Religions share a common spirituality?

Does spirituality have its roots in religion? Or is religion a subsection of a vaster overarching spirituality? Some claim the human phenomenon of spirituality to be more basic, to have preceded religion. But religion itself is very old. How are they linked? It seems like a chicken and egg situation. But it does seem probable that religion developed to meet man’s earliest spiritual need. This makes sense if we think of religion as being there first and foremost to nourish spiritual growth. (And I use the male term deliberately; since it was relatively recently in humanity’s history that woman was generally deemed to be capable of spiritual experience. Indeed even now her religious and spiritual needs and expressions are marginalized in some cultures). Thus spirituality may be seen as the more general term, including religion, and being a core aspect of religion. Although this does not deny that there are 'spiritual but not religious' individuals or that extrinsically religious people may not be especially 'spiritual.'
So we see that the relationship between religion and spirituality is far from cut and dried and to some extent it is controversial. Spirituality is a rapidly developing subject for academic study in many universities and there is a vast growth in literature, and conferences to explore the issues and to encourage dialogue about spirituality with different faiths. (One useful resource here is the international Journal for the Study of Spirituality, first published in 2011.)
I have thought a great deal about this and am persuaded that true spirituality and religion are so closely associated that they cannot be truly separated. Whatever we think we mean by both phenomena, it is probably unhelpful to separate them too sharply, at least at this stage in our level of understanding. Perhaps they are two sides of the same coin, in some kind of symbiosis? Someone has said that spirituality is 'the way we hold the what of our faith' and that spiritual care is best coming from within religious tradition and cannot be generic. Indeed, generic spirituality has been dubbed a kind of 'spiritual Esperanto' in an essay called Dumbing Down the Spirit, by the pastoral theologian Stephen Pattison. Pattison warns that the ability of the religious traditions to contribute to the current search for spirituality is being weakened by this more generalized spiritual quest. This is good enough reason for the religions to change, and fast!
How do we address our spiritual crisis and recover our souls? Ursula King writes that the solution is to be found in our rich heritage of the world’s spiritualities. If we link spirituality in any way with religion, (and how can we not?) then this quest also has to be extended to our rich heritage of the world’s religions. They can help, they must help, and they are helping in this journey of rediscovery!! Therefore don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater, the religion with the dogma! We need religions! This is unlikely to please those who proudly proclaim that they are spiritual but not religious. I believe there is an urgent need for religions to redefine their role, to embrace the spiritual more obviously and more openly: for religion to return more fully to its spiritual roots.
I also believe there is great potential for finding common ground between all spiritualities, all religions, all people, in the quest for something beyond definition, perhaps what we mean by the Holy Spirit, or the Transcendent, a true spiritual oneness of humanity, a global spiritual interdependence available to everyone, whether or not we believe in God the Creator of all things visible and invisible.
Will this help us address our religious intolerances and divides? I think it could do. If we can truly promote a global spiritual awakening this gives us greater hope for human flourishing. How do we do this?

Religion and Spirituality

Religion and spirituality are such slippery words. Most would think they know what is meant by religion, but are not so sure how much religion has to do with spirituality, if at all.

What is religion?

When many people think of religion they think first about outdated institutions, with strict and inflexible dogma, dry rituals, boring sermons. Then they may think of buildings, of mosques and cathedrals, churches (perhaps cold and musty and expensive to maintain!) and synagogues. And many will believe all this to be irrelevant in today’s world. They could not be further from the truth in very many cases.
Mine is a vibrant church, full of joy and worship, with the sounds and smells of choir and incense, all offered to the glory of God. Our different styles of service cater for many different tastes and needs. And the church is where, along with many others, I find my spiritual nourishment.
But it is certainly true that the local Christian church has ceased to be relevant to very many people, and is no longer the centre of community life. Many worshippers drifted away in the second half of the twentieth century. Some simply felt the whole experience to be irrelevant to their lives, and many of these were our youngsters as they grew up, and left home and church. Others became the “spiritual without being religious” group and another group felt that they could better follow the teachings of Jesus outside the formal church. The biggest tragedy of all was the way the church lost its youngsters and this still challenges us today; how to retain our youth when they grow up.

“The majority of…religions…ultimately rest upon the foundation of…a primary goal of enhancing people’s spiritual growth. Religion consists of the institutionalized structures, norms, leadership roles, rituals and the like that have emerged from that basic function.”(1)
We are all intrinsically spiritual beings, and one only has to look around in the world, in our media, on our book- shelves, in the market place, to see the significant role that spirituality plays in many lives. So it would seem that the church is not satisfying that need. The church clearly needs to change and I will come back to this later.

