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To talk about a person’s spirituality is to examine a great deal more than their theology. Theology is
that system of beliefs that gives coherence to religion. It explains and relates and inquires and defines.
It pursues abstractions and concepts and systems. It explains the unexplainable and does it with great
certainty. But in the end, it really does little to bridge the gap between wonder and surety. It simply
begins in faith and ends in mysteries reduced to the reasonable.

Spirituality, on the other hand, is what shows when no one is asking academic questions. Spirituality is
the very fabric and texture of the soul. It does not explain religion, it demonstrates the presence of
the sacred in life.

I have watched a Jain nun lift a ladybug out of harm’s way on a set of public stairs. I have seen a
Buddhist monk drink tea. I have heard monastics chant. I have seen Indian peasants walk up a
mountainside on their knees to honor the place of the mother of Jesus in their hearts. I did not, as a
result of any of these, understand what it means to be a creature or come away knowing the sutras
that underlie the Buddhist way of life, or learn a catechism by watching any of them. But in the very
act of crawling toward heaven, or gentling the bug out of the way, or caressing the tea bowl, or
murmuring the endless rounds of chants, I saw the spirituality that impels them all. I saw awareness, I
saw reverence for life, I saw globalism in miniature, I saw the shadow of the magnetized heart.

To those whose spirituality is holy search, we owe a great deal. They ask the unspoken and
unspeakable questions, they bite the forbidden fruit, they commit the happy fault of which the Easter
Exultet speaks, they scan the stars of heaven for us all and, in the end, their search shows us the way
to conscience, to commitment, to nothing but the pursuit of truth.