Kinship key to college spirituality

It’s funny, but writing a column about spirituality can arouse a great temptation to first craft a disclaimer: In the first year of college, the odds run against the spiritual and religious student, and failure seems almost inevitable.

Still, adaptability as well as conviction have kept me relatively sane this year and have left me with a few survival tactics for the next year.

First, harmonious existence within a college environment is incredibly difficult and must first begin with strong spiritual ownership. That sounds obvious, but this year I have found much merit in the idea of “following your own heart” first while using the structure and support offered by a spiritual community.

Spiritual community is undervalued by college students.

Since first exposure to spirituality often comes through religious affiliation, people generally assume that religion and spirituality are the same.

So when students find conflict and reject religion, which happens quite frequently, it often results in neglect of spirituality.

Common among many students is the difficulty in finding the balance between needing community structure while avoiding the mass mentality and innate impurity of any large-scale organization.

Religion is imperfect; it is human, our primary way of making sense of an unseen realm during the span of such a limited lifetime.

Students should not cease to be spiritual because they reject the ideals of an organization or the structure.

Religion can offer invaluable support and guidance through tradition and community, especially to a person living on his or her own for the first time.

Individual spirituality is the complementary process of internalizing and personalizing and allows us to see beyond the obvious flaws into the core principles that keep each faith alive.

Here’s a second survival tactic: Humans need community. Keep community.

Without parents mandating regular church attendance, sleep easily governs most college decisions. Nine o’clock on a Sunday morning is suddenly much earlier and brighter than it was a year ago.

Months begin to pass quietly while the lack of church attendance may slip past relatively unnoticed. In a slow digression between community and individual, we become “spiritually starved” ourselves, to quote a certain very clever priest. And the spiritual community does not necessarily need to be as traditional as a church.

The last survival tactic is understanding that school and work, although they are socially accepted priorities and tremendously important, are still only a part of this world.

They are distractions if we allow them to consume all of our energy. Knowledge, specialization and expertise most likely will never fulfill us without the internalization of spirituality.

Erica Maltz is a former member of the Maine Catholic Youth Communications Council. She just completed her first year at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, where she majors in human ecology. She may be reached via bdnreligion@bangordailynews.net. Voices is a weekly commentary by five Maine columnists who explore issues affecting spirituality and religious life.