Lessons of Rejection: A Basic Human Need

The American Spirit Essays #8

(continued from last week’s Through the Looking Glass)

Lessons from the Outside

The lessons that I learned during my alternative New Age stint alerted me to what was occurring around me.  Widespread rejection of our spiritual traditions had led large swathes of America into ignorance, denial, and disconnection.  It had created unarticulated needs so shameful that none could speak their name.  But the needs were there, nonetheless.  People—many far more “respectable” than my San Francisco friends—were casting about for something to meet those needs. 

Those of us alive in the 2020s go through our lives mired in denial.  We like to believe we live in a world of reason, of science, of technology.  While we accept that much remains unknown, we bristle at the idea that there may be a realm of the unknowable.  We recoil instinctively at the thought that some sentient deity might reign within that unknowable realm.  Those of us who do venture, on occasion, into the spiritual realm tend to do so privately and quietly.  For most, the entire concept reeks of superstition and mythology—stories aged relatives from the old country tell children.  My desire to rid my life of this nonsense and the burdens that come with it was hardly anomalous.  I was but one more young man trying to move beyond a religious upbringing into the more enlightened environs that define modernity.

The commonality of my error, however, does little to mitigate its enormity—or its impossibility.  Spirituality, I have come to learn, is a basic human need.  It is not a need on par with food or sleep—needs that must be met regularly to sustain life—but it is a need on par with sex.  The many new age tomes on sacred sexuality raise an important point, though it may not be the precise point they had hoped to raise. 

Like the need for sex, the need for spirit may be denied.  In my late teens, when I proclaimed my abandonment of spirit, I could have declared myself celibate (though that would have been a lot less fun).  I could have led a virginal life, a life entirely devoid of sex.  What I could not have done (short, perhaps, of self-mutilation) is declare myself free of either a sex drive or a desire to procreate.  Yes, I might have learned to control those impulses, perhaps relegating them to a few fleeting moments of unhappiness arising at various points throughout my life.  Many have.  I could not, however, have extinguished them.  They are a natural part of healthy human physical, psychological, and emotional existence—an evolutionary necessity that guarantees the continued existence of the human species.  So too with spirituality.

Not a Guru

Which brings me back to a relevant lesson that I learned repeatedly in the various non-spiritual academic disciplines that have occupied much of my learning—and that provides the final answer to this essay’s opening question, “why me?”  You should listen to what I have to say about spirituality and America’s spiritual crisis because I’m not a wannabe guru. 

The core, consistent lesson is that diagnosis and prescription are distinct skills. I’m writing as a diagnostician of America’s spiritual ailment; I leave the prescriptions to others.