Go to Mass occasionally. Even if you're not Catholic.

I'm a cradle Catholic, and I'm not asking you to convert. I am asking you to notice that there's a particular kind of attention in a Mass that you can't get most other places, and that being in proximity to it occasionally — once a quarter, once a year — does something to you that nothing else does.

A real Mass, not a mall Mass with a guitar band, has an architecture you can feel in the room. The standing, sitting, kneeling. The Latin or the formal English. The parts where you say the same words that millions of other people have said for two thousand years. The Eucharist. The silence between things. The whole hour is built to put you in a particular relationship with something larger than your day.

You don't have to believe a single doctrinal claim for that hour to do its work. The work is being held inside a structure that has been refined for centuries to point your attention upward and outward.

This applies to other traditions too — the old liturgies of any of them. Jewish High Holy Days. A serious Buddhist temple. Orthodox Christmas vigils. Sufi qawwali. A Quaker meeting where no one speaks for an hour. The point isn't the specific tradition. The point is being in proximity to people who take the divine seriously and have built a structure for attending to it.

The reason this matters for someone who is broadly spiritual but unaffiliated — which is the actual position more people hold than will admit it — is that without occasional structure, spiritual tends to drift into vagueness. You start meaning whatever feels good in the moment. The structure of a real liturgy is the thing that holds your attention to a higher standard than your moods.

Three guidelines.

Don't go often enough to have to commit. If you start going every week, you're either converting or performing. Once a quarter is right. The point is to be there, not to belong.

Don't take communion if it's not yours. This is a respect thing. Stay seated. Be present. The point isn't to participate in the rites that aren't yours; it's to sit inside a serious room and let the structure work on you.

Pick the right service. The 7am low Mass on a Tuesday is different from the 11am Sunday with the choir. Try a few. Some are tourist; some are real. You'll know which is which.

What you get out of it isn't belief. It's a sharpening. You leave with your own spiritual life slightly more serious for having brushed up against someone else's. That's enough. That's a lot.