Annie Dillard

" 'Spiritual path' is the hilarious popular term for those night-blind mesas and flayed hills in which people grope, for decades on end, with the goal of knowing the absolute. They discover others spread under the stars and encamped here and there by watch fires, in groups or alone, in the open landscape; they stop for a sleep, or for several years, and move along without knowing toward what or why. They leave whatever they find, picking up each stone, carrying it a while, and dropping it gratefully and without regret, for it is not the absolute, though they cannot say what is. Their life's fine, impossible goal justifies the term 'spiritual.' Nothing, however, can justify the term 'path' for this bewildered and empty stumbling, this blackened vagabondage -- except one thing: They don't quit. They stick with it. Year after year they put one foot in fron of the other, though they fare nowhere. Year after year they find themselves still feeling with their fingers for lumps in the dark."
"'Only by living completely in the world can one learn to believe. One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself--even to make of oneself a righteous person.' Dietrish Bonhoeffer wrote this in a letter from prison a year before the Nazis hanged him for resisting Nazism and plotting to assasinate Hitler."

From Annie Dillard's For the Time Being