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The meaning of spirituality has developed over time as our understanding of culture, religion, and personal development has changed.
Traditionally, spirituality was part of religious practice and the attempt to inhabit the original shape of things or live in the image of God.
In early Christianity, spirituality is related to living a life orientated by the Holy Spirit. This is later complicated with aesthetic practises like self-flagellation that missed the point.
In modern times, spirituality refers to many experiences and practices. Spirituality tends now to be about the individual on their personal quest for meaning.
Today, spirituality doesn’t automatically include a religious or communal dimension.
Spirituality generally is about an encounter, whether it is a communal, spiritual, religious or individual experience.
The challenge of spirituality
The challenge with spirituality is to integrate various elements. For Christians, it is the pursuit of an interior life of meaning that is “hidden with God in Christ”.
A healthy “daily” spirituality seeks the middle way between the temptation to do nothing on the one hand and to become a religious nutcase on the other.
Healthy daily spirituality is the spirituality of the ordinary, of daily living.
It is the spirituality, for example, of the working person, the grandparent, the beneficiary, the retired and the school pupil.
The person who lives in the real world and strives to hold competing demands in balance needs a spirituality that gives balance and meaning to life.
As we develop an interior spiritual life, we experience tensions and look for a spirit-frame of living to make the spiritual life happen.
The Tensions
The holy place and the ordinary place
Is God most easily found in the church, shrine, monastery, or at home in the kitchen, with the family, in a marriage or even on the sports ground?
Is the tension resolved when we remember that God is both transcendent and the immanent, incarnate God?
Sexuality, sexual passion and religious purity or celibacy
Is God part of your sexuality and sex life or opposed to it? Is your soul fulfilled by eros or awe, and can you have both, or are these mutually exclusive?
If you sublimate your sexuality and its desires, will you be holier or an unhealthy example of a human being?
Community and personal fulfilment
Is the higher call to serve God and others in the community using one’s talents or to serve one’s freedom?
The Covid experience has brought this question into stark relief. Should individual personal freedom be sacrificed for the common good?
How do we deal positively with the ache for personal love and achievement when acting on this is inappropriate?
This life and the next
Am I living for this life or for the next, and what perspective does this give me? Does the life Jesus promises begin now for me or does it begin at my death?
Is this life a “veil of tears” or the way God leads me to life?
Intellect and will
What rules my life, my heart or my head? Am I ruled by one more than the other and more a prey to one than the other?
Do my thoughts or my feelings reveal God’s presence to me?
Personal conscience and Church moral teaching
When there’s a conflict between how I need to live my life—to be authentic—how do I ‘shape the conversation’? What parameters do I use?
Is a conflict an opportunity for a deeper adult conversation with God and a chance to perhaps better integrate my life as a Christian?
Daily spirituality
Daily spirituality is ‘ordinary life,’ blessed by God.
This spirituality gives time to God, the family, the church, society, the soul and the world.
It is aware of colleagues and friends.
It is practical, straightforward, generous, and sensible.
When a person spends all day in front of the tabernacle and forgets to nurture their relationships, feed the hungry, clothe the naked or visit the prisoner, there is a significant problem.
A daily spirituality is not distracted by devotions when there are children to be fed, and marriages don’t go bust because too little time has been given to the spouse.
Those that disagree might think they are better fitted for a monastery, but the monastery won’t want them because there, too, the rule is Ora et Labora (prayer and work).
Daily spiritual life is not an abdication from living.
Daily spirituality takes time for contemplation, action, socialising and rest. It is a lifetime of gentle fidelity to God and neighbour and a healthy awareness of self.
It is easy for good people to get hooked into religion, private prayer and social service and social justice and forget that they have family members to serve. This is a crucial message of the scriptures. (Luke 1:39-45.)
Life and spirituality are not binary; they aren’t intrinsically oppositional.
Ancient wisdom suggests that a healthy spiritual life and living a healthy human life is the key to happiness.
- Joe Grayland is a theologian and a priest of the Diocese of Palmerston North. His latest book is: Liturgical Lockdown. Covid and the Absence of the Laity (Te Hepara Pai, 2020).
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