Spirituality is about a personal, intimate relationship with God.  It is not about orthodoxy or religion.  It is about personal experience and God reaching us where we are.  It focuses on one's innermost desire --  to be in closer relationship with God.  Often we can't even verbalize that as our deepest desire.  We call it many other things....good health....blessings for our children....the opportunity to serve....but it really boils down to that relationship.

​

It starts with God's in-dwelling.  God within us.  God stirring us.  He stirs our internal energy-- it is about desire, and what we do with desire, and how we channel our desire.  The opposite of spiritual is not the body, the secular, or the material.  It is a lack of energy. A lack of zest. 

​

Spirituality is transformative.  It implies some kind of vision of the human spirit, and how it's full potential is realized. It speaks to the "something larger...something more" in our lives.  Spirituality is about seeking.  It tends to focus either on individual self-realization or some kind of inwardness.  It is a "seeking" desire, to understand the unknowable.

​

In Christian terms, spirituality refers our relationship and understanding of God.  Desire comes from God's in-dwelling, and the spirit of God channels that primal desire to seek God.  Thus, our fundamental values, life styles, and spiritual practices reflect this relationship as the context for human transformation.

​

You came from God and will return to God. Your  deepest DNA is divine. You are already a spiritual being—the much more  difficult question is how to be human! That is what we have yet to learn. I  believe that's why Jesus came as a human being: he didn't come to teach us how  to go to heaven but to teach us how to be simple, loving human beings here on  this earth. Some “non-religious” people do this much better than us “spiritual”  folks.             Richard Rohr

The true self is not about requirements, it’s about  relationship—the quality and capacity for relatedness. This lays the  foundation for contemplation. The contemplative does not need to be “right,”  but only in relationship.                                                      

        The false self will say its prayers but the true self IS a prayer. This is why Paul can say “pray always” (Ephesians 6:18). We pray always whenever we live in conscious union with God​. Then every action is a prayer no matter how secular, mundane, or ordinary it might appear. I would more admire someone cleaning the house in loving union than a priest saying Mass outside of union.​

      I think some experience of God​​ is necessary for mental and emotional health. You basically don't belong in the universe until you are connected to the center and the whole, and a word for that is “God​.” When you live in the false self you are “eccentric,” or off-center. You're trying to make something the Center that is not the center—yourself or anything else. It will never work. Thus the ONLY real sin is idolatry—making something God that is not God​!​

 

 Richard Rohr 

  

​

​

​