The Flowers of Our Souls

How spiritually alive do you want to be?

It’s not the books we read — or write — that make us spiritual giants. If that were the case, imagine if we looked at the spirituality in the books of Elmore Leonard or John le Carre. Both wrote wonderful novels. I greatly admire their dexterity not only with their genres, but how well they wrote about their topics. Their capacities to mold and manipulate the English and American English languages is truly stunning. Each, in his own way, challenged us. They dared us to look inward to see the beauty and the ugliness there as well as in the world outside.

To look at our interior ugliness, our spiritual garbage heap, is far more challenging than it is to see it in other people in the world around us. It’s easy enough to see the belching smoke stacks of others’ souls. But us? Aren’t we supposed to be pluperfect? The clearest path to examining our answer is through our own unworldly lives.

Having a fancy title and a corner office in some charitable organization or another does not necessarily make one spiritually alive. My personal experience from having been in that position was that I, like almost everyone else I’ve observed who’s held such a position, is that we can easily feel cornered in the corner office. The expectations of others all too quickly become overwhelming. We swiftly find ourselves in the position of feeling that we have to do more work. We have to work harder and faster. We have to do better and be better than any human being possibly could be or ever has been…