The Spirituality I Seek

Clergyman, author, and professor of Homiletics at Yale Divinity School, Halford Luccock, used to tell the story of a father who took his young son camping. At one point the father handed his son binoculars so he could better see the beauty of a mountain range. But the boy took the binoculars and looked through them from the wrong end. He complained that everything seemed so small, that he couldn’t make anything out. His father turned them around and said, “Now, you can see things as they are.”

I read that story years ago and have never forgotten it. It seems an appropriate example of the error of our day.

We seem, as a society, to be looking through the wrong end of the binoculars. Everything is small, insignificant, trite, unclear. We have no grand vision, no breathtaking sense of the beauty of our world and its people. We have lost our perspective.

The gifted historian and novelist, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, was a voice of courage and truth against the old Soviet Union. His books confronted the cruelty and emptiness of Communism. He bravely revealed the evil of the Gulag, the Soviet labor camps, where he himself had been a prisoner for 11 years for criticizing the brutality of Joseph Stalin.

Solzhenitsyn concluded that a society, a government, without any spiritual depth will ultimately buckle and crumble. He once wrote, “The strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of its spiritual life than on its level of industrialization. Neither a market economy nor even general abundance constitutes the crowning achievement of human life. If a nation’s spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development. A tree with a rotten core cannot stand.”

We’re not talking here about the shallow, self-absorbed silliness that is often promoted as spirituality today. And we’re not talking about the politically partisan, elitist, often misguided religious foolishness that claims to be Christian, advanced in many American churches.

The spirituality we need today seeks a deeper understanding. It touches our core values and brings them into the light for us to see and own. It is a spirituality that feeds on beauty, tenderness, and tolerance. It promotes compassion. It generates feelings of connection with all people. It breathes in us a love of life.

This kind of spirituality is found when we learn to cherish nature; when we prize all of life both human and animal; when we open ourselves to honesty and insight into our own human needs and desires. It is a force that humbles us and guides us to not take ourselves so seriously. It reminds us, often, that good and evil reside in all of us and so there is no superiority, no call for pretentiousness from any of us.

There is a sense today that learning, education, thinking through our attitudes and actions, are all somehow highbrow and uppish. We seem to be led today only by primitive emotions, by anger and resentment, by jealousy and betrayal. We have become a wounded people, carrying with us the pain of our indifference to others, holding on to old prejudices, ancient myths about race and religion and culture.

We miss out on so much of life when we are unwilling to learn new things, to see life through a fuller perspective, to risk entering the larger world around us where we experience different religious ideas, meet people not of our class or race, try exotic foods, listen to music that comes from other cultures, and put ourselves out there. We stunt any depth of spirituality when we close ourselves off to only what we have always believed, what we have always known, what we have always done.

There is an old saying by the ancient mystics, “If you are not willing to learn, no one can help you. If you are determined to learn, no one can stop you.”

That would be a lovely motto for America these days.

I don’t want to spend my life looking through the wrong end of the binoculars seeing life as small and impossible to see clearly. I long for an enlarged perspective, to see things up close, to realize just how gorgeous our existence is. I want to keep learning. I want to be open to loving the entire world. I want to be possessed by the force of a maturing, meaningful spirituality.

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If I had five minutes to evacuate--what would I take with me?

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The Unclad Soul

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