Spirituality as Common Sense by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

This aliveness has degrees. Don’t you know people who are more alive than other people?

The first question we need to ask ourselves is: What do we mean by “spiritual”? That is the decisive question. These are three terms that we deal with: body, mind, and spirit. All three terms are more problematic than we realize when we begin to think about them.

When somebody asks you, “Where’s your body?” you can point to it. As very little children you have already learned, “Where is your nose?” and then you put (with great delight from your mother) your finger on your nose, and then on your ears, and so on. We have been trained to know where our body is; we have not been trained sufficiently to realize that our body does not end with our skin.

So body, by and large, is not that much of a problem. Mind more so, but also not too much, because in everyday parlance we just lump everything together that isn’t body, and that’s mind. So that’s very simple; if it’s not body, it must be mind.

But when it comes to spirit there are all sorts of ideas in the air, and we have to be very careful. A safe approach with words like that is often to go back to the roots of the word itself. Spirit means “life breath” in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. As far back as we can trace, people speaking about spiritual matters used a term which in everyday parlance means “life breath.”

That helps us, because I would suggest that what I mean by spirituality and by spirit is “aliveness.” Aliveness is of one piece with life as we know it – with the aliveness that you recognize when you are breathing and when your body is functioning.

But it goes beyond that. This aliveness has degrees. Don’t you know people who are more alive than other people? Most of us would say yes: So-and-so is really alive! Well, does so-and-so have a higher heart rate, or a faster pulse? Maybe, maybe not, but that kind of aliveness is not to be measured by your bodily functions. There is something else that we are talking about here. But it is an aliveness.

What kind of aliveness is it; what are we talking about? Interestingly, sooner or later we arrive at the word “mindfulness.” In many spiritual traditions that word has been used, and you see, always then you are speaking about the mind again, but you are not speaking about the mind in its fullness. So this aliveness is a fullness of mind. However, we are immediately in danger of falling into a trap. Mind will then be spiritual, and body will be unspiritual. Many people fall into this trap, and this is a very dangerous trap because with mindfulness – that is, this aliveness – goes something for which we have no word, and which we should call something like “bodifulness.” But that suggests to you the opposite of slimming, and is not particularly helpful. What I mean by the word is a full, deep rootedness in our bodies.

Think of mindful people: They are rooted in their bodies. They are alive in their bodies. And it’s significant that we don’t have a word for that, that we just call it mindful. It indicates that there is something lacking; when a word is lacking in a language, there is some insight lacking – the insight that full aliveness is mindfulness and bodifulness, and it’s this full aliveness that we are talking about.

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