“I had been my whole life a bell, and I never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.”—Annie Dillard
I grew up in a religious home. A full-dose, hard-core, shaken-together-and-my-cup-runneth-over, conservative, Bible-believing, Evangelical, fundamentalist Christian home. Christmas and Easter? Of course! Every Sunday morning? Obviously! Sunday School? Complete with memorizing Bible verses, singing Christian choruses and competing in Bible Olympics! Holidays and Sundays were just the spiritual appetizers. For the main course, there was also church every Sunday night. And there was a Wednesday night prayer meeting, too. And in the summer, Vacation Bible School and Christian summer camp. There were even occasional revival meetings that required attendance every night for a week—or two weeks, God help us. Then there were special kids and youth programs on top of everything else. If that weren’t sufficient to save our souls from secularism, at every meal we bowed our heads for prayer—including when we went out to restaurants, which always made me squirm and then feel guilty for squirming. And after dinner on most nights—a kind of spiritual dessert—my dad would have us read a daily devotional guide. And I haven’t even mentioned prayers and Bible stories at bedtime.
You’d think with all that religion, I might have overdosed and become an atheist. Or at least an agnostic. And maybe I would have, except that underneath all the layers upon layers of religion, I discovered a living, breathing, naked spirituality.
For you, the discovery may have occurred at a 12-step meeting. When you found yourself fighting for survival against a raging addiction, suddenly faith in higher power really mattered. You needed more than a dressed-up Sunday religion—you needed a naked spirituality that would help you get sane again.
Or it may have happened in a small fellowship group on a college campus, or on a retreat, or in a time of illness or bereavement, in the middle of a divorce, or maybe walking along a path in a forest. Maybe someone close to you was transformed before your eyes, and it turned out that their spiritual conversion was contagious. However it happened, what had been a concept or theory got translated into naked experience and real-life practice. You felt something. You knew something. You changed.
I think there is a kind of innate spirituality in young children; the primal connection of child to parent translates naturally into trust in God. But as we mature, our spirituality must mature, too. Otherwise, that childlike connection will be lost along with childhood innocence. In my case, a more robust spirituality started sneaking up on me in my early teens. I had learned hundreds of Bible stories, memorized dozens of Bible verses, said thousands of prayers—including one called the “sinner’s prayer,” important to all fundamentalists. But around puberty, there were little inklings of a new space opening up in my psyche, a capacity for doubt and a capacity for a kind of experience that I had never had before. (It’s interesting how intellectual and spiritual capacities seem to develop along with sexual ones.) I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but by the time I was 16, I was on the path of passionate spirituality.
I think I was 15 when a 17-year-old fellow I met at summer camp told me the story of his dramatic conversion several months earlier. He had been slipping—or jumping—into a dangerous love affair with a drug called mescaline. His grades plummeted, and he dropped out of school. Then through a “straight” (in those days it meant non-drug-using) girlfriend he had “gotten saved.” He was now clean and sober, studying the Bible, reenrolling in school, getting his life together. I saw something real in his life, something more robust and vigorous than I had experienced, and it left me a little envious.
Later that year, another friend invited me to a “discipleship group” made up of some college students who read the Bible, prayed, and talked about their spiritual growth. I didn’t exactly fit in this group; they were older and smarter and more serious than I was, and I was already planning my escape from a hyperreligious life. But again, I saw something real in their lives, something I didn’t have. If I ever did become a more spiritual person, I wanted to be like them, I thought.
Along with my attraction, I must admit I felt a lot of revulsion. To a teenager in the early 1970s, church culture seemed like a throwback to the 1950s—or the 1850s, or the 1750s, take your pick. To a guy interested in science, all the anti-evolution rhetoric seemed unnecessary, even a little silly. To a kid growing a scruffy beard and playing in a rock and roll band, the crew-cut, white-shirt-and-tie-clad, pro-war, anti-hippie churchy role models seemed singularly creepy—just as I must have seemed to them. I felt stuck in a religious twilight zone, not in, not out.
Right in the middle of all this ambivalence, some neighborhood buddies, similarly conflicted, I think, invited me on a weekend retreat with the youth group from their Southern Baptist church. And that’s where spirituality snuck up and crashed upon me like an unexpected wave at the beach. The retreat leader sent us off on Saturday afternoon for an hour of silence during which we were supposed to pray. I climbed a tree—being a back-to-nature guy—only to discover that my perch was along an ant superhighway and that mosquitoes also liked the shade of that particular tree. But eventually, between swatting and scratching, I actually prayed. My prayer went something like this: “Dear God, before I die, I hope you will let me see the most beautiful sights, hear the most beautiful sounds, and feel the most beautiful feelings that life has to offer.”
