Each of us has a unique spiritual design that pulls us toward freedom. The problem arises when we listen to others for our direction, or think we “should” do something because others have done it in the past. Spiritual growth is a fine-tuning of our ear to the needs of our heart.

What obscures this understanding in many of us is the belief that the silent retreat is a priority over other expressions of life. When we believe we are not where we need to be for spiritual growth, we relegate our daily life to a secondary tier. We energetically pull out of our spiritual life and wait for the appropriate secluded moment in order to fully engage. Leaning toward or away from any experience creates an anticipation of fulfillment in the future, and the sacred that exists here and now is lost. Discovering the sacred within all moments is the hallmark of awakening…

The lay Buddhist begins to recover the sacred in the most remote areas of life, in the midst of difficulty and dissatisfaction, loneliness and despair. The reality of problems is challenged and investigated, and life begins to thrive free of circumstances and conditions. The heart takes over and is resurrected from the conditioned habits of mind.

Rodney Smith, Tricycle Magazine Summer 2010

Smith has put his finger here on an issue that has long troubled me. There is that in me, if not in all of us, that so easily divides life into partitions: sacred/profane; spiritual/material; worthy/unworthy. Even the concept of lay Buddhism has for me too religious a connotation, tending to one side of the old religious/secular dichotomy. As I wrote last year,

So many of our practices find their roots in one religion or another – most often Buddhism – that they bring with them sticky remnants of their original religious context. Buddhist practices frequently imply a background acceptance of the concepts of karma and rebirth, for instance; and practices with Christian roots may come with background assumptions regarding the role of the Holy Spirit in the contemplative life.

…these things can be a problem. It is impossible to talk about, even to think about, the spiritual life without using words; and these kinds of words so often – especially for those of us with a past involvement in the formal contemplative life – help maintain an unconscious religious atmosphere that clings to the mere fact of practice itself, and can easily act like a tinted lens that colours our experience, and the ways we communicate it, even to ourselves.

If I were to adopt a label, I suppose it would have to be simply Humanist; a humanist of a particularly contemplative bent, perhaps, but a humanist nonetheless. If we are truly to recover the sacred – the “actually loved and known” (David Jones) – to be, after all, the bits and pieces of an ordinary life – all those things so often dismissed as merely “quotidian” – then it seems to me we need to flee these traces of formal religious language. It is so easy to lose the sacred among the habits and assumptions of our daily lives that to add these ancient designations to the mix seems unhelpful to say the least. As Rodney Smith generously concludes his article:

The lay Buddhist harbors no defense, seeks no shelter, and avoids no conflict for the resolution of wholeness. It is here in the middle of our total involvement [with daily life] that this alchemy of spirit can best be engaged. Our life becomes focused around this transformation as our primary intention for living. We find everything we need immediately before us within the circumstances and conditions we long begrudged ourselves. Spiritual growth becomes abundantly available and is no longer associated exclusively with any particular presentation of form.