All Around Growth — reflections on faith, freedom, and finding purpose through Orthodox Christian living, formation, and the long work of becoming. Earlier episodes available to supporters.
Ep. 527 - Exploring the Heart of Spirituality: Navigating Faith, Community, and Curiosity
•Rob Kaiser•Episode 527
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In this episode, we explore the fascinating realm of spirituality and faith with a discussion suggested by our wonderful Patreon supporter, Kyriaki. Following a call for input from our audience in last week's Patreon post, we received a diverse range of intriguing ideas related to the spiritual aspects of our lives. From mindfulness practices to the role of community, the top 10 suggestions generated by ChatGPT set the stage for a thought-provoking discussion.
However, none captured the essence quite like Kyriaki's response. She dove into the significance of fostering connections—with friends, a partner, or a community—to collectively explore spirituality and faith. Emphasizing the importance of curiosity in actively engaging with one's faith, she encourages seeking knowledge, leadership, and the ability to recognize the divine in everyone.
In today's episode, host Rob responds to Kyriaki's insightful feedback, sharing reflections on his personal journey to find a community for exploring spirituality and faith. The discussion delves into the nuanced differences between spirituality and faith, touching on the decisiveness and devotion inherent in the latter.
A sincere thank you to our Patreon supporters, Wayne and Kyriaki, whose generous contributions bring us closer to unlocking new podcast milestones. These include video content, improved audio quality, and episodes dedicated to topics suggested by you, our valued subscribers. Join our Patreon community, and let's grow together, elevating the All Around Growth podcast to new heights!
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Discussion Links:
Taoism - Taoism emphasizes living in harmony with what is known as the Tao—generally understood as being the impersonal, enigmatic process of transformation ultimately underlying reality.
Theosis - OrthodoxWiki - Theosis ("deification," "divinization") is the process of a worshiper becoming free of hamartía ("missing the mark"), being united with God, ...
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Well, hi there, and welcome back to another episode of the All Around Growth Podcast. My name is Rob Kaiser, and I am your host. Today is Tuesday, November 28th, 2023. And this is episode number 527 of a show where you join me as we walk through life together here on York Meadow Farm. And today we are driving through life together as I make my way up to the big city. Doing some errands, picking up some produce, and we are revisiting the old days today with a show on spirituality. A show that comes from our audience. Many thanks to Kiki and Wayne for being Patreon supporters and contributing to topics of the show and taking it in whatever direction you choose. For those of you who don't know and are not familiar with how the show works, what we do is we rotate through one of the seven core topics that comprise our lives. And those topics are the financial aspect of our lives, the physical component of life, personal development, our family, our spiritual life, which we're talking about today, our social life, and our career. We have a great topic lined up for next week as well, thanks to Wayne. And guys, if you want to participate in the show and participate in the upcoming private calls that we're going to schedule, then join us at patreon.com slash allaroundgrowth and support the show. You can join for free. No support required. You will see things that aren't posted elsewhere. I am getting better with how content is shared and where it is shared. And if you want to participate in that, then head over to Patreon.com slash allaroundgrowth, and you can get some behind the scenes views on what is happening with the show and support the show if you like the work that I do. And ultimately, if you want to see it go in a particular direction, then there are different tiers for you to support it in whatever way possible. Once we hit 10 subscribers, we're gonna start live streaming the show again. But I can't do this without your help. Well, I take that back. I can do this without your help, but with your help, I can do it better. So with that said, let's jump into the show topic and make sure that my door is actually closed. So here's what we got lined up for today. We have some feedback from a Patreon supporter. And admittedly, this came from Telegram because what we are trying to do right now is still build up and promote what's going on through Patreon on Telegram. And Telegram is where we've got the most active part of our subscriber base. And what I would like to do is, with people who engage on Patreon, is make the show a little bit more specific to what you want to hear as a Patreon supporter and subscriber. So that's what we're going to do today. And the show topic is spirituality. And basically what I had written was something that read like this. Okay? So I'm looking for a spiritual topic. Do you have any ideas? And what I did was I went to ChatGPT, okay, and I searched for the top ten topics related to the spiritual aspect of our lives. And I'm looking for input on what we should talk about. So the top ten topics that ChatGPT generated were topics like mindfulness practices, meditation