How to be interested in 'spirituality' when you dislike the word 'spirituality'

Oh boy do I have a good word you can use instead

Close observers of this Substack might have noticed the appearance of a ‘spirituality’ category on my homepage the other week. There are things I’ve been writing about, and want to continue writing about, that are difficult to categorise in any other way. But I have complex feelings about this word. Its presence on my homepage makes my toes curl a little.

To borrow an explanation from the musician Nick Cave, ‘the word “spirituality” is a little amorphous for my taste. It can mean almost anything.’¹ Often it is used to mean something nebulous and woo woo, and I consider myself a Serious Person. I don’t want to throw my lot in with gullibility and charlatanism, or have anyone suspect me of doing so.

It might also imply religious leanings. I’ve written before about my interest in religion, and I’ve certainly dabbled more than a little in Buddhism, but I’m not a signed up member of any faith and I’m squeamish about the idea that my Substack could be assumed to contain overt religiosity.

Partly this is because some — some, I stress — religious people broadcast levels of certainty that I find unpalatable. One of the only things I feel certain about is how uncertain of anything I am, so I’m suspicious of anyone who claims to have The Answer or to know The Truth (militant atheists included).

It’s also because religion, in Cave’s words, is ‘spirituality with rigour’, and rigour in this area is precisely what I lack. I recently happened upon an excellent post by

Noha Beshir

on the logistical challenges of finding places to pray as a practising Muslim in a Muslim-minority country. Reading it, I thought: yep, that’s rigour. Rigour is the sort of non-negotiable commitment to your spiritual practice that might mean you are obliged to honour it in a stairwell, on the bus, or in the fitting room of the nearest clothing shop. My version of ‘spirituality’, by contrast, mainly entails thinking ‘I should meditate today’ and then not getting round to it.

I’m being glib — it entails a miscellany of other things too, like a curiosity about psychedelics, a beginner-level interest in Buddhist and Taoist philosophy, a belief in the transcendent potential of music, and a desire to learn about and feel connected to nature. One of the most spiritually influential books I’ve ever read is Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, a book about fungi that will not be found in the religion, philosophy, or mind/body/spirit sections of your local bookshop, but more likely in popular science or natural history. (If you’re wondering why I liked it so much, lucky you — I wrote a whole Substack post about it.)

So what I personally mean by ‘spirituality’ is quite different to, say, following the teachings of Jesus Christ, which is itself quite different to believing in the law of attraction (do not get me started on THAT callous nonsense). But here I am, sharing in a word that can legitimately be applied to all three. The potential for misinterpretation is significant — but then again, it’s a word that points to experiences that go beyond words, so maybe a certain amount of linguistic inadequacy is only right and proper.

One of the most satisfying definitions of spirituality I’ve heard to date can be found in the introductory episode to Noah Rasheta’s Secular Buddhism podcast. ‘A lot of secular-minded individuals don’t want to have anything to do with spirituality,’ Rasheta acknowledges, ‘[but] everybody is spiritual.’ Our sense of spirituality is ‘how we relate to anything that’s greater than ourselves’. For some, that means God; for others, it means the cosmos, or science. Or art, or nature, or history, I would add, and/or a combination of all of the above.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg

, whom I’m always fangirling, calls this ‘the Big Bigness that lives within and beyond ourselves’. I love this turn of phrase; to my mind, it gets straight to the heart of what the word ‘spirituality’ skirts around, while also conveniently dispensing with the latter’s baggage. It’s specific, and at the same time all-encompassing. You might think of the Big Bigness as a creator God (as Ruttenberg, being a rabbi, presumably does), and you might want to align your connection to it with the centuries of history, scholarship, discipline, and formalised ritual that characterise a major world religion. Or perhaps to you, as to me, the Big Bigness is something ill-defined, and the process of working out how you relate to it involves a lot more exploratory dabbling and toe-dipping. Either way, there is Bigness out there for everyone.

Some of the ways I have attempted to connect to it include: lying on my back and looking at the sky; lying on my back and listening to music (I have a playlist for this purpose); singing in a choir; standing by the river near my childhood home, as close to the surface of the water as I can get; walking slowly among trees; sitting on a cushion and listening to my friend Mike’s band playing arrangements of ethereal chants; going on a meditation retreat; and (the daddy of them all) taking a not-insignificant dose of magic mushrooms.

What I would really like to know, though, is what the Big Bigness means for you, and if you have ways of connecting to it, or attempting to. The comments are open.

Yours in curiosity,

Kx

PS. Your weekly reminder that if you like my writing you can support it by buying my book or sharing The Babbling Brook far and wide.

1. From Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan.