Leo,
I'm not sure if it's available online or not. This is an English translation of it taken from the Kol Haneshamah siddur. It follows the reconstructionist practice of subbing relevant titles in for the tetragrammaton rather than just using Lord every time, so if there's a word all in caps that's just a reference to the tetragrammaton.
"Blessed are you, THE ARCHITECT, our God, sovereign of all worlds, who shaped the human being with wisdom, making for us all the openings and vessels of the body. It is revealed and known before your Throne of Glory that if one of these passage-ways be open when it should be closed, or blocked up when it should be free, one could not stay alive or stand before you. Blessed are you, MIRACULOUS, the wondrous healer of all flesh."
Kol Haneshamah daily prayer book p.20.
So let it not be said liturgy can't have a sense of humor. xD
as much as i hate agreeing with you guys on this, i do. even the bad stuff can be attributed to either God letting it happen or He Himself creating it. i know that bashing a babies skull in is wrong or maybe it isn't in God's Eyes because it was supposed to happen? is this more or less what you guys are trying to get at? that even the bad stuff is God's will taking effect?
I think the word spiritual really has multiple definitions and that can confuse things. for example, I'd agree with p_o_o that on the one hand spirituality is "a matter of perspective or awareness. When one is in a spiritual state of being, everything is spiritual. If one is entirely not, nothing is. In between are all sorts of shades of gray." At the same time I think the word can also be applied to mean that "to me spirit is an underlying energetic component of life...all life. Good life, bad life, beautiful life, ugly life, animal life, vegetable life, mineral life, all life is spiritual. " as Juan said. I would go further and say all of existence is spiritual including the inanimate.
To me both of those definitions are equally valid but get bunched up together with the same word. That creates difficulty when trying to communicate. I also would agree with you on some level that things happen for a reason and that may tie into spirituality definition B. A problem arises when A and B are muddled together. According to B, the Holocaust was spiritual not in and of itself but because it is a part of existence. It is not then independently spiritual. According to A a witness is necessary to see something as spiritual and, as I would read it, an act is only going to be spiritual for those who witness it as spiritual. If there are 20 people running across a bridge and for 15 it's spiritual, that doesn't mean it's spiritual for the other 5. Spirituality becomes a way of seeing the world where the mundane is miraculous.
There's a third definition that ties it together with right and wrong that I would say becomes is particularly at odds with my holocaust example. I tend not to use this definition because I think someone can easily fit definition A while doing something that most people would view as wrong either because they're crazy or because they've managed to get around basic ethical principles by the extrapolation of other principles. An example of that is some of the Buddhist ideas about warfare and the spiritual way to kill that come up around I think it was WWII.
Bandit,
is what one leaves in the toliet spiritual? or is it just the act that makes one spiritual?
From out perspective as finite creatures who perceive a multiplicity of existence, feces seems dirty. But to G!d what's the big difference between poop and chocolate? I guess it depends largely on one's definition of G!d.
If everything is viewed as spiritual does that mean that doo doo is spiritual too? Is the toilet paper & wiping spiritual?
Let's say, going with definition A above, that I take a crap and wipe. As I'm doing that I remain fully present to taking a crap and wiping. I cultivate within me a sense of gratitude that my body's functioning as it should. Maybe I connect my own feces back to the cycle of life (modern plumbing notwithstanding) in that fecal matter is both its own ecosystem and that which nourishes other life on this planet that exists outside of the ecosystem. Maybe I connect my bowel movement back to the meal I ate some time ago and recognize the way my body is able to take what it needs and let go of what it doesn't need. I think there are probably a lot of ways to connect spiritually to pinching a loaf.
Would swimming in sewage be spiritual? or is that bad spiritual & would it have to be clean water to be good spiritual?
I think the bigger thing is, whether or not it's spiritual, it's not sanitary. I don't think it's a good idea to ignore those basic issues. If everything that exists has some sort of spirituality to it then there's nothing special about sewage that should attract a person to swimming in it for religious reasons. If it's a matter of perspective, why would a person go out of their way to foster a spiritual mindset to swimming in feces? (that's rhetorical. I can certainly think of metaphysical backings for such behavior.)
-- Dauer
