How to Embrace Being "More" Spiritual

The fact of “more” is what gives life depth and meaning. The more is not scarce; it is under any rock, in any shell, behind any star. For example, we notice that a symbol is more than what it looks like, and that very more is what gives it depth and meaning. A poem does more with words than prose can do. Singing shows how the voice can do more than speaking can. Dancing shows how legs can do more than walking can. A flag transcends cloth. Poems transcend language. “More” means transcendence, so we are in the realm of the spiritual.

The word “more” is not used additively, as in three is more than two. More, as a description of spirituality, refers to taking two to the thousandth power. We recognize a breadth and bigness in ourselves, others, and the world. We see more in ourselves than just an ego. We become aware of our identity as more than what is recorded on our driver’s license; we are drivers of evolution. To see more is to see with depth. It is also to see with spiritual awareness. Spirituality is a deep experience of life.

We can see the world as more than a place; it is a spacious home that calls on us to make it just, loving, and peaceful. We experience time as more than duration; it is an eternal now rather than a now sandwiched between a past and a future. We experience a sense of oneness with nature and the human community that activates our lively move into service, tending, caring. We find ourselves going beyond loving only our near and dear. We love all beings. Thus, with a sense of more, we widen the range of our spiritual consciousness internally and our social consciousness externally.

Our capacity for the transcendent also allows us a glimpse of a reality that goes beyond what we are looking at. For instance, when we are looking at a redwood tree, we are struck with awe at its firm and graceful contours, its easy ascent into the welcoming sky. In such an awe-filled moment, we are seeing more than just a tree. The awe we feel is a religious response since it takes us to the transcendent. We are seeing something more than a scientist can define.

To understand how this differs from ordinary vision, compare that moment of awe at an actual tree to looking at an image of a tree on a package of cigars. There we see only the image, not the more-than. We see a surface without an interior. We “miss the many-splendored thing,” what inspires our sense of wonder, the transcendent, the more.

In that transcendence, we might also feel “held” by the natural world around us. Charles Baudelaire expressed this mystical realization: “The natural world is a spiritual house. We walk through forests of physical things that are also spiritual things, and they watch us affectionately.”

We read the same from John Muir in a letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr (December, 1872): “When I reached the [Yosemite] valley, all the rocks seemed talkative, and more lovable than ever. They are dear friends, and have warm blood gushing through their granite flesh; and I love them with a love intensified by long and close companionship.”

Psychologically healthy people grow in self-esteem. They see that they are worth more than what others may estimate or more than what their inner critic may cackle to them. They believe they are worthy of human and divine love. This inner assurance frees them from fear and sets them on their spiritual life journey.

Essential to spirituality is an awareness that we don’t know it all—and can’t. We are living in a world of mystery, puzzling and dazzling. We have minds that can know the far reaches of spiritual reality only in part. Thus, our task is to remain open to whatever piecemeal communication waits to be transmitted. We will hear whatever of it we are ready for.

This means surrender of our search-tooled minds to an inscrutable timing. We can trust that we will learn whatever of the divine-human reality we become ready for. We will learn the topography of our path, but only gradually. That path is more than a yellow-brick road we can easily follow. It is, most often, a dark, unlit forest with no clearly marked trail other than the one we guess is there, or rather, here. We hear this from Emily Dickinson in her poem “The Outer from the Inner”:

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The star’s whole secret—in the lake—

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Adapted from David Richo’s Wholeness and Holiness: How to Be Sane, Spiritual, and Saintly (Orbis, 2020).