Consider the aisles we browse in spiritual quests

Being out of town last weekend, I didn’t read Steve Massey’s faith column until Sunday evening. But I smiled about his opening story about meeting a longtime friend in the grocery story and visiting over their grocery carts.

The column before you was already in the works. It is about shopping cart spirituality.

Actually, I have mentally written parts of this column many times over the past few years because I have a serious pet peeve that involves shopping carts. To be blunt, I get really ticked at people who carelessly leave their shopping carts willy-nilly in the parking lot, making it hard for others to park their cars in certain spaces.

Last Saturday, I saw two grocery carts a long block from the store. One time, I paced off the distance as I pushed three carts — 100 yards back to the store!

I can’t tell you how many carts I’ve pushed back to their respective stores just to get them out of the way. Too many times, I mutter under my breath about lazy, thoughtless shoppers or preen myself for being considerate of others by getting these carts to home base.

Silly, isn’t it, how a simple peeve like misplaced shopping carts can turn a reasonably balanced man into a self-absorbed do-gooder. But it happens.

Care to hop in the next cart I take out of the parking lot so we can share our self-righteous disdain about this or other matters of the spirit?

Recently, instead of just blowing steam while I pushed a cart or two back to their port, I tried to consciously transform my attitude into something more worthwhile. It may not be worth any kind of theological prize, but my mind began to meander through the aisles of the store that specializes in shopping cart spirituality.

There really is quite a variety of items for the taking. Think of all the different brands of Christian denominations to choose from.

Catholic and Protestant are the largest main groups, but there are so many churches to choose from within those categories, especially with the Protestant brand name.

There’s a brand to suit every Protestant impulse, and then some. Many years ago I saw two small, nearly identical church buildings next door to each other. One was called The Bible Church. The other was The Bible Bible Church.

It would appear the second was begun by folks who were tired of shopping at the first and opened their own.

Speaking of Bibles, here we are at the Bible aisle, where we can fill our carts with hundreds of different Bibles for different occasions and personal tastes. Just past the Bibles you will be dazzled with seemingly countless books to help you understand the Bible from seemingly countless perspectives.

Some people seem to think their Bibles and the way they interpret the Bible are the only tools you need. But I respectfully disagree.

One reason we have so many different versions of the Bible is that there really is no single version that “gets it right.”

For a great many complicated reasons, we simply cannot accurately translate from the original Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek and get it completely right. That doesn’t stop us, however, from clutching our Bibles like a good-luck charm and hoping that our current translation will answer all of our questions. I truly don’t think it works that way.

Let’s head over three aisles to what is still called by some folks the New Age aisle. It is filled with hundreds of helpful items for those seeking spiritual truth beyond traditional, organized Christian religious tradition.

I don’t cruise down that aisle very often myself, but I know many who do. They are honest in their spiritual quests.

In fact, there are many people who shop for spiritual trinkets, books, potions or programs whose searches honestly baffle me. But since I don’t know where they have come from in a spiritual sense, it isn’t for me to demand they go in any certain direction.

I also know that this more permissive approach to spirituality is quite frustrating for people who believe they have found the only way a person can find spiritual wholeness. Many of these folks are Christians. But others may come from Islam, Judaism or other world religions.

Each may feel their spirituality store is the only store where truth can be found; in fact, only in certain aisles can truth be found.

My problem is this: They can’t all be right that only they are right. I suspect that God’s fullest truth cannot be found in one of these spirituality stores.

The search for God goes far beyond shopping carts, regardless of the portion of spiritual truth they might honestly carry.

Care to join me as we look for God elsewhere?

Maybe we can start with the people pushing the carts.

I think God is actually in them.