Spirituality at the Sanctuary
Spirituality at the Sanctuary
The teaching is simply: “I have arrived, I am home.”
When we are able to apply that to our daily life, we will not run anymore. Then every minute of our life can help generate the energy of solidity, peace, and compassion. Spirituality is something we can cultivate. To be spiritual means to be solid, calm, and peaceful, and to be able to look deeply inside and around us. It means having the capacity to handle our afflictions – our anger, craving, despair, and discrimination. It is being able to see the nature of interbeing (interdependency) between people, nations, races, and all forms of life. Spirituality is not a luxury anymore; we need to be spiritual in order to overcome the difficulties of our times. Thich Nhat Hahn
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What makes the spiritual vision of the Sanctuary unique is the emphasis on the connection between spiritual reality, environmentalism, and inclusiveness. From the beginning, the emphasis at the Sanctuary has been on inclusiveness – not mere tolerance, but the engagement, conversation, and celebration of diverse faiths, and approaches to faith.
Our key spiritual mission lies in creating space to foster the inclusive search for sacred meaning and personal transformation. The Sanctuary could thus be described as promoting an integral vision of spirituality: the fundamental truth of all religions, faiths and mystical traditions.
We see spirituality as something not merely to be pursued and experienced in ritual, prayer, or meditative union with sacred meaning, but in works. A spiritual, reverential attunement to life naturally unfolds into practice, expressing itself in and through the ways we nurture our relationships to other living beings, to our unions of cooperation and identity, to the cosmological origins and destinies of our lives together, to our deepest selves.
We discover the Divine in service to our local communities, in holistic, healthy, mindful living and relationships, in nurturance for all life, in reducing our environmental footprint, and in intergenerational, communal, integrated, continuing education.
Our integral spirituality is practiced, developed and sustained at the Sanctuary generally by our attempt to use the resources and community of the Sanctuary to foster a deeper level of partnership between the human and non-human living beings within the larger biotic-spiritual community.
The more specific content of that interfaith spirituality is something which is being determined through an ongoing process of dialogue amongst the members of the Sanctuary community.