Spirituality That Includes Darkness

Life is a mystery, and most of the systems that claim to explain it are covering it over. If you're honest, you don't know why any of this is happening. Some of it is wonder. A lot of it looks like a random run of luck, and some of it looks flatly cruel. Anyone who lives long enough sees that.

There are two easy ways out, and both are a kind of denial. One is to drown in the darkness until you want to give up. The other is to deny it's there. The second one dresses up as spirituality more often than the first.

The law of attraction is the clean example. The pitch is that you can think your way to whatever you want. Stay positive, hold the image, and it comes. Which means when the unwanted thing arrives, the illness, the loss, it must have been something in you that drew it. You weren't positive enough. Your own thoughts betrayed you. I've watched people do real damage to themselves with that idea. It's the same trade the performance runs: worth and safety made contingent on getting it right, and the ache turned into your own failure.

I don't think your disgust and your grief are flaws to rise above. They're part of how you tell true from false. A spirituality that asks you to feel only the bright things isn't open. It's guarding, with better vocabulary.

There's a knowing that doesn't come through the intellect. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors ran on it, because their lives depended on sensing what was around them. We traded most of it in for planning, tracking, and controlling, and we got good at that, and we came to trust nothing we couldn't verify. So now we feel the truth of something in the body and wave it off unless the science backs it up.

An honest spirituality leaves nothing out. Not the darkness in the world, not the darkness in you, not the thing you sense and can't prove. It doesn't reduce to four tidy truths or ten clean rules. It stays at the razor's edge of what you know, where what you were sure of yesterday might not hold today.