Does your view of God build you up? Does it give you courage to explore and be creative and make you open and welcoming to those who hold other views? Or does what you have learned about God make you feel worthless, guilty, timid, or skeptical?

Spiritual health depends on your God-view, and "spirit" derives from the Latin for "life-breath." Spirituality, then, is aliveness -- super-aliveness. Perhaps it's no surprise that a growing body of research suggests that spiritual health and physical health are deeply intertwined. We may think of spirituality as the highest frequency of life power, set along the larger bandwidth of life that oscillates as one. If we stay with this image, we may envisage our relationship to Ultimate Reality -- to God, if you want -- as the grounding of the life-current.

The idea of grounding is where spirituality connects with religion. The word "religion" seems to come from the Latin re-ligare, which signifies "tying again." The goal of religion is to reestablish broken bonds -- bonds to our deepest self, to society and nature, and to the very Ground of Being. Religion ties us again to our own depth, which is one with the fathomless depth from which the whole universe wells. This broad sense of Religion (capital "R") is the shared mystical matrix of the world's various religions (small "r"), the spiritual humus from which these religions sprout in all their diversity.

Strangely, the prevailing notion of God in our culture stresses not grounding in the divine matrix, but separation. God is seen as an all-powerful Super-Someone over and against us. "He" -- and the idea of God as male haunts even many feminists who oppose it -- is somehow "over there," while we are "over here." Between God and us humans -- between God and everything else, for that matter -- gapes an existential gap. God's very holiness is understood as separateness. All other aspects of our culture's God-view are determined by this basic conviction that God is absolutely other and separate. Rather than grounding us, our spiritual wires are left dangling.

FINDING OUR BACKBONES
Keenly uncomfortable with this gap, an ever-increasing number of people are challenging the dominant God-view on the basis of their own inner God-awareness. Jesus did so in his time. Responding to the inner authority of his mystic awareness, he stood up to outer authority. But many of his followers missed the point. Instead of relying on their inner authority, as Jesus had encouraged them to do, they turned Jesus himself into the new external authority. The time was not ripe. Yet Al Hallaj the Moslem, Spinoza the Jew, and countless others through the centuries also challenged the God-view of their time on the strength of an inner conviction. Once this process is set in motion, it gains momentum, and I believe it cannot be stopped.

Something comparable happened in biological evolution as creatures progressed from an outer skeleton to an inner one. A crab gets its stability from without, by its shell; a human's support comes from the spine within. Spiritually, a similar evolutionary leap is happening today. The crusty shells that people have worn since they were first told about God are now cracking. They are feeling their spiritual spines. Have you ever seen a turned-over beetle struggling in vain to get back on its feet? Beetles get their clumsy support from their outer shell. You, having a spiritual spine, can get up and dance.

How do people find their spiritual backbones? One answer to this mystical question comes from the realm of psychology. In the mid-20th century, Abraham Maslow was surprised to find that a doctorate in psychology gave him no answer to the question, "What is it that makes us psychologically healthy?" Psychologists had been focused on mental illness. But Maslow's question about mental health led him to a discovery as decisive for the emerging God-view as the discoveries of Einstein, Planck, and Heisenberg became for our worldview.

He learned that people with outstanding creativity, inner strength, and resilience have one characteristic in common: mystical experiences. They have had, in Maslow's words, "a sense of the sacred glimpsed in and through the particular instance" of the present moment. Since "mystic" did not fit well into psychological jargon, Maslow soon replaced it with the now-familiar term "Peak Experience."

A VISIT TO HEAVEN
The term "mystic" shouldn't frighten or even impress. Mystics are not special human beings; rather, every human being is a special kind of mystic. Indeed, Maslow concluded that mystical experiences are typical for every one of us, and our psychological health differs depending on the degree to which we integrate them -- and the awareness they bring -- into daily living.

Before reading on, check your memory for a Peak Experience of your own -- a wide-awake moment in which your aliveness and alertness reached a crest. It may have been triggered by a great variety of circumstances: a sunset, a walk on the seashore, a cherry tree in full bloom; music, dance, a piece of art; the "sweet spot" in sports, sexual climax, or the smile on a baby's face. Such an experience can make you snap out of your narrow frame of mind. For a moment, at least, fear disappears. You are aware that the universe is of one piece and that you are part of it. This unity of all gives deep meaning to all. As Maslow put it in metaphor, you visit "heaven" -- a heaven "which exists all the time, all around us, always available to step into for a little while at least." The essence of this heaven is limitless belonging.

