A Spiritual Home

Learning to be at home in one’s skin or in the time and place in which we find ourselves is not easy. In an age of radical change and in our restless, striving, western culture we may be spiritually homeless. Traveling in India you will find reminders of the sacred in the midst of all the people, the animals, the garbage and the honking horns — the temples scattered throughout the villages and cities, the people stopping to purchase garlands to offer during worship and the tilakas painted on foreheads to indicate devotion to a certain deity. In the center of the overwhelming city’s chaos can be found places of profound serenity.

Sri Chinmov speaks to our longing to locate God in time and place: “Spirituality is a man’s conscious longing for God. Spirituality tells us that God, who is unknowable today, will tomorrow become knowable and, the day after, will become totally known.”

Many people resist the spiritual journey Wendell and Sri speak of, a journey of accepting what we are given and where we find ourselves. In true western fashion, we always struggling for something else, something more. We cannot still those voices in our minds that say, “me, me, me,” and “I want, I want, I want.”

Thich Nhat Hanh says, “Anxiety, the illness of our time, comes primarily from our inability to dwell in the present moment.” In the developed world, we seem to be particularly afflicted by this illness, always projecting our needs and desires onto any experience, never content with what we have.

One spiritual home we can turn to most consistently is found out in nature, just walking in the woods. The silence we find is like the silence of the temples in India. In the stillness we can let the voices in our minds go quiet, and stop longing for more. We can let the present moment be enough.

Another spiritual home may be found at Unity of Edmonton.