P. Mehta in defining religion wrote that it need not be confined to the established great religions of the world, “still less of the organized churches claiming authority to lay down what is or is not religious truth…whatever purifies and perfects a man, relates him fully to life and allows the realization of the Transcendent, is Religion.”(2)

But it is true that religion can become “a closed system, a dualistic cult that protects and distracts its adherents from reality” where spirituality is equated with holiness of life instead of religiosity, where spirituality is seen as an overarching phenomenon within which religion has but a small part to play.(3)

And it is also true that not every one who is religious considers themselves to be spiritual.

So What is spirituality?

My favourite definition of spirituality is to be found in J Astley’s Ordinary Theology: Looking, Listening and Learning in Theology, where he defines spirituality as “the way we hold the what of our faith.”(4) I also like John Swinton’s attempt at defining spirituality by what it does, rather than what it is, that it represents something “missing” in our lives.(5) And that we can use that missing element to help us care and educate more, to learn to treat people as human beings; to make a positive difference in the world. This of course is a matter dear to my own heart, explored in great detail elsewhere in relation to healthcare, economics, community, creativity, faith, and nature.(6)

In defining spirituality, words and terms such as “search for meaning and purpose,” the transcendent, soul, consciousness and interconnectedness of all beings, the numinous, divinity, God, inner peace, and perhaps many others will variously spring to mind. So spirituality is also used in a vast range of contexts. It is certainly to be found within the established religions and wisdom traditions, the Muslim Sufi for example, in the great Christian mystics, or the Jewish Kabbalah. These not only provide a rich supply of spiritual experience, they can and do play a part in nurturing and kindling spirituality.

But it is also found divorced from religion, amongst those who say they are spiritual but not religious. Perhaps you are one of these.

And spirituality can be secular, although even in seeking a secular definition of spirituality a transcendent dimension can be acknowledged, that may “include the traditional view of a personal God.”(!)(7)

David J. Hufford, in ‘An analysis of the field of spirituality, religion and health,’ defines Spirituality as the personal relationship to the transcendent and Religion as the community, institutional, aspect of spirituality
Thus spirituality is the more general term, it includes religion, and spirituality is a core aspect of religion. This does not deny that there are “spiritual but not religious”
individuals or that extrinsically religious people may not be especially spiritual.”

We need to try to couple religion and what I would like to call for the moment genuine spirituality back together again. And that is where the church needs to change and become more relevant again. But how can it do this? That will be the subject of another post.

1. Journal for the Study of Spirituality (JSS) volume 1.1, 2011, p.98 Hunt citing McBeis article
2. P. Mehta The Heart of Religion, p. 28.

3. Brian Taylor 1996 Setting the Gospel Free,cited by J Williams p. 99 JSS

4. J Astley, Ordinary Theology: Looking, Listening and Learning in Theology, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), p. 39, (Cited by John Williams “From Habitus to Critique”, in JSS p. 99)
5. John Swinton, “What is Missing from our Practice? Spirituality as Presence and Absence,” Journal for the Study of Spirituality, volume 1.1, 2011, p. 13.
6. Healing this Wounded Earth
7. Elkins et al Journal for the Study of Spirituality volume 1.1, 2011, p. 58

Can spirituality transform our world?

Ursula King poses this question in a paper of that title published in the very first issue of the brand new and rather good Journal for the Study of Spirituality.
In a nutshell she concludes that spiritualities do indeed offer a vision of hope and human flourishing, but that in practical terms we need spiritual education at all levels and to all ages, alongside a global spiritual awakening, to realize an effective spiritual transformation. We need, she says, a spiritual revolution, something dear to my own heart as readers of my blogs and book will know!

