Everyday Spiritual Practice: Simple Pathways for Enriching Your Life - Softcover

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Scott W. Alexander is the editor of Salted With Fire: Strategies for Sharing Faith and Growing Congregations, AIDS and Your Religious Community, and The Welcoming Congregation. He currently serves as Minister at the River Road Unitarian Church in Bethesda, Maryland.

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We live our lives too much in a shell built of inattention and distraction. An analogy is the shoes we wear that keep us from feeling the ground. A few years ago my family went up to Sedona to play and hike among the rocks. The path was finely ground red dirt, the kind that puffs as you walk on it. My children begged to take their shoes off. At first, all I could think of were such practical worries as hidden glass, or snakes, or stubbed toes. Thank goodness they were persistent. The truth was that we needed to take off our shoes; we needed to feel the earth beneath our skin. I will never forget that cool, incredibly soft Sedona dirt molding itself to every footprint. Too bad for the strange glances of passing hikers. We had a wonderful time.

The world is full of wonder, if we but stop and pay attention. It is there, waiting to feed us, even in very difficult situations. The day is made up of moments, and each moment can be an eternity of peace to those experiencing pain or grief. They are like blessings, and we count them, one by one throughout the day. They help us keep our balance.

Pause for those moments every so often to listen and to look, to feel and to smell, to taste and to appreciate, to feel thankful for the beauty which is around us even in the smallest grains of red dirt and in the grandest blue of sky. The mundane world is a source of deep spirituality. Notice it, appreciate it, for you are it and it is you. This spiritual practice is one tool to help us feel our connectedness and sense the oneness for which we yearn.

Like hungry swallows

we search

for there is emptiness

in every breast.

We do not have to fit ourselves to someone’s prescribed discipline in order to feel we are being spiritual. Spirituality is with us always, and our individual situations will define the tools we choose to use, if we take the time to listen to ourselves and know our joys and yearnings, whether for quiet or a walk in beauty, for exercise or music, for sunsets or sunrises, for strenuous activity or the hand in ours, for the glance of a child, for effort or work that is meaningful, for the creative task or the work of community, or for the moments of appreciation which are available to us anytime and anywhere. Whichever path you choose, may you find that for which you search, and your yearning be fulfilled.