Pneumatic Tires: Blow Them Up!

Jan 11, 2026

Linda A. Dove

In my early adolescence, my spiritual life was a hurricane, a tsunami, a driving force. I had a gut feeling there was more to my life than school, homework, Girl Guides, the dreaded hockey practice and boys. I once shared with my covenant group how I got turned off the Episcopal Church. I was twelve when the vicar insisted I go to communion class. I got expelled though, because the vicar complained I kept asking questions about the Creed and the Book of Common Prayer. Later, he let me back in, but on condition that my mother come with me. Not long after, I was kneeling at the altar, the bishop performed the communion rites, and then swung incense at me.

Talking of such church rites …. I remember our teacher asking who St. John the Baptist was. One kid shot up her hand. "I know!" she said, "He was the blacksmith who dumped water on his head."

As we're all only too well aware we can't really describe immaterial things literally, like say fairies or miracles, nor abstract things how we think or dream. We have to resort to metaphor, metaphors like my adolescent tsuman. So, today, I'll use a few metaphors to express the inexpressible about what I'm only just beginning to understand—what it takes to live a spiritual life in action or even to comprehend the idea of the spiritual.

The word "spirituality" is a noun and suggests a thing. But we UUs know it's a process, a conscious searching, a spiritual journey we choose—journey—a hackneyed metaphor but one that works for us. St. Augustine said searching for meaning and value is an innate human need and, from ancient times, the spiritual journey has been described as a search for personal truth, meaning, and purpose—perhaps the ultimate abstract ideas. We spend our lives trying to flesh out what on earth, let alone in heaven, they mean. All this takes self-awareness. But again, we can't really touch our awareness, though we can feel it, we don't doubt we have it. Maybe you've come across the famous novel The Magic Mountain by the 1929 Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann. I once ploughed through it—ploughed through—another hackneyed metaphor. The characters in the novel live without self-awareness; They are carried from day to day, year to year, in driverless cars, with no sense of direction—and then they die. Only Hans, the main character, intuits what's going on and tries not to get sucked in.

Often today, we westerners, especially young people, are cynical and secular. We feel they have no future. And many adults worry they'll have nothing to show for their lives. Many older people too fear their death. And these days, most of us are anxious about our extinction as a species. So, since nothing lasts, we don't take the Buddhist path; we give up trying to find personal meaning, purpose, or truth. We say, "What's the use?

I've already mentioned that miracles where cause and effect are mysterious. But unlike adults, kids can be more down-to-earth (a literal metaphor this time). For example, when the teacher asked what a miracle was, one kid reputedly chirped up, "It was a miracle when Jesus rose from the dead 'cos he managed to get the tombstone off the entrance.

I mentioned anxiety too. Lao Tse had something to say about this. "If you're depressed you're living in the past. If you're anxious you're living in the future. If you're at peace you're living in the present." So my intention this New Year is to do more enjoying the present and less of imagining the future—an imagining, pessimist that I am, that could be catastrophic.

You may know the Hindu saying: We're not human beings in search of a spiritual experience but spiritual beings having a human experience. Over millennia, people have puzzled over what spirit is. It's significant that the Nicene Creed reads, "And we believe in the Holy Spirit . . . the giver of life." Well, what gives life? Pneuma, the ancient Greek word, meaning breath, wind or spirit (perhaps incense as well? Pnuema is the dynamic energy that forces all breathing things to move through living into dying. When our pneumatic tire is flat, we need to blow air into it so the car can roll us forward on our journey.

Remember my traumatic church experience as a kid? Like many agnostics, my reason couldn't see how a creed or the Bible made sense and I was secular through most of my 20s and 30s. But I never lost what Richard Rohr calls "the holy longing." In modern neurological science, the right side of the brain feels, intuits that longing, though I prefer to believe it's the mind, not the brain that's doing the longing—the mind, another immaterial "thing." And now there's evidence that the heart and the vagus nerve are part or our minds. How many of you, like me, have ever felt lost because whatever religious or New Age path we trudged and there were no signposts that pointed us forward on our journey? Personally, I've always yearned for what Hindus hold as the true reality—Sat, Chit, Ananda—Truth, Awareness, Bliss.

