In the past — and not far back in time — religion was mostly a fixed feature of people’s lives. By and large, we tended to practice the same faith tradition as our parents and relatively few people questioned what they had been taught to believe. Today, in contrast, recent data from the Pew Research Center indicates that an astounding 44 percent of all Americans have either switched their religious affiliation from the one they were born into, gone from being unaffiliated with any religion to joining a particular faith, or given up any connection with religious traditions altogether.
Interestingly, the majority of the people in the Pew study who identify with faith traditions that are different from those into which they were born also describe themselves as being “spiritual not religious.” In a clever bit of wordsmithing, the Pew study’s authors describe this portion of the population as America’s “faithful unfaithful.” Among the many things Americans are notoriously choosy about, it seems religion has become yet another of the many options people pursue in search of a richer, more meaningful life. All of which also says there’s a lot of religious questioning and ferment going on in America today.
Until recently, I thought of this kind of do-it-yourself spirituality as an invention of the Baby Boomer generation. Often derided by modern critics as “religion a la carte” and “deli style spirituality,” this kind of spiritual searching actually did not begin with the Boomers. According to Leigh Eric Schmidt, a distinguished religious studies professor at Princeton University, our fascination with spiritual searching actually dates back to the Transcendentalist movement in the mid-nineteenth century.
In a book entitled Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality, Schmidt says it was Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau who first popularized the concept of spirituality as opposed to religion. They were also the first group of Americans to emphasize the importance of seeking direct, personal experience of God or the Holy. Equally importantly, says Schmidt, these men and women were the first Americans to step outside of the confines of Christianity in the course of their spiritual searching. In doing so, they opened American spirituality to a new kind of religious diversity and pluralism. Finding spirituality in solitude, in communion with nature, and through the cultivation of a mystical awareness of oneness were all innovative ideas the Transcendentalists brought to American religious life.
I was born into the Jewish heritage, a religious tradition I haven’t actively practicing since I was a teenager. After a brief, largely unsuccessful attempt to embrace existentialism in my youth, I found that I still yearned for some kind of deeper spiritual awareness. As a result, I became interested in comparative religion and began to embrace teachings and perspectives from a range of faith traditions. If someone asked me back then to describe my religious orientation, I’d say I was a spiritual seeker, a designation I still use today.
That said, what does it mean to be a “spiritual seeker”? For starters, I think it implies an openness to a wide range of spiritual experience and a deeply-rooted embracing of the value of spiritual pluralism and diversity. It requires a willingness to trust our lived experience of the sacred as it manifests in daily life. It fiercely relies on individual conscience as a guide in our searching and a firm commitment to question all external authority in spiritual matters. It means accepting the inherent complexity and paradoxical nature of all spiritual understanding. It requires finding or developing practical ways of manifesting the spiritual wisdom we encounter. Perhaps most challenging, being a spiritual seeker requires embracing doubt about whatever we believe to be true and meaningful. Finally, it means foregoing the safety and comfort of ever arriving at ultimate spiritual truth, that the search is one that must continue as long as we live.
The title of this post is drawn from J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic The Lord of the Rings. Like many famous quotations that find their way onto bumper stickers, Tolkien’s pithy observation is both deceptively simple and deeply insightful. While some of us seem to know from an early age exactly what we want to be and what we believe, there are others who spend much of their lives wandering on journeys of spiritual self-discovery. Indeed, even those who think they know who they are and what they believe often find themselves on quests to rediscover themselves, to uncover aspects of themselves of which they were unaware. As a result of that process, they may well find that they have outgrown the inherited spirituality of the religion of their youth and of their families. That said, it’s likely that at some point in our lives, many of us will become spiritual wanderers. I encourage all of us who find ourselves in search of a more personal path to spirit remember the wisdom that we are not lost simply because we are called to wander.