Friday: Spiritual Vs. Religious Spirituality & Moments of Clarity.

It's Fridaaaayyyyyy! Well, it's really Sunday again. LOL. The weather was mild, there was definite moisture in the air, and it rained like a monsoon downpour on Friday. The picture to the left is out of my office window. Normally you can see mountains in the background, but it was not so much the case on Friday with the thick rain coming down. And much like everything under the rain, I've been under the weather myself. Yikes!! Sometime last week, one of our 'sick' patients came coughing into the office convinced she needed chiro care to help her get better. What she needed was to go get anti-biotics. Yes! So a few days of being in bed, and drugging myself up for the few hours of work that I could do, I made it to the end of the second week of March! 

If I recall correctly, I was here in California running a marathon and facing some pretty big life choices with my then significant-other last year. Apart from all of the feelings one has when they find out they're gonna be father, facing record-breaking heat for a 26.2-mile run, and the all-encompassing sensation that I was connected to everything and everyone in my life all at the time came over me, it was a momentary connection with the Universe, and maybe the Creator; I could only conclude I was exactly where I was supposed to be in my life plan, and it was a moment of clarity. I'll get into that in a bit. But, it's time for another weekly review of  Rants from a Midwest Guy In The Land of Milk and Honey!

Last week, I was talking about our humanity, or rather the basic survival instinct we all share and cultivate in different, more socially palatable manners. Some of us call it being cultured, while others call it living a 'insert religious or spiritual belief' centered living. There is and always has been a perspective on being or living a spiritual life. People defer to this, being spiritual' as the option of choice when asked if they're religious and prefer not to be labeled. Just for purposes of clarity on the matter of religious versus spiritual, I'm gonna chat a little bit about both and where they overlap. For those of you that do not know, I'm a formally trained AOG missionary, which is likely the most charismatic proselytizing group in the world today operating in most countries around the world covertly and also in plain traditional missions style work. I also have been mentored by a doctor of Jesuit theology for the last 20 years of my life. My mentor would tell you my evolution in understanding the matters of God, the world, and their interplay challenge most conventional approaches religion and being a 'spiritual' person or the religious 'spirit-led". So what's the difference between being spiritual versus being a religious spiritually lead person?

In modern day, the traditional roles and understanding of what God is and necessarily what He or She does or is doing has changed. We are no longer subject to, at least in most developed countries, the antiquated notions of God as an angry being and people, we're unable to converse with Him/Her without the help of an intermediary. An intermediary is someone in a better position to stand between us and the Almighty on our behalf. The present-day belief even among the Christian conservatives is that God is as accessible as the air you breathe as long as you're willing to submit to the belief that there is only one way into the afterlife, if you happened to be concerned with that part of your unforeseeable future, and that it is through the intermediate person known as Christ through which you establish a living relationship with that more or less clears up an unearned debt passed down to you by the first man and woman. With this traditional approach to the Almighty, we are essentially born stained and need to be cleaned up before we have an opportunity to attain the afterlife. I'm leaving a lot of the basic Easter story details out because what is more important is what you do from that moment forward till the day you die. Because in it, our life-time, we either maintain our ticket to life ever after or we loose it. 

We are subject to a life-time of having to make the right choices or at least more of them so that we maintain our "Salvation" or that special relationship through Jesus Christ that is our 'salvation' needed to get into the better afterlife. In Christianity, you get a helper to undertake this life-long struggle called the Holy spirit that is the third part of the three-pronged "God" idea. The Father that creates, His off-string Jesus, and His Spirit. The spirit fills one's life at the point we decide that we will submit to the almighty that we are fallen and need to be saved from something (Ahh, it's the almighty himself we're asking to be saved from..), sin and that we cannot do anything on our own make-up or to use a more technical term, we cannot atone for ourselves. This is what is often referred to as being the "Born Again," experience.  Now, in the aftermath of having entered into a salvific relationship with the Almightyvia his son Jesus' work on the cross, we believe we now have a new purpose in life, as if to say that before that we didn't, but maybe that's just semantics. "Born-again Christians" are to live every day with guidance from the "spirit" so that we are more likely to make the right choices that will ultimately lead us to the end of our life's journey into the ever-after foliage of heaven. Some people may call this God's plan for your life. This is what religious spirituality is; it is the taking on of one of the numerous Christian communities beliefs and ways of living believed to be the most biblically appropriate but still modern ways of living out your life-long struggle to the grave hoping that at the end of it, your life, you continue on into the after-life. With the help of the 'spirit' and our community of believers, we do our part of the plan also know as God's plan for our lives not only for you but everyone you are in a community with to bring into reality the ultimate all-inclusive plan for everyone. In there somewhere is the notion that we have free will, but I beg to differ on what 'free will" really is versus what you actually get. 

Much different are those people that call themselves 'spiritual' when it comes to claiming to be religious or not. The 'spiritual' belief that there is a higher power, a creator (maybe/maybe not), or a force all around us, in us, and in all things is constantly moving and shaping your life. This approach to life, by and large, is to respect all things because you, more or less, have an equal or similar part or value to everyone and everything else. This also loans itself to the idea that all things are then interconnected because we are all essentially created the same with maybe different functions but to be respected appropriately because of our spiritual interconnectedness; this concept is also found in the Christian-based believers with the exception that it is largely disregarded due the human condition and the 'superiority' complex. These folks may or may not take on a formal religious ritual of things in daily life or in a calendar year so as to have some routine because we are creature of ritual and routine. These folks may believe in an afterlife but are not concerned whether they will get there or not. These folks believe that what is important is the here and now and returning cycle of energy put out by them that returns, eventually back to them-also made reference to as Karma. They also believe that if they stay tuned-in, they will have more or be more clear of what, the universe of interconnected knowledge is trying to convey to them through either life events (tragic or positive), people (positive/negative), acquired knowledge at pivotal points in their life. 

One observation I've seen in my travels around the world (44 countries) is the proximity of this belief among the most affluent in society and the very poorest relatively speaking. The affluent aren't concerned with where they will live, what they will eat, and what they will do, per se, so they have time to become a little more transcendental in their approach to the spirit life and their development of it in them. On the other end of the pole are the very poor because they may worry about where they will live, what they will eat, and what they will do usually because they have little or no real control over those decisions. I believe that it is this acknowledgment, they have no real control, that the poor are also able to arrive at being more transcendental about their lives necessarily opening their minds and spirits to higher types of value systems. They achieve it...moments of clarity both the rich and the poor alike. The exact opposite populations of people essentially cogitating at higher levels of spiritual processing because they are not concerned, relatively speaking, for the things most people worry about when we perceive we have some control over our circumstances; it's everyone else still caught up in the middle of those extremes that have the most difficult time. We would likely not take the time to listen to the impoverished people because by most of our standards, "If they were in tune with the big picture, they wouldn't be in the situation they're in." But, if someone wealthy or famous says something of the remotely spiritual nature, we're a little more inclined to listen, "..because they have it figured out...look at what they got." The value system, the deep, dark secret of our system of valuation used to measure the worth of someone's words is always leading or way wheather we like it or not. But in the end, the poor essentially gleam from the universe what the wealthy do because they both have let go of their concerns about needing to control relatively speaking. We just want to believe the people we like more than the ones we don't want to be like have the answer!

TO BE CONTINUED.....

There you have it folks, another chunk of your life just passed you by hopefully increasing your interest just a little more, but we'll see. Till then, "Be well. Do good work, and come on back." G. Kieller.