These days, I don't trudge along various dead-end paths. I'm still not at the end of my journey, never will be. But since my 40s, I've come to accept, even enjoy the scientific truth that the "reality" beyond our physical world will never be accessible for us, walled in as we are within time and space. And these days I'm in love with the journey. A stanza from John O'Donohue's poem Fluent expresses how I'd like my journey to be.

I would love to live

Like a river flows,

Carried by the surprise

of its own unfolding.

I still follow my mysterious path round many bends, downhill and uphill. I say "round many bends" because sometimes the journey sends me round the bend! And I say "uphill" because the spiritual path is not always sprinkled with spring flowers but harbors dangerous creatures when the shadows lengthen. How many of you identify with this? At these times, as St. John of the Cross wrote in metaphor, "the dark night of the soul" shrouds us. Again, I've shared with my covenant group how I'm withdrawn at these times; I need quiet and space to climb up out of the darkness into the sunshine. It's then I mutter to myself, "Learn a lesson from dogs. No matter what life brings you, kick some grass over that s-h-i-t and move on!" And, remembering that everything has a season, my breath, my energy helps me to continue on my journey.

Carl Jung in his Memories, Dreams and Reflections used a compelling metaphor that speaks to me. He wrote, "Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition." He went on, "When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity [nothingness]." He continued, "Yet I have never lost a sense of something that … endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains." Any one among you who's tried to uproot milkweed probably knows just what Jung meant.

Did any of you watch the recent Masterpiece drama series about a mystery novel? I was gripped by it and couldn't wait to hear how the novel ended. But in the last episode we discover someone had torn out the last page. I feel this is a bit like our spiritual journeys. We all walk alone on diverse paths and we can't know what'll happen at the end. Maybe we'll find out after we leave this world, maybe not. Or maybe it's never going to be the end. And judging by conversations with UUs here, many of us are following similar mysterious paths.

And now for a few practical things sages from many different traditions have come up with to help us identify with our spirit—the breath, the wellspring of our true selves. These familiar practices are all connected. They are Centering, Emptying, Grounding, Praying, and Connecting.

Centering. Many spiritual traditions urge us to center ourselves in order to integrate our physical, mental and spiritual lives. Centering helps us bring our unconscious, our shadow, into our conscious awareness so that we can grow into whole human beings. Jung, the psychiatrist, saw spiritual disorder at the root of most of his patients' problems. Their issues arose, he wrote, because they'd never tried to identify with their true being (true being—like another mystical puzzle. Lots of practices help us center, among them, yoga, chanting, drumming, focusing on a craft, journaling, or meditating. I can journal alright. But, as for meditation, I do it and then forget to do it when daily concerns take over. I do feel more peaceful when I do it and doing it with others helps. But, I've given up aspiring to be a Buddhist monk—at least in this lifetime!

I like to see my spiritual integration more like a jig saw puzzle with ten thousand pieces I'll never complete.

Emptying also is a way of connecting with our true selves by stopping our ceaseless thoughts, perceptions, opinions, attitudes, and emotions. The pundits say this means emptying out our everyday minds to discover who we truly are—some call it our soul. I'd be interested if any of you are more successful than me in emptying out your brain and touching base with your heart and mind and how you do it.

Grounding is when we feel connected to the earth. It's about finding our stable center of gravity. Metaphorically, or perhaps in fact, we feel energy, breath, flowing down from our feet into the earth and then from the earth flowing up through our heads, our ajna. Do any of you practice with the chakra energy centers? I've done it a bit and, yes, I found it grounded me. But for me and, I know, many of you being in nature or walking outside helps ground us most.

