Spirituality

I’d like to talk about my faith today. I give full credit to my mother for my faith.

My mother was a divorced Catholic who remarried. Who could no longer receive the sacraments in the Catholic church, but she made sure that we were brought up Catholic. Every week we went to religious education. And every Sunday, she took us to Mass.

And if my older brother, who had been out having a good time, came in late and knocked the phone off of the wall, we went to 7 o’clock Mass, otherwise it was usually 10 o’clock Mass.

It is popular among many people of my generation (that is, people in their 60's and 70's) to speak of their "spirituality". People like to claim that they are spiritual. I have even been described as spiritual myself, by a handful of my acquaintances, even though I espouse a strictly rational, science-based world view. I can accept this attribution only on the basis of a definition that I read somewhere recently: "religious people do as they are told to do, no matter what is right; spiritual people do what is right, no matter what they are told".