Spirituality and Eros
What Is Spirituality?
"We are fired into life with a madness that comes from the gods and which would have us believe that we can have a great love, perpetuate our own seed, and contemplate the divine.
Desire, Our Fundamental Dis-Ease
It is no easy task to walk this earth and find peace. Inside of us, it would seem, something is at odds with the very rhythm of things and we are forever restless, dissatisfied, frustrated, and aching. We are so overcharged with desire that it is hard to come to simple rest. Desire is always stronger than satisfaction.
Put more simply, there is within us a fundamental dis-ease, an unquenchable fire that renders us incapable, in this life, of ever coming to full peace. This desire lies at the center of our lives, in the marrow of our bones, and in the deep recesses of the soul. We are not easeful human beings who occasionally get rest-less, serene persons who once in a while are obsessed by desire. The reverse is true. We are driven persons, forever obsessed, con-genitally dis-eased, living lives, as Thoreau once suggested, of quiet desperation, only occasionally experiencing peace. Desire is the straw that stirs the drink.
At the heart of all great literature, poetry, art, philosophy, psychology, and religion lies the naming and analyzing of this desire. Thus, the diary of Anne Frank haunts us, as do the journals of Therese of Lisieux and Etty Hillesum. Desire intrigues us, stirs the soul. We love stories about desire—tales of love, sex, wanderlust, haunting nostalgia, boundless ambition, and tragic loss. Many of the great secular thinkers of our time have made this fire, this force that so haunts us, the centerpiece of their thinking.
Sigmund Freud, for example, talks about a fire without a focus that burns at the center of our lives and pushes us out in a relentless and unquenchable pursuit of pleasure. For Freud, everyone is hopelessly overcharged for life. Karl Jung talks about deep, unalterable, archetypal energies which structure our very souls and imperialistically demand our every attention. Energy, Jung warns, is not friendly. Every time we are too restless to sleep at night we understand something of what he is saying. Doris Lessing speaks of a certain voltage within us, a thousand volts of energy for love, sex, hatred, art, politics. James Hillman speaks of a blue fire within us and of being so haunted and obsessed by daimons from beyond that neither nature nor nurture, but daimons, restless demanding spirits from beyond, are really the determinative factors in our behavior. Both women's and men's groups are constantly speaking of a certain wild energy that we need to access and understand more fully. Thus, women's groups talk about the importance of running with wolves and men's groups speak of wild men's journeys and of having fire in the belly. New Age gurus chart the movement of the planets and ask us to get ourselves under the correct planets or we will have no peace.
Whatever the expression, everyone is ultimately talking about the same thing—an unquenchable fire, a restlessness, a longing, a disquiet, a hunger, a loneliness, a gnawing nostalgia, a wildness that cannot be tamed, a congenital all-embracing ache that lies at the center of human experience and is the ultimate force that drives everything else. This dis-ease is universal. Desire gives no exemptions.
It does however admit of different moods and faces. Some-times it hits us as pain—dissatisfaction, frustration, and aching.
At other times its grip is not felt as painful at all, but as a deep energy, as something beautiful, as an inexorable pull, more important than anything else inside us, toward love, beauty, creativity, and a future beyond our limited present. Desire can show itself as aching pain or delicious hope.
Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire. What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality. Thus, when Plato says that we are on fire because our souls come from beyond and that beyond is, through the longing and hope that its fire creates in us, trying to draw us back toward itself, he is laying out the broad outlines for a spirituality. Likewise for Augustine, when he says: "You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you."3 Spirituality is about what we do with our unrest. All of this, however, needs further explanation.
What Is Spirituality?
Few words are as misunderstood in the contemporary English language as is the word spirituality. First of all, in English, this is a relatively new word, at least in terms of signifying what it does today. That is not the case in the French language, where the word has a much longer and richer history. However, in English, it is only within the last thirty years that this word has become part of our common vocabulary. Thus, for example, if one went to an English library and checked the titles of books, he or she would find that, save for a few exceptions, the word spirituality appears in those titles only published within the last three decades. It is also only within these years that the concept of spirituality has become popular, both within church circles and within the population at large. Today bookstores, church and secular alike, literally teem with books on spirituality.
