Spirit and Story Archive

Welcome to Spirit and Story, where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the contours of our contemporary spiritual journeys. Every other week you will find something new and (hopefully) engaging here!

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Is Urban Spirituality Unnatural?

By David Kraemer

There is a certain banality which characterizes conversations about "spirituality." Ask any 100 random individuals where they experience their spiritual moments and 97 will respond "in the mountains, in the forest, by the seashore, watching a sunset, listening to a Beethoven symphony," and the like. Notably, only the last answer makes reference to a cultural (as opposed to a "natural") setting, though I suspect most people actually experience the symphony as a "revelation" and not as a cultural creation at all.

Ordinarily, I would resist the consensus indicated above. I would insist that humanity's creations, in all of their messiness, are also sources of "spiritual" inspiration. I am, after all, inspired and excited by the great and chaotic city in which I live-a city that is "cultural" in all senses of the term. Still, when I ask myself to identify those moments when I feel most spiritual, I find myself answering like the 97, not the exceptional three.

My spirit is most profoundly restored twice a year-once in summer and once in winter. My summer restoration is found in outer Cape Cod: walking along the beach, with sand cliffs on one side and waves on the other, or getting intentionally lost among the vast and endless dunes, or watching the sea-grass wave in the gentle breeze of the marsh. And my winter restoration occurs in the snow-covered reaches of the Adirondacks: walking for miles in the silence of a winter country road, or watching the mountains undulate in the distance, or fighting the roll of the hill as gravity pulls me quickly down over the packed powder. The truth is, all I have to do is conjure the scenes just described in my mind's eye and my body immediately relaxes, my blood pressure decreasing by 20 points. These are the experiences that most easily send my spirit soaring, whether I like to admit it or not.

How mundane! But how important. If so many of us share this experience, there must be something "true" in it. This yearning for the elements must tell us something about who we are. And it matters little whether this yearning is "natural" or the product of cultural conditioning (though, given the common reference in Psalms to similar natural phenomena, I at least know that it extends beyond our own culture). What matters is that we do experience it-that we do need to experience the glories of God's creation.

Perhaps what is important is that we admit this yearning-and take it one step further. The story is told of Abraham Joshua Heschel who, in an interview of a young man applying to rabbinical school, asked him, "Where do you experience God's presence?" The young man answered, "Out in nature, Professor Heschel-in the mountains, or by the ocean." Heschel responded, "But what about on Broadway?" "On Broadway?" the young man puzzled. "Yes, on Broadway," Heschel insisted. "When you experience the presence of God in the face of the beggar on Broadway, then come back. Then you will be ready to be a rabbi." A little harsh, perhaps. But so true. We must give in to our need to restore our spirits in nature. But we must find nourishment of spirit in the small and difficult human exchanges as well.

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