I understand spirituality to refer to living with one's attention on the full experience of being a human being in all its diversity and richness, particularly its interconnectedness, and the discipline of trying to fully live out of that awareness.

This can be done using the language, symbols and images of a particular historical religious tradition; e.g., Christian spirituality, Buddhist spirituality, or a particular theological or philosophical perspective, Bible-centered spirituality, creation-centered spirituality. It can even be done using naturalism or humanism.

The emphasis is not upon the particular language or specific practices, but upon paying attention to one's own religious experience and the attempt to live out of the awareness derived from it.

There was a time when the term “;spirituality”; colloquially referred to the strict pious practices of the excessively religious. Then along came the women's movement and they resuscitated the word. They rightly pointed out that women's religious experience had been largely ignored, trivialized or accepted only where and to the extent that it mirrored men's.

Not just historically, as in women-centered religious phenomena like the worship of the goddess, female shamans and healers, and the severe limitations on female religious intellectual and spiritual leadership.

Not just theologically in the marginalizing of female “;saints”; where their spiritual insights were limited to a devotional and never a theological or doctrinal role.

Not even when, although not totally disempowered, their roles were always subordinated to men.

Rather, women were given the message that their religious experience was not valued, even not valid.

Hence, in directing women to pay attention to their own experience in shaping their religious response, a more authentic spirituality was being affirmed.

It is ironic that this revival should be initiated by women for it was not just women's experience that had come to be discounted, but ALL people's experience if it deviated from that established by the invariably male hierarchy. This left out most men's religious experience as well.

Differing religious experience could only be validated, and find a following, by the establishment of an alternative hierarchy and orthodoxy. Hence, there came a proliferation of sects, denominations and religions as mutually exclusive alternative truth systems.

It is one of the peculiarities of our Unitarian Universalist tradition that we don't share that assumption. But that is so deviate, radical and counterintuitive that we are forever having to re-remember it and remind ourselves of it.

The basic insight here is that human religious experience is one, for all its “;tutti-fruitiness.”; Spirituality is paying disciplined attention to that experience firsthand, and trying to live out of it.

What the women's movement reminded us was that spirituality—the lived act of being religious, indeed of being attentively and authentically alive—has absolutely nothing to do with orthodoxy.

The religious words, rituals, literature, etc., of a tradition are not spirituality. They are tools for use in spirituality. Sitting around playing with your tools is not spirituality, even if it leaves you with a nice, warm, uplifting feeling.

Spirituality is about what you DO with those tools.

Spirituality is about paying attention and learning to live out of that attention.

I can teach you the tools that I know, and how to use them. But spirituality is something you must do for yourself. It is not a consumer product.