Spirituality

I've been thinking about what people call "spirituality" for a while now. Particularly this comes up in the arts... musicians, actors, those types. People who have no real understanding of God or religious beliefs. "I'm not religious, but I'm a very spiritual person." This bothers me, because unless you are in a relationship with God, the Bible says that you are dead spiritually. Which means that this "spirituality" has no basis in the real spirit world... it's all human emotion, empathy with other human beings or being in touch with nature, that sort of thing. In the long run, it's not spirituality... it's being human. That's not the same thing.

This becomes dangerous when just the kind of attitude I quoted before comes about: "I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual." When humanity starts being called spirituality, it leads people to intellectually believe that they are in touch with whatever "spirit" is, and so they are off the hook to figure it out: I don't need your Christianity, they might think, because I'm already very spiritual.

Spirituality is not being in touch with our feelings. It's not being in touch with The Human Race At Large. It is not feeling sympathy for things in nature. It is not a feeling of wonder at a sunrise. Spirituality is being in relationship with God. Those other things might take you somewhere into the neighborhood of spirituality, but they are the means, not the end. Spirituality is, in a nutshell, meeting God and joining His family.