in the primordial seas. We remember that in our mother's womb, where we wear vestigial gills and tail and fins for hands. We remember that. That information is in us and there is a deep, deep kinship in us, beneath the outer layers of our neocortex or what we learned in school. There is a deep wisdom, a bondedness with our creation, and an ingenuity far beyond what we think we have. And when we expand our notions of what we are to include in this story, we will have a wonderful time and we will survive. (272-73)

Finding the sacred in the ordinary, including the ordinary us, and creating metaphors to express the meaning we find is our spiritual path is the journey. It is a path accessible to us without the need for intermediaries, but it is also a path on which one encounters many mysteries, and we wonder what to do with those. Thomas Moore suggests: "The source from which life flows is so deep that it is experienced as 'other.'" (300)

In an earlier portion of the book, Moore, who lived as a monk for a number of years and is now a psychotherapist, says that we need "an articulated world-view, a carefully worked out scheme of values, a sense of relatedness to the whole, ... a myth of immortality and an attitude toward death." (204) And on another page, he says: "Our culture is in need of theological reflection that does not advocate a particular tradition, but tends to the soul's need for spiritual direction." (229) (I think that is what I am trying to do, for myself at least, and maybe for others.)

What would such a theological reflection contain? I suggest:

-- not cosmic answers but a celebration of mystery
-- a sense of unity with the whole
-- values that reflect the eco-self rather than the ego-self
-- an acceptance of humankind as wounded and suffering, as well as able to experience the sacred
-- life as lessons to be learned on a journey toward wisdom
-- the sacred to be experienced in the ordinary
-- metaphors that enhance the role and value of humankind in the life process
-- symbols that express totality and interconnectedness
-- a sense of special community with those who share our commitment and values, within a sense of belonging to all humankind
-- death seen as passage into another level of existence
-- (add your own, and let me know)

Re death and immortality: I have been willing to say, with Robert Frost, "There may be little or much beyond the grave; the strong will wait until they see." And I have never thought much about reincarnation. Recently, however, I have learned more about reports of near-death experiences, and I have read Brian Weiss' book, Many Lives, Many Masters. Weiss is a Columbia- and Yale-educated psychiatrist who had no belief in reincarnation until he used hypnosis to regress a patient back to the experience that was the source of her phobia and found that she regressed several centuries to a past life. In all, she went back to 12 past lives while under treatment. She also reported experiences of her own several deaths and the learning that she acquired from "Masters" during the times when she was not in a physical state.

I am trying to absorb this new "knowledge" and to discover what differences it may make in my life if I come to see my time here as only one of several appearances on earth -- to learn my lessons, and to expect to continue my "life" in another, perhaps spiritual, realm. How would that change my world-view, my habits, my values, my relationships?