Spiritual is not the same as non-material

I think that a lot of the time when we talk about spirituality we are going off in a dangerous direction.  When we think or speak about the spiritual we tend to think in terms of the mind: reason, imagination, art, ideas.  We picture the ideal 'spiritual' person as someone absorbed in meditation, prayer, and 'spiritual' reading.  The more 'spiritual' a person is, the less concerned they are with the tawdry material world.   Spirit and body are split apart.  One is pure, the other at least a bit sordid.

This dualism, splitting spirit and body into separate, mutually exclusive realms, is misguided and, in fact, counter to a true, living spirituality. Any 'spirituality' that separates body from spirit, that seeks to lead humanity away from 'worldly interests' moves us away from charity, and charity, love, is what fundamentally defines spirit.  We talk a lot about how a life devoted to purely material ends is empty and leads to misery.  We don't talk so much about the fact that a disembodied 'spirituality', just sitting around in the clouds thinking about deep, spiritual things, is sterile, narcissistic and also leads to misery.  To be real love must be embodied in our mundane day to day activities.  Love is expressed and made real much less in gloppy gazes and sweet murmerings than it is in doing the dishes for your lover.   A meal shared with friends can and should be a true spiritual experience.  


Spirit and matter are not separate worlds that somehow manage to coexist.  They are the organic, intertwined whole that constitutes reality.  The meaning of acts comes from the spirit embodied in them; the effectiveness of the spirit comes from its incarnation in acts.  In order to live a 'spiritual life', one that is 'not a theory', we have to learn to see the spiritual embodied in the things and acts around us.  


True spirituality sees the sacred in the profane, the everyday.  Certainly an AA meeting is a sacred event.  What could be more sacred than wounded people coming together to tolerate each other, grow to love each other, share their experience, strength and hope to heal each other and reach out to help others?  How often do we really see it that way?

Evagrius, one of the Desert Fathers, said that virtue is ultimately a single whole in which the beauty and variety of all the 'virtues' are encompassed.  When we locate the spiritual life completely in the mind we inevitably fracture our spirituality.  It is no longer a living organism, an essential aspect of the person.  The virtues become separate tasks to be ticked off on a checklist.  Today I'll master fortitude, tomorrow temperance, Friday I think I'll become charitable.  The unity of virtue as a quality of the whole person has been shredded and spiritual growth gets knocked off balance and can go off in strange directions.  Maybe this is how a banker can sign mortgages he knows will create misery and still consider himself a good, moral person.  True spirituality, incarnated in the person, does not allow for compartmentalization.

A disembodied spirituality, one that treats the spiritual life as an intellectual activity, can lead a person to think that adhering to certain doctrines, following certain precise practices makes one spiritual.  'Spirituality' becomes conformity to rules.  Sound familiar?  There are several trends in AA that, in attempting to struggle against a loosey-goosey 'just go to meetings and complain' strain in AA have turned the Big Book into a cookbook.  Do the steps in this precise way with these people and your spirituality will flourish.  A 'Spirituality' that boils down to an arid adherence to a fixed methodology is ultimately barren and joyless.

All of life should be a prayer, a meditation.  A Shaker elder once said that "there is as much worship in good workmanship, done in the right spirit, as in any other act; the spirit of the thing done and not the act itself is the key to tell whether any thing done be worship or not."  The other side of that coin is the (too seldom heard) AA saying that 'if it's not practical, it's not spiritual.'