2009 Spiritual Wisdom
While I was visiting my father before Christmas, Tom and I stayed at his house for 5 days while I was making cookies. My father’s family is very religious as I have explained before (they are born again Christians) and I nothing personal against the fact that they want a relationship with God and Jesus Christ. I just personally don’t like that they are so narrow-minded because of it.
While I was in my father’s house I realize that it spiritually felt cold, empty, and uninviting. I just feel like that house is draining or empty, not lively and open. I also came to a realization that the main difference between Spirituality and Religion is openness.
Religious is a term for holding so strong in your beliefs that you suffocate the openness and get so enclosed in what you believe that you can not see anything else; you then become close-minded.
It is truly amazing how isolating and pressuring it is in his house-it is a semi-friendly house as long as you believe what they believe and if you believe in thing differently, you feel pressure and uninvited. I felt because I am interested in my own spiritual journey that I was not really welcome that I was just like a worker doing my job and leaving. It felt like I had walked into a snake pit waiting to take a wrong step having all of the snakes bite me at once.
Spirituality unlike religiousness is openness and understanding-an allowing to explain other’s morals and ideals without criticisms or being criminalized for having a different view.
I personally believe in being open and honest. Here are a few quotes to describe how I feel. . .
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for
you in your private heart is true for all men -- that is genius.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
--William Shakespeare “Hamlet”