Saturday, December 20, 1997

Insights from spiritual thinkers and seekers

By Tom Schaefer / Knight-Ridder Newspapers

Let's get mystical.

If the term frightens you, try the word spiritual.

We're entering a season that awakens deeply spiritual longings, no matter what a person's religious affiliation is.

So to stimulate your spiritual search from a variety of religious traditions, I offer these insights from thinkers and seekers.

ON THE TERM SPIRITUAL:

"It is the reference to the transcendent in our own existence, the direction of the Here toward the Beyond. It is the ecstatic force that stirs all our goals ... turning arrivals into new pilgrimages, new farings forth. The spiritual is something we may share in. When we perceive it, it is as if our mind were gliding for a while with an eternal current."

--Rabbi Abraham Heschel, in "Seeds of the Spirit: Wisdom of the Twentieth Century," by Richard Bill and Barbara Battin.

ON PRAYING:

"It's good to be a little physically hungry when you go to pray because of the psychosomatic unity of body, mind and spirit; when your body is hungry it kind of awakens a hunger in your soul," said Brennan Manning, a Christian writer and self-described mystic, in Aspire.

He encourages people to select two times a day (preferably in the morning before breakfast and the evening before dinner), close their eyes and choose a one-or two-syllable sacred word (God, Jesus, etc.).

"When your mind starts to wander, as it inevitably will, you just return to repeating the sacred word without moving your lips. That represents your deliberate conscious intention to stay in the presence (of God)."

ON PRACTICING SELF-DENIAL

"Renunciation is not giving up the things of this world, but accepting that they go away."

--Suzuki Roshi

"O God, break with thy blows this shell of self, until thy light is reflected in glory from the hidden mirror at the foundation of my soul."

--A Sufi prayer

ON GIVING

"We all have, without exception, a very deep longing to give -- to give to the earth, to give to others, to give to the society, to work, to love, to care for this earth. That's true for every human being. And even the ones who don't find it, it's because it has been squashed or somehow suppressed in some brutal way in their life. But it's there to be discovered. ... One of the worst human sufferings is not to find a way to love, or a place to work and give of your heart and your being."

--Jack Kornfield, "Roots of Buddhist Psychology."

ON RITUALS:

"There are moments in our lives when we desperately wish to be moved, when we submit to ritual willingly. Many formerly secular or unaffiliated Jews are returning to the world of Jewish ritual because they find that Jewish life moves them as nothing else can. Newcomers to a traditional Shabbat evening meal are often struck, not by the religious elements of the evening, but by the human dimension of Shabbat.

What stays with them is the simplest sight of parents placing their hands on children to bless them, or of a husband singing a song of praise and love to his wife. The memories that linger are those of families gathered around a table singing, of genuine celebration and festivity somehow created in the very midst of a hectic and often numbing pace of life."

--Daniel Gorid, "Moment."

ON THE MEANING OF CHRISTMAS:

"If, for us, reality is material only; if we gaze at the birth (of Jesus) with that modern eye which acknowledges nothing spiritual, sees nothing divine, demands the hard facts only; ... if truth for us is merely empirical, then we are left with a photograph of small significance: a derelict husband, an immodest mother, a baby cradled in a feed-trough in an outdoor shelter for pack animals.

"But those for whom this is the only way to gaze at Christmas must themselves live lives bereft of meaning: nothing spiritual, nothing divine, no awe, never a gasp of adoration, never the sense of personal humiliation before glory nor the shock of personal exaltations when Glory chooses also to bow down and to love."

--Walter Wangerin, in Christianity Today

(Tom Schaefer writes about religion and ethics for the Wichita (Kan.) Eagle. Write to him at the Wichita Eagle, P.O. Box 820, Wichita, KS 67201, or send e-mail to tschaefer(at)wichitaeagle.com )

(c) 1997, The Wichita Eagle (Wichita, Kan.).

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