Under normal circumstances, our intellect separates "yes" from "no"; our will separates "desirable" from "undesirable"; our emotions separate "good" from "bad." In this split-up world, we feel orphaned and long to belong; we feel divided and long to be whole. "In Peak Experiences, the dichotomies, polarities, and conflicts of life tend to be transcended or resolved," Maslow wrote. We are where we belong: at peace, at home. It is no wonder that, for millennia, different spiritual traditions have cultivated practices to catapult the dividing mind into wholeness, holiness, and health. Among the best known are Zen, Vipassana, Transcendental Meditation, and Yoga. Centering Prayer is another, building on the age-old Prayer of Silence practiced by Christian mystics.

Peak Experiences give us a glimpse of the God-view that can lead to a full and fulfilled life through dedicated practice. It is up to you to create that mystic life for which your background, experience, and talents have uniquely prepared you. And what will it look like? Many perceive the Peak Experience as a direct encounter with truth, goodness, beauty, integrity, simplicity. These will become the guiding values of your life. Above all, your life will be determined by that deep sense of belonging which softens the rigid boundaries of our small ego and liberates us to experience our oneness with all -- with all there is, and with the transcendent "More" beyond all.

A SIN-SICK SOUL
Communion with the Ground of Being (or Ultimate Reality, or God) through a Peak Experience is the core of every mystical tradition. If these mystical traditions are, in turn, the core of every religion, why then the frequent clashes between the God-view of mystics and that of religious authorities? Perhaps they are due to that transcendent "More" that goes beyond all there is. Religious authorities tend to interpret this "beyond" as "above." They see "transcendent" as "separate," and read "More" as "more powerful" -- in an authoritarian sense. Thus, the God-drenched experience of the mystic becomes distorted into the image of an all-powerful divine potentate ruling the world from above: the absolutely separate God.

Nowhere does this God image become more poisonous than in the resulting notion of sin. The authoritarian view of sin gives it a legal twist and a private focus: the little ego is arraigned before the Judge of the World. But we need not view sin this way. With a systemic focus, sin is alienation. We are alienated from Nature, from one another, and from ourselves, for we live without the inner God-awareness. This alienation has led us to the brink of global catastrophe. But we are free to see alienation as a "not yet" in the birth process of a whole, holy, and healthy cosmos.

We catch a glimpse of this potential in our mystical moments. In a Peak Experience, "the world is accepted," Maslow points out. "Evil itself is accepted" -- not condoned, not domesticated -- "seen in its proper place in the whole." As the mystic, Dame Julian of Norwich, writes, "Sin is behovely [useful]. And all shall be well; and all manner of things shall be well."

This systemic focus brings us beyond individual concerns. In a world in which everything hangs together with everything, nothing is a private affair, not even one's own health. For example, more and more people are becoming aware that a toxic environment can cause harm to our bodies. And the process works both ways. The environment can also heal. What helps society grow healthier will affect the personal health of its members. Healing must start with a society's worldview and its deepest layer, the God-view.

A WAY TO HEAL
Jesus provides a helpful illustration of how a society can be healed by transforming its God-view. I will restrict myself here to four facts universally admitted by scholars who study Jesus as a historical figure. He was a healer; he called God "Abba"; he proclaimed a new social order, which he called "the Kingdom of God"; and he taught in parables. These bare historic facts, more basic than all doctrinal speculations, suffice to show that Jesus the healer was mystic, social agitator, and religious reformer. His God-view flowed from his mystic experience and into his vision of a healthy society, reaching individuals as healing power.

Addressing God as "Abba" was rare in Jesus' time. The word expresses an intimacy that the English word "Father" fails to convey; "Daddy" comes closer. Thus it opposes the Hebrew Bible's predominant notion of God as King of the Universe -- whose holiness means absolute Otherness -- found in the religious attitude of Jesus' contemporaries. The Pharisees especially strove for holiness by separating themselves from persons, things, and situations labeled unclean. Purity was their goal. Jesus, in contrast, picks up a minor mystical trend of the same biblical tradition. Here, the intimate nearness of God determines the God-view; compassion -- rather than purity -- becomes the spiritual path.

The Pharisees' striving for purity was socially divisive. Only the well-to-do could afford to follow their meticulous standards; the unwashed masses of the poor were excluded. Jesus challenged this social order of exclusion by one of all-inclusive compassion. This found expression in his shocking table fellowship with social outcasts. The Kingdom of God which Jesus thus inaugurated is a society healed from its rifts: Clean and unclean, poor and rich, "righteous" and "sinners" are all embraced by God's unconditional love. And not only humans. The birds of the air and the lilies of the field -- all of Nature is included.

