32 – Reaching Up and Reaching Out. Blending Religion and Spirituality.featured

I heard an insightful way of describing the relationship between religion and spirituality.  I wish I could remember where I heard it so I could give credit, but sadly I don’t. Spirituality can be seen as a “vertical conduit to God”. It is a personal connection to Heaven, and people look for that in many places. Some find it in a church or their scripture study. Many find it outdoors and eagerly await the next day they can get out for a long walk, a bike ride, or a hike in the mountains. Meditation or Yoga allows others to find the spirituality they seek. Wherever people find it, they find it peaceful, rejuvenating and vitalizing.

The individual described religion as a “horizontal reaching out to others”. It is reaching out to help and ease the suffering of others; and in so doing possibly draw them into your connection with God so they can also feel and benefit from what you have found. It is love. The intersecting vertical and horizontal lines create the image of a cross.

Whether someone first develops a relationship with God and then seeks to share that love and concern for others, or they seek to bless the lives of others and, in turn, feel more connected with God, religion becomes more than finding God. Any spiritual journey must be accompanied by an outward focus on serving and helping others.  Religion is, in its essence, spirituality in practice.  One cannot grow in a balanced way without growing in both directions.  Our loving Heavenly Father does not want us to only connect with Him, He wants us to also help our sisters and brothers. Helping others in turn helps us in ways nothing else can.

Now the cross does not just remind me of Jesus Christ, it reminds me that I build my relationship with Him by serving others.

SERVICE PROJECTS

The instruction to look past ourselves and serve others starts early in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some of my earliest memories in Primary are of singing “Give Said the Little Stream” and making gifts for Mom and Dad on Mother’s and Father’s Days. Some youth activities would focus on serving others. While it never felt exciting to get up early on a Saturday morning to go clean ditches, it always felt like I had done something that mattered. Somehow, service projects seemed to wind up being fun. That is also when I began to notice that serving others did more for me than I anticipated.

In Calgary, the Church does a city-wide food drive every September. Bags are delivered to most doors across the city during the week.  The following Saturday, those bags, now filled with food,  are picked back up from the front steps of those who chose to give. One year we invited our neighbors to help us drop off the flyers and pick up the donations. My neighbor Mike was very impressed with the experience and commented on how it “felt so much better than just writing a check to a charity” saying, “This is what service should feel like”. The following year we had a grandchild help and Mike gave me a hard time for not inviting him again that year.

The Church, like other churches and service groups, can be great for organizing large projects. They find needs that are too big for most of us to take on alone.  The opportunity to work shoulder-to-shoulder with others on behalf of someone in need builds an esprit-de-corps that unites and edifies. The ability to organize in order to serve others is one of the great values of organized religion. It reminds us that the vertical nature of spirituality cannot continue upwards until it is balanced and expanded by reaching our arms out horizontally to ease others’ burdens.

THE PAYOFF OF SERVING

I realize as I write this post that I missed the opportunity to explain to Mike why he felt the way he did in serving others that day. It was not because he did something his mother would have been proud of him for. It was not because some unseen struggling family would have healthier portions of food to eat the next week. It was because he was LIVING the Gospel of Jesus Christ in its purest form, and when we LIVE the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the results will follow as quickly as we let them.

The result of living the Gospel of Jesus Christ is love. Love for others, love for God, and love for ourselves. That love can be developed from our serving and interacting with others (the religion part) or from building our relationship with God (the spirituality part).  That love flows both ways and what we develop from one area will help strengthen the other. As we participate in serving God either directly or through serving His children, the love we feel for ourselves will also grow.

Going through Church discipline will challenge our desire to love others, ourselves, and maybe even God. It is very easy to harbor hard feelings towards those who have judged and condemned us. It can be hard to forgive and love ourselves for what we did and how our own actions have hurt others and ourselves. As we experience those feelings it becomes much more difficult to feel love towards – or from – our Heavenly Father.

That is precisely when we need to look back on what we learned from those Saturday morning service projects in our youth – or whatever our history with service might be. We need to remember that even though we may not have been looking forward to the service project, we felt better with just about everything by the time we were finished.

LOSS OF MEMBERSHIP CUTS OFF MORE THAN THE SACRAMENT AND GIVING TALKS

One of the challenges we have in losing our membership is that we no longer are on the email list. We do not get all the notices of the opportunities to pitch in. Unless we have an attentive bus driver, (see post 10), we are off the invite list for joining the larger organized service projects. We show up on Sunday and hear of something that happened during the week – something we could have benefitted from joining. 

I recognize that not everyone is hurt by missing a service project, but I am. For the first couple of years, I was either separated or divorced and there was not much human interaction outside of work. I appreciated having something of value to get me out the door. I realized the hurt was not necessarily intended, but it was just one more way I felt that the Church I loved, and to which I had given so much, did not want me.

In the October 2023 General Conference Elder Robert M. Haines gave the talk “Sir, We Would Like to See Jesus” and stated: “To serve in this Church is to stand in the river of God’s love for His children. This Church is a work party of people with picks and shovels trying to help clear the channel for the river of God’s love to reach His children at the end of the row. Whoever you are, whatever your past, there is room for you in this Church.”

Whether or not your ward is finding ways for you to join in that work, you can always find ways to help the Savior help Heavenly Father’s children on your own. Standing in the “river of God’s love for His children” is not a proprietary opportunity for baptized members. We can’t be in the temple of the Lord, but we can still help with His work.

Through my experiences growing up in the Church, I knew that serving others would help lift my spirit. After all those years behind the bishop’s desk, I knew that serving others would benefit my effort to repent and connect with God. I quickly realized that I could not rely on others to provide organized service opportunities to participate in – I had to find my own.

AN EFFORT WORTH MAKING

I volunteered to do the pre-Sacrament meeting wipe down of the pews, door handles and more to prevent Covid-19 transmission. It wasn’t much, but I knew the PFR guy, and taking that on meant he did not have to organize others to do it each week. From there I simply had to look for my own ways to help others. 

In the First Presidency Message of the March 1984 Ensign, President Gordon B. Hinkley said “As we look with love and gratitude to God, as we serve him with an eye single to his glory, there goes from us the darkness of sin, the darkness of selfishness, the darkness of pride. There will come an increased love for our Eternal Father and for his Beloved Son, our Savior and our Redeemer. There will come a greater sense of service toward our fellowmen, less of thinking of self and more of reaching out to others.” 

I can testify that in addition to what President Hinkley has listed, we will find ourselves being led by the Spirit as we actively look to serve others. That alone helps us in our personal recalibrating with the Spirit. (See Post 9) You will find the Spirit is still there to guide you. Actively seeking out opportunities, and then serving in ways large and small, we also make it easier for ourselves to feel love FROM our Heavenly Father and His Beloved Son. A humbler love for ourselves can grow from that.  In this way, our personal journey of faith becomes a balanced one.

AN INVITATION WITH A TEST

Whether or not serving others comes naturally for you, I invite you to seek your own experiences in serving others with an eye on how it helps your mood and your ability to feel the Spirit. Try standing in the “river of God’s love” and allowing yourself to feel something old and familiar – or maybe it will be something new and vitalizing.

Working on your spirituality, whether in the Church with others or alone on a mountaintop, is a good thing, but it will always be incomplete until you reach out horizontally to serve and bless the lives of those around you. 

And it will help you in ways you do not anticipate.