Question 5: Have you had any particularly spiritual experiences this past year? How has this experience affected you? “Spiritual” can be broadly defined to include secular spiritual experiences: artistic, cultural, and so forth.
It’s hard to say exactly what’s spiritual. For some people, it’s a synagogue or a church or a mosque. For others, it’s a private notion of a deity. For others still, it’s the face of a child in a crib, or the sound of a lover sleeping, or the night sky, or a bird. It’s a highly difficult thing to define and as a result, answering a question about your spiritual experiences can be a highly eccentric exercise. Those who have answered this question in the past have borne out this theory. Last year, one man wrote about learning to build part of his house as a spiritual experience. “I have been generally alienated from work, like many people I know, but when I put the first nail in the first board, it was an amazing feeling.” Another woman wrote about the visits she received from her recently deceased grandmother. “I know that it’s not true, at least in a rational sense,” she wrote, “but they it’s true to me. I heard her voice. I saw her face.” So what was spiritual to you? You can also, if you so choose, focus on the absence of spirituality in your life and whether you think you might want to remedy that.