Member-only story
Everyone is ‘spiritual’ these days, but does that really mean anything?
“Spirituality is a brave search for the truth about existence, fearlessly peering into the mysterious nature of life.”
~ Elizabeth Lesser
For most of my life I have been neither religious nor spiritual.
Sure, when I was young my family went to Catholic mass on most Sundays, but I never felt interested or inspired by anything that I heard.
So, when I was 13 years old, I decided that I didn’t need any of it. I rejected my belief in the existence of god and assumed that religion had nothing useful to offer me.
Like many of my friends, I defiantly wore my rejection of Christianity like a badge of honor. Whenever I could, I dismissed it and shook my head condescendingly at anyone who thought otherwise.
It made me feel like I was on the ‘right’ side of a battle being waged between the wise and the foolish.
In retrospect, my arrogance and certainty in my own “rightness” made me the epitome of the kind of person I looked down on.
Anyway, when I threw religion out of my life, I threw out everything that looked like religion, too. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that meant discarding ideas and concepts that I would later come to call spiritual.