“Spirituality means knowing that our lives have significance in a context beyond a mundane everyday existence at the level of biological needs that drive selfishness and aggression. It means knowing that we are a significant part of a purposeful unfolding of Life in our universe.”   – The Royal College Of Psychiatrists, London.

People ask me sometimes if I have any ideas for healing or uniting the country. I don’t, really; I’m not so grandiose and smug that I think I can tell the world or the people in it how to heal from the violence, division, and greed that seems to be spreading and threatening the country.

I might be arrogant and outspoken sometimes, but I’m not so arrogant or deluded that I believe I can solve the world’s problems. And I never tell other people what to do, which puts me on the wrong side of much of the country.

I believe in spiritual, not political, solutions. Neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden can wave a wand and heal the country. They are not the real problem. I don’t see these men as saviors. I have to look within myself for a meaningful life, not to others. We are losing our moral center; ideas like truth and kindness are being subsumed with anger and grievance. Lying is very much in fashion.

The healing will take some time, as will as the return of honor, kindness, and decency to our public and private lives. I can only try to do that for myself and hope others will catch the spirit behind a spiritual life. I think that will happen and is already beginning to happen.

My idea for myself is surprisingly simple, focused, and doable.

I want to live a spiritual life despite all this anger and cruelty.

After two decades of searching, I’m still only beginning this journey for a spiritual direction. I’m joining a community of people who want to better each other and be compassionate to the struggling.

I don’t know what or who God is, but I want to leave space for the idea in my Life and my heart. The spiritual work is calming, softening, and educating me on how to live. I had a lot of work to do, but I’ve come far and expect to keep going. I’m reveling in the experience of re-discovering what it means to be happy.

Any commitment to a spiritual direction teaches me the spiritual rather than religious or secular way of living. It proves the time, wisdom, compassion, and structure to create some sacred or precious space where any understanding of God can exist and act. I’m unsure about this God thing but am passionate about spiritual things. It is all good.

My only conclusion about the mess in our country is that I believe we are a non-spiritual nation driven by power, greed, and cruelty. We no longer listen to one another or even speak with one another. We go online and run our mouths.

The idea of a spiritual and sacred space could work to heal that. But the idea of a spiritual direction is aversion to politics and our media since neither believes in the spiritual idea about how we treat each other.

We will heal when more and more of us seek a kindler and gentler idea of politics, government, and freedom. I need to work for it and vote for it. That will take a while. But on a personal level, it’s easy to do and costs nothing.

When I began studying and working for a spiritual direction two decades ago, I started a transformation I didn’t understand, expect, plan, or count on.

A spiritual life is, I think, not so different from a religious life – the idea of both has worked in wonderful and surprising ways to make me a better person, certainly not a perfect one. And we seekers can choose our dogma; we don’t need anyone else’s.

For me, the goal of the spiritual Life is what the prophets call “spiritual formation.”

It is, says Henri Nouwen, “the ever-increasing capacity to live a spiritual life from the heart. A spiritual life cannot be formed without discipline, practice, and accountability.”

There are scores of spiritual disciplines. Almost all of them ask seekers to slow down and organize their time, desires, and thoughts to work around and counteract selfishness, impulsiveness, cruelty, domination, or what some spiritualists call “the fogginess of mind.”

The problems I feel in our country are ancient and familiar to the history of humanity: greed, cruelty, power, unchecked wealth, a refusal to compromise, negotiate, or talk to one another, a retreat into the dark world of the Internet and its often divisive and hateful and growing control of truth and information.

That’s why organized religion popped up in the first place – to make a softer and kinder world. It worked, at least for a while.

We are not called up to decide whether to fight for our values or work independently.

A spiritual direction for me is simple: no cruelty, no argument, no lying, no domination, a love of people with low incomes and the needy, and a need to be gentle and kind to one another. The spiritual direction also teaches me to grasp the idea of having enough, not more than that. I don’t need to be a billionaire. No one in my consciousness needs to be a billionaire. We are forgetting how to treat other people decently. We need to remember how.

How can we ever build a loving and connected world if we have forgotten the truth?

There is no magic wand for this, not for me or the country. I have to get to work and stay focused. Kindness and compassion are viruses; they can and do spread from one person to another. Everyone I know appreciates kindness, empathy, truth, and courtesy.

My spiritual practice has so far done me good.

I am overcoming my fear of managing money, losing perspective, lacking humility,  resisting contemplative listening and thinking, and the fear of wishing to live a happy and fulfilled life.

Those have been, for me, the rewards of a spiritual life. No politician or conspiracy theorist or politician can take that from me. I have the right to be happy; the spiritual Life is the source and trigger of much of my happiness. Maria is another.

It is a world of courtesy, love, and empathy for others.

But there is also a simplicity to the spiritual direction. According to Nouwen, the first and most essential spiritual practice that any spiritual director must ask “is to pursue the discipline of the heart.”

The idea of the spiritual direction came about in the religious realm to help worshippers find the concept of God in their hearts. But interior prayer is now a spiritual idea, not just a religious one, in which we can not begin to understand the concept of God in our hearts as something honest and loving and trustworthy in the center of our being. No lying, no hurting others.

With practice and hard work, I awaken the best parts of me, the thing other people call God. Spirituality lives in the center of my being and sets the good parts free. I’m just getting started.

With practice, I am permitting this idea of spirituality to join up with my heartbeat and my breathing and take me into the world of my hearing, seeing, touching, and tasting. I am learning to wake up to the person I have always wanted to be and see the beautiful part of being human in me and the world around me.

I sometimes tremble at how much work this has been and will be, and then celebrate how many good things it has brought me. I do worry that I’ll die before I get there. But the process of learning has been a lifesaver and life changer for me.

I can’t dictate to the world beyond me; I can only work to make a better me. It’s a pandemic of a kind, with no needles or masks. It can spread. It gives my life real meaning.