“How to be a More Spiritual Person in 15 Minutes a Day”

By Reverend James Kubal-Komoto

Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church

Des Moines, Washington

January 8, 2006

            I thought about calling my message this morning, “Spirituality for Dummies,” but knowing that most of us Unitarian Universalists take a little pride in our intellectual abilities, I was afraid that nobody would show up. So instead, I’ve titled my message this morning, “How to be a More Spiritual Person in 15 minutes a Day.”

            I want to talk about spirituality because, in one way, spirituality is what this religious community is all about. From my perspective, more than anything else, this congregation exists to nurture the spiritual growth of all of us who belong to it.

            On the other hand, I know that spirituality is one of those words that it’s easy for us to get hung up on as Unitarian Universalists.

            So I want to start off by saying what spirituality isn’t from a liberal religious perspective.

            First off, spirituality doesn’t have a lot to do with believing in anything “woo woo.” (For those of you unfamiliar with the term “woo woo,” it’s a very technical, theological term.) In fact, spirituality doesn’t have much to do with believing anything at all. No leap of faith is required to be a spiritual person. One can be a spiritual person without giving up any commitment to rationality.

            Neither does spirituality necessarily have anything to do with what might be called “ecstatic experiences.”

            I recently read Karen Armstrong’s memoir The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness. Some of you might be familiar with another book that Armstrong wrote, A History of God. In The Spiral Staircase, Armstrong describes the seven years she spent as a Roman Catholic nun.

            Armstrong became a nun when she was only seventeen because she expected that she might have many ecstatic religious experiences as a nun. “I would see (God) wherever I looked, and I myself would be transfigured…I would be serene, joyful, inspired, and inspiring - - perhaps even a saint,” she writes of the hopes she had. “And because I was only seventeen,” Armstrong writes, “I imagined that this would happen pretty quickly.”

            Sadly, despite the hours she spent in prayer everyday, Armstrong never felt any of those things she hoped she might. For her, prayer was like a telephone call that kept ringing but was never answered. After seven years, she felt like a failure as a nun and left that life behind her. 

            Finally, I don’t think spirituality necessarily has to do with a lot of things that we think of as religious. There was an article in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer earlier this week about prayers before high school athletic events between public and private schools. To my mind there is probably nothing less spiritual than praying before a high school football game or basketball game. It also makes me with more people would pay more attention to Jesus’ advise about prayer. When you pray, he said, pray in a closet.

Why don’t more so-called bible believers take that verse literally? You know, that’s a headline I wouldn’t mind reading: “Pat Robertson Locks Himself in Closet for Six Months In Order To Get Closer to God.”

            But if spiritually isn’t about believing in anything or having ecstatic experiences or even doing anything religious, then what is spirituality about?

            For me, spirituality is a matter of how we live our everyday lives. It’s about living our everyday lives as fully, deeply, and richly, as possible. It’s about living in a way that is satisfying to our spirits, to our souls, to our deepest selves. It’s about living more abundantly than we might otherwise.

            How do we do this?

            I’ve come to believe that there are four dimensions to spirituality, four dimensions to spiritual growth, and what I’d like to do this morning is talk about each one of these dimensions and talk about some questions we might ask ourselves if decided that we did want to become a “more spiritual person,” And as I said in my title, it’ll take 15 minutes a day or less.

            So what are these four dimensions of spirituality? What are the four questions related to them?

            I want to suggest for your consideration this morning that the first dimension of spirituality is about our ability to live in relationship. More than anything else, spirituality is about relationships, especially our relationships with other people.

            What’s most important to our ability to live in relationship with other people, perhaps more important than anything else?

            When we look at the different religious traditions of the world, we find a lot of variation. Some have one God. Some have many Gods. Some really can’t make up their mind whether there is just one God or three Gods. Some teach there are a heaven and a hell. Some teach there is not.

            Yet within all the religious traditions of the world, there is one virtue that stands out in all of them: compassion.

            Aldous Huxley gave an interview at the end of his life. Huxley is best known for his novel Brave New World, but he was also a scholar of the world’s religions. His interviewer asked, “Dr. Huxley, perhaps more than anyone else alive, you have studied the great spiritual and religious traditions of the world. What have you learned?” Huxley answered, “I think we could be a bit kinder.”

