I find that one of the most difficult things for me to talk about in an academic context, even in my blog, which is academic in only the most tangential, daily way, is spirituality. It's not exactly that everyone is atheist or agnostic, although I suspect a fair number of my colleagues in my field and otherwhere secretly believe anyone who isn't atheist is a dupe of some kind. It's that there's no place for spirituality to be a real part of anyone's life as it is practiced in the academy.
I don't exactly mean that academia makes spirituality or ritual attendance impossible. I know many colleagues who go to some kind of worship service regularly and participate in their respective congregations. One of my colleagues here can't teach or hold meetings on Friday afternoons because she's Orthodox Jewish and lives in nearby City because we have no Orthodox temple here and must be home before sundown, which, let's face it, is at about 4:30 these days. Another colleague is Catholic and wears her Ash Wednesday ashes all day long. It's not that it's impossible. It's that these actions are somehow suspect. They're quietly mocked when they interfere with department function; they're outright ignored when people plan conferences, seminars, and teaching schedules. Religion as a whole and spirituality as a corollary are sometimes studied, but rarely engaged as both intellectual and lived.* Since I've been thinking about this for a while, I'm going to bore you with the narrative and the place we're at now.
When I was in graduate school, this is how everyone I knew lived their lives. A few people meditated, a whole host of us did yoga, and a very few admitted to going to church. Even though I had no real desire to rejoin the Catholic church I was raised in, I kept feeling like something was missing. I wanted some kind of structure in which to engage spirituality, and I couldn't find one. Slowly I ended up at paganism, an odd blend of Wicca and Druidry and what-makes-sense-to-me. None of it feels comfortable.
Ms. P, on the other hand, is an innately spiritual person. She jokes that she was atheist for two days once, until it struck her how stupid that seemed to be for her. Her spirituality is complicated, though. She has twice thought about Catholic religious life, she has a second degree in a particular branch of Wicca, she does magic on a regular basis, she's spent long periods of her life going to Quaker meeting, and she likes nothing better than a good altar and some home-grown ritual with people she loves and trusts.
Together we continue our small personal pagan practices, but we've also been searching for a place, a congregation, a something we can lean into, something that can hold us up when we're searching, something that is big enough to throw ourselves against when that's what we need. It's not Catholicism; she's having mad backlash right now from being with the nuns and the Catholic church is more and more witchhunting queers among its congregations. We spent some time at the local reform Temple after we did some reading in preparation for a Jewish wedding I was in. There are a number of things we adore about Judaism, things we want in our life. But the experience of Temple wasn't compelling to either of us. That idea is on hold until we move someplace that has a bigger Temple and potentially a Reconstructionist Temple. We went to Quaker meeting for a while, but while it fed Ms. P, it made me itchy. Again, the congregation here is so small that it makes me feel self-conscious instead of held in the Light. We can't seem to find grown-up pagans here, although we know they've got to be here somewhere. We went to midnight services at the Episcopal church last Christmas because I refused to go to the extremely conservative Catholic church and the good one didn't have midnight Mass, and Ms. P was a little hooked. I dug in my heels for a while (how many religions were we going to go through, anyway?), but we're going to Episcopal services here now.
And it's fine. It's not exciting, and I'm looking forward to smoothing out the small differences from the Catholic service so we don't make so many mistakes thinking we're doing it right, but it's friendly and pretty and has good music and fine sermons.
The problem is, I really don't fit in Christianity. I think the principles of Christianity are wonderful and a really good idea, but I don't believe Jesus was the son of God any more than any of us are. So on some level, going to any Christian service makes me feel like a fraud. But the pagan experience I cobble together don't satisfy me.
So I feel stuck and angry, and then I blame academia for not having spaces where I get to encounter people living their spirituality on a regular basis. It would make a difference to me, I think, if spirituality were part of people's vocabulary, their narrative of the everyday. But it isn't, not in academia, and probably not in many other contexts. Because what really happens is that people bring their religions into the workplace, and then it's just intolerance all the way down. But damn, what I really need is some grown-up, tolerant, narrative, open-minded, committed, and engaged conversation about how we go about being spiritually engaged people in this world of ours. Any ideas?
*A colleague of mine studies Anchorites in the 13th century, but when I told her about Ms. P, who was then in discernment for the convent, she said it had never occured to her that people still did that.