A generation ago, with some notable exceptions, this was not the case. The secular world then had virtually no interest in the area. This was also true for most of the churches. What we would call spirituality today existed, but it had a very different face. In the Christian churches it existed mainly within certain charismatic prayer groups and theologies of the Pentecostal churches, the social action of some Protestant churches, and the devotional life within the Roman Catholic Church. In secular bookstores you would have found very little in the area of spirituality, other than a section on the Bible and some books on the merits of positive thinking. In ecclesial bookstores, since this was considered an area distinct from strict, academic theology, you would have found very little as well, save for Roman Catholic bookstores where you would have found devotional literature and some books labeled ascetical theology.
Today there are books on spirituality everywhere. However, despite the virtual explosion of literature in the area, in the Western world today, especially in the secular world, there are still some major misunderstandings about the concept. Chief among these is the idea that spirituality is, somehow, exotic, esoteric, and not something that issues forth from the bread and butter of ordinary life. Thus, for many people, the term spirituality conjures up images of something paranormal, mystical, churchy, holy, pious, otherworldly, New Age, something on the fringes and something optional. Rarely is spirituality understood as referring to something vital and nonnegotiable lying at the heart of our lives.
This is a tragic misunderstanding. Spirituality is not some-thing on the fringes, an option for those with a particular bent. None of us has a choice. Everyone has to have a spirituality and everyone does have one, either a life-giving one or a destructive one. No one has the luxury of choosing here because all of us are precisely fired into life with a certain madness that comes from the gods and we have to do something with that. We do not wake up in this world calm and serene, having the luxury of choosing to act or not act. We wake up crying, on fire with desire, with madness. What we do with that madness is our spirituality.
Hence, spirituality is not about serenely picking or rationally choosing certain spiritual activities like going to church, praying or meditating, reading spiritual books, or setting off on some explicit spiritual quest. It is far more basic than that. Long before we do anything explicitly religious at all, we have to do some-thing about the fire that burns within us. What we do with that fire, how we channel it, is our spirituality. Thus, we all have a spirituality whether we want one or not, whether we are religious or not. Spirituality is more about whether or not we can sleep at night than about whether or not we go to church. It is about being integrated or falling apart, about being within community or being lonely, about being in harmony with Mother Earth or being alienated from her. Irrespective of whether or not we let ourselves be consciously shaped by any explicit religious idea, we act in ways that leave us either healthy or unhealthy, loving or bitter. What shapes our actions is our spirituality.
And what shapes our actions is basically what shapes our desire. Desire makes us act and when we act what we do will either lead to a greater integration or disintegration within our personalities, minds, and bodies—and to the strengthening or deterioration of our relationship to God, others, and the cosmic world. The habits and disciplines we use to shape our desire form the basis for a spirituality, regardless of whether these have an explicit religious dimension to them or even whether they are consciously expressed at all.
Spirituality concerns what we do with desire. It takes its root in the eros inside of us and it is all about how we shape and discipline that eros. John of the Cross, the great Spanish mystic, begins his famous treatment of the soul's journey with the words: "One dark night, fired by love's urgent longings."6 For him, it is urgent longings, eros, that are the starting point of the spiritual life and, in his view, spirituality, essentially defined, is how we handle that eros.
Thus, to offer a striking example of how spirituality is about how one handles his or her eros, let us compare the lives of three famous women: Mother Teresa, Janis Joplin, and Princess Diana. We begin with Mother Teresa. Few of us would, I suspect, consider Mother Teresa an erotic woman. We think of her rather as a spiritual woman. Yet she was a very erotic woman, though not necessarily in the narrow Freudian sense of that word. She was erotic because she was a dynamo of energy. She may have looked frail and meek, but just ask anyone who ever stood in her way whether that impression is correct. She was a human bull-dozer, an erotically driven woman. She was, however, a very disciplined woman, dedicated to God and the poor. Everyone considered her a saint. Why?
A saint is someone who can, precisely, channel powerful eros in a creative, life-giving way. Soren Kierkegaard once de-fined a saint as someone who can will the one thing. Nobody disputes that Mother Teresa did just that, willed the one thing—God and the poor. She had a powerful energy, but it was a very disciplined one. Her fiery eros was poured out for God and the poor. That—total dedication of everything to God and poor—was her signature, her spirituality. It made her what she was.
