Do You Have “Spiritual Homework?”

Do you ever feel dragged down because you have to do something? Schoolwork, a job, chores around the house? None of these things sound inspiring or engaging, do they? Most people seem to dislike them so much that they have to put them on to-do lists, because otherwise they may never get to them.

Having your spiritual life become one of these items is rarely a good sign. But it’s more common than many of us would like to admit. For me at least, connecting to God is something that requires strenuous effort. As reluctant as I am to admit it, spirituality is something I would rarely, rarely focus on in my spare time.

But wouldn’t it be awesome if “taking time for God” was something we made time for instead of setting aside time for? Or even better, what if we could bring spirituality into everything we do? What if the things we’re passionate about—be it sports, arts and crafts, playing the piano—were infused with an effortless sense of experiencing the divine?

Is reaching an objective, ticking off all the boxes on your spiritual checklist, really what it’s about?

Stop Making Your Spiritual Life an Item on Your To-Do List

Ideally, a personal connection to the divine should probably not feel like hard work. When you break it down, the components of our daily lives—education, employment, family, relationships—all have some element of spirituality within them. Why? Because you, the person doing all of these things, have a spiritual existence. Why, then, do we tend to compartmentalize “spiritual life” as something oddly separate from the rest of our existence?

That said, it’s also no easy task to shift our perspective on spirituality from “hard work” to “enjoyable.” How would we do such a thing?

Can Spirituality Be Fun?

The philosopher Moritz Shlick had an interesting take on this, and offered a way to bring meaning into just about everything we do. In his essay, “On the Meaning of Life,” he talks about how we distinguish some of the activities we do as “work,” and others as “play.” Work, he says, has “its purpose outside itself, and is not performed for its own sake.”

This could be something as simple as homework. Think about it—homework has an external purpose: to help you score well on tests and propel you into a good college. But when you find yourself working on an algebra equation for the umpteenth time, you realize there is no inherent worth in what you are doing. You probably don’t enjoy algebra for its own sake, and therefore it adds very little to your life, outside of the grade.

Play, on the other hand, are things that are done for their own sake, that we make time for and look forward to doing. These are, according to Shlick, things that make our lives truly meaningful.

Shlick’s point is that just about anything in our lives can become play, if that’s what we choose to make of them. School can be a drudge as long as we think of it in terms of “I have to do this to get a good grade.” Similarly, when you consider your spiritual life as an item on your checklist, it becomes work instead of play; the goal lies in ticking off every item on your list, instead of purely enjoying the activities themselves. A connection to God becomes an achievement instead of a precious, irreplaceable part of one’s life, if there is no greater incentive than simply “getting it done.”

But is it possible to adjust our perspective?

Changing Our Perspective Means Changing Our Language

Sometimes all it takes to change our attitude is changing our words, even the ones we think to ourselves. Rather than saying, “I have to do this,” or “I have to do that,” we can just as easily say, “I get to do this,” or, taking it a step further, “I am blessed to do this.” Making a conscious decision to take interest in something can be more powerful than we realize. To an extent, we have total control over our own happiness. Consciously trying to find enjoyment in life, again and again, eventually becomes a habit, which then becomes second nature.

This can be applied to just about anything in our lives, including our spirituality. So the next time you find yourself procrastinating on your “spiritual homework,” ask yourself, “When did experiencing God become homework?”