Thoughts on Spirituality

My thoughts on spirituality, Linda Holroyd, December 8, 2019

The end of the year, and the start of the new year, is a time of reflection. I find myself thinking about Spirituality. I’m sharing my thoughts below.

Spirituality is about the Head, the Heart and the Hands. 

From the Head, we can read our history books and study religions and religious beliefs and traditions. It helps us understand how people think, speak and act, and helps us understand what spirituality means for people who are not like ourselves. Spiritual growth for the head is about reading, researching, learning and integrating information about what’s important to others.

From the Heart, spirituality is about how we touch people emotionally, and how people touch each other. The goal is to bring peace, love, forgiveness, all these good things to human relations, especially when there have been breaches between people, conflict between groups. Thus, spiritual growth from the heart is about learning to better love, better accept each other as one, no matter how different we are from each other.

From the Hands, spirituality is about doing things great and small which would bring together people who are different from each other. Whether it’s about attending meetings together, resolving conflicts with each other, attending a party or a service or a wedding, the bringing together of people who are naturally different is inherently a spiritual task. The people who bring together others are priests, managers, leaders, facilitators. We owe them a great debt.

It could stop here, but it doesn’t.

Spirituality transcends what we as humans can understand. Far overshadowing our view of the head, the heart and the hands is a world beyond our ability to comprehend, control or even imagine. It’s expressed in the big things that make us feel small: 

• in nature:
  • when we witness the miracles of birth, growth and death,
  • when we witness the majesty of both sunsets and hailstorms,
  • when we witness the terror of earthquakes and typhoons;
• in people when the strength of the human spirit overcomes overwhelming odds; 
• in the soul-stirring expressions found in art, music, dance, words;
• in the wealth of data which helps us understand how small our world is, how insignificant we each are.

For me, it’s always been overwhelming to consider that level of spirituality. I think, ‘if we are so small and insignificant, then nothing we do matters’. Right?

I’ve always gone forward anyway, doing the small things within my power to support the head, heart, and hands of spiritual growth for myself and for those I may touch. As small and as un-pure are they sometimes are, I’d like to think that my thoughts, my words, my actions matter, for my own spiritual development, and for that of those around me.

In closing, I’d like to share a Hindu greeting – Namaste – “May our minds and hearts come together”. 

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