When I was eight or nine years old, I found myself alone on the St. Lawrence River.
It was March. It was nighttime—perhaps seven or eight o'clock. It was cold and dark, and I was wearing a snowsuit.
No one knew I was out there.
I had gone looking for my dog, an Irish setter.
I remember the strange freedom of being out in the darkness and the river, but I also remember the vastness of it. The St. Lawrence at night is an enormous thing. The winter ice stretches out across the water, and the darkness makes it difficult to know where the river ends and the sky begins.
There had apparently been icebreaking activity on the river. I have wondered many times since whether an icebreaker had opened a channel nearby.
Then the ice cracked beneath my feet.
Suddenly, the adventure was over.
I was frightened.
And I prayed.
I don't remember exactly what I said. I was eight or nine years old. Whatever the words were, they weren't theological. They weren't sophisticated. They were the words of a child who had suddenly encountered something much more powerful than himself.
It was a root reaction to the threat of death.
And perhaps that is one of the places where spirituality begins.
Not in certainty.
Not in doctrine.
But in the recognition that we are small.
Looking Toward the Mountain
I remember looking toward Mount Royal.
At the top of the mountain was the illuminated cross.
I remember looking at it intensely.
There was something about that cross in the darkness that was comforting.
I didn't necessarily understand what it meant. But I understood that it meant something.
And perhaps that distinction is important.
Human beings are meaning-making creatures.
We organize ourselves around symbols.
We tell stories.
We create rituals.
We gather around sacred objects and sacred places.
We construct religions, philosophies and systems of meaning.
We look for patterns in the darkness.
We need something to orient ourselves by.
That cross on Mount Royal was, in that moment, more than an object on a mountain. It was a symbol of something larger than me.
There was a human message embedded in it:
You are not alone.
Maybe that is one of the things human beings are built to do.
We organize ourselves around beliefs about what matters.
And when the world becomes frightening, those beliefs can give us somewhere to stand.
Or, in my case, somewhere to look.
Comforted in the Darkness
There is something profoundly human about being comforted by a symbol.
The symbol doesn't have to solve the problem.
The cross did not physically rescue me from the ice.
But it gave the darkness a different quality.
The darkness was still there.
The cold was still there.
The river was still there.
The danger was still there.
But now there was something else.
Meaning.
And perhaps this is one of the functions of spirituality.
It doesn't necessarily remove suffering, danger, uncertainty or death.
It changes our relationship to them.
It tells us that the frightening thing we are experiencing may exist within a larger story.
That is a powerful psychological capacity.
What Kind of World Do We Want to Live In?
I've thought about that prayer many times since.
What kind of world do we want to live in?
We can imagine a universe that is entirely indifferent to us—a universe composed of matter, energy, forces and probabilities, in which our hopes and prayers have no particular significance.
Or we can imagine a universe in which reaching beyond ourselves is meaningful.
I'm not suggesting that we can scientifically prove that the universe answers prayers.
I'm suggesting something different.
What kind of world do we want to live in?
The world in which a frightened child can look toward the universe and say, "Help me"?
That seems like a damn good world to me.
And it gets even more interesting when prayers appear to be answered.
Most of us can recall moments when something happened with such extraordinary timing that we experienced it as providence, grace, coincidence or something we simply cannot explain.
We can argue about the mechanism.
Was it chance?
Was it psychology?
Was it selective attention?
Was it divine intervention?
Was it something else entirely?
Perhaps those are important questions.
But there is another question:
What did the experience mean?
Adler and the Spiritual Task
This is where Alfred Adler's psychology becomes particularly interesting to me.
Adler understood human beings as fundamentally relational creatures.
We belong to families.
We belong to communities.
We belong to cultures.
We inherit a world from those who came before us, and we contribute something to those who come after us.
His concept of Gemeinschaftsgefühl, usually translated as social interest or community feeling, points toward this sense of belonging and connectedness.
But the circle can be expanded further.
We belong to humanity.
We belong to the natural world.
And ultimately, we belong to the cosmos.
The spiritual task can therefore be understood as the task of discovering our relationship to something greater than ourselves.
Where do I fit?
What do I belong to?
What do I serve?
What do I believe is larger and more enduring than my individual life?
These are not merely religious questions.
They are psychological questions.
They are human questions.
We Are Stardust
Modern astronomy makes the Adlerian idea of belonging to the cosmos almost impossible to ignore.
We are made of the universe.
The elements that make up our bodies have cosmic histories stretching back billions of years. The atoms in us were formed through processes that occurred long before there was a human being capable of asking what any of it meant.