No, it wasn’t an altruistic prayer asking God to end world hunger or war. No, it wasn’t focused on repenting of my many sins, although, like any hormonally infused teenage boy, I had my share of things to feel guilty about. No, it wasn’t a theological prayer affirming important tenets of faith. In fact, it was pretty adolescent, and some might say trite. But it was my prayer, honest and at least a little loftier than my occasional pleas for a cute girl in Spanish class to get a crush on me or for help on the algebra quiz I forgot to study for.
In spite of my sincerity, absolutely nothing happened. As the other 57 or so minutes stretched on, I couldn’t think of much else to say. I scratched mosquito bites, flicked ants off my legs, felt my butt go numb, and eventually climbed down the tree and wandered back to the retreat center for supper. There were evening activities, and then we were supposed to go to bed, I think. But somehow, a few friends and I snuck away to a hillside and found ourselves sitting under one of those sparkling autumn night skies. I walked several paces away from my friends and lay back in the grass, fingers interlocked behind my head, looking up, feeling strangely quiet and at peace. Something began to happen.
I had this feeling of being seen. Known. Named. Loved. By a Someone bigger than the sky that expanded above me. Young science geek that I was, I pictured myself lying on a little hill on a little continent on a little planet in a little solar system on the rim of a modest galaxy in a sea of billions of galaxies, and I felt that the great big Creator of the whole shebang was somehow noticing little tiny me. It was as if the whole sky were an eye, and all space were a heart, and I was being targeted as a focal point for attention and love. And the oddest thing happened as this realization sank in. I began to laugh. I wasn’t guffawing, but I was laughing, at first gently, but eventually almost uncontrollably. Profound laughter surged from within me. It wasn’t a reactive laughter, the kind that erupts when you hear a good joke or see somebody do something ridiculous. It was more like an overflowing laughter, as if all that space I had been feeling opening up inside me was gradually filling up with pure happiness, and once it reached the rim, it spilled over in incandescent joy. “God loves me! Me! God! At this moment! I can feel it!”
The joy felt huge, so big that I got a little scared. My stomach started to hurt, because I was laughing so hard. Not only had I never felt anything like this before; I had never heard of anything like this before. I started to feel as though I might burst apart, because the joy felt bigger than I could contain. I felt that my universe was turning upside down, and I might fall off the planet and out into the depths of space. I prayed again: “God, I don’t think I can take much more of this. Maybe you’d better tone it down a little.” Gradually the euphoria subsided, and I quietly moved back toward my friends. While I had been having my private spiritual experience, they were having a spiritual experience of their own, one of a more social nature. I remember hearing one of them say to the others, “I love you guys. I really love you guys.” And then they all started telling each other how much they appreciated each other—saying the kinds of gushy, sincere, vulnerable things that teenagers normally say only when they’re graduating, at a funeral, or getting drunk. I don’t think I said anything, but I know I felt caught up with them in something spiritually tangible—theologians would call it the Holy Spirit—and was bound together with my friends and with God. Soon most or all of us were all sniffling, moved to tears at the connection we were feeling—to each other and to God.
Then I remembered my prayer in the tree a couple hours earlier. Wham! It hit me. God had answered my prayer!
In the previous few minutes, I had seen the most beautiful thing that eyes can see: the glory of God shining in the radiance of creation. I had heard the most beautiful thing that ears can hear: friends telling friends they love one another. And I had felt the most beautiful thing any heart can ever feel: the love of God and the love of others. And at that, my sniffling turned into quiet sobs, again coming from a deep part of me I had never even been aware of before.
If my private laughter was chapter one of my first spiritual experience, and if those shared tears were chapter two, chapter three came later the same evening when I had a vision. I wouldn’t have known to call it that at the time, but, looking back, I think that’s what it was. I was praying again, and in my imagination I could see a pair of sandaled feet. I knew the Bible story about a sinful woman weeping at Jesus’s feet, and it was as if I were being brought into that story not as an observer, but as a participant. I saw myself as a pool of water, of tears, spreading around Jesus’s feet. I was filled with a profound desire to pour myself out for Jesus in simple, pure, selfless love. Whether or not I was a true Christian before that night, I don’t know and it doesn’t really matter.
But from that night on, I was a wholehearted lover of the Creator, a person thirsty for the Holy Spirit, and a devoted follower of Jesus. That was my triune baptism into spirituality.
I don’t like to talk about these experiences much. Talking about them has a way of cheapening them. The memory of the experience itself gets replaced by the memory of telling the story about it. Eventually the experience itself all but disappears, and pretty soon the story being told has little connection to anything that actually happened. Meanwhile, a suspicious psychologist could, I’m sure, offer plausible explanations for what happened to my friends and me that night. There’s a time and a place for that kind of scrutiny and analysis, and I don’t see neurological, psychological, sociological and spiritual categories as mutually exclusive. But even so, sharing experiences like this can feel like casting one’s heart before analytical critics, which is not a pleasant thing.