Many religious traditions use prayer. The ways of praying include communicating with an entity larger than ourselves—some say the holy—asking for something for oneself or for others, and expressing thanks, praise, love. Even if a person finds it difficult to accept there is an "up there" or an "out there", prayer can help us get out of our own way, put things in perspective, inspire insights through our freed up intuition. It's a bit like psychotherapy when just talking things over helps to calm our emotions or clarify our issues so that we can see the wood despite the trees—again, another, among many hackneyed metaphor but you know what I mean!

Connecting is similar. Like many of you have shared, everything I've come across on my spiritual path suggests all is connected. In his book The BioSpiritual Story of the Universe, Thomas Berry puts it like this: "Each atomic element is influencing and being influenced by every other atom of the universe. Nothing can ever be separated from anything else." And quantum physicists and biologists have evidence of this now; life flows within such connections. The Christian philosopher, David Bentley-Hart sums it up metaphorically a bit like the panentheists. He writes: "All things are full of Gods."

[Exclude time is short] Raymond Carver's poem Late Fragment sums up what we call right relations.

And did you get what you wanted from this life . . . ?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

With all these practices, I think, it's a mistake to rely on reason and logic. Physicists especially, but also cosmologists, philosophers, and some theologians come up with ingenious theories about the spiritual. But, mostly, they're just theories and can't be proved using reason and logic. Intuition and imagination are much more significant. How many of you have insights out of the blue (metaphorically) or in the shower (literally) about your problems or direction when you use tools like centering, emptying, praying and connecting?

[Cut this if time is short] In my adult life, like some of you in the congregation, I've had three, what they call "peak experiences." They are beyond words. Even metaphors won't do it. For instance, I was hiking on my own in the Sedona hills. Suddenly, I had no self only awareness. I had no "I" except language can't express the sense that "I" was merged with the cosmos. Peace and bliss was all there was. To say I felt connected, part of the whole, doesn't do justice to my experience. And now I know, know, the spiritual transcends or infuses my physical being. I'm glad I've had such experiences. But I can't comprehend them. I didn't try to have them. I can't summon them at will. I'm not privileged by them. And, no, I wasn't into magic mushrooms. Such occasions are mystical but not at all essential for anyone's spiritual journey. The main thing for me was they somehow cemented me in my truth. Cemented—there must be a nicer metaphor than that!

Incidentally, my uncle expressed his spiritual understanding like this. I In his old age I asked him if he ever thought about his spiritual side. "Well," he said, "I used to love drinking Scotch but now I only dream about it because your aunty gets on at me if I indulge." Talk about the material and the immaterial!

Seriously, though, Love is our core UU value. We're all connected. So right relations with other people, as you know, are a big part of walking the UU spiritual journey. Just saying this makes me feel humble because it's hard to do this every day to day. And spiritual journeys vary. My mother never confessed to an ounce of spirituality but, in the English way, bless her heart, a cup of tea with milk was her way of connecting.

So I end with how I started—metaphors. They do matter. They can limit, expand, enrich and interpret for us how we each assign meaning to our lives. But metaphors can only go so far with us on our spiritual journeys and, to mix metaphors, we'll have to go on wondering what mystery that lost, last page will reveal. Nevertheless, without the pneuma, the energy of spirit—that precious breath of life—how could we even blow up our car tires, let alone drive the journey? And I do hope you agree with me that all of us are spiritual beings having a human experience.

I'll end with a poem of mine.

Where the Clouds Part

It's not my brain I listen to but my heart.

Heart pulses a subtle sixth sense

with wings of imagination that fly beyond

brain's grooved and grounded habits.

My ego grasps at reason, proclaims

cause-effect can explain it all.

But the unseeable, the untouchable,

the pervasive mysteries evade its grip.

My sixth sense inspires me with wonder

and delight in living, even as I ask in awe

why there's my life, why there's yours,

why there's any life at all.

When I abandon brain's logic for heart's subtle sense,

the wings of my imagination span the skies

to where the clouds part and reveal

my little patch of blue sky.