BuddhistDruidChristianHumanist

When I draw this Wheel of Spirituality, I often just put those dollar signs in this portion of the wheel. This area IS about your financial well-being but it is also about worth. Again, thinking about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, there are various levels of financial security. There is the basic financial need that is about being able to provide food, clothing, and shelter for you and your family. There is also the financial desire for greater security for the longterm, the ability to provide a future for our children or other loved ones in need and the desire to feel secure in the knowledge that the next health crisis isn’t going to threaten any of those basic needs. And then there is the financial desire for security and comfort. However, this $$$ placeholder is about more than just the health of your checking account or investments. This is also about worth and identity. How do you view your own worth? Is it only about what you can provide financially or are you accounting for a...

Jesuit priest and philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, said, “We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” At our core, we are spiritual beings. When you think of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Need in conjunction with this quote, this wheel of spirituality I have been describing makes even more sense. As Maslow noted, we have various needs that must be met before we get can focus on transcendence: physiological, security, emotional, esteem, and meaning and purpose. When these needs aren’t met, we are more focused on our “human experience” than our “spiritual being.”   Part of our journey through these aspects of a whole spiritual life is accounting for these various needs so that we can give attention to our spirituality.  But it’s more than that. Tending to our needs also includes making things right with those needs, fulfilling those needs to the best of our ability but also making repairs when those needs have been compromised or diminished. Relationships are one of ...

So, I concluded my last entry by talking about the “shoulds” and the “shame” that keeps us from caring for ourselves and enjoying the re-creational activities that feed our spirit. That connects directly to another aspect of our spirituality – our self-esteem. Self-esteem is basically how you view your self-worth. Oh, but self-esteem is a tricky little devil. There are so many aspects to how we come to our sense of self-worth. First of all, there is the self-esteem that we derive from our families of origin, primarily our parents. Growing up, there was a poster in my house with a poem written by a child psychologist named Dorothy Nolte who wrote: If a child lives with criticism, he learns to condemn. If a child lives with hostility, she learns to fight. If a child lives with ridicule, he learns to be shy. If a child lives with shame, she learns to feel guilty. If a child lives with tolerance, she learns to be patient. If a child lives with encouragement, he learns confi...

This next aspect of our spirituality offers a little word play. Recreation, what do you do for fun? I like to play with the word by pronouncing recreation as RE-Creation. Recreation is about doing things you enjoy. Re-creation is about finding things that rejuvenate you, that give you energy, and feed your spirit. Life is full of tasks, to do lists, and life events that can sap our energy. So, our spirits need a break from the drudgery, not just in distractions which can be an energy sucker themselves (Hello, Facebook). But truly rejuvenating, inspiring re-creation. Of course, this can be very different things to different people. For my wife, she re-creates by hiking in the mountains. I enjoy hiking in the mountains also but for me that joy is mostly about being with her. My re-creational activities include sitting in the sun at a baseball park (any park, I even stopped off on a road trip in Atlanta, Georgia and watched a little league game one time) and singing. (Not necessarily ...

Today, I want to talk about another spoke in the wheel of spirituality – Rituals. Once again, we are familiar with the general concept of rituals. Depending on your age, you have probably attended numerous weddings and funerals, two of the most common rituals. And it is also more than likely that those rituals were based in familiar patterns of a particular religious tradition. But have you ever attended one of these rituals with a mind toward paying attention to what is going on at a deeper level? Take a wedding for example. Aside from the basic element of making a decision to spend their lives together, there are many other things going on as part of the commitment. The two families that are coming together are often acknowledged either by their opportunity to offer a blessing or simply the formal way they enter the ceremony. The couple choose readings that often represent what they think of this moment in their lives, the meaning of commitment, or the presence of God or love in ...

  As we explore these aspects of spirituality, I am in debt to one of my mentors, The Reverend D.Jo Lowell. D.Jo was my immediate supervisor when I first started working as an addiction/recovery chaplain at the Center for Dependency, Addiction, and Rehabilitation (CeDAR) at UCHealth. Her family was among the early European pioneers who came to Colorado in covered wagons in the 19 th century so wagon wheels have provided significant imagery and meaning for her. Although many wheels operate on a similar principle, when you think of a wagon wheel, the spokes of the wheel stand out for the purpose of D.Jo’s metaphor. At the center of a wheel is the hub but radiating from that center are several spokes which support the frame of the wheel, the rim, upon which the weight of the wagon is carried. For D.Jo, spirituality was not ONE thing, standing all alone, disconnected from all else. Instead, a person’s spirituality was at the hub of many spokes which radiated from that hub, giving st...

