Last month, an Alfred State College student, who was working on a project concerning “spiritual life in the Alfred area,” contacted me to request an interview. Although I am hardly an authority on such matters, I agreed to speak with him. His questions, submitted in advance, struck me as serious and provocative. Foremost among them was the question, “Why do you think it is important for students to explore spirituality while in college?”
However well formulated, that question contains a debatable premise and an ambiguous abstraction. As it happens, I would concur with the underlying assumption: that exploring “spirituality” while in college is important. But I would note, first, that the abstract concept “spirituality” may or may not be linked to organized religion. Non-competitive swimming, for example, can be experienced as a meditative activity. Likewise cooking, writing, drawing, gardening, and other human pursuits. Second, I would suggest that “exploring spirituality” will be of limited value if it only involves adopting a set of beliefs but doesn’t integrate a regular practice into the practitioner’s daily round. With those qualifications in mind, I reinterpreted the question as, “What might be the benefits of exploring a spiritual practice during a student’s college years?” To that re-framed question, I offered three responses.
A Refuge
During my years of teaching at Alfred University, I was often aware of the pressures, emotional and intellectual, to which conscientious students were being regularly subjected. Most obvious were the academic pressures, especially on those whose scholarships were based on maintaining a high grade-point average. Many of those same students were working part-time jobs; most were juggling academic demands with social obligations and extra-curricular activities. Beyond that, all were navigating a path toward a promising but uncertain future. Along the way, they were responding to the multiple and sometimes conflicting expectations of their parents, their peers, their professors, and their fluid personal relationships. Little wonder that many suffered from chronic anxiety.
From all such pressures, a spiritual practice can provide a welcome refuge. In times of crisis, it can afford solace and support. And even on ordinary days, it can provide a young person with a “home from home,” as the Irish say, and a way of reconnecting with his or her inner life. Beyond personal restoration, a daily practice can also introduce the practitioner to the silence, the stillness, and the mystery at the heart of being. And over time, it can acquaint the dedicated practitioner with what the Zen priest Norman Fischer has called “that which is beyond [ourselves] and holds [us] in its embrace.”
A Path to Maturity
It is sometimes assumed that as we grow older, we become more mature. Comforting though it is, that assumption is not always borne out by experience. In most spiritual traditions, including Zen, it is understood that the qualities of a mature person do not magically manifest of their own accord. They must be cultivated. Among the most salient of those qualities are the strength to face difficult and sometimes painful realities; the courage to accept responsibility for one’s words, deeds, and even thoughts; the realism to acknowledge one’s personal, physical, and temperamental limitations; the empathy to temper egocentric desires with regard for other people’s feelings and needs; and the discipline to restrain hedonistic impulses in the service of the common good. These and other qualities of a mature person can be developed through regular, systematic spiritual practice. Attaining full maturity—becoming fully human—is a continuing challenge at any stage of life. To undertake a spiritual practice during one’s undergraduate years not only nourishes the practitioner’s evolving maturity. It can also provide a sound basis for future development.
A North Star
It is fair to say that American college students come from a wide variety of moral backgrounds. Their ethical training may have been narrow, strict, and rigid, on the one hand, or vague, lax, and virtually non-existent, on the other. A daily spiritual practice, if conducted in a spirit of openness and flexibility, can provide a moral compass somewhere between those extremes. Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh placed great importance on the ethical framework of Zen practice, which he often likened to a North Star. Rather than view the “precepts,” as they are called in Zen, as an inflexible code of conduct or a set of moral absolutes, he saw them as an ethical destination. By keeping the precepts firmly in mind as we speak, act, and make crucial decisions, we can stay on course toward that distant destination.
All the great spiritual traditions rest on moral foundations. By studying, absorbing, and thoughtfully interpreting those foundations, students can learn to respond to each new situation in a manner consistent with both the particulars of that situation and their deepest moral intentions. That, alone, is reason enough to “explore spirituality” during one’s college years, when life-decisions are being made, and untried graduates are poised to enter the wider world.
_______
Norman Fischer, Taking Our Places: The Buddhist Path to Truly Growing Up (Harper/SanFrancisco, 2003), 121.
Image: Polaris, by steviep87 CC
One Time, One Meeting 