Mary Ann:Spiritual literacy is the ability to read the text of your own lives for spiritual meaning. That means looking at the things you encounter, the animals you encounter, the people, the places where you are, looking at your relationships, looking at all your activities and seeing that within them there is a significance and meaning. The medieval monks used to say that the world was liber mundi, a book to be read. In Islamic tradition, they will say that everything is a letter from God that you're supposed to read. If you're Native American and you walk through the wilderness, they talk about "reading sign." So if a bird appears, it has meaning. That bird is a sign. So spiritual literacy is recognizing that everything you encounter in your daily life is a sign that can be read.

And many different traditions embrace this idea?

Yes, I think it is a thread throughout all the spiritual traditions and it's really almost like a template on experience. In the book we talk about how we often look at life through a haze filter, like a filter a photographer will put on a lens. The idea of spiritual literacy is that you don't really change the scene you're looking at through the lens but you eliminate some of the haze in front of it so that the colors are richer and life seems deeper.

William Blake tells us that if the doors of perception were cleansed, we would see life as it truly is: infinite.

Yes. Exactly. That is what spiritual literacy is about: The ability to see clearly.

You point out that children and indigenous cultures are accustomed to reading life in a spiritual way. Why is that?

I think the cultures of a lot of indigenous people encourage spiritual literacy. They encourage a person to, for example, read the weather from the position of the clouds or from the wind in the trees. They would encourage someone to talk about their dreams and some of the other ways in which the imaginal worlds comes into consciousness. o these are all parts of spiritual literacy that are ingrained in those cultures. With children it is simply that they look at life with openness and wonder. There is an attention that children will bring to whatever they are doing that are markers of spiritual literacy.

Being able to look at the world with awe.

Right. Awe. Wonder. Enthusiasm. There is a wonderful story in the book about a child who gets the part of the Bethlehem star in Christmas pageant and she bursts into her mother's house after the first rehearsal with a sandwich board star on her body and her mother says, "What do you do in the play?" and the little girl says, "I just stand there and shine." That's precisely spiritual literacy: to believe that you can go through life, standing and shining, and being open to experience. Enthusiasm means to be part of the breath of God.

Do you think as a modern society we compartmentalize our experience of spirituality, meaning we relegate our religious experience to one day of the week when we go to church or temple?

I'm not sure why we do that because it doesn't seem to be consistent with what the great spiritual teachers over the years have taught us. But I think it is definitely true that we have made the Sabbath of whatever tradition a day of special observance and the rest of the time we forget about our spirituality. The trend I see now is people really looking for a way to bring spirituality out of the heavens, out of the ethereal, out of the abstract and into everyday experience.

Do you think as a modern society we compartmentalize our experience of spirituality, meaning we relegate our religious experience to one day of the week when we go to church or temple?

I'm not sure why we do that because it doesn't seem to be consistent with what the great spiritual teachers over the years have taught us. But I think it is definitely true that we have made the Sabbath of whatever tradition a day of special observance and the rest of the time we forget about our spirituality. The trend I see now is people really looking for a way to bring spirituality out of the heavens, out of the ethereal, out of the abstract and into everyday experience. Of course whenever you start to get experiential you start to get everyday. Then you have to figure out why playing with your dog is a spiritual experience or cooking dinner is a spiritual experience. Or eating alone or with someone else is a spiritual experience. Everything that you do can be a spiritual experience if you look at in a certain way.

Can spiritual literacy be translated simply as "mindfulness" or "consciousness" as we perform an activity in our daily lives?