Looking at Janis Joplin, the rock star who died from an overdose of life at age twenty-seven, few would consider her a very spiritual woman. Yet she was one. People think of her as the opposite of Mother Teresa, erotic, but not spiritual. Yet Janis Joplin was not so different from Mother Teresa, at least not in raw makeup and character. She was also an exceptional woman, a person of fiery Bros, a great lover, a person with a rare energy. Unlike Mother Teresa, however, Janis Joplin could not will the one thing. She willed many things. Her great energy went out in all directions and eventually created an excess and a tiredness that led to an early death. But those activities—a total giving over to creativity, performance, drugs, booze, sex, coupled with the neglect of normal rest—were her spirituality. This was her signature. It was how she channeled her eros. In her case, as is tragically often the case in gifted artists, the end result, at least in this life, was not a healthy integration but a dissipation. She, at a point, simply lost the things that normally glue a human person together and broke apart under too much pressure.
Looking at Joplin's life, and at our own lives, there is an interesting reflection to be made on Kierkegaard's definition of being a saint—someone who can will the one thing. Most of us are quite like Mother Teresa in that we want to will God and the poor. We do will them. The problem is we will everything else as well. Thus, we want to be a saint, but we also want to feel every sensation experienced by sinners; we want to be innocent and pure, but we also want to be experienced and taste all of life; we want to serve the poor and have a simple lifestyle, but we also want all the comforts of the rich; we want to have the depth afforded by solitude, but we also do not want to miss anything; we want to pray, but we also want to watch television, read, talk to friends, and go out. Small wonder life is often a trying enterprise and we are often tired and pathologically overextended.
Medieval philosophy had a dictum that said: Every choice is a renunciation. Indeed. Every choice is a thousand renunciations. To choose one thing is to turn one's back on many others. To marry one person is to not marry all the others, to have a baby means to give up certain other things; and to pray may mean to miss watching television or visiting with friends. This makes choosing hard. No wonder we struggle so much with commitment. It is not that we do not want certain things, it is just that we know that if we choose them we close off so many other things. It is not easy to be a saint, to will the one thing, to have the discipline of a Mother Teresa. The danger is that we end up more like Janis Joplin; good-hearted, highly energized, driven to try to drink in all of life, but in danger of falling apart and dying from lack of rest.
Janis Joplin is perhaps an extreme example. Most of us do not die from lack of rest at age twenty-seven. Most of us, I suspect, are a bit more like Princess Diana—half-Mother Teresa, half Janis Joplin.
Princess Diana is worth a reflection here, not just because her death stopped the world in a way that, up to now, few others ever have, but because is interesting to note that in looking at her, unlike either Mother Teresa or Janis Joplin, people do spontaneously put together the two elements of erotic and spiritual. Princess Diana is held up as a person who is both, erotic and spiritual. That is rare, given how spirituality is commonly under-stood. Usually we see a person as one or the other, but not as both, erotic and spiritual. Moreover, she deserves that designation for she does reflect, fairly clearly, both of these dimensions.
The erotic in her was obvious, though not always in the way many people first understand that term. On the surface, the judgment is easy: She was the most photographed woman in the world, widely admired for her physical beauty, who spent millions of dollars on clothing, and was clearly no celibate nun. She had affairs, vacationed with playboys on yachts in the Mediterranean, ate in the best restaurants in London, Paris and New York, and had a lifestyle that hardly fits the mode of the classic saint. But that itself is superficial, not necessarily indicative of a person with a powerful eros. Many people do those things and are quite ordinary. More important was her energy. Here she was a Mother Teresa and Janis Joplin, someone who obviously had a great fire, that madness the Greeks spoke of, within her. Partly this was an intangible thing, but partly it could be seen in her every move, in her every decision, and in every line of her face. It is not for nothing, nor simply because of her physical beauty or because of her causes, that people were drawn so powerfully toward her. Her energy, more so than her beauty or her causes, is what made her exceptional.
The spiritual part of her was also obvious, long before she became friends with Mother Teresa and took up seriously trying to help the poor. It was this dimension that her brother spoke of when he eulogized her—her causes, yes, but more important, something else inside of her, a depth, a moral ambiguity that never allowed her to be comfortable simply with being a jetsetter, a habitual effacement, an anxious desire to please, a person under a discipline, albeit often a conscriptive one, a person who, however imperfectly, willed what Kierkegaard spoke of, God and the poor, even if she still willed many other things too.
Spirituality is about how we channel our eros. In Princess Diana's attempts to do this, we see something most of us can identify with, a tremendous complexity, a painful struggle for choice and commitment, and an oh-so-human combination of sins and virtues. Spirituality is what we do with the spirit that is within us. So, for Princess Diana, her spirituality was both the commitment to the poor and the Mediterranean vacations … and all the pain and questions in between. Hers, as we can see, was a mixed road. She went neither fully the route of Mother Teresa nor of Janis Joplin. She chose some things that left her more integrated in body and soul and others which tore at her body and soul. Such is spirituality. It is about integration and disintegration, about making the choices that Princess Diana had to make and living with what that does to us.