and its benefits, nature and spirituality, spiritual wisdom traditions, the role of gratitude, mind-body connection, the power of rituals, inner journey and self-discovery, spirituality in everyday life, and the role of community. And the reason I did that was to provide some food for thought, you know, to get some ideas flowing in your minds and see what it is that you wanted to talk about. Now we had some we had some initial feedback, but Kirayiki was the one that provided a comment that was definitely deep and worth unpacking. And she wrote, ah, this topic is so juicy. Maybe the importance of having friends, a partner, and or some kind of community with which to explore spiritual with which to explore spirituality or faith. And the importance of being always curious about one's faith. By curiosity I mean taking an active role in it, seeking out knowledge and leadership, maybe being open to seeing God or Yahweh or Allah, whomever, and everyone. And what she wrote the asterisk about was spirituality or faith. And she wrote, I am sure spirituality and faith are not one in the same, but I kind of conflated them there. I think faith requires a decisiveness or devotion of the person. Requires the person to choose it unequivocally. I think being spiritual can mean a lot of different, amazing, good things, but it's not the same as faith. And in that, with her insight regarding the differences between spirituality and faith, I am in complete agreement, but no buts, I am in complete agreement. Full stop. I do want to expand on what she talked about with regard to community. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's show. The importance of community with regard to our spirituality or our faith journey. And I think maybe what I will do as I hit the road, because I've got to get on the highway to get up to the big city, and it looks like the weather patterns have changed, and some of the weather that was supposed to be here or was going to arrive here later today has the weather patterns shifted and it is arriving now. So I decided to shift gears this morning and not necessarily postpone the recording of the show, but accelerate my travels into town and figured it would be kind of fun to freestyle it and do the show like we used to do back in the day in the uh early episodes in the truck on the road. So by the time I get to the highway and maybe have a better idea of what the weather's got in store, that will be a good time to conclude the show. So I will share, you know, my journey and how I got involved and found this community that she talks about and why it is important. So the importance of having friends, a partner, andor some kind of community with which to explore spirituality or faith. This is definitely important, and this can be done in many different ways. It can be done through a church, it can be done through involvement in a network of people like the Freedom Cell Network, right? You can form your inner cadre of people who are on a spiritual journey or seeking some kind of path in some kind of way. That's a great way to connect and have discussions about this topic. It can be done. It can be done in other ways too. There was a platform that I used to use more often than not back in the day, and it was Meetup. And it was, if you're not familiar with Meetup.com, I believe it's still in existence. To what extent? I don't know. I haven't used it in a while, but I have looked at events on there recently, and I'm sure that there are meetups taking place about this topic. And the nice thing about Meetup is that you go online to find people to meet up with in person. Because first and foremost, I think, in order to have these discussions to grow your spirituality and to explore your faith journey, it's important to do so in person. It's important to have that human connection because this is a big component of our spirituality and our faith is the human connection with one another. We can read about and we can explore a lot of things online, but if we're not sharing that with another person, we're missing out on something that's integral, that this is an integral part of the equation. And uh bear with me if you hear that squealing, squeaking in the background, I've got a a belt or something that that seems to be giving me a little noise. So if I sound distracted here and there, that's my my old 20 26-year-old truck, 27-year-old truck creaking and groaning in the snow or in the cold. Um, so yeah, it's important to have that that community and that in-person bond. You can explore a lot, you can engage in some great discussions with people online, but to have that that personal connection, someone that you can hug, someone that you can talk with personally, someone who whose body language you can read, someone who you can see and hear the enthusiasm and passion in their voice that it and and it that's that's that's important. It's it's great to have conversations on the phone, it's great to sit in on Zoom calls, it's great to do all of these things, but to have that personal connection to explore these things uh more deeply and more intimately is very, very, very important. So it was about six five or six years ago when I decided that I wanted to take active steps to get involved in my community. And that was my goal at the time. I wanted to get involved in my community, so I decided to do that in two separate ways. One was I was going to do some volunteer work, and I looked, I actively looked at the various different volunteer