Don’t Let Lack Of Spirituality Get The Best Of You

There is a story from Japan that goes like this:

One day Sanesuke, a very powerful man in the government, dozed off in his carriage on the way out of the emperor’s palace. As he awakened, he saw a little man all in white running behind the carriage at great speed. The little man called after him to wait up.

Sanesuke didn’t like the homely look of the man. He told his coachman to run the horses faster, and he growled at the man, “Go away! Find your own way!” Sanesuke was best in his government position because he was dispassionate. Everyone knew this, most of all he!

However, all that selfcongratulation meant nothing today, for the little man, upon hearing Sanesuke’s words, leapt into the air and covered the distance to the carriage in one bound. “I’m from the king of Hell,” the little man said with a smile. “My name is Little White Hairs.” Without another word, he hopped onto Sanesuke’s head, then disappeared.

Back at his mansion, Sanesuke looked in the mirror. His hair had turned white. In his shock, his whole life passed before him. Wrinkles were on his face, liver spots on his hands. He had gone from being 35 to being 75.

In that moment, Sanesuke was converted. He had never been interested in spirituality before, but as he looked in the mirror he saw that he must re-think his whole life. Upon having that insight, magic occurred, for the wrinkles and white hair left him, and he became 35 again.

The story ends: From that day forward, Sanesuke set to pursuing spirituality in all his doings, sought to live his live as a spiritual journey, and became better at all things.

In stories like this one, the storyteller doesn’t say, “Oh, by the way, by spirituality I mean …” Somehow, to interrupt the story with this kind of abstraction would destroy its magic. For most of the peoples from which myths and folk tales come, spirituality grows from tradition anyway. When our ancestors hear “spirituality” in a story they intuited its meaning.

We are, however, the People Without a Spiritual Story. Our social values grow from our materialistic marketplace. In this we are different than previous cultures, for whom spirituality was the center of life and the marketplace an extension of social and economic life. For us, the opposite is true.

When we hear the word spirituality we’re not sure what it means. It reminds us of “religion,” and for fundamentalists that’s what it is, pure and simple. But for the majority of us, dissatisfied with regression to the past and moral simplicities, “spirituality” remains amorphous. It drifts, we can’t quite hold on to it. We live without really “getting it” unless we are, like Sanesuke, awakened to spiritual search.

Sanesuke thought little of spiritual searching until Little White Hairs shocked him into the next step of his maturity. Have you had such a shock? Do you need one? Have you had it but missed its opportunity, closing down your spiritual search before it really got started?

Sometimes someone close to us dies, and we remain in the hurt so long we neglect to see that death is a doorway to questions about meaning, faith, value, worth, love. A divorce, a child’s choice of a dangerous path in life, a lost job or broken illusion begin as sources of pain, which we want, as quickly as possible, to end. For the awakened spiritual searcher, they are only beginnings.

There’s a Little White Hairs out there for everyone. What person, place, circumstance or insight propelled you into spiritual search? If you haven’t met your Little White Hairs yet, you probably will some day, even if only at the moment of your death. How wonderful it would be, though, to meet Little White Hairs while you are still alive.

To make the spiritual search is to gain faith that one not only belongs in the universe, but is essential to it. The heart of spirituality is one’s ability to love. To be spiritual is to have sacred places in one’s life. To be spiritual is to know how to pray, meditate, contemplate. To be a spiritual searcher is to believe that a Great Story guides one’s life, a story the searcher must seek in relationship to others, but confirm individually as true; and a story which, when it is force-fed, is no longer trustworthy.

What do you mean when you use the word “spiritual?”

If you have no clear and true answer to this question, be prepared for a shock one day. xxxx