Spirituality and Mysticism

A Reconstructionist Rabbi’s Personal Reflection

February 23, 2015

So much of our contemporary discourse concerning ourselves in light of diverse teachings of our religious traditions, in offering guidance on the twisting highways of life’s journey and in response to the trials we endure and the triumphs we celebrate revolves around the notion of “spirituality.” We use this commonly accepted but hard to define concept in many ways and in many situations. Chaplains in hospitals and nursing homes provide “spiritual care”. Rabbis are often called “Spiritual Leaders”. People, trying to describe themselves as being more than materialists and unwilling to submit to the discipline of religion, call themselves “spiritual”. We proclaim worship services we enjoy as spiritually moving. Spiritually charged moments fill us with energy. When we are sad, we are dispirited.

Etymologically spirituality comes from the Latin word “spiritus” meaning “breath or wind.” Like the Greek pneuma and Hebrew ruach, which also refer to wind, spiritus refers as well to the energy that seems to moves us through life – the non-materialistic aspect of our self-conscious being to which we, following the Latin, call “spirit.” Thus, spirituality deals with the nature of spirit.

Our awareness of our spirits is similar to our awareness of our bodies, the material aspect of our existence. We know our bodies in part by knowing what is not our bodies. We recognize differences within the physical world by sensing where one body ends, another begins, and the space between them. We are also able to describe the physical forces that connect them to each other and to all those objects around them. We understand the interplay between energy and matter and through this understanding gain a depth of insight into the physical world in which we live and into our own bodies.

Analogously, we recognize our spirit in contrast to the world around us. I see myself as “me” only when I recognize you as “you”. The wondrous discovery of the other as other, not merely as another physical being but as another thinking, feeling, moving being, is transforming. The act differentiation that occurs in early childhood creates the network of interrelationships in which we can grow and thrive. Spirit is our self-understanding of ourselves as individual, recognizable, centers of understanding, and feeling. Spirituality is the relationship we nurture with the other around us.

Spirituality’s roots rest in our fundamental need to be connected to other people and to our world. Although spirituality is often expressed in very personal tones, it rests in our desire to go beyond our lonely sense of selfhood and cultivate relationships with others to create family and community beyond those required by our basic physical needs. It is a rejection of the sense of seeing ourselves and having others see us as merely things. It is a protest to experiencing ourselves as only physical presences, economic units, and statistical data points. It grows out of our fundamental ego-awareness – our sense of ourselves as conscious, self-aware, vulnerable and lonely beings in often desperate need to touch others like us, to be confirmed in ourselves by their presence, to love ourselves by being loved by others and to love others by loving ourselves. The closer we come to others, the stronger the relationships we build, the healthier we feel.

In this way our spirit is our self-conscious, self-reflective, self-critical understanding of ourselves. Yet its very existence hangs by an ironic tension. We recognize ourselves only by recognizing others as other. That which is most intimate to the individual can only be experienced by her or his integration into a world already mapped by his or her cultural context. The tools for our self-understanding come not from within us but are gifts from our social environment. We may be biologically designed as social animals with an unusual talent for linguistic expression but the language we speak is not self-generated but learned from those among whom we live.

Our spirit, our intimate, personal experience of ourselves as self-aware, depends on our relationships with others for its very existence. Yet these relationships have a tenuous existence. The others to whom we are bound are like us limited by time and space, always moving, changing, coming and going, and ultimately dying.

Within all those dynamic relationships we sense a common constant theme, a deep shared feeling that sustains the relationship and nurtures us. We describe this sensation as “love”, “compassion”, or “grace”. We know that when we feel this sensation a relationship seems stronger and when the feeling decreases, a relationship fades. While our relationships flourish and then wilt with over time and distance in our ever-changing world, our awareness of the power the sustained them remains so that often when all has passed, all that we retain is “love”.

By projecting consciousness on the world around us – living things as well as the inanimate objects – we create for ourselves relationships with nature. With ease and comfort, we anthropomorphize the animals, plants, and objects that populate our immediate environments and the seemingly boundless universe in which we dwell. This simple talent allows us to create a relationship understandable to us with things that are far more different from us than other people. It is not difficult for us to describe our bond with our pets as grounded in love, nor is it hard for us to use the same language to picture our connections with flowers, plants, and trees, indeed all of creation, in ways that transcend the purely utilitarian.

