from One River, Many Wells by Matthew Fox
It is not easy being a human being. Unlike other species, we are not born with enough programmed DNA to see us through our survival. The best choices we make must come from intuition, cooperation and learning. We depend on traditions and elders to teach us-and of course on experience, trial and error, and creativity as well. We find ourselves up against many obstacles not only to surviving but to living lives of quality and happiness. Wars, strife, famine, hurricanes, floods, fires, catastrophes of many kinds-divorce, death, sickness, poverty, abuse, slavery, oppression, betrayals-the human journey is not easy.
Nor is it simple. Our strongest assets-our intelligence and our creative powers-can also get us into our deepest quagmires. Is much of the ecological peril that we face today not due to our inventions that have warmed the climate, put holes in the ozone and polluted the waters?
One thing that can make human existence meaningful and give us the courage and creativity to navigate our ways is healthy spirituality. When religion is true to itself and itself healthy, it is about spirituality, for spirituality is meant to be the core of religion. But religion, like everything else that humans touch, can become distorted and misused. It can develop its own institutional ego, even while preaching to individuals about the need to humble their personal egos. This happens. It has often happened. Therefore, it is evident that one can also be spiritual without religion.
In times like ours, when the planet is reeling from abuse and misuse at the hands of humans, when human inventions and discoveries have shrunken time and space on this planet so that we can communicate by Internet and satellites instantaneously with others around the globe, when livable space for our own and other species is dwindling and being depleted, it ought to prove especially beneficial to look to spirituality to help us find our way back (and forward!) to what it means to be human.
Matthew Fox is the featured speaker for Shalem's Fifth Gerald May Seminar in April 2010