The Center Cannot Hold If There Isn't One

From my friend David Mills, a meditation on the "spiritual-not-religious" trope:

The word “spiritual” has no useful meaning if it does not refer to a relation to a real spirit, something from a world not our own, something supernatural, something that or someone who tells us things we do not know, judges us for our failures, and gives us ideals to strive for and maybe help in reaching them. It’s not a useful word if it means a general inclination or shape of mind or emotional pattern or set of attitudes or collection of values. There is no reason to call any of these spiritual.

Unless, of course, you like that little sense of importance and that comforting sense of social approval that our society still gives to “spiritual things,” though not to religious things. It’s a warm and fuzzy word. It’s a cute cuddly bunny word. It’s not like “religion.” That’s a cold and forbidding word. It’s a screeching preacher with bad breath word.

A better definition is not, however, wanted. The moment you acknowledge a real spirit to whom your spirituality is oriented and by whom it is guided, however distant and unengaged that spirit may be, you have a religion. You are bound by something. You have marching orders. You have to ask what the spirit wants and what he requires and what he says.

Read the rest. 

Related:  God Is Not Sophisticated Enough.

I really never thought that I'd have a favorite Anne Lamott quote again, but then there's this:

You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

Somehow I suspect that she thinks she's not talking to people who hate George Bush, for example. But that doesn't mean that what she says isn't true.

Meanwhile, Pentimento, singer, writer, scholar, and mother, bears sober witness to lives lived and unlived:

We were the closest of friends: a group of young aspiring artists living in the East Village, moving from one provisional household to the next, drinking Hungarian red wine because nothing else was cheaper, staying up late into the night, sprawled across one another's sofas (which were generally old, upholstered with shabby velveteen, and draped with Indian-print throws to keep the stuffing from spilling out onto the floor), conversing animatedly about art and beauty and the other deepest desires of our hearts.  We were young women in our teens and early twenties.  We were generally both broke pocket-wise and broken heart-wise, except for the one or two of us who appeared to have found our soul-mates, deep wells into whom we could sink all of our intense need for contact, for engagement, for communion; not one of those unions now survives.  We were painters, photographers, writers, musicians, and performance artists.  We all worked together in the same cafés and bars and lived within a few blocks of each other, ranging from Avenue B to Avenue D and from East 14th Street down to Rivington.

More . . .

Here, now, everything's suddenly gone green, and the air is full of thunder. The little kids have run to hide in the closet  -- upstairs, because that's where all the toys are -- and I am thinking that I should step away from the computer before some lightning-infused electro-rays  reach out of the screen and zap me. Besides, it's hard to type with a shivering 60-pound dog in your lap.