Falling Spirits

  I have been learning in my media evangelization class this idea of the 'holding space' in religious and spiritual communities: a place where people can safely explore conflicts and inner tensions in spiritual life. Perhaps spiritual life is always going to be fraught with doubts, mainly because the term "spiritual" implies that there is something non-spiritual, such as a part of one's being that is 'bad' or impure. Doubt can also refer to not knowing whether one is performing a ritual or a practice correctly, or perhaps even sensing that the way it has been done before is better than how it was done in the past. I think these kinds of doubts give rise to the notion that spiritual life is something that can be gained or lost, rather than being some kind of equanimity.
    I really do want to explore the notion of 'falling', because it reminds me a bit about the fall of Lucifer from heaven. Is falling 'away' from a previous state of 'spirituality' necessarily bad or evil? Sometimes there is much more continuity between stability and 'falling' than one would expect. For instance, by failing to do what I feel is expected of me by a spiritual community, I may find other, more creative ways to sustain my relationship to that community. This is related closely to the idea that spiritual life can never be fixed in one way, any more than the mind can be fixed. I wonder if sometimes a person needs to suffer the occasional 'fall' from grace in spiritual community, in order to find sufficient headway to make new inroads or discover new expressions of this community. The main point however, is that these 'falls' should never be taken as ultimate decisions. It's better to just observe the fall as part of a pattern of continually engaging one's community, albeit in new or unexplored ways.