Another #@%$! opportunity for Spiritual Growth

I was listening to an interviewer discuss an author’s new work on the radio the other day, when he said something that caught my attention. They were discussing one of the themes of the book, adultery, when the commentator made the off hand remark that the book sounded very “American” for “only in America would something as terrible as adultery be viewed as an opportunity for spiritual growth.”

“Is that right?” I thought to myself. It is true that there has hardly been a time in my life when I didn’t think about my relationship/connection with a higher power. I always supposed it was the by-product of growing in a home where both of my parents were very involved with their church. As a child I went to church camp every summer, as a teen I went to youth group every fall. After I left home I earned an undergraduate degree in philosophy, and did graduate work in the history of early Christianity. I have had my share of profound experiences. Looking back, I guess I have always questioned the nature of God, spirituality, and morality, and as I grew older these questions seem less adversarial and more about growth, but I never thought about it as being a quintessentially American characteristic, or that by virtue of my being an American, I was somehow culturally predetermined to look for opportunities for spiritual growth.

I certainly don’t think that Americans have the corner market on Spiritual growth. How could anyone categorize it in such broad terms? Is spiritual growth linked to liberal progressivism? Does that mean Social conservatives aren’t inclined to spiritual growth? Does it have its roots in the (myth of the) American pioneer spirit? I think there is something to the idea that judicial review, and the system of checks and balances, in theory, creates a government with the capacity to be self-reflective. Additionally our Constitution protects individual freedoms and guarantees a range of legal protections from federal restriction.

Perhaps it is this language of freedom that is so ingrained in the story of the foundation of America that lends itself to the potential for spiritual growth. I think this language reinforces the notion that any person, American or otherwise, has been bestowed with a unique destiny, a destiny that unfolds in accordance with the free exercise of the choices and opportunities presented in life and that it is through the moral exercise of human individual free will that opportunities are provided for spiritual advancement.

Americans have had our Unitarians, our Quakers, and our transcendentalists. We have had Emerson, Thoreau, W. E. B. Dubois and William James. We have had the counter culture revolution of the sixties; we have adapted yoga, transcendental meditation, gnosticism, Kabbalah, and even Asian meditation to American sensibility.

I think of all the times I have heard people say, I am Spiritual but not religious. Americans love to shrug off institutional religions as being some how invasive or derisive. The real joy of American government is that we allow ourselves to be self-critical, to hate one’s government and yet love ones country. I think it is what makes the war in Iraq that much more terrible for me, that I can be critical, and I do feel a moral obligation to make a change and yet I feel so powerless, that I cannot find the opportunity for spiritual growth, one that effects change, or at least, the change I want.

Knowing that until I release this expectation that the war will end, that a peaceful solution will be found, and that we can somehow remove ourselves from this situation, these expectation are holding me back from an opportunity for spiritual growth. I believe moral maturity comes from spiritual awareness. So, if I want to effect change, I try to let go and look for opportunities for change where I can. If I want to change the world, it has to begin with me, to look to my own growth, to try to let go of these expectations and be of service to others. Finally, I take solace in the words of one of America’s great leaders (spiritual or otherwise):

“Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” - A. Lincoln