This sense of belonging is in itself healing. Should it surprise us that faith in this new worldview made the blind see, or that trust in this good news made the deaf hear? More often still, the Gospels record that Jesus healed the lame. By empowering them to stand on their own feet, he created a metaphor for a new view of authority.

Authoritarians have a vested interest in a monarchical God at the top of a pyramid of power along which they jockey for position. But the notion of a God separated from us by a gap inevitably separates us from one another and results in a warped world-view. The human race can no longer afford such a poisonous and divisive God-view.

Those whose approach to healing is radical -- which means "from the roots up" -- will always be branded as radicals. Yet an approach that does not start at the roots leads at best to a superficial cure. The healing that Jesus' hearers experienced had its roots in communion with God in their own hearts. Your healing will certainly involve the spiritual practice of prayer (see box, "Silence, Word, and Action"), as it has for mystics throughout the ages. But it may have to start with questioning authority.

The Way Forward
The great challenge of our time goes beyond religious toleration -- beyond putting up with incompatible God-views. We need a God-view that unites. Mystics of all religious traditions have glimpsed the same Ultimate Reality that makes each of us whole and all of us one. Wars of religion are clashes not between spiritual people but between religious institutions. The time has come for people within these institutions to affirm and celebrate their unity. The institutions will have to come to terms or die of irrelevance.

It may seem unlikely that we could ever find a God-view that unites the world's religions. In fact, that God-view has already been found. You can discover it for yourself by paying attention to your own inner experience of the More that gives your life meaning. We touch upon this "more" whenever we ask the three great questions that make us human.

• We ask: "What is really real?" and are confronted with a silence more real than anything else; it goes beyond what we can grasp or put into words.
• We ask: "Who am I?" and find the More in that depth of our own heart that thoughts cannot fathom nor words express.
• We ask: "What is life all about?" and find that our own living and loving is participation in an inexhaustible More of life and love.

Our spiritual and physical well-being depends on our grounding in the experience of these questions -- and in the answers that cannot be put into words. The More into which these questions plunge us pervades our being and yet immeasurably transcends it. Primordial religion confronts these three aspects of the More as one sacred Presence, but all the great traditions that grew out of this primordial matrix pay special attention to one of its three aspects.

God Beyond Monotheism
Buddhism explores more thoroughly than any other spiritual tradition the abyss of silence in which we experience the More as the ground and source of all reality. In his great wordless sermon, the Lord Buddha simply holds up a flower. All those who wait for words are disappointed; the one who understands shows that he does so not because of words but by a silent smile. The Buddha, we are told, smiles back and so passes on the core of Buddhist tradition to this, his successor, through silence.

How different from the western traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam! Take away the words, and what is left? Many students of Buddhism in the West seek refuge in silence from what they characterize as "words, words, words." Yet, as T.S. Eliot knew, "words after speech lead into silence." The word, too, can become transparent to the More. All things, people, and situations can be understood as words in which silence speaks. The More comes to word in the "Amen Traditions" -- so-called because they share the word "Amen," an expression of faith in response to the faithfulness of Ultimate Reality.

In these traditions, the experience of word, listening, and response opens up the possibility of a personal relationship to the More -- to the notion of God as personal (though we must not slide into the misunderstanding that God is a person). We come to understand ourselves as divine word, both spoken and addressed. By our response, we become the word we are meant to be. The self-understanding of Jesus as one with the Father is a new level of human self-understanding and must not be limited to Jesus. Christian mystics knew this, and Thomas Merton stated it succinctly: "God isn't someone else!"

Swami Venkatesananda offers a way to understand how Hinduism fits into this scheme when he says, "Yoga is understanding." The English word "yoke" comes from the same root as "yoga," which yokes together word and silence through understanding. Understanding comes only when we listen deeply to a word and act on it in such a way that it leads us back into the silence from which it comes. This is the pivotal point of the Bhagavad Gita: the hero Arjuna's conundrum can only be solved by action. There is an aspect of the More that we cannot come to know except through doing. It is this aspect on which Hinduism focuses through yoga.

