But we decided to clarify by taking a minute here and illustrate how awful are some of the spiritual traumas we’re contemplating in the negative end of the spirituality continuum, they provide a good reason to get you to learn to deal with your spirituality (whether you have recognized them as spiritual crises or not). Some are life-changing, spiritual self-examination can do that. For some, tragically it begins with familial abuse, psychological, physical, sexual for example. For most of us though, our experience of major spiritual events start in earnest with our teenage years of angst, the raging hormones at puberty bring it on with a vengeance, dangerously and unfairly before we have the emotional equipment to deal with it. Some young people don’t survive the pissing contests of youth and trying to establish their place in society’s hierarchy, some survive with emotional scars that last a lifetime.

But once we emerge from those troubled times we’re mostly grateful to put them behind us, and just get on with our everyday lives. Although we should, we still don’t take it as a warning or bother taking the time to learn about our spirituality.

Then something happens to start a dissonance going, and you find yourself questioning your comfortable assumptions, your sustaining core beliefs. Perhaps your world fractures into rubble around you, maybe you can patch it back together or maybe you have to start from ground zero. If you’ve already encountered variations of these, how well have you survived? Were your feelings tangled up and twisted into pretzels and spun round and round? A battle-filled divorce and how could this person you once loved and opened up to and felt at one with and with whom you shared your most inside still-of-night secret thoughts (which was a good thing until it went bad) now betray you, slashing at every soft spot and hot button issue by turning that intimate knowledge against you as if you had never felt so deeply caring towards one another? Or else a person you deeply cherished and depended on died and left you, and now, trying to let go and say your final goodbye, there’s confusing anger (but where do you aim it?), with an uncomprehending emptiness and ache to know where the beloved animating spirit that made that dear irreversibly lifeless body into the person you knew has gone and the body laying there seems to all outward appearances much the same. Or perhaps you lost part of your identity when you lost the job where you found your self-respect, a forced retirement that left you on the outside of your accustomed place in the world where you could say to others, “I’m a carpenter” (or doctor or nurse or manager or musician or waitress or an actor or whatever) and they would immediately know certain human things about you and they could connect to this and know you were a somebody, you had a real skill or purpose in life. Or, if you’re military, just being in a war zone truly and really facing death and it’s not pretend any more and your loved ones are far away and trying to cope too, that can make you soberly take out and reexamine everything you ever believed; and how much more urgent if you have seen your buddies lose limbs or get blown apart or you have suffered injury yourself, or wondered about the humanity and family of that enemy you just killed who was trying to kill you, did you wonder if he was fighting for his own sincerely held belief and hopes for family and children, or just another grunt told he must fight the foreign demons, jagged black holes ripped into the internal picture you held as your personal universe with your friends all around, dealing with 4 a.m. tossing and turning wide-awake self-questioning and thoughts, peeling down into your own self to find what is at the core of your own being, is it your parents’ versions of their faith unexamined by you, or emptiness, uncertain despair, loneliness? Or true blue stolid head-in-the-ground belief in your country, yourself? Events like war make you feel your life more keenly and bond you deeply and at a cellular level to your buddies, you try to have each others’ backs, maybe for some it was a thrill-seeking experience until there were real deaths to rip you like a personal failure. And then what good are your central beliefs if you can’t find any reason or truth or comfort in them?

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