What it Means to be Spiritual

I must confess that I often dread the question, “What do you do?” I’m a spiritual director. For one, not many people, even in the Christian world know what that is. And more importantly, the two words, especially juxtaposed together, can evoke a whole range of connotations mostly falling in the woo-woo category of things.

I think the problem mostly lies with the word spiritual, and what we make of it. As I’ve thought about how to describe what I do, I realized that I’ve never really taken the time to understand the word spiritual and what it means to be spiritual, to me. Even though I’ve spent most of my life in a Christian church (or maybe because of this), the concept of spirituality has felt both obvious and elusive. What does it really mean to call something “spiritual”? I think our understanding of spiritual practices, spiritual formation, and spiritual direction, hang on how we define and approach what it means to be spiritual. What follows is my own meditations and conclusions on what I think it means to be spiritual.

What does it imply or conjure up in your mind?

A free association – When I think of Spirit…

I tend to immediately identify what it is not. It is not flesh or material. It is not something that can be apprehended by the five senses. I think of angels, ghosts, and the like, but I also know that things like love, joy, peace, judgment, anger, fear, are all intangible and yet all very real. I think it’s fair to call them spiritual things.

When I think of the spirit of a person, I wonder if it may refer to a unique signature, a combination of energy, influence, character, and even a posture or orientation to life: the inner life of a person. Could it be that spirit refers to the reality behind the physical surface of things?

What I Find in Scripture…

The first time the word “spirit” appears in the Hebrew Scriptures is in Genesis 1:2, where the “spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.” This word for spirit in the Hebrew language is, “ruwach,” which simply means, “breath”. So literally, the breath of God was hovering over the waters. Breath seems such a simple word for spirit. And the Scriptures use this word that gets translated in other ways in other places: wind, mind, even disposition. But the first use of the word “spirit” is breath.

The Spirit, or breath of God, communicated the mind of God, transmitting thoughts into words that brought life into being. Spirit expressed the inner life of God and formed the external physical world. Spirit was integral to God’s creative expression.

And then later, God breathed on us, the humans beings, enlivening us and also giving us a part of his Spirit, his breath. And in doing so, gave us agency in how we might express our spirit into the world. God gave us a way to express who we are in the world through our breath/spirit, which manifest as our words, our energy and actions. Through our spirit we transmit what is uniquely inside us, to the world.

It seems to me that not one thing comes into physical being without spirit, whether God’s or ours. Whatever will exist begins in the inner life and must be expelled, breathed out of someone before it comes to being in the world. What is spiritual precedes and gives birth to the physical. There is more to us than what we can see with our eyes. The spiritual part of us is just as real the physical, maybe even more so.

*For a deeper study into spirit as the “ruwach” or breath of God, listen to this podcast with the Bible Project.

Spirit as the Inspiration & Expiration of our Lives

If spirit is as breath, there must be inhalation and exhalation. It begs some questions.

• What are you inspired by? What brings you life? What are you inhaling and filling yourself with?
• What are you exhaling into the world? What dwells in the place near your hearts and minds that you expel upon the world, for better or worse? 

Each person has a unique spirit that in a large way steers the course of his/her life, playing and interacting with the physical, tangible world. So it seems that spirit is behind everything we do in the world.

Far from exclusively religious connotations, spirit is common to all humans, describing the life force, the life wind, the breath in all of us. It is the unseeable that steers the course of the seeable. Like a rudder, it is hidden deep beneath the surface of our lives but has a lot of power in determining the direction and what course we take. As such, spirit is malleable, formable, turnable.

Spiritual Formation, Spiritual Practices, & Spiritual Direction

To speak of spiritual things is to talk about what directs the inner life of a person and forms their deepest selves. Our lives influence our spirit and our spirits also influence our lives. This is why so much emphasis is put on the spiritual life of a person, no matter what religion you ascribe to. Now that I’ve defined spiritual, let’s take a look at what spiritual formation, spiritual practice, and spiritual direction is with this new lens.

Spiritual Formation

Spiritual formation considers how our spirits have been formed and are being formed. Spiritual formation looks at everything that forms our spirit, whether the good and beautiful, or the destructive and wounding tendencies that harm ourselves, our fellow humans, and the created world.  Christian spiritual formation in particular is concerned with how our spirits may be formed in the way of Christ: the way of love for God and neighbor.

It’s important to consider our past, the people and cultures who have formed us, the circumstances of our lives. All these have influenced our spirit, for better or worse. Our actions and attitudes, inherent beliefs and biases offer clues to what has formed us. It is not a matter of shame to consider the ways in which we don’t yet live up to our calling in Christ. We do ourselves no favors by letting guilt or shame bully us into a false pretense of holiness. The way of Christ is to consider the true nature of our spirit and invite Christ into those spaces to experience greater understanding, compassion, and healing for the places in which we fall short. By exposing our hurt places to Christ’s love, he makes us new, not by our effort, but through our experience of his love and grace.

Spiritual Practices

Spiritual practices support spiritual formation by opening us up to life, to love, to Christ, to Reality. They align our spirits with the Spirit of God so that we turn away from what is life-destroying and towards what is life-giving. By getting in touch with our deepest desires for healing and wholeness, we can identify spiritual practices that will open us up to Christ’s love in that place.

And practices, as the word implies, are meant to be practice. We learn, grow, and develop them as we do them. There are no right ways, only guidelines that help us learn them so that we can make them our own and find Christ with us in them. They do not always feel familiar or comfortable and we may need to practice them a long time before it feels like it’s doing us any good. But the practice changes us in ways that can be profound.

Spiritual Direction

Finally, spiritual direction is a practice of meeting with a spiritual director to attune your spirit to God’s love, grace and movement in your life. It is one practice that many find helpful in their spiritual formation. Given that each of us has a unique journey, it can be helpful to have a companion who is there to help us hear the voice of Love, respond in honesty and freedom to that voice, and discern what our next right steps are. A director can help you sift and sort out the elements in your life that bring you closer to Christ and open you to life and love, or those that turn you away from Christ and close you down. And as I’ve discovered in my own receiving of spiritual direction, north is not always the direction we think it’s in. Having another to listen to the details of my spiritual life has opened me up to God’s love and grace in an experiential and much deeper way. If you’d like to get a taste for spiritual direction, set up a free appointment with me here. 

So how do you define what it means to be spiritual for you? Has anything in my musings helped your own understanding? Is there anything you’d like to add to my thoughts? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.