Some days, it is all a little much, isn’t it? Some days, it just feels like too much is going too wrong too often. When I have these kinds of days, I notice that it is things that are personal to me as well as things that are happening in the world that make me feel overwhelmed. If the world feels out of control but I feel okay, I can usually deal with it. If I feel out of control, but my family and friends and community feel like they are humming along, and I feel like I have care and support, that’s something I can deal with. But some days, I feel overwhelmed.

For me, this is why spirituality is so important. And it always brings me back to words I often shared in my role as a professor––from a famous speech by the author David Foster Wallace. In This is Water, he describes the kind of “end of my rope” experiences that you may have to wrestle with in the world, and talks about how we can tap into our deeper selves to gain a sense of perspective. After sharing a scenario in a grocery store after a long workday, he writes:

But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I, personally, take a lot of comfort in trying not to have and to lose some infinite thing. I try to be deliberate about how I fall into worship and direct my values and where I seat real meaning in deliberate ways that affirm my best and most authentic self. Being a part of this spiritual community at UUCC is a big part of how I get to do that, to tap into the deeper currents of grace and peace and hold onto the infinite things that are often not far from our grasp.

If you find yourself overwhelmed sometimes, if you want to be more deliberate about how you seat meaning in your life or how you center your values, so much of UUCC’s life together is oriented around those needs: Rev. Randy’s Journey 101 courses, ARE opportunities, connecting with YRE classes, small groups, justice actions, community meals and times of fellowship––what Wallace means when he talks about “love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.” If you haven’t been explicitly invited before to connect in that way for that purpose in your own life, I hope this invitation finds you.

Sometimes it is hard to tap into our spiritual selves or find time to nurture our creativity and intellectual curiosity. Here is a section that reflects on some nourishing materials from around the web and related media channels in order to get us thinking, get us feeling, and get us reflecting on the lives we are living in this big world. **Some Adult/Mature Themes May Appear in Links and Other Attached Material**

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Allan T. Georgia, MDiv, MTS, PhD

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