The Meaning of Spirituality

But what does it mean? Once the word had quite a different ring to it from the way we use it today. In medieval times it referred to the cardinals, bishops and abbots of the church. They were the “spirituality” who, together with royalty and the nobility, lorded it over the common people.

Today the word is used of an interior experience. It’s totally subjective – you can’t transfer your spirituality experience to anyone else. It’s life-enhancing, a dimension of our awareness that we can’t readily explain or pin down, but has to do with our feelings, our yearning for “something more” beyond the bread-and-butter, work-a-day routine. It’s an experience that helps give meaning and direction to our lives. At best it carries a sense of connectedness with the totality of the life around us. There’s a touch of sacredness about it. Bring all these together – inwardness, life-enhancing, connectedness, reaching beyond, sacredness – and you’re getting close to a spirituality right for our times.

That must include fostering a spirituality that embraces the earth, a spirituality of action and hope. Has our Christian heritage anything distinctive to offer here?

I believe it has – as long as we’re willing to expand our understanding of religion and spirituality to encompass the new story of creation, the new challenges and new responsibilities that our new millennium presents.

For me, the role of religion is central because, properly understood, it touches every aspect of our lives as individuals, societies and denizens of planet Earth. It’s not some kind of spiritual clip-on to so-called “real life” experience, nor even to do with a supernatural dimension to life (though some people will see it that way). It’s something integral to our very being. It joins the rationality of our left-brain logos with the imaginative creativity of our right-brain mythos. Italian religious historian Carlo Della Casa defines religion aptly as “a total mode of the interpreting and living of life.”

That total mode begins with our immersion in the material world and builds from there. We see that clearly in Christianity, for at the heart of Christian faith lies the concept of the Incarnation – that is, God or Godness enfleshed in our material world and in the human. That means we live within a divine milieu (to borrow a phrase from Teilhard de Chardin), which I think of as an active, all-surrounding, constant, force-field of love.

Here there’s a marked shift away from the teaching of past centuries, when the church focussed on men and women as essentially soulsin need of salvation from sin, with the ultimate prize of everlasting bliss with God in heaven. That doesn’t resonate with secular New Zealanders any longer.

The social gospel, important in my Methodist upbringing, sought to raise ordinary people out of poverty and despair, and give them a new dignity within society. Excellent as far as it went but missing was concern for the earth on which life pivots. A modern spirituality needs that but it also needs more.

For starters, we can open our hearts and minds to “another way of seeing” – beyond the purely rational and scientific, beyond received economic assumptions, and certainly beyond consumerism.

We can pick up that definition of religion – “a total mode of the interpreting and living of life” – and determine our place within it, with emphasis on our total mode of the interpreting and living of life.

We can locate our spirituality firmly within the everyday material world, never thinking that whatever we do is too trivial to make a difference. When added to what millions of others are doing, our efforts in re-using, repairing, recycling and disposing of rubbish do matter.

The same goes for buying lots of stuff we don’t need, so let’s structure our daily living around the economics of enough. Our lifestyle expresses our relation to the earth.

Of course the scale of the climate crisis demands much more than each of us doing a bit better with our household waste. Government action to curb fossil fuels, protect key environments, penalise pollution, limit population growth, re-orient business towards carbon neutrality – all that and more are urgently needed.

There are mountains of relevant reports and recommendations in this area: next time I shall enlarge on the role spirituality can play.