I'm Not Very Spiritual

A confession bound up inside a conviction.

Being a pastor for 29 years, a seminary professor, and someone who directs a center with “Christian imagination” in the title, one might assume I consider myself (or at least pretend to consider myself) a spiritual person. But given how we frame these things, I’ve found myself increasingly ambivalent on the whole project.

Organized religion (cue oxymoron joke)—panned as a crusty (if not harmful) and moribund killjoy—has been hemorrhaging for decades, but being spiritual has been enjoying a moment. These days, saying you’re spiritual is about as controversial as confessing you use soap when you shower or you like puppies. Spiritual topics flood bookshelves, Instagram reels, and podcasts. A recent Netflix sitcom worked the Enneagram into the storyline, and it didn’t seem odd in the least.

There’s immense good here. Our spiritual yearning rises out of our longing for wholeness and love, to be embraced by the fire, to have a large sense of the world and our place in it. Many of us grasp for language to describe how impoverished we are, how lonely and fearful, how we feel shrunken and cold and brittle. We know, in ways we can’t quite explain, how a flat, disintegrated rationalism (whether “secular” or “religious”) strips wonder and delight and can never touch our soul. We crave the holy. We want to be fully alive.

However, the trouble with a good bit of spirituality talk nowadays is how it assumes our spiritual sensibilities are my truth but little more. I decide which ideas fit me. I determine how long I’ll stick with them. I pick up ideas and practices when they suit my inclinations, and I drop them when the novelty or impact fade. An existential Choose Your Own Adventure. There’s limitless doors, we’re told, just pick one because the details matter little.

There’s (at least at first), liberation here, especially if we grew up in a heavy-handed environment which shamed us for questioning or veering outside the lines—and especially if no one told us how God opens up our world rather than narrowing it down. God does not smother. God makes us free. Really.

Eventually, though, this spiritual experience defined by me turns out to be cramped and suffocating all over again. My shoulders are not strong enough to carry the universe’s existential weight. I need more than a personal mantra or self-prescribed rule of life or my preferred daily affirmation to give me meaning. I need God to break in, to shatter my illusions, to show me how to live and how to die. And I’m absolutely convinced, from a lifetime of effort, the wisdom I can muster is always thin, frail, and faltering.

Another deficiency with many prevailing ideas on spirituality is how abstract things can be, how unrooted from concrete commitments which make demands on our lives. And because much modern spirituality is ethereal, vague, and personally curated, most everything goes. Who am I to say? However, if you want to transgresses contemporary orthodoxy (ironic), just let your spirituality get too specific or granular or suggest the vision offers a true account of the way the world actually is. Yet these concrete, odd particulars—the dear God, if this is really true crucibles—are precisely where the juice happens.

I don’t first believe in the general concept of spirituality and then go find a god who blends into my ideas. Rather, Jesus of Nazareth lands like a lightning bolt, knocks me sideways, stunned and shocked, unnerved. Jesus—the friend of Lazarus and John and Martha who hung on a wooden cross and died while his wailing mother wept through the horror—has overwhelmed my heart and my defiance. This Jesus, the one who descended into hell’s dark hallows and rose from a borrowed tomb—upended everything we thought we knew and opened an entire universe we could never have dreamed.

This is not a God I’ve concocted. If I had, there’s a whole list of things I’d make different. Any true encounter with the Almighty leaves us rattled, trembling and disoriented. God makes claims on us. Jesus reshapes my mind and values, my loves and hopes. This Jesus invites me to lay everything down and follow, if I dare.

I don’t believe in God because the idea works for me, which is good because regularly it doesn’t. If spirituality is our holistic plan for self-actualization, I’ve failed miserably. Our family has traversed interminable seasons of pain. I’ve been distraught and on the brink. My faith often raises more questions—and tough, inexplicable ones. I’ve experienced profound joy and mercy, always enough, but these gifts never negate the sorrows.

Even among Christians, a lot of our spiritual notions and expectations fall flat for me. The Eucharist offers me mysterious grace but there’s little effervescence. Sunday sermons are often ho-hum, especially my own. Pete Seeger and Chris Stapleton do more for me than most worship music. I often have to repeat sections of morning prayers because my mind flitters to rehashing a frustrating conversation, or pondering the boiled eggs Miska’s making for breakfast, or musing over Clemson football. I find most Christian cultures baffling, boring, derivative, and petty, and increasingly idolatrous. A fair bit of the current discussions around spiritual practices and spiritual formation make me itchy. By many measures, I’m not very spiritual at all.

I do not seek to live my faith because it is immediately, personally fulfilling—but because I have understood Jesus to say this is what it means to be a human in the world. And my job is to obey. I want to follow Jesus because he is the only one I trust can tell me how to genuinely live. I’m committed to the church because Jesus says he is there, and God knows I want to be wherever Jesus is. I pray because God is real, and I’d be a fool to ignore him.

I am a Christian not because I need a spirituality, and this one will do as well as any other. I am a Christian because I believe the God revealed in Jesus Christ—this God who fills every stitch of the world with boundless, profligate love—is true. Fundamentally true. Cosmically true. Whether any of us believe or not. Whether we ever feel spiritual or not.

And if you’d like a small bit more to ponder, a final word from Eugene Peterson (Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places):

Jesus is the name that keeps us attentive to the God-defined, God-revealed life. The amorphous limpness so often associated with “spirituality” is given skeleton, sinews, definition, shape, and energy by the term “Jesus.” Jesus is the personal name of a person who lived at a datable time in an actual land that has mountains we can still climb, wildflowers that can be photographed, cities in which we can still buy dates and pomegranates, and water which we can drink and in which we can be baptized. As such the name counters the abstraction that plagues “spirituality.”

Jesus is the central and defining figure in the spiritual life. His life is, precisely, revelation. He brings out into the open what we could never have figured out for ourselves, never guessed in a million years.