The idea of spiritual life has obsessed with me for nearly 20 years. I work at it almost every day.

The search for spiritual life was anything but smooth: it led me to leave my family, move to the country, confront my anxiety, ease my anger and hurt,  find love and discover the possibility of happiness, accept the reality of aging, launch my precious blog, start taking pictures (a very spiritual part of my life), discover silence and meditation, learn how to be healthy, speak up for myself, see what good was,  and understand the genuine meaning of authenticity and peace of mind.

That’s just the start.

Injecting Spirituality into my life was one of my best and most important decisions; I have never regretted it for a second, and it has enriched me in more ways than I can say. I can’t get enough of it and hope I never will.

The search for Spirituality has guided me toward being a better, stronger, and even sometimes fearless human being; that’s what I want from it.

A spiritual journey never ends, which is awesome; mine is just beginning. I have a long way to go.

Like Christianity, there is a lot of talk about Spirituality and what it means to have a spiritual life, but nothing is close to consensus about what a spiritual life means or what it is. Many people who speak about it seem to have no idea what it means or where it goes.

What’s the point of spiritual life, especially if you don’t believe in one all-knowing God?

In the past few years, in meditation and contemplation and living,  studying at least a dozen spiritual philosophers from Thomas Merton to St. Augustine to Henri Rouwen, Richard Rohr, and, lately, Joan Chittister, I have found my definition and understanding of it. Spirituality, for me, is not about politics or even religion.

I have to credit Joan Chittister, a former prioress of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie and a prolific author and lecturer. Chittister pushes dogma aside and goes to the heart of the spiritual life, what it means to feel, want and strive to be better. Spirituality helped me get my soul back.

She is also the best writer on aging I’ve yet found.

In her book, The Time Is Now, Chittister writes about Prophetic Spirituality.  She says Spirituality is an attitude.

This attitude teaches me the purpose and clarity of the spiritual life more clearly than I have found before. This is my place; there is where I want to go and be.

The spiritual person, she writes – the person with the soul of a prophet – sees what the rest of the world either cannot see or does not want to see and uses that vision as a compass through life.

In our culture, goodness, and empathy have become political,  another way to divide us. They are no longer considered religious ideas; think of the war against the “woke” and the persecution of  LGBTQ children. Blind and angry politicians are soaking the life out of the spiritual tradition.

The spiritual or prophetic person sees the world as the Christians, Jews, and Muslims see their idea of God.

Like the biblical prophets of old, spiritual prophets speak peace for the nations, dignity and compassion for all people, and “holy integrity” rather than war, hatred, domination, or corruption in transmitting the faith, religious or not.

Spirituality, said the prophets, was the bridge between the world we have and the world, so many of us want and dream of – especially the spiritual prophets.

The great Jewish Philosopher Maimonides argued – this stunned the world – that conventional human reason can only get us so far. At some point, he argued, “holy irrationality” must take us farther if we were ever to become fully human.

In our time, the news evokes his argument every day. Compassion and mercy, in truth, are in hiding. So the prophets viewed the earth as a sacred gift to be cared for. They didn’t need climate change to understand how fragile Mother Earth could be to human greed and depravations. Nobody listened to them them, nobody listens to them now.

The prophetic spiritualists have a compass, and it is the compass I plan to embrace for the rest of my life.

This is the point of a spiritual life, a guide, and a compass for life.

Before my spiritual explorations, I had no idea where I was going. Now I do.

This compass takes me beyond the economic, political, greedy, and often hateful notions of the material and profit-driven world in which only those working for money and others have the right to eat.

It rejects the idea that only those with the money to pay can heat their homes for their children and keep their electricity. It challenges the political rigidity that embraces as policy the idea that only those like us have the right to live near us or anywhere but in refugee camps.

“The whole object of prophets,” wrote Maimonides, “is to declare that a limit is set to human reason where it must halt.”

The angry and “spiritual” haters of the world insist that empathy and compassion are political positions that make the people who care “woke,” “blue,” or “progressive.”

Thus it’s easy to identify them and attack them.

Labels are poison in my mind; they take away our ability to think and define ourselves. They are at the core of the so-called human “reason” that paralyzes people of compassion and stigmatizes them as dangerous, even evil.

Spiritual prophecy writes Chittister, rejects the notion that those who call themselves envoys of God or followers of Jesus Christ on the right to a godly message.

Spiritual defines for me the point where human compassion becomes more critical than the commercial competition and racial or religious criteria.

“Then,” writes Chittister, “as Jesus wept over Jerusalem, so do the prophets of today weep for those caught in the suffocating web between profit and prophecy.”

Those who hear this call come to look differently at life than others, radically altering their expectations of the world.  This has happened to me, bit by bit, slowly but deeply.

Compassion is not an argument; it is a way of life.

The prophets of all ages wrote Maimonides, dream dreams far beyond what the average person believes is possible or sees a way to achieve. I dare not call myself a prophet, but this is the message I want to embrace and carry.

This speaks to my heart and beliefs.

Compassion, empathy, and peace are not political arguments for billionaires to fund and pretend to embrace. They are a truth that transcends common reason.

My spiritual life has taken me here; this is where I want to go.