Thus, we can define spirituality this way: Spirituality is about what we do with the fire inside of us, about how we channel our eros. And how we do channel it, the disciplines and habits we choose to live by, will either lead to a greater integration or disintegration within our bodies, minds, and souls, and to a greater integration or disintegration in the way we are related to God, others, and the cosmic world. We see this lived out one way in Mother Teresa, another in Janis Joplin, and still in a different manner in Princess Diana.
We can see from all of this that spirituality is about what we do with our spirits, our souls. And can we see too from all of this that a healthy spirit or a healthy soul must do dual jobs: It has to give us energy and fire, so that we do not lose our vitality, and all sense of the beauty and joy of living. Thus, the opposite of a spiritual person is not a person who rejects the idea of God and lives as a pagan. The opposite of being spiritual is to have no energy, is to have lost all zest for living—lying on a couch, watching football or sit-corns, taking beer intravenously! Its other task, and a very vital one it is, is to keep us glued together, integrated, so that we do not fall apart and die. Under this aspect, the opposite of a spiritual person would be someone who has lost his or her identity, namely, the person who at a certain point does not know who he or she is anymore. A healthy soul keeps us both energized and glued together.
However, to understand this more deeply, we need to look more closely at the soul, both at how it is a principle of fire and also, at the same time, the glue that binds our persons together.
The Two Functions of the Soul
What is a soul? It would be interesting to record impressions of what comes to mind spontaneously when one hears the word soul. For many of us, I suspect, the word, to the extent that it conjures up anything at all, produces an image, a very vague one, of some white, semi-invisible, spiritual tissue paper that floats somewhere deep inside of us and which takes on stains when we sin and that will separate from the body at the moment of death and go off to be judged by God. Whatever the inadequacy of that picture, it is not without merit. We are after all trying to conceive of something inconceivable and we need to form some picture of it.
What is wrong with that conception, though, is that it separates the soul too much from the core of our persons, from our self-conscious identity. Our soul is not something that we have, it is more something we are. It is the very life-pulse within us, that which makes us alive. Thus, we speak of someone as dying precisely when the soul leaves the body. That is accurate. The soul is the life principle within a human person, as indeed it is the life-pulse within anything that is living. As such it has two functions:
First of all, it is the principle of energy. Life is energy. There is only one body that does not have any energy or tension within it, a dead one. The soul is what gives life. Inside it, lies the fire, the eros, the energy that drives us. Thus we are alive as long as there is a soul in our bodies and we die the second it leaves the body.
It is interesting that sometimes when we use the word soul, and think we are using it metaphorically, we are actually using it in a strangely accurate way. Thus, for example, we speak of "soul music." What gives music a soul? This can be understood by examining its opposite. Imagine the music that you so often hear in airports, supermarkets, and elevators. It is simple filler, soulless. It does nothing to you. It does not stir your chromosomes. Certain other music does and that is why we, precisely, call it soul music. It is full of energy, eros, and all the things that eros carries—desire, disquiet, nostalgia, lust, appetite, and hope. Eros is soul and soul gives energy.
But the soul does more than merely give energy. It is also the adhesive that holds us together, the principle of integration and individuation within us. The soul not only makes us alive, it also makes us a one. At the physical level this is easy to see. Our bodies, considered biologically, are simply an aggregate of chemicals. However, as long as we are alive, have a soul within us, all of these chemicals work together to form a single organism, a body, within which all the separate chemicals and all the processes they produce work together to make a oneness, a single thing which is greater than the simple combination of all its parts. We call this a body and every body depends for its existence upon a soul. Thus, when we see somebody die, we see precisely that from the second of death onward we no longer have a body. In fact, we no longer even call it a body, but a corpse. At the second of death, all the chemicals begin to go their own way. Death and decomposition are precisely this. Chemicals which used to work together for a oneness and were, indeed, a oneness, now go their separate ways. For a time, after death, they still give the appearance of the body, but only because they are still lying contiguous to each other. That, soon enough, changes. Once the soul has left, the body too is no longer a body. Chemicals, going each in their own way, do not make life.
