For me, like many others, the spiritual path doesn’t seem to lead to a specific building or faith or community. I don’t find myself wanting a Church or a Temple or a Meeting House, I am not drawn to labels or dogmas or ideology, even as I dip in the well of many of them. I was born a Jew, joined a Quaker Meeting, meditated in Buddhist communities, taken refuge in a Presbyterian Church, studied the writings of Thomas Merton, admired the beliefs and preaching of Jesus Christ, read the wisdom of the Dalai Lama, read the Kabbalah faithfully.
My cathedral is not bounded by a structure or single community.
There is something in each of these faiths for me, and I like to sip from each of them. As I often say about my life, I support the team but don’t seem to be able to ever join the team. I guess I am my own team. Lately, I have come to worship at the altar of love, my life with Maria has transformed me more than any teaching or dogma.
Still, lately a new spiritual construct has emerged for me, it has been a powerful experience for me, and perhaps for others, so I want to share it. Religion is a system of course, and it seems to be weakening in the modern world, for all of the empty posturing our leaders so often do about faith.
We live in a world of systems. Facebook is a system, government is a system, health care is a system, death is a system, Amazon and Apple are systems, technology itself is a system, so are media and communications, banking and finance, the law and the food chain, even climate change and mother earth. Corporations are systems, they are growing all the time, and it is increasingly complex and difficult, if not impossible, to exist outside of them.
These systems vary radically in philosophy and style. Facebook is a vast and impersonal and often frightening entity, it claims to promote community but it is unreachable and vast and uncontrollable. It can be profoundly disconnecting. Apple and Amazons are systems that are reachable and responsive, but also vastly controlling and monopolistic. Health care is a vast system running wildly out of control, devouring many of the very things it is meant to save and heal.
We are confronted with systems that tell us they care about us, but it seems they often do not. This hypocrisy can be difficult to grasp.
For me, there is great spiritual discovery and revelation in learning to deal with these systems, they force me to confront my own humanity and decide what kind of person I wish to be.
Facebook has billed me for ads I did not authorize. My health insurance refuses medicines other insurance accepts, and accepts medicines others refuse. The government has gotten confused about my medical records. My pharmacy is drowning in red tape and confusion. Apple has drawn me into an ecosystem that has worked so well for me, but has also made me dependent on them in a sometimes disturbing way.
I do not share the popular resentment of government, it is a system here that has always helped people like me and my forebears.
In the past year, I have had reason – like most of you – to contact each of these systems and tried to resolve conflicts and clear up the confusion and error that is a systemic part of the new technology that is supposed to simplify our lives. Yet our lives do not seem to be getting simpler or easier, even though we blindly plow on ahead as if they were.
I see each of these contacts as a spiritual opportunity. To be patient. To be courteous. To be empathetic. To understand that there are human beings in every system, and there is almost always one who will talk to me, help me. I see that each of these contacts gives me the opportunity to be good to someone, to be understanding, to pass along a beam of light and connection in a frantic and disconnected world.
In this isolation and fragmentation, there is community. Each system offers me the opportunity to learn how to be a better human being. A dog trainer once told me that if I wanted a better dog, I had to be a better person. This is true of life with systems.
Yesterday, I reached a government agency on the telephone, there was a lovely person who helped me. It took two hours to reach her, and it was the third person I spoke with. I knew I would find her. I did not complain to her about my struggle. I just asked for her help.
A pharmacy tech approached me apologetically the other day – we had been trying for weeks to resolve a difficulty with an insurance company. It happens all the time, she said. It is her normal. “I am so sorry for what you have had to go through,” she said, “I am sorry for what you have to go through,” I said, “I am fine.This is just life now. We have to be patient with each other.” She cried, she says she is yelled at every day.
I have never been able to speak with a human being at Facebook about the false billing. I have decided instead to be firm and stand in my truth, and not pay an unfair bill, no matter what. Spirituality is not always about acceptance, sometimes it is about strength.
Today I am going to bring some flowers to the techs at the pharmacy to let them know I understand that they are people too, doing the best they can in an impersonal world of systems. I thought I had lost community when my independent pharmacy closed, but I see that there is community anywhere if you are open to it.
So this is a kind of faith for me, a kind of church, a way to live in the modern world. I am no pollyanna, not seeking to be saintly. I am not pure or overflowing with goodness. I can be a difficult man. I have a temper, I have known anger and frustration and impatience. But I see that every time I take a breath, practice patience, learn acceptance, seek to make a connection it feels good. It feels good in my heart, it feels good in my soul. It feels healthy. It is a spiritual path.
This new way of understanding spirituality has advanced my search for a spiritual center as much as any faith or text has. Isn’t this the point, after all? To build our center, to practice acceptance, to love when we can, to be good when it is possible. I feel myself growing as a result of these systems, my choice is to rail and lament about life, or to permit it to help me grow and try to become the human I wish to be.
It was the Rev. Billy Graham who first set me on this path some years ago when I was a reporter, following him and interviewing him. He told me to never speak poorly of my life, or see the world around me as something to complain about. Taxes would always be high, prices would always be up, life would always be full of challenges.
Do not live a life of complaint and lament, he said, it will make you bitter and small. This idea has grown in me, the systems around me challenge me to take if farther. I have rejected the spirit-killing toxins that are labels. I will not see the world as a left or a right, it is just a license to be angry and disconnected from people.
I guess I am learning that I don’t need to go too far outside of myself to find a spiritual path. Mother Earth is my cathedral, love is my dogma. The gurus and priests and prophets have all helped me, but in many ways they are guiding me towards how to live well and meaningfully in our time. So I am growing again, I am learning still. I have found a new path for me, and it is both challenging and exciting.
A love of life and faith is not compatible with hatred and resentment. Everything that is, is holy. A saint is capable of talking about the world without any explicit reference to God, or any declaration of dogma. Saints are everywhere, they don’t have to be in a church. In every system, there is a good person waiting to help me, and every time we find one another.
To worship blindly is suffocating, to worship nothing is hell.