I will return to Pantheacon   issues shortly, but Holly Liebowitz Rossi over at Fresh Living   wonders whether I am using the word ‘spiritual’ appropriately in my blog on shopping locally.  This gives me an opportunity to explore this interesting question a bit more.

In mainstream Western culture ‘spirituality’ has generally been separated from the material world.  They are two orders of existence, one higher than the other.  Radical secularists just chop off the higher level, and voila! We are in the midst of a world of things, valuable only for our subjective utility.  We are radically alone in the universe, but in consolation, we have lots of stuff.  Economists are the new high priests, and when the God fo the Market is happy with us, we are awash in stuff.

Hunting and gathering peoples, and the Pagan traditions that grew from them blend these levels of spirit and the world about us.  They do so in different ways, but all believe the world of spirit is not radically separate from our day to day existence.  NeoPagans generally share this outlook.

From a NeoPagan perspective we do not live in a world of things valued only for their utility.  We live in a world of relationships, and from those relationships comes utility, among much else.  If you are not sure what I mean, think of friendship to get my point.  Friends are useful, but if I value someone for their usefulness, I am not their friend.  In this sense Holly is spot on in noticing I connect spirituality with community, but in her more critical remarks I suspect still assumes our culture’s division between spirit and the world.

American society values nothing for itself.  For me that is its major shortcoming.  For many Americans not even human beings matter much, given their support of torture and bland acceptance of children’s deaths as “collateral damage” in wartime.  In such a place getting into a frame of mind where we are aware of immersion in a world of relationships is difficult.  If we think of ourselves as ‘consumers,’ it is impossible.

Treating buying locally as an important principle is a first practical step into this wider sense of relatedness with all around us.  It need not mean I only buy locally.  As one of my commenters in my previous blog pointed out, even local merchants sell things made far away, and for most of us that is a good thing. Few are rich and prices do matter.  My argument is not to ignore these things, but not to let them slweays override the less obvious relationships we have with our community, a community that properly understood extends in concentric rings to encompass ever the universe.