In a wholesome spiritual life we find access to the one inexhaustible More along three pathways: silence, word, and understanding. Early Christian tradition expressed this mystical insight by affirming that "Father," "Son," and "Holy Spirit" are the one God. This implied a Pan-en-theistic God-view, distinguished from Pantheism (all is God) by the little syllable "en," which means "in." God is in all and all is in God (as the More is always more than all). But the notion of God as absolutely Other was so deeply engraved on the western mind (and so advantageous for authoritarian institutions) that this wild and wonderful God-view had to be domesticated. Christian theologians objectified mystical insight of God as triune, and projected it onto the God-Over-There. The time was not yet right.

Today, we can reclaim the Trinitarian God-view. It is a model familiar to mystics in every religion. It gives full scope to each tradition in its own right, encouraging each to learn from others and discover different aspects of the inexhaustible divine More. After all, "exploration into God" (in Christopher Fry's lovely phrase) is a task to which we must all rise together.

Silence, Word, and Action: A Mystic's Guide to Prayer
Prayer happens whenever we open up to that infinite More that gives meaning to the finite reality in which we live. In a Peak Experience, we perceive this More in a flash. However, we can prepare ourselves through spiritual practice to receive it as a steady light.

Let silence, word, and action be our guide. Silencing our mental noise prepares us for an encounter with the More. Too, we can learn to listen so deeply to what our senses perceive that the More, which goes beyond sensuous reality, speaks to us through sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. And any activity with which we become fully one can open us up to its More -- in an understanding that comes only by doing.

1. Silence is hard to come by. Most of us live under a constant bombardment of sound, taking for granted traffic noise, Muzak, and constant chatter. Have you left your TV on, unaware that no one is listening? Take this as a warning signal that noise pollution is endangering your health. "All that lasts long is quiet," says the poet R.M. Rilke. We wouldn't last long unless our bodies insisted on quieting us down in sleep. For our inner health, too, we need periods of being still. Stillness heals. A broken arm needs a cast to keep it still, or else it will not heal. To heal our inner restlessness, we need a spiritual practice that has for its goal silence. Spiritual silence is more than the mere absence of inner noise. It is the More that we experience when we go beyond the reach of words and thought. Many different practices belong to this world of prayer, called Prayer of Silence. All of them aim at leaving the world of the senses behind in order to dive into a fathomless More, an ocean of wordless meaning. Don't let this scare you. Just making room in your schedule for a few minutes of deliberate silence is a good beginning. You will soon witness how much this does for your inner and outer well-being.

2. Another whole world of prayer consists of spiritual practices that go in the opposite direction from Prayer of Silence and yet, paradoxically, lead to the same goal. There, we left the world of the senses behind; here, it becomes the gate through which we enter the More. This, too, requires spiritual practice, since normally we live merely at the surface. But when we turn our deep attention, our heart attention, to the smallest part of reality, it speaks to us. We receive it as not just, say, a dandelion, but as the More speaking to us in unique and untranslatable dandelion language. Thus we find meaning, which is essential for human well-being. We cannot survive without it. And "meaning" in this sense is not the significance of a word which you can look up in a dictionary. What is truly meaningful to you? It is some encounter or activity in which your heart finds rest -- for a while, at least. "Restless is our heart" until it finds rest in the More, as Augustine pointed out. We can tap into a second world of prayer by turning to any one of the innumerable things around us and being nourished by its meaning. All such different practices are called Living by the Word.

3. Understanding comes through doing. In doing anything with total attention -- like the concentration of a dervish's whirl -- we discover there is more involved than our own effort. The very vitality of our bodies is a mystery to us; the body "has us" as much as we "have it." When we are "in" love, we are immersed in More. We somehow understand love only by loving, vitality only by being alive and active. Another name for this participation in the More is "blessing," whose English word comes from the same root as "blood." In peak moments we are blessed and can bless. At other times, we can deliberately let the bloodstream of blessing flow through us, breathing the life-breath of the universe. The term for practices that foster experience of the More through full attention to what we're doing is Contemplation in Action.

Prayer as silence, word, and action is the very core of spirituality, the very essence of health. It calms, nourishes, and enlivens body and soul through communion with the More.

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Brother David Steindl-Rast has been a member of the Benedictine community at Mount Saviour Monastery since 1953. His books, Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer and A Listening Heart, have been reprinted and anthologized for more than two decades. He co-authored Belonging to the Universe (winner of the 1992 American Book Award), a dialogue on new paradigms in science and theology with physicist Fritjof Capra. His dialogue with Buddhists produced The Ground We Share: Buddhist and Christian Practice, co-authored with Robert Aitken Roshi. His website is gratefulness.org.

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