Every human life is a profound mystery. Deep and invisible currents make us who we are, and the world around us is full of secret intentions and laws. One response to all this mystery is to treat it as a problem to be solved and to do everything possible to be informed and in control. But another way is to bow down in ignorance and confess our limitations. Religion and spirituality, for eons intimately connected, offer creative ways to become people of depth and compassion through embracing mystery.

The religions have a precious cargo, but they often fail in their job by moralizing, intellectualizing, and defending themselves to such an extent that their real purpose is obscured. Today people all over the world are abandoning the religions in disgust and anger. Still, everyone has an instinct for transcendence. People know intuitively that some kind of spiritual life is necessary, and so many are searching on their own or joining new churches and communities. They distinguish sharply between the personal spirituality they have found and the religious institution they have abandoned.

I was speaking with a woman recently about the craving for spirituality. I asked her what she thought it was all about. She became quiet for a moment and then slowly and carefully said, "We want more, more than what is." I've heard this response all over the world, and I believe that simple statement about wanting more expresses the need for transcendence. The object of this desire is unknown and open-ended. It isn't described in typical religious language, and yet I think it evokes the very essence of both religion and spirituality.

I have spent my entire life pursuing this desire for more than what is. At thirteen I left home to join a religious order. I didn't know exactly what I was doing, but I felt an overwhelming yearning to reach as high as I could. At twenty-six I left the order with the same yearning for more. I didn't feel settled again until I had become a professor of religion, but after a few years I was fired from that post. I read that dismissal as a sign, too, that life had more in store for me. When I was fifty and had no money, no position, and no prospects, suddenly one of my books became popular. Then I had work to do and the means to support a family. Looking back, I sense that all these turning points were moments of transcendence, mysteries that charted my spiritual progress.

In Care of the Soul I presented the ordinary human situation as full of mystery requiring a sense of paradox and deep acceptance. I recommended, as a response to our troubles, a shift from cure to care, from what my friend James Hillman calls heroic to what I might call foolish. In the human comedy we all fall on our faces. Sometimes we can laugh at ourselves, but often we take ourselves so seriously that we try to be perfect -- healthy, we say today. The comic view is the spiritual one, and that's why throughout this book I speak of holy foolishness to deepen our intelligence about things spiritual.

I have been profoundly influenced by the religions of the world. From Zen I have learned never to believe that I have grasped the truth or have understood anything fully. From Taoism I have been taught to find strength in yielding and never to believe that my conception of the meaning of things is ever completely accurate. I have learned from Christian mystics to be content in a cloud of unknowing, to risk the dark night of the soul, and to cultivate deep and ironic ignorance. Among the Sufis and Native Americans I find the image of the fool as a persona of holiness.

I sense a religious sensibility in all open minds and open hearts. It can be found in the religious institutions, in the new communities, in people searching and questioning, in skeptics, in the secular arts, and in the old traditional stories and rites. All of these things are part of my religion, but I realize that my use of the word is different from that of most people. They see the pomp and circumstance, the authority, and the emphasis on select morals. I mean the word differently, and one purpose of this book is to redefine religion, to grasp its soul, and to present it in such a way that spirituality is not an alternative to it, but part of it.

Care of the Soul addressed the deep soul as found in the emotions, relationships, and culture. In that book I also laid the foundation for a new approach to spirituality, but I gave little more than a taste. Here I focus directly on the spirit and explore its many aspects. I have a great love for religion and spirituality, as they are found in many different forms. Here I present the very core of my life experience and ideas -- a way to be spiritual that is honest, close to physical life and emotion, and not arrogant by any means.

In this work I search for spirit in the tangled emotions, the impossible relationships, and the endless failures that come along in most lives. This is the opposite of spirituality as escape; it is an appreciation for the spirituality to be found down in the depths of experience, in the never-ending efforts to make sense of life, and in the ordeals that can be seen as spiritual initiations rather than failures to achieve a self.

This book may look simple, but it is not naïve. It doesn't coddle the ego. It offers the challenge to be a person fully in the flesh while developing at the same time an intelligent and deep-seated spiritual identity. It doesn't encourage gazing at your navel but finding the infinite in all that lies within and beyond the self. It defines transcendence as getting through a divorce and as offering service to your community. In this spirituality, justice is more important than enlightenment and humor holier than ambition.

Unlike many people I know, I am not antagonistic toward the religious institutions. My mother and father have lived graceful lives of good humor and community and are models to me of the spiritual life. Yet they have consistently found their inspiration in the Catholic Church. In recent years I have redefined Catholicism for myself and find unexpected riches there. But I am aware that the official church is largely in a state of retrenchment. It's frustrating to meet people all over the world who are desperately hungry for spirit, while at the higher levels the churches are becoming more defensive and authoritarian, losing the opportunity to feed themselves and the people of the world with the spiritual intelligence both crave.

In this book I write from my personal experience as a Catholic and former member of a religious order, as a psychotherapist, and as a specialist in religion. My own Catholicism has deepened and widened so much that I don't fit well in an official Catholic setting. I hope the reader will not find my personal background limiting but more a model of someone on a spiritual odyssey who has not completely abandoned his roots but has revisioned them. While I feel an innate and ineradicable Catholicism in me, I also feel a brotherhood with all sorts of spiritual seekers and explorers.

IN MY WORK I am always looking for spiritual depth, and I use that phrase carefully. As a therapist I know that people get into trouble when they separate their spiritual search from their emotional life and their relationships. I see it all as one piece and devote many chapters of this book to the deep spirit found in the ordinary travails of life. In each case I am looking for the link between soul and spirit.

When the situation is ideal, it is impossible to tell the difference between these two dimensions. But circumstances are rarely ideal, and then only for a passing, revealing moment. We can spend half our time enmeshed in the tangles of the soul -- at work, at home, in dealing with our desires and fears. We devote the other half to cultivating a spiritual life that has meaning and is honest and well founded. These two dimensions feed each other. One without the other is inevitably neurotic.

This book is full of paradoxes and inversions: I stand many things on their heads as I look for spirit in the depths rather than the heights. I am in search of a religious and spiritual intelligence that has nothing to do with information or quantitative studies. I want to cut through to an incisive and substantive intelligence about the spirit, but I want to avoid the fantasy of being smart about it all, of knowing more than it is given to us to know. I want be intelligent about mystery and not defend against it with excessive explanations and theories. At the same time I don't want to slip into spiritual romanticism with a numb mind and an overactive heart.

This ironic foolishness is not literal stupidity. It is something infinitely subtle, like a mist or a ghost who colors our thinking and acting. As such it is compatible with clear thought and good judgment, which come from some other ghostly presence. Those who have written in praise of the fool, such as Plato, Erasmus, Jung, Yeats, Blake, Dickinson, and Lao-tzu, were all brilliant minds but they were aware of an entirely different kind of intelligence.

The point of spirituality is to find a way to break the boundaries of reason and ego. What we find on the other side is not wisdom but emptiness. The word fool originally meant an inflated ball or a bellows. The American Heritage Dictionary uses the telling word airhead. On the other side of ego is air, the possibility of breathing again instead of trying to outsmart existence. Similarly, Hildegard of Bingen speaks of being a feather on the breath of God.

It has taken me a lifetime to reach this beginner's appreciation of air and emptiness. All the arguments and examples in this book point to the last page, the empty one. Intelligence happens when you stop trying to be smart. A sense of self appears when you no longer have a need to be somebody. Transcendence arrives when you embrace the life that is given.