Some Practical Steps Toward Enabling a Shared Spirituality

Part 5 of Losing Our Moral Compass: How the Decline of Organized Religion Undermines America’s Pursuit of Virtue

(In Part 4 of “Losing Our Moral Compass,” titled "Conceptualizing a Humble Creator-Centric Spirituality," we explored the need for a renewed spiritual framework that transcends traditional dogmas and embraces a broader moral dialogue rooted in the shared recognition of a Creator. This perspective argues against the backdrop of cultural nihilism and the absence of a shared moral grounding, suggesting that both traditional religious settings and new moral spaces can benefit from fostering openness to spiritual experiences and mysteries. It highlights how practices like yoga and humanist principles can integrate into this framework, enhancing moral inquiries rather than discarding them. When the diverse religious traditions of active monotheism can articulate a mutually agreed, easily accessible Creator-centric cosmology, they create an interlinkage amongst themselves and offer pathways to those just beginning their spiritual inquiries. And by growing in this organic way, their unified influence expands and enables, not by doctrine but by self-discovery, a common focal point for moral and virtue obligations. The shared framework moves beyond doctrinal stances and helps each person recognize a framework that offers more than individualistic and relativistic approaches and enables them, almost as a byproduct, to embrace the idea of a collective pursuit of virtue, cooperation, and respect for life. This shift towards an accessible spirituality rooted in a ‘common denominator’ language provides a more robust moral coherence and resilience in the face of societal fragmentation, emphasizing active spiritual engagement through practices like prayer, meditation, and service to foster mindfulness around transcendance, deeper communal bonds, and moral vitality.)

Timeless night sky - photo by mahshid-saberpour on Unsplash

Part 5

Some Practical Steps Toward Enabling a Shared Spirituality

It is one thing to envision adopting a humble, Creator-centric spirituality to renew our shared moral and virtue-centric framework. It's another thing entirely to face the practical question: how do we bring this vision to life? In an era of hostile political polarization and societal fragmentation, there is a tendency to fall prey to the despair of existentialism, seeing life as random and meaningless. These steps aim not only to restore our common moral vocabulary but also to help rescue us from the insidious anomie that inevitably leads to a carpe diem mentality and existential despair. They offer a framework of being that can help bridge the divides that have left our communities and the larger public sphere so fractured.

1. Offering and Encouraging Reflective Practices:
   Before anything else, we can reintroduce the habit of reflection. Moments of silence, contemplation, or meditation in public events and schools -- spaces where we pause and consider our actions -- can help a shared moral language begin to form. By providing contemplative "quiet rooms" in workplaces, supporting interfaith meditation groups, and organizing book clubs around wisdom traditions, we step out of the productivity mindset and entertain a glimmer of a reality beyond our immediate deadlines. Such quietude enables an "openness to the spiritual imagination," humbly embracing both mystery and discomfort. It fosters a sense of wonder, allowing for moments of transcendence within our daily existence that guide us toward revelations and realizations of shared moral insights rather than relying solely on personal preference.

2. Reclaiming Community Spaces for Authentic Dialogue:
   As religious attendance wanes, community centers, libraries, gardens, museums, online forums, and religious institutions themselves can host interfaith dialogues, invite spiritual thinkers and moral exemplars to speak, and sponsor workshops on transcendence in human life, kindness, justice, atonement, and forgiveness, among many others. These encounters need not -- indeed should not -- be denominational pitches or strive to yield doctrinal consensus. Rather, they are simply to propose the importance of openness to the spiritual imagination and by doing so, they serve to remind us that moral and spiritual questions truly matter. They serve to educate us and keep reminding us of the importance of spiritual fitness and mindfulness of a shared moral and virtue-centric code. Over time, they nurture the moral vocabulary our society lacks, allowing participants to safely share diverse experiences of transcendence, what many refer to as mystical experiences, and articulate their aspirations and doubts in ways that strengthen communal bonds.

