I read something this Christmas Day 2011 that helped me capture how I'm feeling at the moment. What I read was a comment attributed to Annie Dillard, the writer, which described her as "spiritually promiscuous."
Dillard comes by her spiritual promiscuity more legitimately, though, than I come by mine. She had years of religious and spiritual coaching and guidance and indoctrination. I decided very early on, by age 14 or so and despite the religious teachings of the First United Methodist Church of Corpus Christi, Texas, there was no supreme being, no God, no spirit, no sacred path to follow, nothing outside our own uniquely human minds. Dillard's use of the phrase describes her incorporation of many religions into her own religious understanding. I, on the other hand, have no religious understanding, just what I can only describe as a thirst to know the unknowable.
My early decision about the existence of a supreme being has not changed. I don't believe there is one. I don't believe there ever was one. I just don't. That does not mean I don't believe there was a Jesus or a Buddha or any number of other people who had an enormous influence on how humanity has evolved in the last few thousand years. No doubt there were some very charismatic people who had some very important ideas about justice and humanity and morality. There is no question in my mind their words were recorded in some form and have evolved into what today forms the foundation of a great deal of religious belief. I don't dispute there were people who had important things to say and to whom we owe much, if not most, of the moral codes upon which today's civilization rests. I simply dispute the "divinity" of those people. They were, perhaps, brilliant leaders, but I don't believer they were divine nor magical.
How my "spiritual promiscuity" comes into play is this. I believe humankind has the unique capacity to make conscious contributions to this world we live. I believe we are inately "moral" in that we are conscious of the affects of our actions on others and that we feel empathy for others. That empathy is natural. It can be trained out of us, but I believe we're hard-wired with it from the start. And I believe we have the capacity to use that empathy for good, not only for our own generation, but for generations to come. We won't be here for them. They will never see us in "heaven." But we can plan our impact on the future. And "we" can, as time goes by, recall and understand what those who have gone before us did for our benefit. And we can plan for the benefit of others. That, in my view, is spirituality. Insomuch as the promiscuity comes into it, we WANT to do it. We WANT to not only do for others we want to SHOW it.
I'm probably not explaining it sufficiently. Maybe I never will. But someone will. Someone in the future will. They won't recall me. I won't have my hands on their shoulders when they make that connection and utter that explanation. But I will have planned for it. There's the spirituality. And there's the promiscuity.