What is true biochemically, is also true psychologically. Here too the soul is the principle of oneness. In the heart and in the mind, the soul is also what keeps us together. Hence, when we use the expression, "to lose one's soul," we are not necessarily talking of eternal damnation. To lose one's soul is to be-come, in contemporary jargon, unglued. To lose one's soul is to fall apart. Hence, when I feel my inner world hopelessly crumpling, when I do not know who I am anymore, and when I am trying to rush off in all directions at the same time but do not know where I am going, then I am losing my soul. This, as much as the question of eternity, is what Jesus meant when he asked: "What does it profit a person to gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his or her own soul?"
A healthy soul, therefore, must do two things for us. First, it must put some fire in our veins, keep us energized, vibrant, living with zest, and full of hope as we sense that life is, ultimately, beautiful and worth living. Whenever this breaks down in us, something is wrong with our souls. When cynicism, despair, bitterness, or depression paralyze our energy, part of the soul is hurting. Second, a healthy soul has to keep us fixed together. It has to continually give us a sense of who we are, where we came from, where we are going, and what sense there is in all of this. When we stand looking at ourselves, confusedly, in a mirror and ask ourselves what sense, if any, there is to our lives, it is this other part of the soul, our principle of integration, that is limping.
In a manner of speaking, the soul has a principle of chaos and a principle of order within it and its health depends upon giving each its due. Too much order and you die of suffocation; too much chaos and you die of dissipation. Every healthy spirituality, therefore, will have to worship at two shrines: the shrines of the God of chaos and the God of order. One God will keep us energized, the other will keep us joined together. These two functions of the soul are always in a creative tension. That is why we experience such intense struggles sometimes inside of ourselves. Energy and integration, passion and chastity, fire and water, are forever fighting each other, each having its own legitimate concerns for our health. Small wonder that living is not a simple task.
This has immense practical implications for our lives. What is healthy for our souls and what is unhealthy for them? Thus, for example, is it healthy to see violence or sex on television or in the movies? Is this or that particular experience healthy or unhealthy for me right now? Given this background, we see that the question of what makes our souls healthy or unhealthy is very complex because, on any given day, we might need more integration rather than energy, or vice versa. To offer just one simple example: If I am feeling dissipated, unsure of who I am and what my life means, I am probably better off reading Jane Austen than Robert Waller, watching Sense and Sensibility rather than The Bridges of Madison County, and spending some time in solitude rather than socializing. Conversely, though, if I feel dead inside and cannot find any enthusiasm for living, I might want to reverse the menu. Some things help give us fire and certain things help us more patiently carry life's tensions. Both have their place in the spiritual life.
It is for this reason, that the elements of fire and water have always been so central in religious symbolism. Fire symbolizes energy, eros, and passion. Water symbolizes a cooling down, a holding in containment, a womb of safety. Mythically, spirituality is often seen as interplay between these elements, fire and water. Small wonder. In mythology the soul is forever in a forge, heated and shaped by fire and then cooled off by water.
Along these same lines, it is utterly fascinating to study, in various cultures, the different legends concerning the origins of the soul and all that is involved in its getting into our bodies.
In Japanese culture there is the idea a baby has come into the human community from very far away. Its soul is strange to this world and, therefore, it is of critical importance that, initially, the child be kept close, that the mother or primary care-giver must not ever leave the baby alone. This strange creature must be made to feel welcome. There is something, a fire, inside of this child that comes from elsewhere. Among the Norwegians there is a beautiful legend that, before a soul is put into the body, that soul is kissed by God and, during all of its life on earth, the soul retains a dark, but powerful, memory of that kiss and relates everything to it. And then there is the Jewish legend that says that just before God puts a soul into the body that soul is asked to forget its preternatural life. Hence, just as the soul enters the body, one of God's angels presses the baby's mouth shut, as a gesture that, during its earthly life, it is to be silent about its divine origins. The little crevice below each person's nose is the imprint of the angel's forefinger, sealing your lips—and that is why, when you are trying to remember something, during your ponderings, your own forefinger spontaneously rises and rests in that crevice.
Beautiful legends truly honor the soul. They also intimate, as we have been suggesting, that there is a fire in the soul that comes from beyond and what the soul does in this life is very much driven by that fire.
