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I’m spending the weekend at one of my spiritual homes, a place where I have deep roots, a place which has fed and nourished me over the years.

I’ve been thinking about my other spiritual homes along the way–the Catholic church, into which I was born; the variety of Christian practices I’ve explored; non-theistic, body-oriented practices including yoga and meditation; ecumenical and non-denominational practices, and simple, powerful practices like devotion. Even marriage seems to me to be a spiritual practice, and at this point a spiritual home, a ritual set of practices that holds me in my life and helps orient and balance me.

I notice a long-term pattern in my relationship to spiritual homes, which, in short, might be described as “love it….hate it…..meh.”

When we encounter a new way of seeing, believing, or some practice that seems to make sense to us, there’s often a rapture period, a period very similar to what happens when two people fall in love. We love everything about it; we fall into it. We’re crazy about it. We tell our friends, family, everyone. “Have you ever tried triskadated bifurcal metromeditation? It’s incredible! It’ll change your life!” Sometimes this happens with foods or diets, or even supplements. “I’ve started taking micromucatated fortron-B every day and I feel like I’m 18 years old again.”

My reaction to new spiritual practices can often have this “pink cloud” aspect to it. In this phase of practice, everything about the new practice fits. Everything makes sense. There’s no other way to see, no other way to be. People who don’t believe or practice the way I believe and practice are just crazy nuts, lost, or not paying attention.

Then, just as in dating, reality hits.

The other person (or the practice, or the organization, or our own little group) has warts. There are things that don’t fit, quite. Some of the principles don’t seem to be entirely worked out, or I can’t understand or apply them to my life. Not everything works perfectly; in some cases, things don’t work very well at all.

In all spiritual practices, other practitioners of those practices eventually let us down. We build them up to a bigger-than-life stature, one they can’t possibly maintain, and then when they behave as human beings, we feel disappointment. This happened in my experience as a Catholic, it happened in my experience as a yogi, as a meditator, in virtually every spiritual “home” I have ever been part of. The flip slide of the “falling in love, bigger than life” phase of spiritual engagement is the “falling out of love” phase where our ideals come crashing down to the ground.

Both types of reactive engagement (the “I just discovered this, you have to try it, it’ll change your life!” phase, as well as the “there is nothing good in this practice/belief/organization; it sucks; it’s not what it says it is” phase) represent an incomplete or immature engagement, in my view, but they are necessary steps. They are part of the process of how we engage. I don’t think the extremes are avoidable as a process, but I also don’t think that either one is desirable as a destination. What we get at the extremes of these two is either a complete fanatic, a cult member, or the reverse: a bitter, cynical, profoundly disappointed person who vows never to hope again.

There’s a middle.

I call the middle “meh,” but it’s anything but disinterest. It’s a place of rather profound acceptance where we take what there is to be taken, understand what there is to be understood, accept the practice, or the organization, or the person, for what it is. This phase to me seems to be something I’d call “assimilation.” It represents the place where I allow into my life the thing that the particular practice offers me, the positive contribution it has to make, and I accept that with gratitude, without having long lists of all the things it doesn’t do.

In my own personal history, for example, my experience with Catholicism, at this point in my life, offers me a profound appreciation of ritual, of tradition, of lineage and passing-down, an appreciation of devotion in the face of all odds. It does not offer me much in the way of respect for women and sexual orientation, but I no longer expect that of it. My stance at this point is that it does not have to be perfect to be useful.

Similarly, yoga offers me some things and not others; meditation is great for my own sense of being centered and grounded, but doesn’t do much for social justice. I have to get off the cushion, off my ass, and out into the world to engage that. Every community, from my marriage on out to the largest communities that I am part of, has things that work for me and things that don’t.

Ironically, when I get to “meh,” that sense of “whatever; it is the way it is, you are the way you are, I value what there is to be valued, and I let go of the rest,” there’s magic in that place. When I stop reacting for or against, pro or con, and operate from the place that “this person is exactly the way this person is supposed to be; this practice is exactly the way this practice is supposed to be) I’m able to integrate that into my life in a very useful way.

This is not the same as “shopping.” In shopping, we take our favorite bits from one practice and favorite bits from another, studiously avoiding anything that challenges us or strikes us as more difficult, skimming the cream off of each practice and moving on. That’s not as valuable. There is value in devotion, in challenge, in “stretch,” and there is value in diving in, fully, to each experience, moving through the predictable phases of “I love this new group! I hate this new group! Meh!” Eventually we get to, “it is what it is.” And, for me, that’s the place where, finally, I can get started. That’s the place that’s real, where I’m clear of my own reactivity, and I can really begin to engage whatever is in front of me.

Hope you have a great weekend wherever you might be.

PS: The New England Retreat weekend is beginning to fill up! Please contact me as soon as possible if you’d like to reserve a place, or arrange a phone call for more information.

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