what is spiritizing, part 1

let's talk about spiritual activism

Wow, there are lots of tree-lovers reading these emails. And I loved hearing from them, from you--the poems, stories, and assorted “I love trees, too” messages--in response to my last email about Jeanine’s and my daytrip to Joyce Kilmer National Forest.

That piece was definitely about trees, which I praised and called the most virtuous beings on Earth. But it was also about the virtues, or at the least the capacity for virtue, of us more spiritually complicated human beings. It was about the reverence and love, or conversely, the irreverence or hostility, we carry within us and emit into the spaces we enter, and the way those energetic emissions accrue and remain residually present over time, making some places feel especially sacred, consecrated, like an old growth forest, a cathedral, or a cave where people have meditated for centuries, and other places feel desecrated.

And it's not just places and spaces that are affected by the energetic charge we carry into them and leave with them. It’s also people and other beings that we consecrate or desecrate by the quality of our presence with them. The love we feel for a child, a spouse, or a friend, or for a dog, a cat, or a dahlia, gets radiated into them and lives in them, as does, unfortunately, whatever disinterest, coldness, or scorn we feel. You can look at another person, you can look at a dog, you can look at a landscape, and see the love, hate, or indifference that has been sewn into them.

Another way to say it: you can enter a space, or enter the presence of another being, and feel the way it has been spiritized.

“Spiritize (Spirit eyes)” is what I call this email series, or blog, or cyber-space, or whatever the right word for it is. But thus far, it’s been way more “spirit eyes” than “spiritize.” Most of what I’ve shared here have been descriptions of moments when I was given spirit eyes to see the luminosity that’s always there, in all people, all places, all things, all moments, but that I’m usually blind to. I write about these and share them because I believe spirit eyes are contagious. It's other people, whose spirit eyes are open and seeing, who’ve taught me to see, who’ve infected me with seeing, and I share what I share here in the hope of paying it forward.

But I’ve been hesitant to write about “spiritizing.” I’ve nodded sideways at it once or twice, and on the “About” page of the “Spiritize (Spirit eyes)” website, I attempt an explicit definition:

Spiritize (verb):  1. become Spirit, be suffused with Spirit; 2. foster, magnify, or strengthen Spirit’s becoming (in the world and in others)

But mostly, I’ve been reluctant to say much about it directly.

One reason for the reluctance is that “spiritizing” feels like an “idea” to me, and I have more confidence in stories, and the felt experience they evoke, more than I do in ideas. I have more confidence in myself as storyteller than I do as teller of ideas. I like reading things and writing things that are visceral and have a bit of sparkle I them, and I don’t trust my ability to write about spiritizing the idea without getting heady and dull. Another reason I’ve hesitated is that, while I’ve been there when spiritizing has happened--I’ve seen it, I’ve felt it, in others, in myself, in both of us or all of us at once—I know that what I know of spiritizing is limited and miniscule.

But dang it, the world needs spiritizing. The world needs spiritizers. And we need to be talking with each other about this.

So let me ask you a few questions.

1. Do you believe that you are, regularly or occasionally, a bearer of spiritual power? Do you believe that you--yes, you—are ever the instrument by which some deeper-than-words spiritual force is birthed in the world, or sewn into a situation, or transmitted to another person, in such a way that it changes things, or changes someone, for the better? Do you believe that ever happens through you, even sometimes, even a little?

2. If so, do you believe that you are a 100% passive vessel of that spiritual power, a 100% active creator of that power, or some 50-50, 75-25, 99-1 blend?

3. And if you believe that any bit of the spiritual power you bear does come from something you bring to an encounter, from something you do, what is that something? Or what are those somethings?

There’s a line in the Gospel of Mark where Jesus says, “This kind can only be driven out by prayer and fasting” (Mark 9: 29). It’s the last line of a healing story (click here if you want to read it) in which his disciples could not help a young man with seizures, but Jesus could. The story says that the seizures were caused by a “dumb spirit,” which Jesus “drove out.” And afterward, when the disciples ask Jesus why they couldn’t help but he could, that’s when Jesus makes the claim about the power of prayer and fasting.

It's a claim about spiritizing. And what I’m asking you—two thousand years later and living in the age of science--is whether and to what degree you believe it: that prayer, fasting, and presumably other practices of spiritual activism (which are inseparable, I believe, from practices of spiritual receptivism) help release some energy, some force, that has operative power in what Sufism calls ālam-i ajsām, “the world of bodies and things,” and that would not be released without that spiritual activism.

In the weeks ahead, I’m going to try writing more about spiritizing. I want to talk about the power of “prayer and fasting” and other spiritual practices, and I’d love to respond to comments and questions you send by email or share in the comments section. But this is enough for today.

If you know someone who might want to read along or be part of this conversation, please use the share button and let them know.

Until then, carry on, spiritizers.

Russell

(photo credit: Johannes Plenio / Pexels)