Spiritual Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

Spiritual Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

This weekend we celebrate the birth of our nation. The founding fathers wrote it is self-evident that all of us are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights. Among our rights, they wrote, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I have heard these words my entire life, for longer than I can remember. We do not know what motivated those men in Philadelphia when they agreed to those words 241 years ago. They each had their own hopes and expectations, fears and anxieties. Like any group project, the result they agreed on is a reflection of their diverse ideas.

It would be fascinating to understand more about the perspectives of each member of that congress. More important for me, though, is discerning what their words mean to us today.

Is it self-evident to us we have the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? What do each of those rights mean to you today? How do the rights we have help shape our experiences of spiritual life?

Our Right to Spiritual Life

My understanding of spiritual life depends on my belief it is a gift we receive.

I do not believe there is anything we can do to earn more spiritual life, nor anything we can do to lose it.

There are people, though, who apparently do not believe we have a right to spiritual life. Spiritual life could have been taken from them, or they might treat it like it does not exist.

Some of us become convinced spiritual life is a distraction, a series of fairly tales or comforting fiction. They may have set aside what they were taught as children, or ideas they have never really explored. It becomes easy for them to disregard the ways spiritual life seeks to draw them into itself.

Other people struggle with even the idea of spiritual life. They may have the experience of being treated unfairly or having someone poison spiritual life for them. The concepts of spiritual life and Sacred truth have become sources of pain and confusion.

An unhealthy understanding of what spiritual life is may be creating feelings of fear or anger for them. They could see spiritual life as a burdensome set of rules they are required to follow or ideas to be analyzed.

People may need help from someone else to assert their right to spiritual life.

Like the other legal rights we have, it may be a challenge for us to exercise our right to spiritual life. In the same way, it can take us years of effort to come into our full rights.

The essential fact to remember is we have the right to spiritual life which no one can take away from us.

Our Right to Spiritual Liberty

We have a right to spiritual liberty. Spiritual liberty is not the same as religious liberty.

We live in a world when governments make laws and policies which treat members of certain religions differently. Religious institutions assert their authority to decide what forms of spiritual practice they endorse and which they do not.

It is important for us to protect our religious liberties and to exercise our spiritual liberty.

Each of us has the liberty to understand and experience spiritual life in our own unique ways. Neither governments nor other institutions can force us to conform to their standards.

No one has a monopoly on understanding spiritual life. Spiritual life fills the world around us, and the world within us. Our hearts overflow with spiritual life as we share it with the people around us.

Each of us has our own intimate, personal relationship to Sacred truth. We have significant liberty to relate to and express spiritual life in a multitude of ways.

As with any liberty, our spiritual liberty comes with responsibilities. Our first responsibility is to explore and discover how we will relate to spiritual life.

We may want to ignore spiritual life or run away from it, hoping it will leave us alone. Our first impulse may be to try to master it or control it, to understand spiritual life. Some of us may want to sort out the right answers and give them to other people.

Like any strong relationship, we need to make decisions for ourselves. Spiritual life will not force us into anything. It will not force itself on us. Our liberty is essential to building a healthy relationship.

We need to learn the benefits and costs of how we exercise our spiritual liberty.

Our Right to Pursue Spiritual Happiness

I used to think the pursuit of happiness sounds like the weakest, least significant of these three rights.

Life and liberty sound important, while happiness seems a little shallow.

Now I think our right to pursue spiritual happiness is more essential than it may sound. We tend to take spiritual happiness for granted.

Some of us assume spiritual life will make us happy. Other people believe we need to connect to spiritual life whether it makes us happy or not. I know people who seem to believe we should be happy all the time, whether it makes sense or not. Some people think being happy is almost the opposite of spiritual life.

I appreciate the way it is described as the right to pursue happiness. Happiness, including spiritual happiness, is not automatic. Sometimes we need to go out of our way to find it and sustain it.

The first step in pursuing spiritual happiness is understanding what makes us happy. If we do not know ourselves well enough to appreciate that, we do not know where to pursue happiness.

Part of pursuing spiritual happiness is recognizing it may surprise us. There have been times when I found happiness in places I had worked hard to avoid.

We have the right to pursue spiritual happiness.

Questions

How will you exercise your rights to spiritual life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness this week?

Where will you explore your relationship to spiritual life today?

[Image by Jdmoar]

Greg Richardson is a spiritual life mentor and leadership coach in Southern California. He is a recovering attorney and university professor, and a lay Oblate with New Camaldoli Hermitage near Big Sur, California. Greg’s website is StrategicMonk.com, and his email address is StrategicMonk@gmail.com.