The Power of Spirituality

The word "spirituality" conjures up a wide range of feelings, attitudes, opinions, and responses, depending on an individual's upbringing, religious preference, experience, and lifestyle. It seems that spirituality has become a lost art. People seem afraid of offending others by talking about spiritual matters in mixed circles. Others are reluctant to develop spirituality along with their mental, emotional, physical and social talents.
I believe spirituality is the greatest of all the talents and gifts we can acquire, but it must be developed. Spirituality helps us understand our feelings. If we become past feeling, we are in trouble as individuals, families, communities, and nations. We must be able to feel or we lose the ability to care and feel compassion for others. As the old saying goes: We are not human beings trying to have a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings trying to have a human experience.
The prolific writer and thinker C.S. Lewis made this perceptive observation: "It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ORDINARY people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations--these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit--immortal horrors or everlasting splendors".