3. Integrating Spiritual and Moral Imagination into Education:
   Just as grammar school once taught the ABCs, education should include stepwise refinement of moral reasoning, character formation, and pursuit of virtue alongside reading, math, and science. By introducing students to diverse spiritual wisdom traditions and offering narratives of exemplars not only navigating moral and ethical challenges but sharing the common resistance to the beckoning of virtue, we show that the pursuit of wisdom is universal. This exposure seeds the spiritual imagination, enabling future citizens to approach moral dilemmas with depth and nuance rather than defaulting to tribal loyalties or personal whim.

4. Emphasizing Service and Acts of Kindness:
   Service projects and mentorship initiatives transform abstract moral principles into lived reality. When we actively help neighbors in need, we participate in a shared moral language that transcends individual preference. Compassion and responsibility become tangible virtues, not remote ideals, reinforcing the understanding that moral truth exists beyond our own inventions and not only undergirds our communal life but is necessary for its survival. Thus, moral and virtuous behavior needn't be experienced as sacrifices. One of the marvelous effects of practices like service to others and acts of kindness is that we make our and their lives, individually and collectively, more enjoyable and meaningful.

5. Honoring a Shared Moral Foundations While Embracing Diversity:
   In a pluralistic society, a Creator-centric framework approached with humility can function as a gentle compass. It does not mandate uniform theology, but reminds us that moral truths, like natural laws (e.g. biological instinct and laws of gravity) that we take as givens, exist beyond our own inventions. Interfaith councils and public ceremonies acknowledging something beyond ourselves reaffirm that developing moral and spiritual mindedness (yes, even intentional agnosticism) need not depend on everyone believing the same thing, only on respecting that a higher moral order might bind and guide us -- and indeed -- sustain us all.

6. Sustaining Spiritual Growth Over Time:
   Spiritual maturation -- individually and collectively -- requires patience, practice, and perseverance in effort, just as does physical fitness. Communities that invest in reflection, dialogue, and service develop resilience, compassion, and the capacity to more effectively navigate ethical challenges and life distress. Over time, we regain the moral muscles to resist exclusive self-interest and zero-sum thinking and begin to see the inherent sensibility of pursuit of virtue. We might think of it as "spiritual fitness," requiring regular exercise and consistent practice.

7. Expanding Our Sources of Wisdom:
   As we widen our reading, listening, and learning, we discover common threads of moral insight woven through indigenous traditions, revered sacred writing, and accessible wisdom tradition translations. These varied works -- such as the Iroquois' Thanksgiving address entitled "The Words That Come Before All Else" or accessible translations of wisdom texts rooted in an ecumenical theology -- enrich our collective spiritual imagination. Rather than demanding that people decipher abstruse treatises, leaders and educators can distill these rich teachings into compelling contemporary narratives that resonate with lived experience. This enrichment of perspectives cultivates a moral and spiritual language robust enough to speak across differences while maintaining connection to timeless truths.

It's important to recognize that none of these initiatives yields instant results. Rebuilding a shared moral and virtue-centric vocabulary among a population whose sensibility in these matters has been eroded or cynically dismissed is a long-term endeavor, one that requires patience and sustained effort, and anticipates gradual, perhaps even imperceptible cultural shifts. Over months, years, and even generations, such practices help reshape our moral landscape, nurturing virtues that can weather ideological storms and resist the temptations of quick fixes and unexamined self-centric preference.

At its heart, or dare I say soul, this path forward is an inward, outward, and upward journey -- an inward turn toward honest self-examination, an outward path toward shared virtue, and an upward reach toward discerning transcendent moral truth. By weaving reflection, community dialogue, education, service, recognition of a shared reverence for spiritual transcendence, and diverse sources of insight into our cultural fabric, we begin restoring the moral and spiritual vocabulary that our society desperately needs. This will be a long endeavor, spanning generations, but it can help create a framework of meaning and equips us to ground ourselves so as to navigate the storms of our time with greater integrity, empathy, and hope.

(Part 6: Can We Find Ways To Shore Up The Spiritual, Moral, and Virtuous Pillars of the American Ethos?)