Spirituality in the News

In troubled times, when the world seems to be on fire, people think about God and the religion they were raised in — a source of solace and hope matters more in a crisis. I don’t find myself thinking about spirituality in those terms, however. Like a winter coat that’s put away in spring, for many people spirituality, in the sense of going to church or praying to God, gets put away when the crisis has passed.

What does spirituality mean to you? Would you say you are a spiritual person?

We all need something to believe in, and for some, traditional religion as a basis of spirituality has lost its way. People are looking to other areas for their faith so what is modern day spirituality? What is it that we believe in, that governs how we live our lives?

Students at four schools in a poor San Francisco neighborhood meditate twice a day during “quiet time,” and the results have been remarkable.

With Hanukkah coming to an end, Christmas days away, and people taking time off work, we are in a season of quickened faith. When you watch people exercise that faith, whether lighting candles or attending Midnight Mass, the first thing you see is how surprising it is. You’d think faith would be a simple holding of belief, or a confidence in things unseen, but, in real life, faith is unpredictable and ever-changing.

On April 15, 2013, James Costello was cheering on a friend near the finish line at the Boston Marathon when the bombs exploded, severely burning his arms and legs and sending shrapnel into his flesh. During the months of surgery and rehabilitation that followed, Mr. Costello developed a relationship with one of his nurses, Krista D’Agostino, and they soon became engaged. Mr. Costello posted a picture of the ring on Facebook. “I now realize why I was involved in the tragedy,” he wrote. “It was to meet my best friend, and the love of my life.”

I recently came across an essay by journalist Eric Weiner, the author of “Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine,” in which he says, “We need a Steve Jobs of religion.” In the piece, published last December in the New York Times, Weiner says we need “[s]omeone (or ones) who can invent not a new religion but, rather, a new way of being religious. Like Mr. Jobs’s creations, this new way would be straightforward and unencumbered and absolutely intuitive. Most important, it would be highly interactive. I imagine a religious space that celebrates doubt, encourages experimentation and allows one to utter the word God without embarrassment.”

It is an excellent idea, but my message to Eric Weiner is: We already have a “new way of being religious” and we don’t need a Steve Jobs to invent it. It’s been evolving for quite some time now.