Spiritual Gangster

As part of my youth suicide prevention work, I went down to Sunnyside the other night to present at a program called Family Links. It's a program for kids who have entered into the criminal justice system, are “low risk”, first time offenders and requires them to participate, with their parents, in a two week program that works with them on a variety of areas. I was invited to present on adolescent stress and depression and to talk about the link between stress, depression, and suicide.
Seated around the table are 3 young men, and their parents, 2 with their moms, 1 with his dad. Shortly after I arrived, the probation officer that runs the group gave them a break and I sat at the table with a couple of the kids and next to the dad, Vicente. Vicente looked to be in his early 30s, shaved head, strong build, Mexican, tough looking, maybe a former gang member, and he didn't look particularly thrilled to be sitting at the table. Vicente tried to strike up a conversation with me, asked me what I did, if I drove up from Yakima, and then proceeded to ask me questions about my job. As he talked with me, he did not fit the stereotype I had given him.
When I present, I try to engage my audience, invite discussion, sharing of personal experience and stories that we can all learn from, and I do my best to be authentic, to share at least a little bit of myself, my own life, in hopes that they will see me as someone they can relate to, talk with, not just someone there to talk at them. Vicente was very talkative, shared about his own struggle with depression, about becoming a dad at the age of 15 and then again at 17, about getting divorced, about the stress of raising 2 boys in that community, the opportunities for things to “go wrong”. His first born son is now 17 and was the reason he was there. I don't know what he did to end up at Family Links, his name is Adrian, looked like a clean cut kid, was respectful, but seemed sad, heavy hearted in some way.
I never really know what I am going to encounter when I present to parents. Sometimes they are open, sometimes they are very guarded. At the end of it, I always ask them if they feel better equipped than they did before I came, sometimes they mutter something under their breath, sometimes, they tell me a story that reminds me that this work absolutely makes a difference. No one really offered much, but I could see tears in the eyes of one of the mothers as she left and Vicente looked me in the eye and said thank you, that it was a lot of good information. None of the kids commented.
I stuck around as people filtered out and chatted with the probation officer, Paula. In our small talk, I discovered she knows of my sister through her work. Paula asked me what our “background” is, our ethnicity. I told her we have Native American roots and the rest is a bit of a mix. She smiled and said “So, the Native American, that is where your spirituality comes from?” I wasn't sure what her question was and I said, “I'm not sure what you are asking me.” She kind of laughed and said she wasn't either. “But, you are spiritual, aren't you?” I said, that yes, I would call myself a spiritual person and maybe it comes from my Native American roots. And then I thought to myself, aren't we all spiritual, really?
I shared this story with my husband tonight. He said, that no, he doesn't think we are all spiritual. I was still contemplating what it was that she saw in me that made her say that. He described a “gang banger” (I need to work on not using so many quotation marks, bad habit) and asked me if I saw someone like that how would I describe them. I responded, “Like a gangster.” He said, “Well, that is how it is with you, you just embody it, its how you present yourself.”
So, it made me wonder what does it mean to be spiritual?
Here is wikipedia's definition:
spir·i·tu·al adj
1. Of, relating to, consisting of, or having the nature of spirit; not tangible or material.
2. Of, concerned with, or affecting the soul.
3. Of, from, or relating to God; deific.
4. Of or belonging to a church or religion; sacred.
5. Relating to or having the nature of spirits or a spirit; supernatural.
I identify most with 2. Concerned with the soul, particularly my own – that's me, a spiritual gangster.