This deep sense of connection draws power from our emotional center. Yet, it is more than an emotional response. It is not a feeling as much as it is an intuition into what seems to be the cornerstone of our being and its integration into the core of all that is around us. It roots us. It anchors us. It is our rock. If we sense any internal motion, it is that of return to our foundation, our essence, our true self.

We describe our first awareness of this connection with another as “discovery”, as “enlightenment”, or as “revelation”. That moment halts our journey but it is not its goal. At that instant we do not feel changed as much as we feel real, authentic, and honest. Once we sense the power of that moment, it is ours forever, engraved in our hearts, and sealed in our minds. The sensation is not ephemeral. It is not passing. Although any one relationship may end, the awareness of the “love” that enabled it never does but grows deeper as we strengthen and expand our network of relationships.

This spiritual search for connection to others drives us necessarily to the search for connection to the One who is absolutely Other. As our experience of “love” increases as our web of connections to others – other people, our communities, other living beings, other creatures – grows, so does our desire for that experience. As our sense of wholeness with all within the world grows, we understand ever more clearly that the wholeness we so deeply desire is ultimately unavailable to us in this world with is by its nature incomplete. We seek connection to that which is beyond change, beyond creation’s boundaries, an unending, inexhaustible fountain of the “love” that is filling more and more of our very being. We seek connection with that which we call God – the Endless One, unbounded by time and space.

We reach out with the tool that has served us so well. By casting God in our image, we try to connect to God. God’s utter otherness stymies us. God is our king but not a real king. God is our father but not a real father. God is our betrothed but not a real spouse. There is always something missing. The One whose presence we can feel but not describe is so real and so elusive, so completely other but so utterly familiar. God is the One who cannot be seen – hidden under the dark, uncountable layers of dogma, metaphor, and theology or so brilliant that when relieved of that cloak God’s presence blinds us. God is both the one distant one who demands our loving service and the neighbor most close to our hearts whom we need to love as we love ourselves.

So we look for moments of connection, those brief marvelous moments when all layers are removed and God’s brilliance is revealed just long enough to warm our souls. Most of us enjoy the fleeting glimpses of God’s light in the small miracles of life – the unexpected surprises of daily living, the cycles of nature, and the passing of the seasons of our lives. The patterns of religion we have created provide us with a framework to recognize these moments and share them with others in a commonly understood metaphor system.

While many find spiritual meaning and purpose through connection within the patterns and rituals of daily life and religious observance, there are others who seek a more direct attachment to God, the One whose very nature flees from human comprehension. While moments of awareness may fill our lives, these souls long for more than snapshots of God’s ever-passing presence. Adherence to God rather than experiencing God through connection to God’s world becomes the primary goal. Through practices and wisdom honed through the ages, they seek to transcend the boundaries of time and space and the walls of heart and mind and breakthrough to a deeper, higher, more durative encounter with the Boundless One. Willing to risk disappointment, delusion, deception, and defeat, they pursue their goal with a deep trust in its ultimate value.

Yet, like the rest of us, they live our world. They, too, are subject to the physical laws that rule all creation. They, too, are embedded in a cultural world that provides them with the vocabulary to understand themselves and their quest. Their traditions, their tools, and their very being are bound to the world which they seek to transcend. Their venture, although ultimately futile, is of great value. As researchers of the spirit, they remind us that it is possible to expand our understanding of the love, compassion, and grace that binds all and how to cherish it, honor it, love it as itself. Yet, as they pursue this “love”, “compassion” and “grace” beyond the worldly network of interrelated connections in which it thrives, they risk losing it or the world or both.

So we connect to God through our limits. Our boundaries are God’s. We met at the edge of time and space. We explore what we share – being unique, being alone, being other, being loved, and being loving, and, perhaps, being whole. Living in the spirit – our human spirituality – is living in connection, living in relationship with all beings alongside us and, at moments, with that One who is beyond.