What Does My Spirituality Look Like These Days?

I get this question a lot. Well, it is plunging headfirst into reality.

What Does My Spirituality Look Like These Days?

I am currently in a phase of the book cycle where I am talking about the book all the time. Podcasts, interviews, publicity. And one question I keep getting asked is "What does your spirituality look like these days?". Well, to put it simply, it is about plunging headfirst into reality.

My spirituality, if that’s what I'm still calling it, cannot be a magic elevator that whisks me away from this messed-up world to some sanitized cloud full of harp music and good lighting. There’s this impulse (maybe ancient, maybe just neurochemical) to imagine that spirituality is supposed to feel like elevation. If that’s what spirituality is—an escape hatch—I want no part of it. I’ve read enough science fiction to know that fleeing the planet rarely ends well. Someone always gets eaten in space.

No, if my soul is to have any integrity, it has to go into the world. Right into the thick of it. Into the chaos, into the heartbreak, into the dumb, cruel, strangely beautiful mess that is life on Earth. Into resistance. Into what I’ve been calling for a few years a rebellion of care. It is a form of incarnation.

Now, that might sound noble or poetic, but I assure you, it’s mostly gloomy and difficult and smells like other people’s coffee breath. Still, it is the only honest response I can think of. We absolutely do not need more people trying to “rise above” reality. We need more people staying with it. Elbows deep in it. Praying not by folding their hands, but by rolling up their sleeves.

Into reality of people's lives. That's where we have to go. Take queer love. What a marvel. What a miracle. Not some “issue” to debate or tolerate or explain away with tortured translations of ancient texts, but a living, breathing expression of joy and courage and loyalty in a world that often crushes those things. It’s not theoretical—it’s real. And it’s here. So if your spirituality can’t handle that, maybe it’s not very spiritual.

And then there’s Gaza. And Haiti. And Sudan. And the Congo. If your idea of salvation doesn’t know how to look those places in the eye and stay, then it’s not salvation at all. If your spirituality floats above the world—untouched, unbothered, unbotherable—then it’s not spirituality so much as anesthesia. A vibe. A scented candle lit in a burning building. Or worse: a kind of metaphysical tourism

This is what bugs me about so much of the “spirituality" we have inherited. It’s all travel brochures. "Leave the world behind!" "Find your bliss!" "Ascend!" No mention of the baggage fees or the people left behind.