Today is Pancake Day.

• Pancake: ukgate.com

This day is also known as Shrove Tuesday.

• Shrove Tuesday: mariannedorman.homestead.com

Until today, I have never made a connection between the two. I have lived in this country for six years now. Yet, I didn't know what Shrove Tuesday was. I'd definitely heard of pancake day before. Perhaps you knew the significance of today and perhaps you didn't.

How completely the separation of church from the people has occurred. Shrove Tuesday has a spiritual significance: it is a day of confession. The pancake tradition is derived from using up ingredients involved before they would not be used for Lent. Many similar traditional days peppering the Western annual calendar that have their spiritual significance wiped out or reduced.

Strange how a nation clings on to these days that no longer have any real meaning to them.

Well, they should have no meaning to them. Yet, a nation clings. These holidays are kept with all their accoutrements including their moral significance, but with a studious avoidance of any religious reference. You cannot turn your back on the religious tradition you have come from. The patterns of your calendar, the values you uphold and the law of the land are all derived from an ethics routed in religious belief. Without Christianity, your identity is impossible, even though you may not be Christian. You cannot completely wipe out Christianity, because it is who you are.

Notice the emphasis on feeding the body and pleasing it that these various days have taken on, or perhaps all that remains once you remove spirituality. Easter is for chocolate. Christmas is for gift giving and copious feasting. Don't forget Pancake Day.

As human beings, I do believe we have needs and wants that we are compelled to feed. Disobeying these compulsions is both difficult and unpleasant. These are all things basic to our nature. Obeying them is the fulfillment of natural behaviour. You cannot control what you need and want as a human being any more than you can control being born with two eyes.

There is those of the body: for sleep, nutrition, comfort, physical pleasure, adrenaline rushes, social contact and material objects.

There are compulsions of the mind. Our minds cry out for stimulation, for rationality, for control, for understanding, for stability and security.

These are wants and needs universally acknowledged modernly. What is not modernly acknowledged and most certainly not emphasised is the desire for spirituality as fundamental to human nature. Spirituality is viewed as a choice, as a personal preference, as a luxurious indulgence of emotion and thought. To quote the quotation that is always quoted, it is regarded as the 'opiate of the people'. (I should someday read the quotation in its original context. Keep that in mind that as I give it a small treatment below.)

In some ways, that quotation is apt. You manufacture your own opiates within your body; you have receptors for them in your nerves. Part of the human experience is to experience the effect of opiates. You require them for your normal functioning as a human.

Spirituality likewise is natural to the human state. I know of no people among the peoples that have built communities without marked spiritual expression. That is the evidence in history. Yet there is evidence in the present.

There are many who reach for spirituality but cannot quite capture it; the domination of rationalistic thought bars them from conviction. When they indulge their spiritual instincts, they have to compartmentalise it away from their everyday experience in a world that is effectively spiritually bankrupt.

There is much modern pursuit of practices that have a spiritual dimension to their experience. 25% of school age youth in the UK have tried drugs. This isn't mentioning when they move on to institutions such as university where they have loans to spend, lack of supervision and easy access to dodgy substances. Most of it is of course marijuana. An attraction drugs reportedly hold is an altered state of consciousness. Particularly interesting to me is repeated references to oneness and dissolving your conscious self as an individual entity. This is interesting to me because it is evocative of a practice I indulge in: Prayer.

I am not unique in this comparison. Many also seek similar experiences out in meditative rituals of various forms. Some instructors even claim they can give a psychedelic experience.

I am not commenting heavily at the moment on the consequences of spirituality. I am simply presenting to you the idea that it is human to be spiritual and that it is the natural human state from social, biological or even philosophical perspectives.

I do acknowledge that spirituality for me is basic to me and my contentment. I often become preoccupied with my experience of life as a scientist and a woman, neglecting my spiritual self. Yet, recently, when I found myself heavily immersed in religious practice which I was not accustomed to habitually, I found a weight lifted off me that I barely knew was there.

We are human. Our needs and wants are varied and conflicting. However, it is important to consider what they are before they are denied, controlled or indulged. You live as a human being on so many levels.

You have your body.

You have your mind.

You have your soul.

Remember that all parts of you must be fed.