The time-honored spiritual discipline of study, outlined in scores of handbooks on spirituality, tends to get pushed aside for more popular disciplines such as meditation or centering prayer. But for me, rigorous study is at the heart of spirituality -- extending, enriching, and nourishing my life. That realization is what led me, in midlife, to spend four years in seminary. So it is with some dismay that I report that the notion that there is too much to do to spend time in study actually starts, of all places, in seminary, courtesy of a subculture of students who think of theological education as merely a hurdle to jump on the way to getting a congregation of their own.

In my current work as a spiritual director with ministers and seminary students, I find some kindred souls who seem to feel the need to apologize for enjoying their academic pursuits. They experience wholeness in the midst of their books, papers, and class discussions but wonder if they can trust that to be holy ground. My job, as I understand it, is to help them see that it is, and build on that trust.

The spiritual discipline of study may be the best-kept secret among lifelong academics. Scores of professors know in their hearts that the love they carry for their studies is their spiritual gift. But ironically, they are sometimes battered by those I call the "professionally spiritual" for being too much "in their heads" and not enough "from their hearts."

This head-heart split needs to be exposed for the sham it is. Our hearts are married to our minds. We are whole beings, equipped with both reason and emotion. To privilege one over the other is to set up a false dichotomy. People who practice the discipline of study know spirituality is more than lighting a candle, clearing your mind with a mantra, or being able to speak eloquent words of prayer. We know spirituality is as much alive at the library as it is at the chapel. And we're through apologizing for our intellectual hunger. It may not look like the brand of spirituality that's the flavor of the month, but we know in our hearts that we're like the rabbi in Jane Yolen's Here There Be Angels, who reads the Torah day and night and therefore could never be taken by the angel of death. We are studying to save our lives.

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