💬 Crowdsourcing: Essential Spiritual Practices

We're not human beings becoming more spiritual, we're spiritual beings becoming more human. What helps you to do so?

“We are not so much human beings trying to become spiritual. We’re already inherently spiritual beings and our job is learning how to be good humans! I believe that’s why Jesus came as a human being: not to teach us how to go to heaven, but to teach us how to be a fully alive human being here on this earth.”

Richard Rohr

I was two years old when my dad came to faith in a jail cell, after being arrested for drug possession.

The faith he came to was one of rules. Of structure. Of fences. It was the kind of faith he needed to contain him and direct him. I’m grateful for it. Who knows, it may have saved my life. Also, it had consequences, which I wrote about it in True Companions:

I have had a long and complicated relationship with God. I don’t remember the early years of my life when, I suspect, God felt as close to me as my breath. Few of us do. Memories tend to begin later. My memories of God begin in a church. It was a small church that made God seem small, and it was a scared church that made God seem scary. Of course, as a kid, I did not understand the God I was being given was shaped like the insecurity of those giving him to me. I just assumed God was less loving and less mysterious than almost everyone I knew.

It was confusing. We were taught our place in heaven had already been bought with blood and yet we needed to work really hard for it, sort of like that old layaway system at Sears: your spot in heaven had been saved for you, but you still had to come up with the cash. Spiritual practices were the currency.

That all started to change for me when I was introduced to the writing of Henri Nouwen, and passages like this:

To pray is to listen to that voice of love. That is what obedience is all about. The word obedience comes from the Latin word ob-audire, which means “to listen with great attentiveness.” Without listening, we become “deaf” to the voice of love…If we could just be, for a few minutes each day, fully where we are, we would indeed discover that we are not alone and that the One who is with us wants only one thing: to give us love.

Suddenly, everything was already right here—not somewhere else, not up in heaven, not off in the future—but here, in the everyday grit and grind and occasional glory of being human. These days, I think of spiritual practices not as a spaceship that will carry me to another world, but as a sixth sense, attuning me to the sacred depths of this one. I wrote about that in True Companions too:

There are extraordinary layers of reality that cannot be experienced with our five senses. We can’t smell faith. We can’t hold hope. We can’t taste love. We can’t hear the unity of all things. We can’t see the mystery sustaining everything. In this way, spirituality is like eyeglasses for the soul; it helps us to see the unseeable.

So, if I had to pick one essential spiritual practice for myself, it would be a walk around my block, in the woods. No earbuds. No phone. No plans. No distractions. Just listening.

What’s your most essential spiritual practice?

This is how Crowdsourcing posts work:

1. In the comments, in all caps write your SPIRITUAL PRACTICE, then share why it’s important to you.

2. Choose one other commenter whose practice you appreciate and let them know by responding to their comment.

To get us started, I’m going to put a second essential practice of mine in the first comment, and then I’ll circle back later today to enjoy yours.

Looking forward to learning from you all!