SPIRITUAL

     “There are persons, for instance, whom we find indulging to their heart’s content in prospects of immortality; and there are others who experience the greatest difficulty in making such a notion seem real to themselves at all. These latter persons are tied to their senses, restricted to their natural experience; and many of them, moreover, feel a sort of intellectual loyalty to what they call ‘hard facts,’ which is positively shocked by the easy excursions into the unseen that other people make at the bare call of sentiment. Minds of either class may, however, be intensely religious. They may equally desire atonement and reconciliation, and crave acquiescence and communion with the total soul of things.”—William James, Varieties of Religious Experience

     When I first read these lines in my thirties, I found myself ardently wishing that someone had conveyed this idea to me when I was a child—because I always I felt, growing up a nonbeliever in a church-going community, deficient and set apart, as though there were something essential missing in me. I tried to pray; I searched for faith. But the Christian ideas that I got second-hand from my friends—of angels playing harps on clouds for all eternity, for instance—did nothing to sustain or comfort me. In seventh grade I started going to the Unitarian Church in Minneapolis with my friend Mary. I’m not sure why my father allowed this, except I know he was impressed with the minister Dr. Storm’s intellectuality and he approved of his politics. And perhaps he was confident that with the power of logic, he’d already inoculated me against faith. Still, as belatedly as I read James’ words, it was profoundly important to me to recognize that being tied to my senses and loyal to hard facts did not mean I wasn’t a spiritual being.