            Why is compassion, or kindness, so important?

            Yes, it’s true that the world would be a much better place if we all remembered what the novelist Henry James once said about the three most important things in human life. ( The first it to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.”)

            But even more importantly than making the world a better place, we ourselves live more fully, deeply, and richly when we are compassionate.

            To be compassionate literally means “to feel with,” and it’s true, when we are compassionate, we open ourselves up to other people’s pain, but we also open ourselves up to other people’s joy, and can participate in their joy as much as if it were our own, perhaps even more so.

            If the first dimension of spirituality is our ability to live in relationships, and if compassion is most important to the quality of our relationships with other people, one question we might ask ourselves everyday is, “How can I live more compassionately today?”

            I want to suggest the second dimension of spirituality is our ability to enjoy tour own lives.

            This may seem a strange thing to say since so often people associate spirituality with asceticism, but I want no part in any spirituality which does not allow at least occasional decadent indulgences. I find myself much more in agreement with the author of Ecclesiastes in Hebrew Scripture who says to, “Eat, drink, and be merry,”

            On the other, I know that most of the things that the society in which live tells us will bring us enjoyment will not. Contrary to what our society tells us, I know money will not make us happier. Fame will not make us happier. Power will not make us happier. More stuff will not make us happier. Extravagant pleasures will not make us happier.

            But what will?

            More than anything else, I know gratitude for what we already have will make us happier.

            I know that many people think that gratitude is a result of happiness, and the way to be more grateful is to find other ways to make oneself happier, but in fact I’ve come to believe the reverse is true.

            Gratitude comes first. The more grateful we are, the happier we become.

            And by intentionally cultivating gratitude, we can make ourselves happier.

            In an experiment at the State University of New York at Buffalo, psychologists tested the wisdom of that old song, “Count your blessings, name them one by one,” After five times completing the sentence, “I’m glad I’m not….” People felt relatively happy and satisfied with their lives. By contrast, those who counted their unfulfilled desires, by completing sentences beginning with, “I wish I were…” came away feeling worse.

            I also know this is true from my own experience.

            I suspect this past week was a difficult week for many of us. At least it was for me. Getting going again after the holidays. I started back to work on Tuesday, reluctantly, I admit.

            I was driving south on I-5 to a meeting with some other Unitarian Universalist ministers in Tacoma. It was raining. I found myself thinking, “I don’t want to go back to work. I don’t want to go to this meeting. I wish I lived in Maui.” As I was thinking these things to myself, I found myself getting more and more miserable. It’s probably a good thing I-5 doesn’t go to Maui because I might have kept driving if it did.

            But then, for some odd reason, I started thinking about a movie that Hiromi and I saw recently, March of the Penguins. If you haven’t seen this film, it tells the story of the life of Emperor penguins, especially the misery and deprivation that these penguins undergo in order to bring a new penguin life into this world. I know a lot of people found this movie inspirational, and it is inspirational in many ways. But the whole time I was watching this move, I couldn’t help thinking to myself, “Thank God, I’m not a penguin.”

            And for reason, this thought came back to me as I was driving south on I-5 through the rain to the meeting I didn’t want to go to. I started thinking to myself. “It could be worse. I could be a penguin living on the frozen tundra of Antarctica forced to sit on an egg for more than a month while going without food.”

            Now when I walked through the doors to that meeting smiling, the other ministers probably were thinking, “Well, James looks well rested from a few days off,” and probably weren’t thinking, “James looks really grateful not to be a penguin,” but indeed, that was what I was thinking, and I was happier for it.

            If the second dimension of spirituality is our ability to enjoy our own lives, and if gratitude is most important to this, a second question we might ask ourselves everyday is, “What am I most grateful for in my life today?”

            I truly believe that so many of us have so much to be grateful for, but I also know that all of us at sometime in our lives have experiences that we wish we didn’t have.

            The simple fact of the matter is that nothing in the world is perfect. The world itself is not perfect. None of our family and friends are. None of us are.

            We make mistakes. Others hurt us. We get sick. We get old and our bodies don’t work as well as they used to. And in the end, all of us and everyone we love will die.

            The world in which we live is far from perfect.

            And it’s not because we’re sinful. It’s not because we’re bad people. It’s not because this world is a fallen one. From my perspective, its’ just the way things are.

