Spiritual community
Plink plink plink.
A moment of silence.
Again—plink plink plink.
It’s 6 a.m. and the sky is still unlit, the color of chalky charcoal. But in a corner, under the darkened window, a small orange light is on a steady, metronomic blink, flaring and fading at half-second intervals, trying to tell anyone who will listen that there are three e-mails and two texts and another four calendar alerts vying for attention.
Plink plink plink.
For so many the call marks the beginning of another 21st century day filled from open to close with a multitude of technological tethers that tie us, Gulliver-like, to our phones, computers, tablets and GPS locaters. Without an e-mail by noon, system malfunctions are suspected. Stripped of cell phone or PDA, we feel out of touch and somehow exposed.
In a world that is increasingly interconnected, a virtual bazaar of non-stop information blasts, the ancient practice of spiritual devotion can begin to seem out of place, a reverse anachronism. We value the new and innovative and original; juxtaposing that against the quietude and reflection that are, for most of us, the hallmarks of spiritual development can seem nearly impossible.
Spirit itself is even a quiet word.
The value of spiritual growth, though, is immense, and well worth integration into modern life, believes Scott Holmquist, executive director of the Billy Graham Training Center at the Cove, a retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina near the storied minister’s home.
“It’s like the difference between going to a regular movie and a 3-D movie,” Holmquist said. Sure, a 2-D movie is decent, but sort of pales in comparison to the wonders and unexpected sensations of three dimensions.
While the spectacle of modern life is wonderful, it can limit how we interact with our own third dimension—the spirit, the 3-D glasses of personal growth.
“I’m so glad to be in the 21st century, but those things that are wonderful can keep us from stopping, from taking a deep breath,” Holmquist said.
The ancient Sufi poet Rumi advised his students to “close both eyes to see with the other eye.” Rumi was an Islamic Persian mystic who lived in the 13th century; although that might usually qualify him for inclusion in the prudes-of-the-middle-ages category, the poet was actually an ardent believer in building spiritual life based on love and devotion to God and to others.
Ringing true eight centuries later, spiritual leaders from a plethora of faith backgrounds echo Rumi’s thoughts: spirituality in a modern world needs discipline, but more importantly it needs love and community.
Rabbi Alon Ferency is, today, the leader of a relatively conservative congregation at the Heska Amuna synagogue in central Knoxville, Tenn.
But Ferency didn’t come to the job via conventional means. He grew up Jewish but then went to Harvard where he got a degree in near Eastern languages and civilizations. He rode his bike cross-country from Seattle to Boston. He joined the Peace Corps. He worked in Cameroon, Africa as a community health agent. He founded a media company in L.A. Then he decided to devote the rest of his life to the rabbinate.
And in his diverse and decidedly non-traditional experience, Rabbi Ferency has emerged passionate about the role of community in spirituality.
“It’s absolutely essential,” he said. “You can’t do spiritual change without a community.”
Many people say they’re spiritual but not religious, that they value their spirituality, but don’t need a community to express it.
“The word I always think of there is fatuous,” says Ferency, bluntly. “Spiritual development is actually sometimes very painful, and if you didn’t have a community, you would never see it through.”
Dr. Heather Murray Elkins, an Elder in the United Methodist Church, professor, and a convenor of feminist liturgy, also holds in low esteem the idea that spiritual life can be healthy without community.
“I meet people frequently who say ‘I’m a Christian, I just don’t go to church.’ That’s an absolutely nonsensical answer,” says Elkins. “It’s not a matter of going to, it’s a matter of being in. It’s community, and you can’t do that by yourself.”
Community is key not only to sticking it out on the sometimes arduous spiritual road, but to getting on that spiritual road in the first place, Elkins said.
“In a culture where time is money, we just keep going faster and faster and faster, so I teach students to try to tell time differently,” she said. “You have to do it with some kind of community. You can’t keep holy time by yourself.”
Elkins gives the example of Orthodox Jews as impeccable holy timekeepers, holding one another strictly to observances of Shabbat, where all of the distractions and responsibilities that life necessitates are taken forcibly from the equation.
“They agreed to protect each other’s time,” Elkins said, and without that protection, holy time falls by the wayside in deference to the frenetic pace of the world clock.
Elkins, who has also been a poet, a teacher at a bi-lingual Navaho school, an instructor in South Korea, and a truck stop chaplain, will be part of a spiritual growth retreat held June 17-18 at Lake Junaluska Conference and Retreat Center, a Methodist conclave near Maggie Valley, N.C. Elkins’ seminars attract people from around the continent to talk and debate liturgy.
The attraction to this type of face-to-face interaction is not only increasingly hard to come by, it’s apparently becoming increasingly undesirable as well.
In a study done by the Harvard Business Review, people showed themselves to be far and away more likely to use self-service or automated options over interacting with an actual human. This rang true on every level from banks to supermarkets to troubleshooting their glitch-ridden cell phones. People, increasingly, do not want to talk to or interact with other real people if they can possibly help it.
