What Does It Mean to Be Spiritual?
Updated: 3 hours ago
Spiritual Growth Series
By Bear Van Gelder
People use the word “spiritual” constantly. “I'm spiritual, not religious.” “She's a spiritual person.” “That concert was a spiritual experience.” And yet if we asked ten people to define it in one sentence, we would likely get ten different answers.
Beneath the question of how to be a good person sits another one: what does it even mean to be spiritual? Let's build a definition together, piece by piece, borrowing from those who have thought about this longest.
Before you read, arrive
Sit up, feet on the floor, hands resting open in your lap. Close your eyes if that's comfortable, or soften your gaze downward. Breathe in for four counts… hold for four… and release for six. Do it once more.
You don't need to have this figured out. You just need to be here, attending. That, as we'll see, may already be the beginning of the answer.
I. Spirituality Is Not the Same as Religion
Religion, at its best, is the structure: the calendar, the community, the shared texts and rituals that carry a tradition across generations. Spirituality is the aliveness inside that structure, or sometimes outside it entirely. You can have religion without spirituality, going through the motions with a dead heart. And you can have spirituality without religion: a felt connection to something larger, with no institution attached to it at all.
The Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel put it this way:
“Religion is an answer to man's ultimate questions. The moment we become oblivious of ultimate questions, religion becomes irrelevant, and its crisis sets in.” — Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man (1955)
Heschel's insight is that religion goes stale the instant it stops being in living contact with the questions that gave birth to it: Why am I here? What happens when I die? What do I owe the person next to me? Spirituality, in this sense, is staying in contact with the ultimate questions, whether or not you belong to any institution at all.
II. Spirituality as Relationship, Not Information
Martin Buber, another Jewish philosopher, distinguished between two fundamentally different ways of relating to the world: what he called “I-It” and “I-Thou.”
“All real living is meeting.” — Martin Buber, I and Thou (1923)
An “I-It” relationship treats the world, and even other people, as objects to be used, analyzed, or managed. An “I-Thou” relationship meets the world as a presence, a “Thou,” worthy of full encounter. Buber's claim is radical: when we meet another person, or nature, or Source, in the fullness of I-Thou, we are not gathering information about them. We are meeting them. Spirituality, by this measure, is not a set of facts you know about the universe. It is the quality of your meeting with it.
III. Spirituality as the Inner Reality Behind the Outer Form
The Sufi tradition within Islam draws a sharp distinction between the outer law (sharia) and the inner path (haqiqa): the letter of religious practice and the living truth it is meant to point toward. Al-Ghazali, the great 11th-century Islamic theologian, wrote after his own crisis of faith and turn toward mysticism:
“Knowledge without action is wastefulness, and action without knowledge is foolishness.” — Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali, Ihya' Ulum al-Din (The Revival of the Religious Sciences)
Al-Ghazali is describing exactly the gap we are naming: you can know every doctrine and keep every ritual, and still not have crossed over into the lived, felt reality those forms exist to protect. Spirituality is what happens when the outer form becomes an inner reality.
Meister Eckhart, the Christian mystic of the same general era, described that inner reality in one of the most startling lines in the Western contemplative tradition. Read it slowly:
“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.” — Meister Eckhart, Sermons
This is not a claim of doctrine. It is a report from inside an experience: the collapse of the felt distance between the person praying and the One being prayed to. This is spirituality at its most concentrated. Not talking about Source, but the direct encounter with Source.
IV. Spirituality as Attention
The philosopher and mystic Simone Weil offered a definition that has quietly reshaped how many contemplatives since her have thought about the spiritual life:
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” — Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1947)
Weil's larger argument was that prayer, at its core, is attention, and that most of what passes for spiritual practice is actually a way of training the wandering mind to attend fully to what is real: to Source, to another person's suffering, to the present moment. In this light, spirituality is less about believing certain things and more about a trained capacity to be fully present.
The Buddhist tradition arrives at nearly the same place through a different door. The Dhammapada teaches:
“The mind is everything. What you think, you become.” — Dhammapada, verse 1 (traditional paraphrase)
And Thich Nhat Hanh, translating this ancient insight into contemporary language, wrote:
“The present moment is the only moment available to us, and it is the door to all moments.” — Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step (1991)
Try it now: give the next thirty seconds to simple, quiet attention before reading on.
