Posted June 11th, 2003 by Sean Williams

Maybe spiritual people maintain this feeling, but for me, any belief in the supernatural left me around the same time that adolescence did. I remember that I used to believe in sprit guides and reincarnation, although God was always completely foreign to me.

And I must be wrong. So many people believe in God, there has to be some kind of terrible arrogance on my part, or simply shallow mindedness. But whenever people begin in on Faith or Spirit or describe anything as ‘spiritual’, I immediately start thinking they have a screw loose.

That being said, I do have palpable reminisces about belief. I know exactly what it felt like when I thought that things were happening that I had a direct relationship with on a completely non-physical level. And I think there ought to be a word for that feeling, the specific magical feeling you have when a surge of adolescent belief shifts into a sort of magical reality.

We are missing a lot of words. Shaddenfreude, and I might be spelling that wrong, is a German word that describes the sensation of taking joy in someone else’s pain. It describes many people’s reactions to Martha Stewart and I guess Hillary Clinton a few years back. Our weather words are pretty good, ‘Blizzard’ was invented in this country for the midwest, but I still don’t know what to call this extended winter turned muggy summer we are having. ‘Wet’ is all the weathermen can come up with.

My friends tend to be, above all else, wordsmiths. Some of them, like Mac and Ian and John, with professional aspirations (if being a poet counts as a profession), but most of them, like Ehren and Steve, are just fantastic word players. How we use words is similar to how other guys drink or play basketball or cite baseball trivia.

I think this is all related…

Ah yes, here’s how it’s all related. We are living in a world, my social group, where the commentary is almost as entertaining as the happening. We are rabid sharers of information and opinion, always letting each other know, in the most facile and showy terms, exactly what has happened to us, exactly how we interpret those happenings, and how much funnier it all would have been had we told the joke.

But that world away from this physical one, the world we don’t have words for, is one that we never talk about. I know nothing about the spiritual lives of my friends, mostly because if it ever came up we would shoot it down immediately. When Ian described his reasons for choosing his wedding date he gave me an obligatory eye roll at the ‘non waxing, non waning moon’ part, but for all I know he has had his charts done and regularly meditates, he just doesn’t discuss it with me.

I worry a little bit that I am missing something, but I also have this overpowering inclination that the spiritual life is just not for me. I don’t mock it, in many ways I envy it, but I cannot, for some reason, find any iota of truth within myself that there is a power greater than myself.

Probably just an ego problem.