Prescript: My apologies for length between posts. We were in the mountains for a long weekend and I didn't have the ability to post much other than a few sentences about where we were. -----------  When someone is asked to describe their “spirituality,” they most often think that spirituality is about what they BELIEVE. Especially in the western world, we tend to equate spirituality with religion and religion with beliefs. That may not be true worldwide but that doesn’t mean beliefs are wrongly placed in this discussion. What you believe IS a part of your spirituality but I encourage you to broaden the concept of “belief” so that it is not exclusively about theologies and dogmas. For some people, those ARE a part of their beliefs but, even for the more conventionally religious, “belief” is much more than theologies and dogmas. I love language and there may not be a more interesting word to me than “belief.” In English, “belief” has the same root as the word “beloved.” So, “belief...

How is your spiritual life? (Stay with me, Agnostics and Atheists. This question concerns us all for reasons I will explain.) That question itself can provoke anxiety, so pregnant with expectations and judgments. So, let me first unpack the question by saying what is NOT intended in that question. As a Spiritual Director, my role is not to determine how good a Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, Humanist, et cetera are you? My role is not to determine how well your doctrine, theology, or practices adhere to the orthodoxy of your identity. My role is not to test the strength of your faith. Spiritual direction is about deep listening, paying attention to YOUR journey, noticing the emotions you present, the resources you have and are aware of, and the tools you have to access those resources. So, when I ask you “How is your spiritual life?” I am inviting you into an inventory of your emotional life, your experience of your spiritual journey (including how much judgment and grac...

About eight years ago, a test flight for one of several companies working to develop the space tourism industry ended in tragedy. The co-pilot was killed and the pilot was severely injured. Early reports had extremely little information about what happened so the news story to which I was listening included a lot of commentary on the courageous nature of test pilots. “They courageously take risks that most people don’t want to take,” one reporter said. “They make a decision to live life to the fullest. ” It was this last statement that caught my attention. Without intending disrespect for the deceased, I want to challenge this commonly held notion that “living life to the fullest” and “living courageously” are the sole possessions of the adventurers and explorers in our society, those that push the limits of safety. In fact, this notion has the potential to be both dangerous and dismissive. Dangerous in that it romanticizes risk to the point that “risk for risk’s sake” becomes the ...

Have you heard the quip, “If his brains were TNT, he couldn’t blow his nose!” Well, in truth, the mind is a powerful place. While you are reading this, you are capable of so many more thought processes than just the reading of a single sentence. In fact, when I do couples counseling, I like to point out that, while I am speaking, they are likely to be thinking about many other things even as they try to listen to me attentively. They might be thinking about the stove that was on right before they left for this appointment. Or if they can get to the grocery store before picking up the kids from school. Or what are they going to have for dinner tonight. Or they might be anticipating what I’m going to say next, particularly if they are worried I’m going to slay a sacred cow. “You need to give up Monday Night Football” or “Maybe dinner at your mother’s doesn’t have to happen every Sunday night.”   A whole slew of thoughts can come and go just in the amount of time it takes me to spea...

I was walking out to my car the other day when I noticed a car at the back of the lot and thought, “Wow, there are a lot of scratches and dings on that car.” Shortly after, I realized that was MY car. I knew where some of the scratches and dings came from. There’s a swirling pattern of scratches on the driver’s side where my then-three-year old decided to use my car as a chalkboard… with a garden stone. There’s a dent in the front of the hood where someone during rush hour hurtled a rock over the dividing wall that separates the neighborhood from the 6 th Avenue freeway. But then, there was also a dent on the undercarriage. I think that came from a pothole near my grocery store. And several dimples on the passenger side rear door. And several other random dings and scratches that I hadn’t notice before. That’s life. A ding here, a scratch there and, before you know it, that shiny new car from three years ago is looking worn. In life though, it is important to pay more attention to...

Thirty-five years ago, I was working at a Sears Distribution Center in Columbus, Ohio. I had left Oberlin College due to the confluence of a job to help run a congressional campaign and Oberlin withdrawing me because I couldn’t afford the tuition. The campaign job had ended in November but I was still withdrawn from Oberlin so I got a job loading trucks bound for retail stores during the Christmas shopping season. I had been living in an apartment on the west side of Columbus working second shift talking to other guys who were working second shift after a year or two of college. They all had different stories but the similarity was some twist or turn had brought them to this second shift job some years ago and this is where they remained. There was something symbolic about driving a forklift deep into the back of one of those trailers where you could barely see out to the right or left, only a narrow view straight out. Sometimes, it felt like being entombed. I stayed at the distribut...

Any journey of transformation is likely to include not only a journey toward a truer self but also an attempt to change things about ourselves that we don’t like. So, this exploration should include a conversation about shame and guilt. In my years working as an addiction chaplain, this was a frequent topic. You can imagine, even if you haven’t lived the experience itself, that addiction brings a lot of guilt and shame for the journey. Here is a paraphrased narrative that I heard many times in my office when meeting someone early in recovery where X, Y, and Z stand in for different actions someone did in the course of their addiction. “I can’t believe the things I have done to feed my addiction. At first, I didn’t think it was so bad. I said to myself, ‘Yeah, I like doing this but I would never do X.’ And then, one day, I realized I had done X so I said to myself, ‘Ok, I’ve done X but I would never do Y!’ And then, one day, I did Y and I said to myself, “Y isn’t so bad. At least, I...

