With summer comes vacation, a time to change our routines and relax.  But on a recent trip I took I discovered that spirituality is closely connected to routines.  In our community I enjoy spiritually rich routines.  I have personal devotion time in the morning where I meditate, study and pray.  We gather in the morning as a community for worship, scripture reading, prayer and liturgical response.  We practice Daily Office prayers and liturgy at lunch and dinner.  If we have an evening meeting, we end the time with a Compline.  And finally, before bed I’ll often read and meditate on the Daily Light passage for that day.  But being away on this trip my routines were disrupted.  I was in long meetings all day and had to find a place to eat each evening.  On top of that I was suffering from jet lag and didn’t sleep that well, especially since the trash collectors had no shame making a loud racket at 3:00 a.m..

I noticed on this trip, that I’ve thought of spirituality as something that builds up in you.  Since my schedule was so discombobulated, I relied on “built up” spirituality to sustain me during my trip.  While I had a nice time, I didn’t enjoy the peace and communion with God I usually experience.  I noticed my thoughts turned negative and a cloud hung over my head at times.  It wasn’t a disaster, but I would have liked to have been more confident in God and more aware of the needs of others.

I was thinking that spirituality was like character.  Good character is developed by consistently behaving in a loving way.  As you regularly keep promises to yourself and others your integrity is established and you become a reliable person, someone with good character. But spirituality, defined as spiritual awareness or spiritual orientation and thoughts, isn’t something that comes out of you, but something that you enter into.  Character comes out of you.  Spirituality you enter into.

This is where spiritual and liturgical routines come into play.  These routines enable us to enter into spirituality.  They help us have a God-oriented mentality, or what the Bible calls “being spiritually-minded.”  These routines do shape us so that we reflect in our behavior and attitudes godliness, but since spirituality is something that is entered into, we can’t rely on this shaping to carry us along.  Spirituality has to be constantly practiced and entered into.  This is why the spiritual disciplines (meditation, prayer, fasting, study, worship, etc.) are vital to maintaining and cultivating our spirituality.

Spirituality is something we participate in.  It’s an action.  It’s not something you can store up.  By definition it’s something you engage in.  So if you want to be spiritually edified, spiritually minded and aware of God and His ways, you must practice spiritual routines.  I know of no other book for learning the spiritual disciplines as thorough and accessible as Richard Foster’s The Celebration of Discipline.  My experience from this recent trip makes me more hungry to master that material.