Some spirituality is about those type of practices. In fact when Fred and I were putting together this book of 650 spiritual readings on everyday life, we discovered that, when we were going through deciding what passages to include, we needed to define what made the passages we chose specifically spiritual. So to get to that point we began to talk about different indicators or markers of spirituality and that became what we call the "Alphabet of Spiritual Literacy." We look at elements like "Attention." If a passage revealed that someone is being attentive then it becomes a spiritual reading. We have passages about beauty, passages about being present and coming into your senses. Those are spiritual practices. Now, those three are concepts that you associate more with Eastern spirituality than Western spirituality. But we also have "Compassion," "Faith," "Grace," and "Gratitude" which cut across all the spiritual traditions. We have "Devotion" which is very important in Judaism but cuts across all the traditions. The "Alphabet of Spiritual Literacy" became the backbone of the book. It became our way of identifying why something was a spiritual experience. And when we finished the book, we decided to categorize all the excerpts according to the alphabet practices for the index. So if you look in the index under "play", for example, you'll find all the examples for the different chapters about the spirituality of play. I was very pleased by this because I was able to categorize and see how these different practices were illustrated by the book.

What about this modern phenomenon of dismissing everything blessed or amazing that happens in our life as merely "coincidence?" Instead of seeing the spirituality in a specific experience, we tend to pass it off with skepticism, calling it coincidental.

It's interesting because I think a lot of spiritual teachers would say that nothing happens by chance, that there are no coincidences, that coincidences are something that are part of a divine plan. Of course, we also have free will so you can get theological about it all. But I think it is unfortunate that we as a society are willing to dismiss things as being "flaky," for instance, or say it's just coincidence. Why not just go the other direction and say "this [experience] has deep meaning?" Everything has deep meaning and when you start to look at life that way, your whole perspective on life changes.

What about the person who says "I don't have time to look at my life spiritually!" I have kids, I have laundry, I barely have enough time for myself or my partner. Are you saying that everything, even the drudgery in life, can be a spiritual experience?

Actually, we do have sections in the book that cover just that. We have sections on the spiritual experience of sorting socks and doing chores. First of all, you don't have to start by making a spiritual reading of everything that happens in a day. The last chapter of the book is called "A day in a spiritual life" and in it, we have 50 different examples of things that could happen to you on a typical day and how you can look at them spiritually. So what I like to think of is that it only takes a few spiritual moments to make things seem a lot more meaningful overall. Just look for a few moments. There is a passage in the book about a man ironing a shirt and how he uses this experience as a way of connecting with the woman from his childhood who taught him to iron. He uses the experience of ironing as a pause in his day, as a meditative period. He also uses it for a practice of attention because when you iron you have to pay attention to the details. So there's three practices right there from simply ironing a shirt: Being present, connection and attention. To simply recognize and name what you're doing, then you have more spirituality infusing in it. If the kids are screaming and the TV is blaring and the soup is burning, those are kind of like shadow experiences. That is a time for you to step back and ask is there anything I can do to slow down? Is there anything I can do to reframe this experience and learn from it?

It also seems like people today are addicted to "busyness" because we're afraid of sitting with ourselves. We fill our lives with so much stimuli and activity so we can't possibly pause and experience a moment.

Busyness and distraction are two of the blocks to literacy that we talk about in the book. Another one we've just mentioned is cynicism. This idea that "oh, you're reading too much into a certain experience." And cynicism is also reflected in this "lighten up" idea. You know, people who say "lighten up! This isn't brain surgery!" I love that expression because it's saying that somehow something can't be serious unless it's a matter of life and death like brain surgery! But there are lots of serious things in life that are not life and death experiences.

What about the charge that this whole practice is a little too idealistic? That looking at the world in a spiritually literate way is to wear rose-colored glasses?

This book is not about being Pollyannish. Something we worked into the book deliberately was the idea of the "shadow" self. In the spiritual traditions, this would be called sin or evil. It's this idea that there is a part of all of us that we deny, that we don't like, that we sometimes dislike so intensely that we project it onto someone else and we do that as society to other ethnic groups and to other nations. What we're saying with the practice of shadow is that you have to recognize these elements in yourself and deal with them. There is a line in the book from Richard Rohr who says that in spirituality, there is nothing that doesn't fit, everything belongs, including these shadow elements of ourselves.

The Yin and Yang.