A National Geographic exploration of worldwide longevity found that we, as average Americans, had three close friends just 15 years ago; now, most say they only have one and a half. This is not the case in places such as Okinawa, Sardinia or even American Seventh-Day Adventist communities, where close-knit, lifelong personal communities are the norm—as is longer life.
When the Harvard researchers agglomerated customer service call center data, the information showed that a staggering 57 percent of callers had already spent considerable amount of time on the Internet and the company website trying to address the problem themselves. Thirty percent stayed on the site, continuing to attempt self-service while actually talking to the person who is supposed to be the expert.
“Here’s a hypothesis that would be concerning if it’s right: maybe customers are shifting toward self-service because they don’t want a relationship with companies,” say Matt Dixon and Lara Ponomareff, who penned the analysis. And while that theory is certainly distressing to businesses trying to romance the spending public, this increasing isolationism and separatism carries heavier implications for the spiritual life.
Zoe Allison-Rockingbear, co-founder and director of Earth Green Medicine Lodge, joins the chorus of spiritual professionals advocating community, lauding its effects.
“I think it gives you kind of a balancing mechanism, because a lot of people, if they were just left to their own devices, they might become less understanding of what community means,” Allison-Rockingbear said.
A community forces an individual to recognize what he or she does not know. Without other, more knowledgeable people around, it is easy to think that one’s realm of understanding is pretty well complete. Community members expand the limits of one’s knowledge directly and indirectly.
“Everybody becomes important in the community, everybody has a piece of understanding,” says Allison-Rockingbear. “It allows people to have freedom.”
Allison-Rockingbear practices a mix of Cherokee and other native spiritual traditions, but her idea of comparing one’s spiritual knowledge to that of others also runs through Scott Holmquist’s evangelical Christianity. He calls it The Body.
“The vitality of our personal relationship with God is pivotal and is key and is really, really important, but it is always in the context of the body of Christ, the church, the virtual church,” he said.
What he means, he says, is that sure, one’s knowledge and experience are essential, but only, really, when it’s up against other people’s. That’s why it’s called a body—hands are amazing instruments, but severed from the rest of the body, they just become grotesque.
Community—being with other people, being a part of something—is therefore the common denominator. Yet practitioners concede that taking the time to do this is not easy, and the modern Western world is in no way structured to offer its inhabitants time out for spiritual pursuits. But taking a moment to reflect and committing time to engage with other people spiritually is, they say, vital to spiritual growth.
The pastoral mountain setting of The Cove provides an environment in which visitors can take that moment for themselves.
“Mrs. [Ruth] Graham said that The Cove is a place of retreat, rest, relaxation and renewal,” Holmquist said, and he hopes that’s what the bucolic, tranquil mountain location gives visitors—a place for renewal. He describes stepping onto the lush, green property as “a big exhale,” and said he hears the same thing, unsolicited, from visitors all the time.
“We really believe this place has been set apart for this purpose, and when people come here they say, ‘you know, when I first even came on the grounds, I felt the presence of God,’” Holmquist said.
Allison-Rockingbear too sees the mountains as the ideal place to forge and reforge spiritual connections. Through her Earth Green Medicine Lodge, she’s been leading people into the peaks for 21 years on “vision quests,” in which supplicants seek a vision for their lives, accompanied by a days-long fast. The topography of the mountain ranges provides participants a stage on which their life vision will play out.
Regardless of where one seeks his or her spiritual growth, the process is just as well measured in day-to-day increments.
“I think Judaism would tell you to put your spiritual self into your schedule wherever you find yourself,” Rabbi Ferency said. At your law office, waiting in line for coffee, walking to work—engage your spirit in all of those times. But, he adds, if you don’t also schedule at least a little time to nurture your spiritual life with others, it’ll fall by the wayside.
“You always have time for three breaths, and in those three breaths, with really conscious breathing you can bring yourself back to center,” Allison-Rockingbear said.
Medical research has shown that leading a consistently stressful life causes something called the inflammatory response, which, according to the National Institutes of Health, is a contributing factor to all manner of nefarious afflictions like cardiovascular problems and Alzheimer’s. Stepping back from that stress-fest for just 15 minutes a day can help reduce those effects.
“The spiritual part of my life is going to require a priority that will need to have reflection in commitment of time and of resources,” says Holmquist. “Whatever we feed is going to grow.”
That’s a sentiment that hearkens back to our medieval friend Rumi, the love poet.
“But knowing depends on the time spent looking,” Rumi said.
The lifestyle of our modern world puts high value on speed, innovation and increased virtual connection. And as Holmquist pointed out, there’s really nothing wrong with that. It’s led to some outstanding technological breakthroughs, like robotic surgery, nanotechnology, and Post-It notes. But there is still, practitioners say, value in those little acts of rebellion against the clock and in standing with others to protect our time and enrich our spirits. It’s a value that benefits our minds, spirits and even our bodies, and it is, they say, worth turning off the phone for, even for just a moment.
“Abraham Heschel said that if you had only one prayer to say,” Heather Murray Elkins said, “thank you would be sufficient.”