A sense of the spiritual comes from staring deep into the formation of a rose or a hibiscus and being astonished at the intricate delicacy of its symmetry without needing to see behind its perfection of form the fashioning hand of deity. It comes from watching your child being born and gazing for the first time into those newly-opened eyes, from holding that child against your chest and feeling his or her heartbeat melding with yours. It comes from gazing up into the sparkling solitude of a clear midnight sky, secure in the knowledge that, no matter how alone you may feel at moments, the message of the stars appears to be that you most indisputably are not. At such moments, you need no dogma to tell you that the world seen or unseen, near or distant, is a wonderful and mysterious place. Spirituality, then, requires neither science nor religion, both of which hunger after answers and reassurance - while the essence of spirituality lies in the opening up of the individual to dazzlement.
Spirituality entails no worship.
At the very moment of my mother's cremation, her brother, trapped thousands of miles away in England by airline schedules, got out his photographs of her and spread them on his coffee table. He reread her old letters and spent some time meditating on the life that had been lived - his way, at the very moment flames consumed her body, of celebrating the life and saying farewell, his way of engaging with the spiritual. Back to Canadian Authors on 2000 .