Spiritual musings

This came from an old email exchange last with my friend Terty Biddlington and I quiet like it:

"'A quote from my choir mistress that points to a use of the word spiritual:

"Yes, it's amazing how singing together engenders such good feeling. I think a combination of the physical (deep breathing which oxygenates and calms), the mental (brain busy concentrating on harmonies, so too absorbed to worry about life/ourselves) and the emotional (lovely bonding experience) and sometimes I think we can reach the spiritual, when we're singing a powerful song and there's so much good intent in the room, it does raise us all up."

I suppose I can't really separate out my experience of singing in this choir, of being at a Quaker Meeting, of some times receiving Holy Communion, of being in a prayer room at York or Durham Cathedral, or perish the thought at Callanish stone circle on the Hebrides or cycling home with my eyes on the stars in Orion. It's all spiritual for me and its all about feeling blessed, feeling Created and thankful and so I am led to praise my Creator and figure stuff out about that. I guess I am saying that my religion starts with experience that I can only describe as spiritual and then stumbling towards/groping for a context to make sense of it. For years (around 1971) all I had was Wordsworth's poetry to explain to myself what I was experiencing, then it was New Age ( around 1981) and finally Quakers (1990) and then I found that I could make my uneasy peace with Anglicanism."' (Although I keep thinking I should just quit the C of E over Gays, Lesbians and Woman).