            It’s helpful to me to remember that in poetic description of the creation of the world we find in the first chapter of Genesis in Hebrew scripture, God says that the world is good, it isn’t perfect.

            Yet many people, perhaps some of us, spend so much time and so much energy wishing life were perfect or wishing that other people were perfect or wishing that we were perfect. Or perhaps we don’t with things were perfect, but only different than they are.

            As a result, many of us walk around with unresolved grief. We walk around holding grudges resulting from long-ago hurts. We walk around with a bag load of disappointments about ourselves.

            And these are heavy burdens to carry. They weigh us down, trapping us in the past, making it impossible to enjoy the present, making it impossible for us to imagine the future. They make our hearts bitter.

            I know of people, and I’m sure you do to, who have been destroyed by these burdens, and this is why I want to suggest that a third dimension of spirituality is our ability to live with integrity in the face of frustration, failure, and loss.

            What’s most important to our ability to live with integrity in the face of frustration, failure, and loss?

            Very simply put, acceptance

            We sometimes have to accept life for what it is; reminding ourselves that life is good despite its limitations.

            We have to accept others for who they are and not who we would like them to be. I read about one man who, in an effort to be more accepting of his spouse, got up every morning, looked at himself in the mirror, and said to himself, “Remember, you’re no catch either.”

            And when others hurt us, we need to do our best to forgive them.

            But most of all we need to accept ourselves.

            As one wit once said, “It doesn’t matter what we do until we accept ourselves. Once we accept ourselves, it doesn’t matter what we do.” Or as the Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield says, “Much of the spiritual life is self-acceptance, much of all of it,” Or as psychologist David G. Myers says, “…the best predictor of general life satisfaction is not satisfaction with family life, friendships, or income, but satisfaction with self.”

            Now in arguing for more acceptance, I’m not saying we should be all accepting. I’m not arguing for total passivity. Here I find the Serenity Prayer useful. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

            If the third dimension of spirituality is our ability to live with integrity in the face of frustration, failure and loss, and if acceptance is most important to this, then another question we might ask ourselves everyday is, “What is it that I need to accept about life, about somebody else, or myself today?”

            I want to suggest that the fourth dimension of spirituality is our ability to live with meaning.

            You see, I believe there is a deep hunger within each one of us for meaning. At the end of our days we want to look back on our lives and feel that we not only enjoyed our lives, but that we did something important with them.

            Yet how do we experience meaning in our lives?

            We experience meaning in our lives when we commit ourselves to worthy goals and when we are then faithful to those commitments.

            Now there’s all kinds of commitments we can make in life, all kinds of goals we can set for ourselves, but I believe we experience in the most meaning in our lives when we commit ourselves to some cause beyond ourselves, some cause that benefits the common good for the world in which we live.

            And while it always feels good to feel successful in our efforts, in the end, I think it’s actually more important for us to be faithful to our values and commitments than to be successful.

            I recently came across the following piece titled “The Paradoxical Commandments” that was written in 1968 by Kent Keith when he was a college student that expresses this idea well: “People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered,” he wrote. “Love them anyway. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway. If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway. The biggest men with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men with the smallest minds. Think big anyway. People favor underdogs, but follow only top dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anyway. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway. People really need help but may attack you if you do help them. Help people anyway. Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have anyway.”

            If the fourth dimension of spirituality is our ability to live with meaning, and if commitment to worthy goals or faithfulness to worthy values is what is most important to this, a fourth question we might ask ourselves everyday is, “What commitments or values do I want to be most faithful to today?”

            To summarize: Four dimension of spirituality. Our ability to live in relationship, our ability to enjoy our own lives, our ability to live with integrity in the face of frustration, failure, and loss; and our ability to live with meaning. And four virtues that go along with these: compassion, gratitude, acceptance, and faithfulness. And so four questions we might ask ourselves everyday to help cultivate these virtues in our life: “How can I live more compassionately today?” “What am I most grateful for today?” “What do I need to accept about life, somebody else, or myself today?” and “What commitments or values will I be most faithful to today?”

            These, I believe, are the questions we need to ask ourselves if we are to live lives of fullness, richness, and depth.

            And absolutely no woo-woo involved.