Spirituality is often identified with the value center of life, especially with all we do to find meaning and purpose in life and connect ourselves to others by means of compassion and empathy. Cultivating a spiritual life affects our relationships and, more subtly, our thinking our perceptions, our evaluations and our ways of knowing. We all acquire frames of understanding that we trust will help guide us to the truth about ourselves and the world, but with spiritual growth comes a freedom to engage in deep questioning about our ability to see the truth we seek.

The spiritual point of view allows us to take seriously questions that challenge our ordinary ways of thinking and our culturally embedded assumptions. This was recently brought home to me when a friend asked, "Who understands more about breathing, the pulmonologist or the yoga master?" Many would no doubt respond, "the pulmonologist," and for this reason: if science is the arbiter of truth, and you want to know the truth about breathing, go to the scientist who specializes in breathing.

But there is more to the story, which is why asking questions about yoga masters and pulmonologists or about geologists and potters (who best understands clay?) is important. Such questions provoke reflection and self-confrontation. There are cultures in which people trust the deep understanding of yoga masters and potters, so what do we do with that? We might express our disagreement and give our reasons, or even dismiss such unenlightened thinking, but perhaps some humility is required. Perhaps the more important question to ask is this: "What is it they know that I don't?" Allowing ourselves to be stumped when confronted with our own assumptions reflects an openness to learning and even some deeper spiritual stirring or awakening.

Calling assumptions into question is the work of scientists as much as it is that of philosophers and theologians. William James, an early 20th century philosopher and scientist, refusing to be boxed in by the boundaries of disciplines and the artificial orderliness of academic structures, once commented that the universe is a "more many-sided affair than any sect, even the scientific sect, allows for." He then followed up by saying "science and religion are both of them genuine keys for unlocking the world's treasure house to him who can use either of them practically ... ."

On this understanding the geologist whose mineral and soil analysis leads to a decision about where to put a building to avoid a landslide is akin to the potter who whirls clay on a wheel, shapes it, glazes it, fires it in a kiln and makes a functional and perhaps beautiful pot to enhance daily living. Both understand earthen materials clay and both hold a truth that does not negate the other's.

If spirituality so affects thinking and understanding that it breaks down the barriers we have created to avoid complexity, then we do well to take James' serious point about truth that truth appears in what is practical. And the practical test of spiritual growth will appear not only in outlook and attitudes but finally in the most practical thing of all our actual behavior.

Consider a central spiritual value, humility, and how it is expressed in practical behavior. Humility has its critics and despisers, but there is no doubt that genuine humility is a difficult spiritual attainment. Humility poses a direct challenge to the egoism and competitiveness that is so fostered in our society, and if the English author and philosopher Iris Murdoch was right when she said, "Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real," then humility is actually necessary for the seeing beyond ourselves that is love.

What does it look like to see humility expressed practically in action?

In the 1960s, England's secretary of state for war, John Profumo, got himself tangled up in a sex scandal with a call girl who had herself been involved with a Russian spy. After lying about the affair and having the lie exposed, Profumo resigned. The conservative government of Harold Macmillan followed suit not long after.

Profumo never sought to excuse his behavior. He removed himself from the public eye, and for the next 40 years, until his death in 2006 at the age of 91, he worked in a charitable settlement, Toynbee Place, helping the poor in London's East End. This disgraced public official became a dedicated social worker who washed dishes and cleaned toilets, who visited prisons and worked to house the poor. When he died many considered him a saint.

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Faith and Values: Reflections on spirituality, true humility