The older I get the more suspicious I am of spirituality as something ethereal, exotic, and otherworldly—something found elsewhere. The poet William Carlos Williams coined the phrase “No ideas but in things” to express a poetic that preferred concreteness to abstraction. By the same token, I know of no spirituality outside the relationships that constitute the daily life of my community… .

[T]he quintessential activity of a religious community is not the purveying of doctrines and ideas but the worship of the presence that has called the community into being. In common prayer and song we lay aside the burden of self-consciousness; we recount the story of the encounter that brought us together. In worship we become participants, living members of a body, rather than observers and connoisseurs.

Liturgy is where art and community life meet. Where spirit is not thought but made flesh through hands, knees, and vocal chords. In worship the stuff of art is offered up in the name of the community, not the ego of the artist—or the clergy.

Gregory Wolfe, Religious but Not Spiritual

Heck, just read the whole thing.

(via triadic)