On any given day at Bishop Spencer Place, you could wander our community and find yourself in a range of meaningful activities. If you like poetry, you’d want to be in the Westport Room on Thursday afternoons to hear residents read their selections for the month. If you like keeping up with world affairs, the Great Decisions meeting is the right place to hear a thoughtful discussion on key topics affecting people around the world. If art and music are more your jam, wander past the Bistro for the rotating art exhibit, attend a presentation from a Nelson-Atkins curator, join an art class, or find a seat in the full living room every Friday afternoon for live music performances from renowned Kansas City musicians. Physical health matters too, so you might consider tai chi, dance class, gardening, or chair volleyball (which is as fun as it sounds).
And of course, there’s a place to express your faith and connect with other residents in our weekly Eucharist services, reflection groups, and times of monthly remembrance.
All of these activities are spiritual practices. Spirituality is where we find meaning, purpose and hope in our lives. For some that involves the practice of faith, but there is a wide range of other activities, relationships, settings that nurture our spirituality too. God created us with a capacity for relationship, and spirituality is how we tend to those significant connections with the world around us, ourselves, and God.
My daughter once asked me, “Mom, why do you work where people live?” I explained that many people at Bishop Spencer Place don’t get out much anymore, so we try to provide most of what they need so they don’t have to go anywhere. She replied, “Then why do you work there? You’re just a priest.”
Beyond the dose of humility, she offered an important insight. Perhaps she underestimated the range of things I do as a chaplain, but I’d like to think she rightly recognized what people need is not only a priest. There are so many ways we find meaning in our lives, and each of those sources connect us with what we value most. It’s a joy to collaborate with my colleagues at Bishop Spencer Place to provide meaningful opportunities of all shapes and sizes so that our residents may tend to their own spiritual lives in the many ways they are expressed.
Spiritual care also looks like tending to the needs of people for whom these sources of meaning and purpose are absent. Consider a patient admitted to our skilled nursing unit for rehab. Let’s imagine they enjoy baking, daily chats with their neighbor, attending yoga classes, and singing in church. All the sudden, those sources of purpose are not as easily accessible to them, and despair can set in. Spiritual care names the grief of those losses and looks for ways that meaning can be restored, even if it looks different than it did before.
Equally, it’s important to not push for meaning when there isn’t any. Sometimes bad things happen, we experience suffering, and the light is hard to see. It can be harmful to force someone to see a silver lining to their suffering, because so often there isn’t one. In those cases, we come alongside one another to bear witness to their pain and remind them they aren’t alone, expressing hope that one day all shall be well.
I invite you to consider the many ways you practice your own spirituality. As Episcopalians, prayer is one such way, as in connecting with one another in worship and in our parishes. I wonder what other activities and relationships you enjoy that help you feel connected to God, yourself, and the world around you? These sources of meaning are God-given, rather than something that is outside our practice of faith. God nurtures in each of us a unique light that testifies to God’s movement in the world. Your spiritual expressions are but one way people encounter God’s joy, abundance, love, and provision.
So take on that yoga class. Visit the Nelson-Atkins. Have a good conversation about politics (yes, it is possible!). Invite a friend out for pastries. Cheer on the KC Current at your local sports bar. Go for a walk and see how many birds you can spot.
There are so many ways we bear witness to the Divine at work within and around us. Rooted in prayer, motivated by love, your own practices of connection – whatever they may be – nurture a deep spiritual life and invite us to see the Imago Dei within you and one another. That process, in and of itself, becomes a source of meaning and purpose with endless possibilities for how it’s expressed.
This article was submitted by the Rev. Janette Platter, Chaplain at Bishop Spencer Place.
