Organization Is a Spiritual Practice
Just about any pursuit can become a spiritual practice. Consider, for example, martial arts; or a chef’s mise-en-place.
Healthy spiritual practices do these things:
they help you to acknowledge reality rather than hide from it
they point you toward connection rather than isolation
they open your perspective beyond your own ego
they are generative: they give energy and foster creativity
Healthy Spiritual Practices Help You Come to Terms with Reality
Reality is often different from what we wish it would be.
We bump up against the reality of other people, which means the realities of conflict and compromise.
We bump up against the reality of limits: time limits like deadlines, limits to our own energy and attention levels, limits on the resources we have on hand.
We bump up against the reality that life ends.
If you have ever served on a church council or the board of any spiritual (or nonprofit!) community, you soon find your time occupied by things that seem to many to be decidedly unspiritual: budgets, time, money, resources, and the realities of working with other people.
Conflicting priorities and the realities of buildings and budgets might feel unspiritual; but acknowledging what is actually real rather than what we wish were real, is the foundation of any spiritual practice.
Religious practices such as mindfulness meditation; or religious holidays like Ash Wednesday, or the Jewish High Holy Days, are about facing reality rather than running away from it.
Through these and similar practices we face the moment unfolding in real time rather than chasing the imagination; we face our own deaths; we face our own actions in the past before we turn toward the future.
Healthy Spiritual Practices Point You Toward Connection Rather Than Isolation
Recognizing our interconnectedness with other people and the world around us is core to spiritual practice.
Religious traditions use prayer, ritual, service, and gratitude practices to help practitioners remember our interconnectedness with one another, with the natural world, and with future generations. (This Sunday I will be officiating at our parish’s annual Blessing of the Animals service! We will also collect donations for the local animal shelter.)
This, again, is about facing reality: no one is an island. (And even islands, if you dive deep enough, are interconnected with all other land.)
“The Pound Netters”
Healthy Spiritual Practices Open Your Perspective Beyond Your Own Ego
Self-care is important, and I am a big proponent of it. But it shouldn’t stop with yourself.
I see self-care as the way to equip yourself to serve the greater realities around you, of which you are a part.
Since I consider myself both spiritual and religious, that includes, for me personally, seeking a sense of alignment with unseen spiritual realities.
But widening your perspective also includes seeing a bigger picture with the world around you.
If we think of recognizing interconnectedness as a kind of horizontal web, this is the vertical dimension. This is where values come in.
Healthy Spiritual Practices Give You Energy and Foster Creativity
Many creation myths in the ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman world are stories of breathtaking violence and dysfunction, on a cosmic scale. If ancient Sumerians or Greeks wondered why life is messy, capricious, and difficult, their communal stories taught that it had always been so.
However, in the book of Genesis, the first of its two creation stories begins with a deity who creates through getting things organized: bringing things into being by naming them, and putting them in order (Genesis 1-2.4).
When you name what is actually present, and you sort, and you separate, and you put your emotional and your physical things in order, it is a generative and creative act.
It frees up more of your energy and inspires new thinking for you.
How Getting Organized Becomes a Spiritual Practice
In time management and thing management, the same kinds of questions crop up:
What really matters to you; what are your priorities here?
Why are you doing what you are doing?
Why are you keeping what you are keeping?
Who else and what else is affected by what you are doing; and what you are keeping?
How much is enough?
What do you need to hold onto?
What do you need to let go of?
These are foundational organizational questions.
They are also foundational spiritual ones.
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Notes
“The Pound Netters,” by Art Miller, is a stained glass window inspired by sea chanteys. “The Pound Netters” commemorates the watermen of the Chesapeake Bay. You can see it for yourself at the Mathews (Virginia) County Visitor’s Center.