The point of departure for this integrating reflection was growing awareness of my personal sense of desire for a different/ enhanced experience, of my own personal Everyday Spirituality as I contemplated the shape and character of my own Future Story. Non-obviously related was a SEER- group member’s comments that some of our discussions about Future Story, generally, and our own specifically, “was much ado about nothing” (paraphrased). These two things led me to review both Joan Chittister’s book about call, Following the Path (2012) and David Keirsey’s widely respected book about and entitled Please Understand Me II: Temperament, Character, Intelligence (1998): the culmination to that date of his personality theory. Although I intuitively new that each contributed, perhaps non-obviously, to foundational elements of what NEW FUTURES characterizes as our Everyday Spirituality, I had lost track of its relationship to my personhood.
To give a hint as to what I found: (1) I cannot be other than my temperament, nor (2) engage my later life in any significant way differently than my maturing personality will allow in this time and place, location and ministry, to which I have been called, and have committed myself. Therefore (3) the “different/enhanced” experience I found myself desiring, and I encourage others to remember, would not come through the addition of traits from other temperaments or character, but only through psychospiritual maturation of the one I have.
Thus, after all I’ve read and written about Everyday Spirituality generally, and mine specifically, I am reminded that happiness, contentment, and fulfilment lies not in adding more or different to what I’ve done and been, but in the necessity to mature in the life I have been pursuing through all its ups and downs to date; and in the spirit and values that have brought me to my here and now.