We are not separate from the cosmos.
We are made from it.
We are one of its temporary forms.
There is something almost poetic about the idea that the universe has produced beings capable of wondering about the universe.
We are, in a sense, the cosmos looking back at itself.
And then there is time.
With modern astronomy software, I can sit at my computer and look ahead at eclipses that have not yet happened. I can see the movements of celestial bodies with astonishing precision.
I can look at the next hundred solar eclipses visible from Earth and watch the mathematics of the heavens unfold.
My individual life is tiny compared with that scale of time.
Stars are born and die.
Galaxies move.
Planets orbit.
Eclipses occur.
The Earth continues turning.
And somehow, within all of this immensity, I am here.
Thinking.
Remembering.
Loving.
Grieving.
Wondering.
Praying.
The Universe Has Become Stranger
And just when we think science has explained the mystery away, physics seems to make the universe stranger.
Quantum mechanics has challenged many of our ordinary assumptions about reality. Quantum entanglement, for example, demonstrates forms of correlation between particles that are deeply counterintuitive from the perspective of everyday experience.
None of this proves spirituality.
I think it is important not to use physics as a shortcut to prove whatever spiritual idea we happen to prefer.
But modern physics does something else that may be just as valuable.
It humbles us.
It reminds us that reality does not have to conform to our intuitions.
The universe is under no obligation to make intuitive sense to a human brain that evolved to find food, avoid predators and navigate social relationships.
Reality is stranger than we imagine.
Perhaps spirituality begins, in part, with being comfortable with that mystery.
We Are Built for Meaning
I keep coming back to the image of that cross on Mount Royal.
A human being had taken something—a symbol—and placed it high on a mountain.
Why?
Because human beings do this.
We put symbols on mountains.
We build temples.
We light candles.
We tell stories around fires.
We bury our dead.
We celebrate births.
We create rituals around marriage.
We pray.
We meditate.
We sing.
We gather.
We search for meaning.
There is something in us that wants to organize our experience around an understanding of what is sacred, important and larger than ourselves.
Perhaps this is not an accident.
Perhaps the spiritual task is partly the task of learning how to use this extraordinary human capacity responsibly.
Because beliefs can divide us as easily as they can unite us.
A symbol can become a source of compassion—or a weapon.
A religious belief can give someone courage—or become a justification for cruelty.
The spiritual task, then, is not simply to believe.
It is to ask what our beliefs do to us.
Do they make us more compassionate?
More courageous?
More connected?
More capable of loving?
More willing to recognize our place within the larger whole?
Do they increase our sense of belonging?
Or do they make us smaller?
The Ice Cracks
Sometimes I wonder about that little boy on the St. Lawrence.
What did he understand?
Very little.
He didn't know about Adler.
He didn't know about Gemeinschaftsgefühl.
He didn't know that he was made from elements forged in stars.
He didn't know about quantum mechanics.
He didn't know that decades later he would be able to sit at a computer and look hundreds of eclipses into the future.
He knew only this:
The ice was cracking.
It was dark.
He was cold.
No one knew where he was.
He was looking for his Irish setter.
And he was afraid.
So he prayed.
And then he looked toward the cross on Mount Royal.
I think that may have been my first encounter with the spiritual task.
Not because I had discovered the correct answer to the question of God.
But because, for a brief moment, I experienced myself as a very small part of something immensely larger than myself.
And I was comforted in the darkness.
Perhaps that is where spirituality begins.
With wonder.
With humility.
With belonging.
With the recognition that we inhabit a reality we did not create and cannot completely understand.
The spiritual task may be the lifelong process of discovering our relationship to that greater whole.
Sometimes we encounter it in religion.
Sometimes in nature.
Sometimes in science.
Sometimes in the birth of a child.
Sometimes beside the bed of someone we love.
Sometimes while looking through a telescope.
Sometimes in the quiet after someone we love has died.
And sometimes—
perhaps most unexpectedly—
when the ice cracks beneath our feet.
In those moments, the question is no longer simply:
What do I believe?
The deeper question becomes:
What kind of universe do I believe I belong to?
I like the universe in which a frightened child can pray.
I like the universe in which human beings can organize themselves around beliefs that give courage and comfort in the darkness.
I like the universe in which we can look upward and feel that we belong to something greater.
And I am especially intrigued by the possibility that the impulse to reach beyond ourselves—to ask, to wonder, to hope, to love, to pray—may itself be one of the ways that we participate in the mystery of being alive.
The ice cracks.
We look up.
And perhaps, for just a moment, we discover that the darkness is not empty.