Friendly Humanist

I think I’ve mentioned once or twice about humanist spirituality. And I know I’ve talked about Unitarians a few times. Well, I just read an interesting article, The DIY Spiritual Practice, by Doug Muder, in the UU World magazine. In it, he describes a spiritual practice that he and his wife have evolved over the years. (It was linked from his blog here, so go there to drop him a comment if you like – or dislike – what he says.)

It’s not that I don’t have a discipline. I do, but it’s like so much of what Unitarian Universalists do—my wife Deb and I have cobbled it together for ourselves over a couple of decades.

For those hard-nosed skeptics among you who think that “spiritual practice” is simply a euphemism for rituals reinforcing supernatural beliefs, with no real effect on anything, I strongly recommend you give his article a read. You may not decide to try out his solution, but at least you’ll get an idea of a very humanist approach to spirituality and spiritual practice.

So what is this do-it-yourself discipline my wife and I have been practicing for 21 years? The heart of it is very mundane: We talk to each other.

I don’t know if Doug and his wife are “religious” (in the sense of believing in some supernatural reality). But the practice that he describes sounds to me like a well-grounded, practical, and enjoyable way to deal with the emotional (and other) issues that arise in daily life, and to appreciate life’s events as they come.

What do you think?

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