Spirituality

Spirituality is much more than what we believe about the cosmic and spiritual realms. Our spirituality is the soil from which our whole lives grow: How do we conduct ourselves in the world? What do we see as our role in life? How do we treat ourselves and others? What do we strive for? What makes us come alive? How can we approach life from a place of love rather than fear? What meaning do we give to our lives?

People are increasingly distinguishing between ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’. The distinction can be pushed too far of course, but it is useful. Religion refers more to the doctrines, traditions and rites of different faiths. The emphasis is on distinctiveness – the rites of passage for belonging to particular groups, the sets of beliefs and behaviours that must be adhered to in order to be considered a member of the ‘tribe’, a hierarchical (usually male) leadership, and usually a set of writings that are revered as authoritative ‘scripture’. In recent decades, interfaith movements have opened up dialogue among different faiths, painstakingly comparing doctrines and beliefs. This is all useful, but only takes us so far. They tend to be focussed on doctrines and formal practices, and the leadership tends to reflect the still overwhelmingly patriarchal structures of the respective faiths.

At a level deeper than religion lies our spirituality. Our true spirituality can be at odds with the religion we profess to adhere to in order to belong our particular ‘tribe’. We all know people whose life and practice seem to bear little relation to the ethical teachings of their stated religion. Our spirituality is what moves us at the deepest core of our being. In economics there is a concept called ‘revealed preference’ (stay with me a moment). It means that in economic research, there’s not much point asking people what their preferences are, because they’ll usually bias their answers towards what they think they should prefer – such as kale smoothies when really they’d prefer a burger and fries. So instead, you observe what they do – how they spend their time, energy and resources. In other words, our choices reveal our true preferences (yes, with appropriate caveats about how free we are to choose etc.). It is the same with spirituality. Our actual lives, priorities, behaviours and choices reveal our spirituality far more than any particular doctrines we profess to believe.

Two profoundly important developments in spirituality have emerged over the past century, and especially since the 1960s:

Interspirituality

The first was a movement of interfaith engagement beyond the level of official dialogue and doctrinal comparison. The mystics and contemplatives of different faiths began to spend time with each other, praying, meditating, discussing their experiences and reading the writings of the great mystics and sages of each other’s traditions – which, for the first time in history, were widely available in translation. They saw that beyond the inevitably inadequate language used to describe the indescribable (or “‘effing’ the ineffable” as Alan Watts used to say), there seemed to lie a common, non-dual mystical experience that was familiar to contemplative practitioners and mystics of all traditions. This was not the banal predictability of “Your emptiness seems to be the same as my emptiness”, but rather, overwhelmingly similar experiences of a vast, mind-blowing, transformative spaciousness and sense of connection with all life and with the pulsating love, grace and energy of Being flowing through the fabric of universe and yet also transcending space and time. Pioneers of this movement, dubbed ‘interspirituality‘ by Father Wayne Teasdale, included Catholics such as Thomas Merton, Bede Griffiths, Thomas Keating, Swami Abhishiktananda, Matthew Fox and Richard Rohr, Sufis such as Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Buddhist luminaries such as the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hahn and interspiritual teachers such as Andrew Harvey, Mirabai Starr and Kurt Johnson.

Sacred activism

The second key development has been the growing prominence of sacred activism as a distinctive movement. Sacred activism is not a new idea – think of the anti-slavery campaigns of the 1700s – though the phrase itself is recent. One of the most vocal and energetic proponents of sacred activism in recent years is Andrew Harvey – an Anglo-Indian mystic-scholar who speaks passionately of the fusion of two great rivers of fire: the river of the mystics’ passion for God, with the activists’ passion for justice, in order to birth an explosion of sacred love in action. Sacred activism is far more than simply the ethical implications of different religions. Sacred activism is the inevitable outgrowth of a deep, transformative spirituality that truly recognises and responds to the dire state of our planet and the abject suffering of the poor, the oppressed, and billions of animals.

Sacred activism is an antidote to two things: First, sacred activism is an antidote to a kind of detached, disengaged, dissociated, narcissistic, consumerist spirituality – the kind of spirituality that is so focussed on personal bliss, comfort and liberation that (ironically) it is curiously indifferent to the very nondualistic interconnection with other living beings that an authentic spiritual quest reveals. And second, sacred activism is an antidote to the angry, ranty, alienating activism that paints opponents as ‘the other’, or ‘the enemy’; that seeks retribution; that is unaware of its own shadow side; and that has so little grounding in spiritual practice that it burns itself out in bitter, exhausted disillusionment.

Sacred activism is what fuelled Susan B. Anthony, Mahatma Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., and Óscar Romero and what continues to drive the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Bill McKibbin and millions of other citizens living out an engaged spirituality with a clear-eyed appreciation of the challenges we are facing.

Spiritual direction

If you are interested in deepening your spiritual life and practice, you may be interested in spiritual direction.