In spite of those misgivings, I’ve shared this dramatic experience for three reasons. First, I think it’s important for you to know that I’m not writing about spirituality as a dispassionate observer. Since that starry night, I’ve been an insider to spirituality. And since that initial spiritual baptism, many other kinds of spiritual experiences have similarly snuck up and surprised me. Some of them have been equally dramatic, some more, most less, but still very meaningful. Sometimes they haven’t come when I felt I needed them most, and others have felt like bounty poured upon bounty. They’ve never been an on-demand, push-button kind of thing for me. But usually, even when I’m in the middle of a tough and draining day or season, if I’m quiet for even a few seconds, I have been able to find that sacred space at the center of my life where there is at least a faint, quiet glimmer of that same joy, love, and unity that I experienced that night under the stars. My initiation into spirituality stuck, and it has persisted through life’s many dangers, toils, and snares, as the old hymn says. So everything I write about spirituality today has been tested in the crucible of my own experience during the nearly 40 years since that night.
Second, I want to distinguish the wine of spirituality from the wineskin of the religion in which I experienced it. That dramatic experience took place at a Southern Baptist retreat center, around the fringes of charismatic renewal, in the context of the Jesus Movement, in the broader context of conservative Evangelicalism—the same basic matrix, incidentally, that gave birth to the Religious Right. At the Bible studies, conferences, youth events, and religious festivals I began attending after that night, I would regularly hear sermons against evolution and for six-day creationism—sermons that never sat right with me. When I listened to Christian radio—as I did religiously—I would be warned against every approach to the Bible except fundamentalist literalism, about which I always had my doubts.
When I went to youth rallies, I would be told repeatedly that anyone who had not said the required “sinner’s prayer” would miss out on the “abundant life” before death and would go straight to hell afterwards. Again, I always had misgivings about this dualism. When I went to church and Christian conferences, I was consistently taught why women shouldn’t be leaders, why gay people should be stigmatized, and why liberals were anti-God, and although I probably nodded in agreement and maybe even voiced a flimsy “Amen” from time to time, I had my doubts. And to top it all off, in popular books and through little tracts and scary propaganda movies, I would be reminded that something called the Rapture would occur any day—so we shouldn’t concern ourselves with social issues, but only focus on saving souls and helping them become born-again, Spirit-filled, elect, Evangelical Christians just like us.
Now, almost four decades later, I cringe when I hear the teachings that were standard fare back then. I have discarded those theological wineskins, but I treasure more than ever the wine of the Spirit that was somehow conveyed to me through them. That suit of theological clothing doesn’t fit me anymore, but the naked spirituality that sustains me today originally came to me dressed in it. I hope you can see that even if a particular style of religious clothing now feels stiff, tight, and ill-fitting for you—Roman Catholic or mainline Protestant, Evangelical or Pentecostal, Sunni or Shi’ite, Reform or Orthodox—the possibility of naked spirituality remains a live option.
Third, I want to acknowledge that dramatic spiritual experiences happen, but they are, by definition, pretty rare—otherwise they wouldn’t seem dramatic. Beyond that, although they solve some problems, they can create others. Some people, for example, seem to develop an addiction to dramatic spiritual experiences that disrupts their life much as other addictions would. Most important, dramatic spiritual experiences simply aren’t the point. Whatever the value of extraordinary dramatic spiritual experiences, to which some people seem more prone than others, I’m convinced that what matters most—and is available to everyone—is daily, ordinary spiritual experience. With or without dramatic experiences, we can all find, expand, and hold a quiet, sacred space at the center of our lives, a space where we experience vital connection to the living God. We can all learn to tap into the quiet current of sacredness and love that runs from the Creator through all creation. Dramatic experiences can awaken some of us to the reality of the spiritual life, but they are not sufficient to strengthen, sustain, and deepen us as truly spiritual people.
But how do we become truly spiritual people? How do we learn to strip away the superficialities so that, in Richard Rohr’s terms, our naked souls can encounter the naked God? How do we nurture daily spiritual experience, with or without dramatic spiritual experiences? That’s where spiritual practices come in, and that’s what we will explore together in the pages ahead. We will root twelve essential spiritual practices in one simple word each. These 12 practices will not in any way be exhaustive, but they will be essential—essential for strengthening a vital, vigorous, naked spirituality.
The hope was that they would eventually become Republicans too.
Quoted in Jane Redmont, When in Doubt, Sing (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin, 2008), p. 312.
Nobody captures the embarrassments of growing up fundamentalist better than Frank Schaeffer in his sparkling fiction, including Portofino, Saving Grandma and Zermatt (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2004), and his disarmingly vulnerable nonfiction like Crazy for God (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2008).
Barbara Bradley Hagerty exemplifies a nonreductive, multiperspective exploration of spiritual experience in Fingerprints of God: The Search for theScience of Spirituality (New York: Riverhead, 2009).