One last thing, an important one, and this concerns the soul's omnipresence in all of nature. The ancients and the medievals believed that it is not just human beings that have a soul and spirituality. In their view, every living thing, plant, insect, or animal, has one as well. They were right. Moreover, today, given our understanding of physics, we know that even the tiniest particles of the universe, with their positive and negative charges, have something akin to desire and thus too have their own kind of soul. It is important to realize this, not for romantic or mythical reasons, but because we are all of one piece with the rest of nature. To properly understand ourselves, and what spirituality means for us, we need to set ourselves into the widest possible context, the entire cosmic world.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin*, who was both a scientist and a theologian, once defined the human person as evolution become conscious of itself. That is insightful for we, as human beings, are not separate from nature, but merely that part of nature that can think, feel, and act self-consciously. Nature is all one piece, a certain continuum; some of it is self-conscious, some merely conscious, and some has only a very dark, analogous consciousness. But all of it, including ourselves, as humans, is driven by soul, spirit, desire, eros, yearning. Nature too is fired by a madness that comes from the gods. The difference is that, prior to the level of human self-consciousness and freedom, the force that drives nature is a dark, seemingly sightless, unconscious, some-times brutal, relentless pressure. Nothing is ever really quiet, even at the most basic level of nature.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a scientist, philosopher, theologian, and poet, who lived from 1882-1955. A world-renowned paleontologist, he was also a Jesuit priest. He spent most of his years doing pale ontological research in China, writing a number of books in both the areas of science and religion. In terms of science, his most famous work is entitled, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper and Row, 1955). Theologically, his major work is entitled, The Divine Milieu (New York: Harper and Row, 1960). Few persons, certainly within our Century, have brought together so unique and rich a combination of science, mysticism, and Christian faith.
Oxygen unites with hydrogen and this combination is in turn driven outward to unite with still other elements and so on and on. All things in nature, just like all human beings, are fundamentally dis-eased and are driven outward. An illustration here:
A friend of mine relates how, after buying a house, he decided to get rid of an old bamboo plant in his driveway. He cut the plant down, took an ax to its roots, and, after destroying as much of it as he could, he poured bluestone, a plant poison, on what remained. Finally, he filled the hole where the plant had been with several feet of gravel that he tamped tightly and paved over with cement.
Two years later, the cement heaved as the bamboo plant began to slowly break through the pavement. Its life principle, that blind pressure to grow, was not thwarted by axes, poison, and cement.
We see this same incredible, seemingly sightless, spirit in all things. In everything, from the atom to the human person, there is the blind power to unite with other things and to grow. Nothing can stop this. If you put a two-inch band of solid steel around a growing watermelon it will, as it grows, burst the steel.
Everything is driven outward. Rocks, plants, insects, and animals are just as erotic, and as relentlessly driven, as are human beings. There is, at some level, a stunning similarity between a bamboo plant pushing blindly upward through the pavement, a baby feeding, a young adolescent restlessly driven by hormones, the tangible restlessness of a singles' bar, and Mother Teresa kneeling consciously in prayer before her God. Desire is working in each case, sometimes blindly and sometimes consciously. St. Paul would say that, in each instance, the Holy Spirit is trying to pray through something or somebody. The law of gravity and the pull of emotional obsession is not so different.
Teilhard de Chardin once said that God speaks to every element in the language it can understand. Thus, God lures hydrogen through its attraction to oxygen. God draws everything else, including each of us, in the same way. There is, in the end, one force, one spirit, that works in all of the universe. The chemicals in our hands and those in our brains were forged in the same furnace that forged the stars. The same spirit that drives oxygen to unite with hydrogen makes a baby cry when it is hungry, sends the adolescent out in hormonal restlessness, and calls Mother Teresa to a church to pray. There is a discontent, another word for soul and spirit, in all things and what those things, or persons, do with that discontent is their spirituality.
We are part of a universe, that part that has become conscious of itself, wherein everything yearns for something beyond just itself. We have in us spirit, soul, and what we do with that soul is our spirituality. At a very basic level, long before any-thing explicitly religious need be mentioned, it is true to say that if we do things which keep us energized and integrated, on fire and yet glued together, we have a healthy spirituality. Conversely, if our yearning drives us into actions which harden our insides or cause us to fall apart and die then we have an unhealthy spirituality. Spirituality is about what we do with that incurable desire, the madness that comes from the gods, within us.
Everyone has to have a spirituality. While this is clear as a fact, it is not so clearly understood, or accepted, today in Western culture. For all kinds of reasons, we struggle with the spiritual and whether we have a Christian background or not, we all tend to struggle particularly with the ecclesial dimension of spirituality. It is to that; our struggles to both theoretically and existentially understand this, that we now turn.