I was talking to some friends the other day about spiritual discipline – not the sort that involves self-mortification – but the kind of practice that enables us to communicate within, and without.
Reading William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience has been a great help to me in understanding a sensible religious perspective on this. It is about conceptualising, feeling and then in some sense transacting with, what lies beyond us. My friends were able to do this by finding the silence within.
I have to confess I am a bit too noisy within to access this silence. I’ve found that saying ‘thank you’ to God for the day, no matter what the day looks like, is a good start. You can conceptualise God however you want, to do this.