Spiritual practices do many things, like orient us towards the Holy, or strengthen our connection to all of being. Some practices strengthen our breathing and others strengthen our body and yet others strengthen our reasoning and our feeling.
Many spiritual practices also stretch our hearts. They invite us more fully into compassion, love, forgiveness, thanksgiving, generosity, and wonder. These spiritual practices help us live and stay present when life is uncomfortable and even when life is downright dangerous or deeply painful. They help us stay present when bad things happen and when illness, hatred, or fear threaten.
Much can be accomplished with individual spiritual practice. But corporate spiritual practice offers many benefits. Corporate spiritual practice (such as communal worship, study, singing, prayer, meditation, and faithful social action) stretches our hearts in community. The more we do those practices we people we don’t know yet or well, the more we are stretched in living open-heartedly with strangers. The more we pursue those practices together, the more we develop a different relationship to our neighbors, friends, and family.
Spiritual practice really gets rolling when we meet the edges of our comfort and head out into where we’re uncomfortable. We might, for example, feel very comfortable with the same small group of people around us, but add two new folks and all the relationships shift, frequently causing a little discomfort while everyone explores new ways of relating together. In Unitarian Universalism, there is often discomfort around rules of worship. These are very cultural and mostly unstated until someone challenges them (“we always sing XYZ here” “we never do it like that” “the spiritual leaders will robe/not robe”). The specific practices are part of what create worshipful culture and community.
In Parashat Tetzavah (Exodus 27:20-30:10) the people are learning how to worship together, how to welcome and feel connected to the Holy wherever they go. In this section, the Holy, which is everywhere, also can contract and be right there in the new place prepared. In creating a set-apart special space, a special container, we have a chance to know and trust that right there we can connect to the Holy, no matter how difficult it may be in day-to-day life. In naming these specifics involved in creating an extra-special place of connecting with the Holy, Exodus is teaching the people (and us, the subsequent generations) what creates worshipful space and experience.
Spiritual practices are like a special container that allows us to know and trust that right there and through this special container we can connect to the Holy or the sense of all of life, no matter how difficult that is in our day-to-day lives.
Spiritual practices from and forming traditions passed down over millennia often have much to teach us in what is uncomfortable. Discerning which discomforts to embrace and work through and which to adapt is a process and not something immediately evident much of the time. I use a wheelchair, so I practice yoga with the wheelchair as part of the necessary tools to help me stretch into the asanas. That’s an easily discernible adaption, even if how to move with the specific postures isn’t always so easy to discover. But I’m much less like to adapt something that might make me uncomfortable because of inconvenience, like the number of times I stop to pray each day (five). Life is frequently inconvenient, and I never want to allow my sense of gratitude or connection to all of life itself to be further diminished because I found I didn’t have the time for a few minutes of prayer. When I’m singing words that challenge me, my first question isn’t “what can I do to change the words to my comfortable theology?” it is instead, “how is this meaningful and can I find meaning in it?” I’ll take the time to sing until I find understanding, stretching my heart. And, depending on the musical tradition, the age of the song, and the permission of the composer (if the composer may be consulted), I may decide it is ok to adapt the lyrics, or not.
Spiritual practice without discipline (regular, steady, and willing to be with discomfort) is not much of a practice. The discipline is what draws us into greater open-heartedness, into greater wisdom, into greater abilities to be steadfast, generous, loving, forgiving, thankful and reverent. Discipline is not about punishment in this context. And discomfort is not the same as pain. Discomfort is what happens when you work your muscles hard one day and as they heal, they’re sore. But that isn’t pain. Similarly, discipline is about limits and undertaking what may be challenging or difficult. Spiritual practices should challenge us to change for the better. To do that, we can’t always be comfortable. We all need and benefit from some comfort. And our hearts also need the work within these beautiful containers of spiritual practices. That way, when we’re not engaged in the practices and meet a difficult, painful, or horrid part of life, we’re more able to be lovingly present and persistent.
Whatever our spiritual practices, individual and communal, may we engage them attentively, regularly, steadily, in the joyful and easy parts and in the uncomfortable bits. In so doing may we find our hearts stretching for the better, and our lives more full of love, wonder, generosity, compassion, forgiveness, thanksgiving, reverence, and joy.
