When I hear people talk about spirituality, I start to think of cotton candy and featherbeds. Soft and sweet. Nice, but not for me.

I need a spirituality that will see me through those times when the road is bumpy and I’m not sure where it’s taking me. I need a spirituality that will help me be true to my deepest values when I’m angry, hurt, or humiliated. I want a spirituality that offers me a way back when I’ve betrayed my own sense of who I am and what I hold as my deepest values. Sweet and peaceful is nice but sometimes my spirituality is a slap upside the head, I need something that wakes me up and forces me to look at the big picture with re-spect and com-passion.

What’s re-spect? It’s learning to look at something or someone again with new eyes. When life and relationships are amiss it won’t help to see the same-old same old. I have to challenge my assumptions about right and wrong and who is the bad guy in the story that I have created about whatever happened. I have to ask how I participated in making the mess I’m in and then learn from the answers. What might happen if I give up the posture of “victim” and take on the stance of “actor” or even “warrior?” Or maybe I need to sit down and listen to the story that someone else has to tell.

What about com-passion or “feeling with” another? I’ve learned that it’s impossible for me to know exactly how another person feels even if we’ve had the same experience. Your grief when someone you love dies is not the same as my grief in the same circumstances. I can’t crawl into your skin, your psyche. But I can stand with you in sorrow, joy, fear, anger, anxiety, pride, or whatever you feel. I can hold you in loving kindness, accepting your reality and your need without judgment.

But it goes deeper than this. Com-passion asks that I acknowledge the essential core that binds us together as human beings. This human core is not a garden of sweet-smelling roses. There are roses, but you’ll also find some pretty nasty stuff that most of us try to ignore . When we think, say, and do things that reveal this noxious stuff, we might complain that we didn’t put it there. It was those toxic people we’ve lived with, our traumas, our suffering. While our past might have been awful, we still have face the fullness of who we are as part of the practice of com-passion for ourselves and others.

When I practice re-spect and com-passion I discover that a lot of the bumps in the road are rocks and boulders that I put there myself. Sometimes I discover some new and fun ways to go over or around the bumps so that I can move on. On this journey, the only person I have to worry about is me!

Rev. Christine Brownlie has been the full-time minister at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the New River Valley in Blacksburg since 1999.