The most familiar form of spiritual practice for most Unitarian Universalists is our Sunday gathering:  our communal practice of joining in worship. Our form of worship, inherited from the Protestant Christian tradition emphasizes the word, other forms of worship practice include ritual and participating in the sacraments

This fall, we’re going to take a look at spiritual practice.

Spiritual practice is the “doing” part of religion.  We are going to ask, “What is it that people “do” to activate and deepen their spiritual life?”

After the first of the year we will switch to the “why” question.  Why engage in a spiritual life?  We will start in the winter with personal spiritual goals for our individual lives.  But people aren’t religious just for themselves.  Religion is also a social project.  So we will look at various social goals of religion in the spring, what people hope that their religion will do for all of us, generally.

First, though, the spiritual practices. Of which there are dozens and dozens.  If you already engage in an identified spiritual practice, I hope you’ll feel affirmed and maybe find some way to make your practice stronger.  If you don’t have a spiritual practice, I hope you’ll be inspired to begin one, or at least to examine the question for yourself, “What do I do when I do my faith?”  What do you do to make your faith stronger, and deeper?  What do you do to express your faith in your life and the world?  How do you live your faith?

I’m going to organize the varieties of spiritual practices this way.

First, spiritual practices that people do within a spiritual community.  Spiritual practices like worship, hymn-singing, reading and discussing a book together, religious education in a classroom-like setting, gathering together for regular fellowship, like church potlucks, or for regular support like healing circles or covenant groups.

Then, in October and November, we will look at spiritual practices that people tend to do privately, or individually.  Some practices in this category include things like prayer or meditation practices, movement practices like yoga or tai chi or walking a pilgrimage route, or journaling, or hiking in nature.  Some of those things you might do with other people around doing the same thing, but this is the category of spiritual practice as private experience.

And finally, in December, we will look at those spiritual practices that people do in public, with, or for, people who are outside their own spiritual community.  Spiritual practice in the public sphere.  Activities here include things like evangelism, social action, public witness, parenting, teaching.

Now last week, I started by giving some definitions of what I mean by spiritual, because my intention is that this be a meaningful exploration of spiritual practice for everybody in the room, including people who don’t think of themselves as spiritual and who don’t use that word.

So just to review, what I mean by spiritual, is that “spiritual” refers to that part of being human where we engage with the existential questions of identity, purpose and meaning.  Every human person asks  Who am I?  What Should I do?  And Why does it Matter? Some people ask in a casual way.  Others are more engaged with those questions in a profound way.  But we all ask them.  That’s how we chart a path through life.  And it’s how we organize our days.  Who am I?  What Should I do?  And Why does it Matter?  Identity.  Purpose.  And Meaning.

How you answer those questions defines your theology.  Your theology can be atheistic, or theistic, strictly materialist and naturalistic, or it can include immaterial and supernatural elements.  And in a UU church we welcome multiple, diverse theologies across the entire spectrum.  Any theology is welcome here as long as it is grounded in and leads back to supporting the values we name in our UU seven principles.

But every person, of every theology, and even those who claim no theology wrestle with the spiritual questions:  Who am I?  Is there a self?  Is there a soul?  What does it mean to be human?  What should I do?  Am I responsible for others?  Should I become vegetarian?  Should I prioritize my personal dreams and happiness or work for others?  And why does it matter?  Who cares?  Is there any objective way to judge good or bad or better or worse?  Does my life matter only to me?  Are there social goods I should align my life with?  Or do I owe my life to something big and universal like a god?

So, if you can agree that we’re all spiritual, by that definition, then a spiritual practice is a way to regularly engage with those questions, answer them more fully and confidently for ourselves, and then let our answers guide our life choices.  That doesn’t mean, necessarily, literally asking those questions, although you might.  But what a spiritual practice always does is deliberately puts ourselves in a setting where we commune with the psychological entity (whether within in our own minds or beyond, depending on your theology) where we hope to find or have found answers to those questions, and then listening deeply.

But also, importantly, a spiritual practice is a practice.  It’s an action that you engage in regularly.  A practice is like practicing the piano.  Every week, or every day, you sit down, and whether you’re in the mood or not, you do your work.  And sometimes it’s successful, and inspiring and life-changing, and other times you just sit there for an hour and nothing much seems to come of it.  And then you come back the next day and you do it again, or you come back the next week, whatever your practice.

The spiritual practice we experience most regularly is worship.  This experience we are having now.

Worship is another one of those words that can trip us up.  So again, let me offer an inclusive definition that I think we can all see ourselves in.

Worship comes from an old English word related to the same root where we get the word “worth.”  To worship is to assign worth to something.  That something doesn’t have to be a god.  Some gods I hear about aren’t worthy of worship in my opinion.  The word “God” might not even apply to any actually existing entity in the universe.  To assign worth to a fantasy would be silly, or simply wrong, or possibly dangerous. But to give worth to something beyond yourself is crucial.  To hold that there is nothing of worth beyond yourself is also silly, or simply wrong, or possibly dangerous.

So worship, in a Unitarian Universalist context is not about the church or the minister naming the object of worth for you, but inviting you to name for yourself what is worthy.  Maybe it’s the seven principles, or a simple value like justice, or peace, or love.  Or maybe the object of worth is the fellowship of this community, or the human community of all people, or the planet.  Maybe the object of worship changes each week, depending on the theme of worship for that day.  Or maybe you worship a particular god, or goddess, and what they stand for, or you worship a large encompassing spirit that holds many worthy qualities.

And then “to worship,” the action of worship, is for each of us to lift up that worthy thing and to spend an hour (or an hour and eight minutes, perhaps) paying honor to that thing, resolving to center our lives more securely around that thing, and listening to hear what wisdom that thing has to give us.

Worship as a spiritual practice is that regular returning to communion with that something of worth that we hold as the best and highest organizing principle of our lives.

But here is what I want to say about why we worship in community.  Why is worship a communal spiritual practice?

Worship is itself a collection of many spiritual practices.  We sing.  We pray.  We drop a stone into a bowl of water.  We light a chalice.  We make an offering.

Most of what we do during worship is something you could also do alone, privately, as an individual spiritual practice.  You don’t have to come to church even to hear a sermon; you could just stay home and find a TED Talk on YouTube.  It’s not like I’m the only person who has anything spiritually wise to share this morning.

Why not save yourself the trouble, and lower your carbon footprint, by just staying home on Sunday morning?

Because the real and unique benefit of communal worship, is not the communion with the something that we worship, but the communion with the community that we worship with.

You know that.

It’s that we do this together.  It’s that we sing together.  We pray together.  We share ritual together.  We share our joys and sorrows outloud and hold them in community.  There’s the palpable energy and power of focusing the attention of a room full of people on one child as they light the chalice.  There’s the symbol of gathering the resources of an entire community into one offering toward one shared goal.

And there’s the power of an entire community hearing one message, going home with the same thoughts, coming back later in the week remembering a common experience.  There’s the spiritual discipline of laying aside for one hour (or an hour and eight minutes) your own preferences and interests about what you want to hear, or what you want to sing, or even where you want to be, and giving up that individual will, which gets so much attention throughout the rest of our lives, and instead resting in our commonality.  This people.  My people.  This congregation.  My church.