organizations in town and read about them and learned about them and decided which one would be a good fit. I've done some volunteer work in the past, it was a great way to connect with people and be of service, and I wanted to do that again, but this time not simply to be of service, but to get involved in my community and meet other people who were of like mind, other people who wanted and were actively involved in the community. I wanted to form a network, right? And connect with people, human connection. Secondly, I decided to return to church, and I say return to church because I was born and raised in a Christian church. Um I was born and raised in a Roman Catholic family, okay? And as I grew older and began asking questions as a teenager, trying to learn more, I was met with a lot of resistance. Maybe some of my questions were seen as provocative in some way, shape, or form. And maybe the way in which I was asking them was improper and disrespectful, and I was met with the same level of respect with which I gave it, which was very little. Ultimately, I pushed back and I rebelled, and as soon as I could, I stopped going to church. So throughout my 20s, throughout my 30s, you know, I felt a little bit of a void, and I would go back to churches. I would, I would, I would do this from time to time until inevitably something happened that repulsed me from a particular church. And I was not really too keen on the way that Roman Catholics had historically answered my questions or dealt with the things that I was inquiring about. So I explored all different kinds of churches. You name it, I've probably been there, all sorts of different flavors of Christianity, and I was very much interested in some Eastern philosophical schools of thought, specifically Taoism. I did a lot of reading of the Tao Beijing, multiple translations, and other Taoist works, and I very much enjoyed that mystical component of spirituality and that that line of thinking. Like I said, this continued on and off throughout my 20s and 30s. It very much took a back seat to everything else in life. In my early mid-30s, as I pursued a career in the corporate world, that became my focus for a long period of time. And many other aspects of my life, my physical health, my family, my spiritual well-being, they all took a back seat as I pursued my career. And inevitably, because I lacked balance, I burned out. So fast forward a few years, I've moved back here from Southern California, and I'm looking to get involved with my community and I'm seeking good people. And in my mind, I believe that we can generally find good people in various institutions where people are volunteering their time, and we can also generally find good people at church. And that's what I did. I found a church and it was a church that uh resonated with me at that time for various reasons, and I'm not going to get into the reasons why. Perhaps another time we can get into a more of a theological discussion, but nevertheless, I found a connection with people there, and I got involved in the church. I began leading Financial Peace University classes at the church, and that led to a role as the interim treasurer. They thought that maybe I had a good, you know, I was a good fit to participate in the financial aspect of the church and just review decisions that were being made and sign checks and do things like that. And I did so for approximately six to nine months. And it started to grow into something that I was no longer comfortable with because I didn't feel I was suited for that role. And there was something else that was happening in my life that was drawing me towards something else. And I would, I was having, I began having discussions with the pastor of that church, discussions of a spiritual nature, discussions of what I was seeking, and and my my perceptions and views on faith. And like Kiriyeki wrote, faith is and requires a decisiveness or devotion of the person. It requires a person to choose it unequivocally. And that's I had faith in something that I didn't understand, and yet I had some ideas about how I could achieve this and how, or not not necessarily how I could achieve it, but I had ideas of what it meant. And as I pursued this dialogue and engaged in this dialogue with the pastor of the church, he he actually directed me to a different church. And like I said, we can we can unpack the theological nature of these discussions at another time because I am approaching the highway and I'm seeing more snow and I'm gonna have to focus on my driving and focus less on talking. But in short, what I was what I was talking about, and I didn't even know it, and was a word that and an idea and a concept that the that the pastor of this church introduced me to, and it was Theosis. Okay, and he told me that this was an Orthodox Christian idea that one could seek unity with God. And in a nutshell, that's kind of what I was getting at. That God is in everyone, and God is in everything. And if we work hard enough, and if we try hard enough, we can actually experience some of this in our own life by seeing it in other people, which is exactly what Kirigiki was saying by seeking out knowledge and leadership and being open to seeing God in everyone. And and I believed, I believed this, I just didn't know it. I didn't I didn't know how to articulate it. And I found this in the Orthodox Church. And moreover, what I found in the Orthodox Church, and as I began my journey there, was that an integral component of one's