As part of this Lenten Journey, I want to take some time exploring different emotions and experiences. Today, I want to give attention to Frustration. Frustration happens to be on my mind today because we are in a transition in our family that requires that I shop for health insurance on the open market rather than through an employer. I will spare you the details but the variations in premiums, levels of coverage, network providers, and the complexity of identifying which of your doctors are in which networks is dizzying. I have long been an advocate for universal health care simply for the amount of creative and entrepreneurial energy it would release if people were free of employee-based health insurance. But now I’m an advocate for the single payer system as a way of freeing up the energy I am having to spend trying to figure out which option best suits my family. In any case, I have experienced a lot of frustration today. So, I want to take some time to reflect on how we respo...

When I lived in Cleveland, I sang at Temple Israel during the High Holy Days services for several years. One of my favorite moments in the Yom Kippur liturgy was a passage that I can recite almost verbatim. “For transgressions of one person against God, the Day of Atonement atones but for transgressions of one person against another, the Day of Atonement does not atone until they make peace with one another.” I found this passage to be a powerful testimony to forgiveness. Yom Kippur is possibly the most significant Holy Day in the Jewish calendar. The Day of Atonement is about reconciliation and forgiveness. To my humanist spirit, it makes sense to me to make a distinction between the spiritual and the material practice of forgiveness. If God knows our heart, then the Day of Atonement is the day when God declares forgiveness for the transgressions that have separated your heart’s truth and relationship with God from your actions. But for transgressions between two people, there can b...

Today, I want to take a journey toward “Joy.” Not simply “What makes me happy?” but “What fills my heart with joy?” I want to get at a deeper experience of joy. I’m sure I could come up with more categories but for the sake of simplicity, I came up with three categories related to joy. 1. Distractions 2. Fun 3. Joy When I first ask my self the question, “What brings you joy?” I am tempted to start listing things that I enjoy but some of those are simply distractions from… life. From the disturbing news of the world, worries about my health or the health of loved ones, worries about finances. I enjoy watching movies, playing Sudoku, and listening to pop music. But those are mostly distractions. The next level of answers for that question brings me a list of things that are fun. I have fun when I ride roller coasters, go to the swimming pool and go down the big slide, and try a new recipe for dinner. These are all FUN things to do but I’m trying to go to a deeper soul level w...

This Lenten Journey that I have decided to take is about inviting transformation. So far we have explored languishing and the malaise that may be a reaction to the pandemic or just the responses death and loss that doesn’t need a pandemic. We’ve explored grief and how we grief has shaped our life so far. I promised we would turn to the issue of Hope when I asked that we stay in the grief of Good Friday to take a closer look at how we have experienced grief. So, let’s do that now. I want to share with you a blog I wrote two years ago on the subject of Hope. "Hope Does Not Disappoint Us" I just watched an inspiring movie by my friend Steve Sealy. The movie told the story of a man named Matt who suffered a serious spinal injury that rendered him quadriplegic (with an expectation that this would be a lifelong condition). One year later, Matt rode in the Triple Bypass bicycle ride. (The Triple Bypass is a 120 mile ride between Evergreen at the edge of the foothills west of D...

Easter Sunday brings so many memories. The music, the pageantry, the colors, the flowers, and, of course, the message. New life, transformation, renewal. But I find it important to remember that Easter Sunday isn’t Easter Sunday without Good Friday. And I find it further helpful to step into the sandals of the disciples and consider the bewildering grief they must have felt when Jesus was crucified. No matter what your theological belief is about what happened three days later, we can all relate to unexpected grief and loss. So as I reflect on the Lenten Journey, I have to hold a space for the journey toward that grief just as much as I see it as a journey toward hope and transformation. So, I want to reflect on grief today. What is your first memory of grief? What lasting impact has it had on you; how has it transformed you and shaped who you are today? There will be another day to consider how you found strength or hope after grief but today I want to stay on Good Friday and not ...

Early in my professional ministry, I was officiating a memorial service for a young mother. Her teenage son came to me and said something so profound that it has stuck with me 22 years later. I don’t recall the precise quote but it was essentially, “I don’t know if I feel the way I do because my mother just died or because ALL of my friends seem to be having big emotions right now.” For someone so young, he had enormous insight into the complexity of human emotions. In the weeks leading up to Ash Wednesday, I was doing some reflecting about a kind of malaise I had been feeling. As I journaled about this, some things became clearer and others more confusing. As the Covid pandemic approached, my beloved Uncle John died… and I completed the last of eight months of chemotherapy… that began less than a year after my mother’s death. As the pandemic progressed, my father-in-law died in October, my mother-in-law died in February, and then my own father died in July. So, as I journaled, I bec...