Spirituality: A Journey, a Practice, or a Relationship: Part 2- Relationship
Image from: Ekaterina Shakharova @minigirl
I used to think that the spiritual journey was like a one-way trip up a mountain to some kind of nirvana. Life has shown me something different.
Much of my professional life has been spent in research and evaluation. Whether working with non-profits to understand the impact of programs or with the church to understand congregational vitality, I was the measurement queen. I published articles in journals for sociologists and religious researchers. I taught non-profits how to determine and measure their outcomes while also teaching funders how to give grants based on outcomes. In the church I developed a way to measure congregational vitality and trained leaders in several denominations how to use the survey as a diagnostic tool when working with congregations. I deeply believed in the old saying (attributed to Peter Drucker), “What gets measured gets done”. The whole point of measuring outcomes is to help the person or organization change to becoming more successful - whatever success means. This is an important practice in our professional and sometimes even our personal lives. Measuring our progress toward a desired outcome helps us imagine a better future and know whether our efforts to attain it are fruitful. If not we can change course - or even change our goals and then measure again to see how we are doing. Outcome measurement is an invaluable tool for organizations and for ourselves when it comes to concrete measurable goals like saving money, loosing weight, finding a job, etc. Only when we measure our progress will we know when we succeed.
Unfortunately, it falls apart when we apply this principle to relationships.
When the lawyer asked Jesus what how to attain the kingdom of heaven, Jesus said that we are to “love your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” and that “the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:34-40)
That is the end game. It is beguilingly simple. Love!
Love is not a reward we receive for our efforts to impress or satisfy someone - whether a person or God. Love is inherently relational. We can not experience love unless there is an “other” with whom we share it. Love is a verb that requires a noun to make sense.
God had love within God’s self (sometimes called the Godhead – Father, Son and Spirit) as described in Genesis 1:26, “Then God said, “Let us make human-kind in our image, according to our likeness…” God uses a plural word to refer to God’s self. When I read the account of creation, I see that it was God’s abounding love within the Godhead that could not be contained even by God. Instead it expanded - perhaps even exploded to form all of creation so that even more could be included in this love - from the beginning of time until the end of time (Alpha - Omega).
Several mystics assert that we are already part of this loving relationship - part of the “us” that is God. We came from it and will return to it - ashes to ashes, dust to dust. While our perspective shifts, we never actually leave this relationship. For these mystics (regardless of their particular religion), the spiritual journey is the realization of that truth. To paraphrase Julian of Norwich: We should rejoice that God dwells in our soul and that our soul dwells in God. Our soul is made to be God’s dwelling place and the dwelling place of the soul is God. Many spiritual authors talk about our mutual indwelling with God, not as a goal to achieve, but as a reality to be perceived. Our relationship with God is the most intimate and loving relationship we can have.
Ultimately spirituality is about our embodied relationship with God and God’s embodied relationship with us. By embodied, I mean that it isn’t something we think about, it is something we actually do - in real time, in this life. We are to love God and be loved by God right here, right now. Period.
Like every relationship, it is a two-way street. For this reason, our spiritual journey is about learning how to recognize, listen to and engage with God. Like any relationship, it is something we work at even while it is also something we simply enjoy when we notice that we are in the presence of the other. But most important to remember here, a relationship is something to be developed with someone, not a goal to be reached or a state of mind to achieve.
As someone who has focused on attaining outcomes for most of my life, this is sometimes a hard lesson for me to remember.