spiritual journey within the church involves a spiritual father, and that is someone who provides guidance and counsel to you as you proceed on your own spiritual journey, and that was something that was very important. To me, because it made sense to me. And I'm gonna conclude this episode. I'm not gonna get on the highway right now, but I'm gonna drive past it, circle back, and conclude the episode. But having a spiritual father was something that was definitely uh important and it was something that made sense because if I'm learning something new, like welding, for example, or carpentry, what I'm going to do when learning and engaging in this new skill set that I'm trying to learn is I'm going to, if I want to learn it and learn it well, I'm going to begin that work as an apprentice. And I'm going to engage with a mentor in a way that's going to facilitate an environment and allow me to learn by doing and be corrected when necessary. And that is exactly what the role of the spiritual father is in the church. And before I even learned about that, one of the things that I found and discovered in the church was the closeness and the tightness of the community, the way in which I was welcomed, the way that the priest welcomed me when I first showed up, the way that everybody else welcomed the new enquirer. And it's um it's it's it's really incredible because people are genuinely interested in the the in the newcomer. They're genuinely interested in why that person's there, what draw them there, what drew them there, and you know what they're looking to gain out of their experience within the church. And moreover, there was no question that was unwelcome. There was no question that was off limits. Everything was okay. And for lack of a better term, it it seemed like a safe space to discuss all of the questions that I had, all of the inquiries that I had, and every every time there was dialogue taking place and questions being asked, it almost always and inevitably ended with what other questions do you have? What more do you want? And we would talk and we would talk and we would talk and we would talk until literally I couldn't think of anything else to talk about at that time. And then we would finally talk about when the next time we would get together and talk would be. A lot of these questions took place after the church service, after divine liturgy over coffee, and a lot of these questions would take place at the home of the priest who invited me over to his home for coffee and pistachios and and and all kinds of other snacks and dates and you know everything else. Because a lot of these Orthodox churches are ethnic in nature, and but yet they are all the same. So whether it's Greek Orthodox, Bulgarian Orthodox, Romanian Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Serbian, um, Ukrainian, whatever the case may be, they are all Orthodox churches. And so they are one and the same, but largely centered on and focused around their own ethnic groups and cultures. And so the church that I ended up going to was uh and and feeling the most welcome in was an Antiochian church, which has a large Arab population. Um, Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian, and uh my exposure to Middle Eastern food and being fed has uh has increased tremendously, and it's something that I'm very grateful for. But above all, it's the community aspect that has formed and the welcome embrace that people have provided to me, letting me know that I am welcome, my questions are welcome, and it's really a beautiful thing. So I have found the deepest level of community there in the Orthodox Church. I'm happy to discuss the theological differences another time. Uh, if someone out there in the audience is interested in my perspective on that, by no means am I an expert on anything. All I can talk about is my own experience and in conclusion, my own experience with this comment about the importance of having friends, a partner, and some sort of community in which to explore spirituality or faith is it's critical. It's a necessary component to grow spiritually, and faith can be a part of spirituality, but it is not spirituality. And spirituality can be a part of faith, but it is not faith. They're very different, and I think in order to grow all around, we've got to always be curious, we've got to always be seeking, and always have a desire to learn more. Because if there's one thing that I know at this point in life, it's simply the fact that I don't know. So, guys, with that said, that just about wraps it up for today's episode. I'm going to hit the road, I'm gonna hit the highway, and I look forward to catching you next week on another episode of the show where we talk about a social topic, one that comes to us from Wayne, and a topic that is going to be very interesting, and I'll just leave it at that. It's a deep topic. There's a lot to uncover about, you know, guys. There's a lot to uncover about a lot of things. So all I'm gonna do is leave you with that little teaser and invite you back next week for another episode of the All Around Growth Podcast. Many thanks to Kiryicki and Wayne for your support on the Patreon page. And again, patreon.com slash all around growth. Sign up for free. Support the show if you like. Your support is always welcome and encouraged, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the show. Many thanks. I hope you have a great week. This is Rob Kaiser, and God bless.
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