V. Spirituality as Connection to Something Larger
The Lakota holy man Black Elk, in an account recorded by Joseph Epes Brown, described peace not as an absence of conflict but as the felt awareness of belonging to a larger whole:
“The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Tanka, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.” — Black Elk, in The Sacred Pipe, as told to Joseph Epes Brown (1953)
This is a strikingly universal description. Wakan-Tanka, often translated “Great Mystery” or “Great Spirit,” is Black Elk's name for what other traditions call Source, Creator, God, Brahman, the Tao. What matters is the structure of the insight: the deepest peace is not manufactured by circumstance, but discovered by realizing our place inside something already whole.
The Upanishads, the philosophical core of Hindu scripture, state this connection even more directly, in a phrase repeated as a teaching formula between teacher and student:
“Tat Tvam Asi” — “You are That.” — Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7
The claim is not that you are separate from the divine and trying to reach it. The claim is that the divine essence, call it Atman, call it soul, is not other than the ultimate reality, Brahman, that pervades everything. Spirituality, in this framing, is not acquiring a connection you lack. It is waking up to a connection you already have and had forgotten.
VI. Spirituality Without a Name for God
It is worth saying clearly: many people report this same quality of aliveness, attention, and connection without using religious language for it at all. Albert Einstein, though not a conventional believer, wrote about what he called “cosmic religious feeling”:
“The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.” — Albert Einstein, “The World As I See It” (1930)
The poet Mary Oliver, writing from a largely secular vantage point steeped in the natural world, asked the question spirituality ultimately points toward:
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” — Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day,” New and Selected Poems (1992)
That is a spiritual question whether or not it is asked inside a church, synagogue, mosque, temple, or none of the above.
VII. A Working Definition
So let us try for a working definition, built from every voice we have heard: spirituality is the felt, lived contact with what is ultimate, however you name it, expressed through attention, relationship, and the quiet recognition that you are not separate from the whole.
It can happen inside a religious structure, richly. It can happen entirely outside one. It cannot happen by accident; it requires the kind of attention Weil called “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” And it does not require you to have all the answers. It only requires you to stay in contact with the questions.
Questions for Reflection
For journaling, or for talking over with someone you trust.
Have you ever had a “spiritual” experience that had nothing to do with a religious setting? What made it feel that way?
Buber distinguishes “I-It” (treating something as an object) from “I-Thou” (meeting it as a presence). Where in your week do you catch yourself relating to people as “It” rather than “Thou”?
What is one ultimate question, about death, meaning, love, or purpose, that you've stopped asking? What would it take to reopen it?
Try Weil's definition on for size: attention as generosity. Who in your life could use thirty seconds of your undivided attention this week?
Key Takeaways
Religion is structure; spirituality is the aliveness inside it. Religion goes stale when it loses contact with life's ultimate questions. (Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man)
Spirituality is a quality of meeting, not a body of information. “All real living is meeting.” (Martin Buber, I and Thou)
Knowledge and practice without inner reality is empty. “Knowledge without action is wastefulness, and action without knowledge is foolishness.” (Al-Ghazali)
The mystic's report: the felt collapse of distance between the self and Source. “My eye and God's eye are one eye.” (Meister Eckhart)
Attention is the doorway. “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” (Simone Weil)
Presence over doctrine. “The present moment is the only moment available to us.” (Thich Nhat Hanh)
Spirituality is realizing a connection you already have. “You are That.” (Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7) “The center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.” (Black Elk)
It doesn't require religious language. Even secular “cosmic religious feeling” and awe before mystery count. (Albert Einstein)
A working definition: felt, lived contact with what is ultimate, through attention, relationship, and the recognition that you are not separate from the whole.
This week's practice: Once a day, stop and give one full minute of undivided attention to a person, a task, or your own breath. Notice: that undivided attention is itself a spiritual act.
May you leave here not with a tidier definition, but with a keener attention: to the ultimate questions, to the people beside you, to the moment you're actually in. Spirituality was never about having the answer. It's about staying in the room with the question. Go in peace.
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