Re: Spirituality & relationship
Greetings!
Sure, it's a great question. To what degree do we get to ask other people to share our most ardent pursuits and avocations? And it's important! Even if what you love most is baseball. So it's fine to explore this and healthy to look at options and compromises.
Spirituality especially is such a big picture, that it is really hard to figure out who is spiritual and who isn't. It's tricky. There are all kinds of ways for a relationship to be spiritual. Sometimes it comes out in actions rather than appearances.
I have a very old dear friend who had no interest in spiritual things. Zero. Made him intensely uncomfortable, didn't want to talk about it.
But, several times he drove me to a distant church because I wanted to see it, and he sat in a pew and slept through the whole thing and then drove me all the way back home.
Then as I embraced various spiritual practices like meditating on our office floor, he was careful to keep his stuff under his desk out of my way in though it wasn't always convenient for him.
Then when I kept shoving spiritual books at him he would patiently sit and read them just because I cared about them.
Then over many years as I felt disillusioned with one practice after another, he was very sympathetic and spent hours listening to me rave about God and where I should go to find enlightenment.
Then, after 20 years, on a trip abroad, I started to learn some things about him from the people in another country. How this guy had renounced all sorts of benefits and money and advancement and success, in order to save the lives of political refugees. He just handed it over and didn't blink and never told a soul. He short circuited his career and cost himself years of work. He spent one summer there, carrying a man on his back for miles to get medical care. That kind of thing. It took years for the truth to come out, but it did. A lot of very poor people know all about him all along, and the things he did in secret that made him so tired he was snoring in church pews.
Now he lives far away and I miss him. And all those years I spent with him in his daily presence and didn't understand, all this time, I finally get it: he's like a saint.
Just a thought.
A