The Dance Steps of Spirituality

I have been a practicing Catholic my entire life, but I feel like I have only just recently reached that confusing stage of spiritual adolescence. It’s not quite like having your voice crack, or battling incessant pimples, but it does come with certain challenges.

When I was a child, weekly mass was a time to repress my five-year-old urges to yell and scream and play and dance and throw things, like hymnals and chair dividers, at other parishioners. Needless to say, I was not very good at this kind of repression. I would typically spend most of my church hour exerting every crumb of energy I could muster by enthusiastically exclaiming my faith through emission of loud, obnoxious animal-like noises--that is, of course, only when I ran out of books to throw at parishioners.

Church started to become more significant to me as I began to receive the different sacraments and learn about my faith and growth as a Catholic. However, I felt as though I was still simply following the formula of faith-practice that others had conditioned me to follow. My faith was based solely from a template designed by others who had made the journey before me. It made things easy, because it meant I didn’t have to search for the next life-step. Unfortunately, maturation cannot take place in this manner alone if it expects to endure. For example, you can lay an array of plastic footprints upon a wooden dance floor in such a pattern that indicates some intricate dance and then ask someone who has never danced to follow the pattern. That person may be able to step the right steps and in the correct order, but that does not mean the person will be able to mimic the dance successfully. Everything was wonderful when the steps were mapped for me, but I realized that I wasn’t truly dancing.

Saint Martin’s College (SMC) presented the next chapter of my spiritual growth, but not necessarily through the vantages of SMC spiritual life. I discovered much of my spiritual development by listening to others. I listened to those who were deeply entrenched in their perspectives of spirituality and religion. I listened to those who did not claim any religion at all. I even listened to those who were scornful of the very concept of religion. From this, I realized that the topic of spirituality delves far past the topic of religious differences. Since spirituality is a type of life journey, it made sense to me that the questions surrounding spirituality should be questions about all aspects of life and not restricted to questions about religious life. Realizing this simple point has changed my outlook on faith interaction and community. I now believe that a community without variety makes for a stale culture with little room for maturation. The key is not only to respect others’ beliefs, but to also appreciate the differences of those beliefs.

I started to pay attention to others’ stories, focusing on why people believe what they believe, thereby digging beyond the rigid surfaces of their viewpoints. This experiment has led me to the conclusion that arguing with another person about faith is often pointless, since argumentation is often centered on changing another’s position, while faith and spirituality develop from our personal experiences. For example, try explaining what the color red is to a person who has been blind since birth. It is impossible, because the blind person has never seen or experienced the color red. We cannot fully explain our own experiences to others. This is what makes them our own experiences. Therefore, we cannot fully explain our spirituality and religious beliefs to others who do not share our experiences of spirituality and religion. Two people of the same religion may not even agree on why they believe what they believe, because their experiences dictate their spiritual and religious outlook, and though those experiences may often be similar, they are never the same.

But this concept is what makes faith so wonderful, because it means that it is your own. No matter how much you struggle with it--and I suppose that we all need the struggle--your faith is your own. It is the intimate relationship between you and whatever you call God, or whatever invisible credence you turn to when you’re in need of security or comfort.

A couple years ago, I took a wonderful English course that focused on Romanticism. Reading several works by Percy Bysshe Shelley stirred a class discussion regarding whether or not Shelley was true to his claim that he did not believe in God. In many of his poems, one student pointed out, Shelley alludes to God when he credits an unknown force that causes everything to exist and function. The student’s argument was that though Shelley may not have believed in certain definitions of “God,” he did acknowledge the existence and significance of an ultimate power. Too often, we constrict God’s prominence by attempting to tag it with a definition. Too often, we try to control God.

I can truthfully say that I believe in and love God. However, I cannot in all truth explain exactly what that means...and I think that’s okay. Faith is a journey and not a prototype to be re-created. The mystery of God and of humanity nourishes each individual’s spirituality. Not knowing the next step can be a scary thing, but it can also be an exciting adventure.