Ditch
the Categories
“Spiritual
practice can easily continue the pattern of fragmentation in our lives if we
set up divisions defining what is sacred and what is not, if we can call
certain postures, practices, techniques, places, prayers, and phrases ‘spiritual’
while the rest of who we are is left out. We can compartmentalize even our
innermost lives.”
Jack
Kornfield (A Path With Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual
Life; Bantam Books, 1993)
Most people who are church-goers or
regulars at synagogue, mosque, or temple, feel closest to God when they are enacting the rituals, speaking the prayers, and singing the hymns of their
faith. There is something about the words, the cadence, the evocative music
that is so deeply engrained in their psyche that the sacred becomes a palpable presence.
Others of us experience the presence of divinity most potently in nature, in
a woodland, on a mountain, at the ocean, or next to a river. Hardly anyone
feels their spiritual connection to creation when sitting in a classroom, or
checking out at the grocery store, or when punching their pin into an ATM. The
truth is, as Carl Jung said, “Bidden or not, God is always present.”
Being
able to integrate our spirituality into everyday life is where the divine and
the mundane cross and intermingle. I don’t want to imply that this is easy and
natural. At one point in human existence, before there were ten-thousand layers
of difference between us and other creatures, when we lived in communal
settings and depended upon one another for survival, perhaps such divisions
weren’t as obvious. Part of our development from hunter-gatherers to street savvy
hipsters has been to categorize everything in our lives into neat and discrete compartments
of this or that. We live compartmentally and we think the same way.
God is
always present because God is all of creation. God knows what we do and what we
think and what we say because God looks through our eyes. God is within us and
outside us, in the earth, the sky, and the water. God is in our homes and on
our streets, in the birds that sing, the dogs that bark, and the airplanes that
stream by overhead. As the words of Romans 8: 38-39 tell us: “…neither death,
nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor
things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature can separate us from
the love of God…” We are here to stay and so is the creative power that we
call God—indistinguishable, no degrees of separation. Our job is to recognize
this truth in ourselves and in each other. And most of all, to allow it to
inform our every moment every day. May your Solstice be blessed with wholeness.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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