04/08/2026
Food for Thought - What Does Spirituality Mean To You?
“Luminous beings are we...not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you.”
- Yoda, Jedi Master
Two dinners ago, several of our tables took up the question, “What does spirituality mean to you?” I was sad not to be able to join the discussions, but I’m told they were some of our most connective and depthful conversations to-date. That they were beautiful exchanges of perspectives that ranged across beliefs (religious and not) but all spoke to the same common truth:
We, human beings, are spiritual creatures.
We need connection to something both wider and deeper than ourselves - something greater, but also utterly personal.
It was this sentiment that was shared, too, by several BreadBreakers volunteers from a variety of spiritual backgrounds when, in preparing for this newsletter, I asked them to contribute some of their own reflections on spirituality. (Make sure you continue to the bottom to read their reflections in their entirety, by the way - it’s seriously worth your time.)
Alicia, one of our table hosts, wrote, “Spirituality is believing that there’s something greater. It’s about feeling connection to others, feeling purpose and experiencing awe. Spirituality inspires positive feelings of joy, contentment, and peace.”
Another host, Todd, wrote, “A person’s spirituality is their belief about ‘what is and why’, which gives their life a meaning. This meaning gives them a purpose.”
Meaning and purpose. We need to understand how our own selves fit into the bigger picture; what that means for our lives and for how we relate to others. When we don’t have that sense - or when we thought we had it but lose it - we feel anxious. Unmoored. Disconnected. Maybe even helpless; useless; alone.
And, as tends to happen, the effects of what’s going on inside tend to not stay inside. They feed into the way we approach others; our pursuits, our work, our friends and family, our conversations, our disagreements.
In one way or another, our deepest social ills today - mass loneliness, rampant hopelessness, our infected discourse - all run back to that hole in our souls, that discontent, that drive to find and then defend at all costs our innate senses of who we are in the world. Either we haven’t found it and we’re desperately looking, or we’ve found it in a place that draws artificial lines between “us” and “them”, or we’ve found it in something that won’t last - and we know it.
And yet, in much of life today, we seem to have collectively decided that the spiritual isn’t something we’re supposed to talk about with each other.
We’ve equated it with religion (save it for your pastor, or your rabbi, or your spiritual advisor); with the supernatural (let’s keep it rational, man!); with the squishy and uncomfortable (oh gosh, are you going to make me sing with you?). We button up, put our professional faces on, and leave the spiritual stuff for those few minutes of existential dread when we’re trying to fall asleep.
This is why, in BreadBreakers, we include the spiritual stuff in our topic lists. And it’s why we’re starting up Soul Coffee, a place to talk about how our souls are doing, how we’ve experienced wonder lately, and what we’re truly needing right now. (Check it out on the 12th; details in the Substack page linked below; no RSVP required, though if you sign up it’ll help us ensure enough chairs.) Because if spirituality is that intrinsic to our lives, how could it not be that intrinsic to a community where we’re supposed to be our full and true selves?
In fact, I think spirituality even goes a bit deeper than that in BreadBreakers - it permeates even our conversations and interactions that aren’t explicitly “spiritual.”
Because when we come to BreadBreakers, we come seeking something good and whole, to connect in some way to that great good. We seek it knowing that if we don’t pursue the good, the world or our own selves will fill the hole with something not-good. As C.S. Lewis once wrote, “Spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”
We know there’s a better way of be-ing in the world than the fragmentation and invective we see around us - a way rooted in compassion, care, humanity, connection.
And the beautiful thing is that the ultimate Good at the center of it all will look a little different for each of us, but they all point toward the same wholeness.
For me, that capital-G Good is Jesus, the man who, in my faith tradition, both embodied perfect compassion and told me that my identity is that of a beloved son of God, freed of the need to prove my worth, to let my soul be at rest.
For you, it might be the same God, different scriptures; it might be Brahman; it might be Nirvana; it might be the beauty of billions of human beings coming together in their mutual empathy to create community, morals, and shared meaning.
No matter who or what it is, BreadBreakers points us in that direction, and when we head in that direction we find ourselves in more harmonious relationship with one another.
Pete Wehner recently wrote about the meaning of shalom, a word found in my Christian tradition but found before that in the Jewish tradition (1). Most translate the word to “peace”, but as Wehner writes, “...Its fuller meaning is something closer to human flourishing...Rabbi Jonathan Sacks characterized it as a ‘state in which everything is in its proper place and all is at one with the physical and ethical laws governing the universe.’”
Alignment, rightness, wholeness, with the ultimate Good and with each other - the very thing another of our table hosts, Albert, wrote of when he referred to spirituality as a “disciplined effort to align one’s character with reason, humility, and the natural order of things.” That Todd from earlier pointed to when he wrote of spirituality in his life, “Believing that we are all connected and that there are truths independent of belief, I seek to find and understand those truths so I can live in accordance with them.”
And the best news of all - we can travel in that direction together, knowing we won’t ever fully get there (not in this lifetime anyway), but that there’s goodness in the traveling. In both BreadBreakers and in Spirituality, we find that imperfection is baked in. As yet another table host wrote of their spiritual journey:
“I feel freer now—no longer needing to be on my ‘A game’ at all times. It’s okay to make mistakes, to fall short, and to trust that growth continues. Spirituality is helping me accept where I am in life and reminding me that meaningful relationships and everyday beauty matter far more than perfection. Wow!”
Wow, indeed.
So wherever you are in life; whatever spirituality means to you; whatever your Good is - let’s acknowledge it. Let’s talk about it. And let’s travel toward it together.
And don’t forget to check out the full versions of what our volunteers wrote! Their reflections are just below my signature.
All the best,
Michael Graham
P.S. - You can learn more about Soul Coffee coming up on the 12th, and our community dinner on April 22nd on the Substack version of this newsletter: https://breadbreakers.substack.com/p/what-does-spirituality-mean-to-you
(1) https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/us-conflict-society-unity/686274/
Luminous beings are we...not this crude matter.
