From the Secular Spirituality website Sunchild linked (thanks, SC!):
Spirituality, demystified, is simply a natural aspect of human psychology. Much of what falls under the banner of the spiritual has nothing to do with belief in spirits or deities or anything supernatural. Rather, it has to do with consciously pursuing a meaningful life, according to however one might define what makes life meaningful. It has to do with attending to one's inner life, to one's attitude toward and outlook on life. Spirituality is the realm of hopes and dreams, of values and ideals. It has to do with seeking and maintaining balance, externally and internally, and with focusing on the non-material aspects of one's life.
Amen, sistazz and brothazz! I wholeheartedly agree. And in celebrating the spirituality in the secular, no one outdoes the erstwhile poet, W. H. Auden.
The Geography of the House
by W. H. Auden
Seated after breakfast
In this white-tiled cabin
Arabs call The House where
Everybody goes,
Even melancholics
Raise a cheer to Mrs.
Nature for the primal
Pleasures she bestows.
Sex is but a dream to
Seventy-and-over,
But a joy proposed un-
-til we start to shave:
Mouth-delight depends on
Virtue in the cook, but
This She guarantees from
Cradle unto grave.
Lifted off the potty,
Infants from their mothers
Hear their first impartial
Words of worldly praise:
Hence, to start the morning
With a satisfactory
Dump is a good omen
All our adult days.
Revelation came to
Luther in a privy
(Cross-words have been solved there)
Rodin was no fool
When he cast his Thinker,
Cogitating deeply,
Crouched in the position
Of a man at stool.
All the Arts derive from
This ur-act of making,
Private to the artist:
Makers' lives are spent
Striving in their chosen
Medium to produce a
De-narcissus-ised en-
-during excrement.
Freud did not invent the
Constipated miser:
Banks have letter-boxes
Built in their facade
Marked For Night Deposits,
Stocks are firm or liquid,
Currencies of nations
Either soft or hard.
Global Mother, keep our
Bowels of compassion
Open throughout our lifetime,
Purge our minds as well:
Grant us a kind ending,
Not a second childhood,
Petulant, weak-sphinctered,
In a cheap hotel.
Keep us in our station:
When we get pound-noteish,
When we seem about to
Take up Higher Thought,
Send us some deflating
Image like the pained ex-
-pression on a Major
Prophet taken short.
(Orthodoxy ought to
Bless our modern plumbing
Swift and St. Augustine
Lived in centuries
When a stench of sewage
Ever in the nostrils
Made a strong debating
Point for Manichees.)
Mind and Body run on
Different time-tables:
Not until our morning
Visit here can we
Leave the dead concerns of
Yesterday behind us,
Face with all our courage
What is now to be.