Dearest Danda -
I read with considerable anguish your latest blog, gnashing my teeth through the tough parts, and then basking in the sunshine of one of your sentences "I am not religious, but I am very spiritual".

I offer you this from a book I am reading by Joan Chittister. Chapter 2 is titled Spirituality, and I quote - There is a difference between religion and spirituality. There is a link between them, of course, but one is not meant to be the other. Religion is about what we believe, and why we believe it. It is about the tradition, the institution, the system. Constructed over centuries - more than five thousand years ago for Hinduism, the first formal religion - religion draws for the world a portrait of creation and relationships. It gives us creeds and dogmas and definitions of God. It gathers us in worship and reminds us of a world to come.

Spirituality is about the hunger in the human heart. It seeks not only a way to exist, but a reason to exist beyond the biological or the institutional or even the traditional. It lifts religion up from the level of the theoretical or the mechanical to the personal. It seeks to make real the things of the spirit. It transcends rules and rituals to a concentration on meaning. It pursues in depth the mystical dimensions of life that religion purports to promote.

When we develop a spiritual life that is beyond some kind of simple, unthinking attachment to an inherited canon of behaviors, the soul goes beyond an adherance to a system to the growth of the soul. Sprituality seeks to transcend the functionairies of religion to achieve an intimacy of its own with the mystery of the universe. Spirituality takes religion into our own hands.

Got that? Chew on it for a bit. There is a mystery as you look down from the top of St. Paul's. It is not the vastness of the space, the alignment of the pews, the rays of light through the great windows that brings you to tears. The very air seems permeated with an intangible. That is why you cried. That is why my eyes are moist when I behold any such a structure. I, too, am not religious, I am more spiritual, and it is that intangible that we seek, don't you think?.

Chittister goes on to say - Sometimes I know I am floating in a sea of eternal possibility. At other times, I know I am in a desert that cannot possibly quench the thirts of the soul.

If we could only bottle spirituality, we would rival Coca Cola!
Hugs, LSC xoxoxoxoxoxoxo