Spiritual development follows a profoundly personal path. Like any of our beliefs, even the existence of a "Spirit" is not beyond dispute. I know what spirit is for me. And I recognize it as an arena of life, like health, relationships, mission, hobby, that has unlimited upside potential.
Many commingle spirituality with religion. This is an obvious connection, for faith leverages peoples need to connect to something higher than themselves to propagate a particular dogma, or not to propagate. What I mean is that, for example, Christianity is evangelical while Judaism is not, generally speaking. Yet, I believe that we all influence one another in our regular daily interactions, and this influence tends to enhance or degrade another spirit. How we present ourselves to one another, and with what intention we present, directly affects the other, and that propagates through the other's day, to others, and the whole. When you think about it like that, it's like "WOW" what a responsibility we have when we interact.
Organized religion is not for everyone. Bill Mahar would have you believe that it is the root of all the world's ills. I see his point. However, it is a specious argument. In discussions about history, I often play the game of "What other way would have been plausible?" Humans needed a way to explain the unexplainable. We still do. We need to connect to something higher than ourselves. We are aspirational creatures who want to leave a legacy. What we leave behind should be a little better than when we came upon it (a great lesson for children when cleaning up your camping site!). Religion was the natural manifestation of the human race to survive. Survival is safety and order, and consistency. Survival is what comes from natural law, the foundation of which is The Golden Rule. There was no other way, in my opinion than spiritual development through organized religion. Like all institutions, religion is fraught with evil and corruption. It's not exempt from the malevolent nature we all must guard against daily.
At its root, our spiritual development could be traced to the first self-help book ever written, Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics." This work looks at all aspects of life and gets into the weeds by laying out continuums of our behavior. For example, wit and charm are highly valued, but beware! The over-application can lead to buffoonery and, worse yet, boorishness. How many of us have had our spirit brought down by boorish behavior? It's all tied together, I believe.
And what of belief? Do you believe in a god? If you do not, you believe there is no god. The existence in God, whether through the argument of design, or necessity, or any of Aquinas' five other arguments, are hypotheses that cannot be proven or disproven.
Catholic or atheist, it is all tied up in belief, and I think we cannot look askance at one another for our expressed beliefs. Spiritual development is tied deeply to respect for every person.
German Philosopher Immanuel Kant posited "The Universal Maxim." Live your life like every action were to become a universal law." For example, were you to ignore someone in need, imagine that everyone lived that way. Where would we be? We would have never emerged from the fetid pool of our first days, methinks. Another way to think of this maxim, live your life, in every way, as if someone is watching. And who is that someone? Now I can see why an all-seeing and knowing God was fundamental to getting us to behave. Indeed!
Norman Vincent Peale, American Minister and author who wrote "The Power of Positive Thinking," once said, "When God wants to send you a gift, he wraps it in a problem. The bigger the gift that God wants to send to you, the bigger the problem he wraps it in." Every challenge is a gift! Every problem is a chance to Feed our Spirit.
Be well, dear reader.