Exactly. And he quotes St. Francis of Assisi who said you have to love the leper within. For example, many people have a romanticized view of nature. They have awe-filled experiences in nature and come to a whole reverence for life. At the same time, you don't want to romanticize nature to the point that you've made it into some sort of false idol because nature has downsides too. It has tornadoes, floods, hurricanes and brutality. We have a passage in the book from Richard Bass who lives in Montana about why you shouldn't go out in a blizzard to get wood for your woodstove because you might not find your way back. In our chapter about animals, we have a really powerful passage by Mary Oliver about how the great-horned owl likes to eat the brains of rabbits and kittens. And then she concludes that the world that this owl lives in is the same world she lives in. There is a unity of all creation. This is just the way this owl is. There is an openness there and a respect for the mystery of the world. That's an important part of the book and I think it's something that people coming out a deep religious tradition will understand. It hasn't been emphasized as much in the kind of freelance spirituality of positive living that we see these days. But certainly anyone deeply rooted in any one of the traditions would recognize it.

This book gives people a grounded approach to spiritual practice and gives people daily activities that they can do on their own, or with their families or neighbors, in order to integrate some of the "Alphabet of Spirituality" that you talk about in your book.

We didn't want to just give examples from great writers writing on spiritual experiences. We wanted to point out that this is available to all of us and it is not difficult. It doesn't require that you climb the ladder of enlightenment. Anyone can practice spiritual literacy on a daily basis. At the end of each chapter we have a couple pages of exercises called "Practicing Spiritual Literacy". Some of them are journal exercises. Some of them are conversation topics. Some of them are household projects and we always try to include some that could be done with children. And then we have activities that are more traditional spiritual exercises: blessings, rituals, prayers, studies of some of the spiritual concepts like the Sabbath, for example. Once again, we are saying that everyone can practice spiritual literacy and we hope that people will use the passages to think more closely about what they can do in their daily lives. There are rituals spread throughout the book, like the ritual of blessing a new house, and we are hoping that these very specific examples that are written out will encourage people to start doing some of these practices themselves.

And it seems these examples of rituals are a great way for people to begin to reinvest their own family traditions with their original meaning. Thanksgiving and Christmas have, for the most part, become rather hollow markers of an occasion but the meaning itself has been lost.

>And it doesn't take much to reinvest the meaning back into a family ritual. Take something like Christmas, for example. You can simply add the practice of connections to the experience. You can think about all the ways your family throughout history has celebrated Christmas and then you are connecting with your ancestors. For example, I'm not just making this particular dish at Christmas because I always make it around the holiday time but when I make this dish, I connect with my grandmother because it's her recipe. You can also connect with what is symbolically important to you by the kind of gifts you give during the holidays. Or you can connect with the people in your community by volunteering your time or giving extra contributions during Christmas. You can also connect with your faith tradition by the extra worship services at that time. So there are many ways to make holidays rich with spiritual practice.

Do you have a favorite passage in this book?

Oh, there are so many! I think that a favorite concept in the book is the idea that, no matter what religious tradition we come from, we need to expand our concept of what we consider spiritual in our lives. Brother David Steindl-Rast has a wonderful passage in the book in which he says that spirituality is a vital awareness in your life and it is the part of your life where you come alive. So if you come alive in creative pursuit like music or art , that's where you are spiritual. If you come alive in your relationships or in your partnerships, then that is where you are being spiritual. Some people come alive when they are at work. Some people come alive when they are caring for animals. Or they come alive and feel that vital awareness when they are in nature. The point is to start to point and identify the area in your life in which you feel most alive and recognize that as spiritual connection. You're connecting to something greater than yourself there that is nourishing you. You are connecting to something that is sacred. Once you find that one area, you can start expanding it to other areas of your experience and I think it's just a very simple way to say that no matter how busy you are, no matter how distracted, how pressured, you can find one moment every day in which you feel alive. That's the point. To find that, treasure that, and then extend it to other areas.

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