These days the word spiritual can mean anything from crystals to highly alcoholic beverages.
However, it hardly ever means what it originally meant, which is matters of the "spirit", that part of us which has to do with reality beyond what we can see, hear, and touch. This can encompass our highest values though it originally specifically referred to our spirit — that part of us which continues after death and which defines our identity.
This notion of spirit is shared by the main monotheistic faiths, but it remains deeply contentious within the West’s atheistic community. Today we relegate spiritual matters to the sphere of private property; things one has no business asking about. Spiritual things are both private and contentious so why ruin the party with discussion about them?
Most religions are concerned with spiritual things but with trust in mainline religions waning many people prefer to separate being spiritual from adherence to a religion. There can be a fair amount of superstition in religion, but most are deeply concerned with the real world.
Indeed, I would say that this is the mark of real spirituality, that it promotes love and concern this side of eternity. If it doesn’t then I would doubt there is much spiritual going on.
This is certainly the case for Christianity. Love is the highest value and locates true spirituality. To be spiritual is to love but what is it to love?
Love is so terribly hard to nail down and yet, in one simple statement, Jesus did so. To love, he said, is to "Do to others as you would have them do to you."
Of course, thought is involved. We must think about what we are doing and whether we’d like it done to us and if we could do that, the path to love may well unfold before us. Most of us find this incredibly hard to do and with good reason because most of us are hard to love — at least in part.
Love, it turns out, is a tremendous challenge for humans. We will always need help to love well.
Even love that begins with deep romantic attraction fails to keep modern marriages together roughly 50% of the time and the average length of marriage in the West today is a paltry 14 years.
But it’s worth it. A person who feels truly loved cannot help but be convinced that this is how they should be towards others.
A few years ago, I had the privilege of taking an elderly wheelchair-using member of my congregation to a rugby game. Leaving, I had to wait for the rest of our party to make their way to the exit.
As I stood there waiting, a very drunk, large young male staggered around the corner and accidentally ran into the footrests of the wheelchair, taking a huge chuck of skin off his shins. Pained, he yelled a significant list of obscenities and threatened to beat me up for hanging around with a dangerous weapon like a wheelchair.
The options looked bad. I could disabuse him of his view of the incident and, no doubt, end up in some kind of brawl which I would likely lose badly, leaving my companions to pick up the pieces. I could try to convince him nicely that there was another way of viewing the incident — unlikely — or, as was my normal approach, I could run, again leaving my wife and the elderly couple to deal with the situation.
None of these were clearly palatable. I truly loved this older man and I still wanted to be married once we returned home.
I prayed. What do I do God? In about the clearest voice I can remember I was called to admit to all the stupidity implied by the young man’s obscenities and ask for forgiveness, which I duly did.
The man was stunned and repeated his charge loudly and with a wider range of obscenities. I again admitted to everything and asked for mercy.
To say he was stunned would be an understatement. He’d clearly never heard such a pathetic defence.
He began once again to repeat his charge but stopped after a couple of words, waved his hand with a look of complete exasperation and left. Case closed. Love wins.
I have failed in this regard far more often than I have succeeded but I have learned that to be spiritual is to apply love even in the very worst of situations.
■ Richard Dawson is the minister at Leith Valley Presbyterian Church.
