One of the joyful surprises of aging is learning to relax into new forms of spirituality. It’s small consolation for knees that ache and hips in perpetual lockdown but the inward ease of spirituality in the second half of life calls to mind the “fountains of living water” Jesus describes. I’m not sure how it happens, maybe through the same processes that turn hair gray and injuries permanent, but after years of seeing a world of scarcity where only the strong survive, I find suddenly an intensified beauty to the journey, a delicacy to life, and a sacredness in sharing it with others.
We don’t start the journey that way. When initially making our way -- be it in faith, career, or relationship -- we mark our boundaries, establish evaluative measures, and carefully circumscribe everything about us. Earlier in my life I cared deeply about things like membership numbers, race times, and savings account balances. These days, my focus has subtly shifted toward quality conversation, experiences shared with loved ones, and the joy of a growing faith. This shift must be what Ken Wilber meant when suggesting that the spiritual journey always begins elitist and ends egalitarian.
The problem is that the boundaries needed to sustain the constructs of life’s first half often ignore the spiritual needs of the second half. At some point – especially in the realm of faith – we become less interested in whether something is practical, revenue generating or efficient and long for something to touch our souls, to feed our spirits, and allow spacious room to breathe.
That’s why Jesus found boundaries terribly uninteresting. They were too limiting, ultimately insufficient for the spiritual needs of God’s people. Instead, Jesus saw the larger whole, the both-and way of faith, and trusted in God’s goodness to work out the boundaries. So he said dangerous inclusionary things like, “My Father’s sun shines on the good and the bad, his rains fall on the just and the unjust.” Or, “Don’t pull out the weeds or you might pull out the wheat along with the harvest.”
Today we see a broad movement toward messy spirituality, boundary-less, undefined spirituality. This movement is manifesting itself largely as a rejection of ‘organized religion’ (whatever that is) and the Church that represents it. Some church leaders bemoan this movement, fight it at every turn, and even do things like embrace Latin liturgies and ancient creeds to plant a stake in the ground against it. I’m occasionally tempted to join the chorus that offers vigorous declarations demarcating our boundaries. How else can we be sure not to drown in a sea of competing ideologies? Besides, the sanctuary is the only realm where clergy still have a touch of control.
But I wonder if it would be wiser to listen to these spiritual but not religious, boundary-less anti-institutional people. I wonder if they’re rightly calling into question the focus of our faith and encouraging us to grow into more mature expressions of Christianity, faith that is less competition with those outside our tradition and more cooperation, less critique of those who think and act differently and more collaboration on our shared values, less attack on the perceived ‘other’ and more appreciation for the divine in us all. I wonder if the ‘spiritual but not religious’ movement isn’t a God-given catalyst to those of us affiliated with Christian faith to move beyond the boundaries of the first half of life that no longer serve us well and into the God-breathed beauty of the second half, even if we can’t control its outcome.
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