The Pinnacles and Valleys of Spirituality

Part of my growth in spirituality is a return to the very things that I was taught were not spiritual, things like silence, gardening, doodling, journaling, being creative, hospitality—in essence living and enjoying oneself.  I worked diligently for a while to make it to the top of the intellectual and academic pinnacle of spirituality and quickly realized that having Strongs numbers memorized and being able to recite the books of the Bible in order (things that I had to do for grades in a college course!) had zero spiritual value.  As I descended the pinnacle and realized I had left a lush valley that I just wasn’t cultivating, so to it is easy for those without an informed spirituality to simply neglect the presence of mystery in everyday life:

It’s easy for a liberal farmer at Yale University to dismiss the
spiritual implications of farming. We work in the soil, we believe what
we can touch, and the whole reason we came up to the farm was to take a
break from that exhaustive intellectual nonsense that occupies the rest
of our lives anyway. But our philosophy of organic farming is to work
with nature rather than attempt to quantify it, and to allow ourselves
to become a part of the natural system rather than to stand separate
from it. It is an attempt to give up and become a part of something
larger than ourselves, something that we may not fully understand. That
thing might be a balance of soil microbes and nutrients, but it also
might be God.
-The Atlantic‘s Sustainability blog

I don’t want to knock knowledge as a facet of our spirituality, for it is, and I think what is the bigger picture is that when we are spiritual novices we flock to what comes most easy to us.  For me that is anything that involves books and learning.  True spirituality, a living, breathing, incarnational spirituality is a journey beyond what is easy onto unkonwn and hard paths.  True spirituality begins to change us and form us from cracked icons into something more and more whole.  And that first begins in recognized that every step on our journey to deeper spirituality and communion with each other and God comes from "becoming a part of something larger than ourselves, something that we may not fully understand."

Or, as the Hillsong chorus goes, "we are alive in the mystery."