What Spirituality Means to Me

This past weekend, I went on a church retreat at St. Lawrence in Chester, New Jersey. St. Lawrence runs a retreat every year in which students from grades 10-12 that go to St. Lawrence and St. Luke (one of the three Catholic churches in Long Valley) typically attend. The retreat is not limited to parishioners from these churches; I met people at the retreat that go to Our Lady of the Mountain, St. Mark’s (my parish), and kids that do not attend church at all. The retreat consisted of people that go to West Morris Central, West Morris Mendham, and Voorhees High School.    

Obviously I cannot talk about the content of the retreat (you would have to attend it to find out!), but I can tell you that I had a fulfilling experience, just as I have had three similarly enriching experiences at the retreats hosted by St. Mark’s. At the St. Mark’s retreats, a large part of my enjoyment comes from the fact that I am able to share my thoughts and feelings about spirituality and life in general with the peers that I have grown up with in the Church. At this retreat, on the other hand, I found the experience to be equally as fulfilling because I was able to share my experiences and spiritual journey with people that I, for the most part, had just met. I knew a contingent of people from the musical at West Morris, as well as my peers in my grade, but I met the majority of people at the retreat for the first time.

What does this have to do with spirituality? I’m not really sure. Spirituality is a concept that I have been trying to understand since I became a teenager five years ago. Recently, I began reading a book called “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle. Tolle is a somewhat famous non-denominational spiritual teacher, and my parents have always encouraged me to read his books. I am glad that I picked up the book at this point in my life, because a few years ago, it would have made no sense to me.

Thus far into the book, Tolle has emphasized that pain and suffering comes from the mind. He argues that humans actually have a higher level of thinking, which he refers to as “consciousness”. To be conscious is to be free of the mind. This means that if a person is conscious, he does not dwell on the past or future (which he claims is the cause of suffering—the idea that if one is not “present”, he will inevitably think about the past or future, and therefore become angry, anxious, nervous, etc.). Tolle refers to “being present” as being aware of your surroundings and truly abandoning thought and time, except for practical purposes. He illustrates his belief that time is an illusion, and that through the concept of time, humans self-pontificate about events in the past or future, and thus consider these events to be problems. As you can tell, I myself am even a bit confused about the true meaning of this book. I realize that its meaning is difficult to explain in a paragraph, but I advise you to pick it up and discover its wisdom and teachings for yourself.

What I have been trying to express throughout this whole entry is that even though I do not consider myself a spiritually rich person, I have been trying to change that over the past couple of years. I have gone to church retreats, attended mass, even picked up a complex book detailing a spiritual philosophy. I suppose that most teenagers feel somewhat distant from a higher being, mostly due to the culture and stereotypes in America surrounding practices that the Church and other religions generally consider to be holy and beneficial.

Do I feel distant from God? I don’t really know. When I was younger, I used to imagine God as the priest at my church. As I grew older, this image evolved (or regressed?) into a picture of a large, grizzled man with a grandiose throne and a mystical staff (not unlike the classical projection of Zeus). Now, I view God as something else. I view God as something beyond our understanding, something that is present in everything. Present in nature. Present in the people around me. Present in myself. I get this feeling when I see strangers perform random acts of kindness. When I watch a sunset. When I realize the extent to which people have done things for me, for my own benefit.

So, using that definition, I would say that I feel that I am becoming closer to God. This is because I have become more involved in the community, more in touch with my own feelings, and more at peace as I have progressed throughout high school. And I think that spirituality has led me to this path. And for that, I thank the positive influence of the Church and the community upon my outlook on life.

Next week, I will write about the upcoming musical at West Morris (Children of Eden). I am participating in this production, and although Tolle would tell me to avoid looking to the future, I cannot help but anticipate this experience.