Spirituality When You Reach Forty

As someone in your forties (or beyond) do you find yourself resuming the spiritual quest you started in your early twenties? Your original questions were all about life: what does it mean and why am I here?  Remember? Or maybe you grew up in a home with a deep religious or spiritual faith that gave you all the answers so you never felt a need to, or maybe never dared, to question anything beyond the visible realm.

Hmm. That is the same thing people wonder about in their forties. Well it is and it isn’t. This time you bring a whole different perspective to it. In your forties you tend to see the oneness of things rather than the “me” aspect of existence.  How do you take up your journey now that nobody is telling you what is right and what is truth?  For me, when I was a teenager I became very deeply involved in existentialism. Hey, it was the 1960s and the works of Kierkegaard, Sartre and Camus were all the rage during the hippie-flower child era.

Interestingly the upshot of my exploration got me so confused (challenging my dearly held beliefs) that I bounced back and forth between believing only in my religion and completely nixing my religion.  Know what I mean? Did you ever or, more likely, do you find yourself in a similar place? Do you find, suddenly, that some things you were taught no longer fit or just do not make any sense at all?

In my forties I developed a clear sense that religion and spirituality were not at all the same thing. I found that many people I knew were deeply spiritual with no religious attachments and that many people I knew to be devout followers of some religions had no clue what spirituality meant to them.  How did I move into a place of peace around something as key to life as spiritual beliefs and peace? I paid attention to how I felt when I attended religious services. Ah, now that is novel idea!

Rather than blindly follow the service, saying the prayers I was directed to say, doing the religious dances unique to that congregation, I really started asking myself what all those words meant to me.  And then it happened. The religious leader, in his sermon, told everyone that you couldn’t pray just any way. He said there is a right way to pray and nothing else counted.

Whoa! What! This highly respected person who sat in on prayer breakfasts at the White House in Washington, D. C. thought he had the religious spiritual thing all locked up and you had to do what he said for your prayers to count?  That remark ended my conflicted feelings about attending any religious service. 

What sparked your journey into your personal meaning of spirituality? Have you found it yet?