Spirituality

Probably the most helpful definition of spirituality I have encountered came from an aboriginal Australian, Adrian Tucker, who describes it in the words on the right.

The awareness to which it refers is something beyond the purely intellectual. It is experienced more as an emotion, a feeling, a connection.

This experience feeds our creativity, our intuition, our hope, our love. It makes our view of the world brighter, sharper, and engages us in transforming it – in co-creating it into its potential.

It is a form of truth beyond the rational, one that we can find in a song, a poem, a painting, a beautiful sunrise, or a smile. It makes our heart leap, our spirit soar, and gives us a new sense of being fully alive. And it enables us to be our best. To live up to our potential. To bless and inspire others. And to change the World.

Spirituality is about tapping into our connection with what is yet to be. Connecting reality and imagination. Co-creating the World. Accessing hope in faith that it will deliver.

Creativity is a very spiritual act. Whether that is expressed in influencing images, writing, concepts or patterns of activity. Creativity changes our relationship with the way the world is and might be. It is about moving beyond the confines of our situation and tapping into things we do not fully understand. In doing so, it reshapes the world around us.

The joy that we feel in our spirit when that happens is a spiritual reaction to what we are doing – a connectedness with something bigger and more enduring than our physical selves

Science can partially describe and interpret how this happens, but it neither defines or constrains what it might ultimately prove to be. Equally religion may allow us to glimpse more of its character, but it is still ‘seeing through a glass darkly’ and, at a purely rational level is limited to the vocabulary we have available to us. But when we tap into this power, our own spirit experiences something beyond the language that we have to describe it, and we are uplifted and elevated by the experience.

For me, as a Christian, that experience I interpret as a connection with God. But the God I believe in fights (and dies) for free will, and therefore I vehemently uphold that everyone should be allowed to arrive at their own interpretation.

Whatever YOUR interpretation, hopefully it will not detract from that wonderful feeling of being a human fully alive that is open to all of us in this spiritual creative space. For in this space lies the answers to resolving the stressful burdens around you and protecting your mind from the stresses that might otherwise overwhelm it.