At an individual level I would say we need a spiritual re- awakening. Surely we used to be spiritual beings before many of us became unduly influenced by the advance of materialism and scientific reductionism and the accompanying cynicism about religion and spirituality. In this materialistic and consumerist world many of us have lost the ability to connect with the spirit within us, to transcend the material elements of our lives. If only we can rediscover the spiritual essence of our beings. We then need to connect that spiritual element across all boundaries of space and time, to realize that we are not mere individuals, but we are all part of a deeply interconnected, social mind, with huge potential significance for our future.
But that begs a question. What is spirituality?
It is almost impossible to define, but significantly in that same Journal John Swinton, Professor of Practical Theology and Pastoral Care in the School of Divinity at the University of Aberdeen, draws our attention to the idea of spirituality being best thought of as something that is missing in our lives. It is true that very often people will reflect that they feel something is missing in what they do, but they have difficulty articulating what that something is. So they change jobs, go away for a while, buy more consumer goods, and never find that elusive quality they seek. They continue to feel dissatisfied but don’t really know why.
If spirituality has something to do with our search for meaning, purpose, love, some kind of a God, then we are saying that something profoundly important is too often not being adequately addressed. Our challenge, Swinton writes, is to “learn what it means to treat people as human beings.”
That is clearly of fundamental importance, as Swinton points out, when we are thinking about healthcare and the treatment of patients or about the way we run our businesses and commerce, where people can become nothing more than “economic units.” I’ve written about this elsewhere in my book Healing this Wounded Earth…
But I take this a step further. To learn how to treat other people as human beings, then, strange as it may sound, I think we actually have to learn to be human beings ourselves! By that I mean that we need to raise our own spiritual awareness, be compassionate to ourselves, love ourselves, first, be “happy” in our own bodies. How can we bring love and compassion and spirituality and a total sense of worth into any workplace or life if we do not have those qualities in ourselves?

And furthermore I believe we are challenged to bring that undefined spiritual quality into everything we do – not only in our workplace, but in our communities, in our creativity, in our faiths, in our relationships, so that our work and whole way of life reflects that love and compassion and spirit and can become a healing influence for others. Because there is no doubt that the alternatives can be harmful. The Jesuit priest, Thomas Merton, tells us that our hatred of ourselves is more dangerous than our hatred of others, because we project our own evil onto others and we do not see it in ourselves. “If you love peace,” he wrote, in his book New Seeds of Contemplation, “then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed – but hate these things in yourself, [Merton’s italics] not in another.” It is easy to see how our self -hatred could for example be reflected in those nasty computer and video games that are now so freely available and are almost certainly a harmful influence to our children and indeed many adults. But someone, indeed a whole production team, brought such items to the market place, made them freely available to one and all.

Those who create such horror for the retail trade seem to be allowing their own wounds to crush them. They need their own healing. But they also have a responsibility for the potential negative effects of their work; for the harm it possibly inflicts on the minds of others. We know that people who are subjected to too much gratuitous violence put up a barrier of defense and they become desensitized, a process sometimes known as ‘psychic numbing’. (This is significant when we consider the behavior of our soldiers, for example, trained to kill, but who have to live a different life back in the “real” world.) It is not hard to see that the longer-term effects of such violence on the general behavior and indeed future of the human race could be far reaching. I wrote more about this over on my Ripples of Hope Blog very recently.


More spiritual education to enhance the world’s level of spiritual literacy would surely begin to address issues such as these. But how do we start? Some things we can all do. We can introduce our children to beautiful art in our national galleries, we can show them more of the awesome wonders of nature in our museums, we can celebrate with them the wealth of religious traditions around them, we can nurture the innate spiritual qualities within them. And we can nurture our own spiritual needs at the same time! But we do need the support of a spiritually driven education. Because we know that children are born naturally empathic and spiritual, thanks to the work of David Hay and Rebecca Nye, for example. It is our subsequent education system that crushes these qualities, beats them out of our children. And we have a generation or more of parents who went through the same spirit-crushing system!
How many of us are teachers, school governors, or otherwise involved with children in some way? We can all play an important role.

By tapping into the natural spirituality of our young and nurturing it throughout their education, I hope we can start to build a better world. I would hope that children so educated would be less inclined to squander valuable time on video “nasties,” or violent films, for example, and will be steered towards a more spiritual and healing life, a much more satisfying life, that will influence all those around them, in an ever widening aura of spiritual consciousness. Or is this a pipe dream? I don’t think so. I hope not!

This leads into plenty of other topics to write about! What do current consciousness studies tell us about the possibility of a global spiritual awareness? What are the differences between religion and spirituality, how do they interrelate? Do they overlap, or does one encompass the other? If spirituality is a necessary component of all religions why is this not a unifying force between them? What do we understand about the evolution of consciousness and spirituality? Given that we can steer our own evolution by our actions or inactions, and are conscious that we can do this, how can we steer the world towards a better future, whatever we mean by that?
I shall muse on these by the swimming pool today!