Describing Spirituality

I’ve thinking a lot about how to describe spirituality to people.  

I believe that spirituality is a deeply personal urge to find ultimate meaning. Spirituality operates beneath traditional and exterior religious forms and is expressed through the symbols available in the social context in which people find themselves.

Yust et al. (eds) in their recent book, Nurturing Child and Adolescent Spirituality, offer this definition: “Spirituality is the intrinsic human capacity for self transcendence in which the individual participates in the sacred – something greater than the self. It propels the search for connectedness, meaning, purpose, and ethical responsibility. It is experienced, formed, shaped, and expressed through a wide range of religious narratives, beliefs, and practices, and is shaped by many influences in family, community, society, culture, and nature.”

This definition is helpful because it extends to how spirituality is formed.

I attended a day session led by Brian Thorne about the intersection between person centred psychology and spiritual direction. He offered an interesting (quite secular) definition of spirituality, essentially defining it as a yearning for transcendence and meaning. “There is a desire to uncover meaning behind the apparent randomness and contradictions of experience and nomore so than in grappling with the mysteries of birth, death, relatedness and suffering . . . “

Importantly, spirituality is not limited to Christian experience, but is a core human experience.

Evangelical gender hang ups

Why do evangelicals think men and women are so different that they require separate ministries?

 A year ago I was talking with a newly married couple who has recently started attending church. The wife is a Christian who has struggled with the faith for a number of years, the husband is not a believer but is open to learning more. Although they liked the new church they were trying out, they were mystified by people’s insistence that the husband go to the men’s breakfast and the wife go to the women’s Bible study. They asked us, ‘Why do Christians divide men and women?’

It’s a good question. No other group in our society is so set up splitting up the genders. Are men and women really so radically different that they can’t grow together spiritually?

 I don’t think so. I’ve been in several fellowship groups with both men and women and we have studied the Bible together, prayed together and shared our lives with each other, and never did we sense that our mixed genders was holding us back from growing as Christians.

My husband is my best friend, and despite the fact that he is a man and I am a woman, we are fully capable of sharing our spiritual lives with each other, praying together, and learning from each other.

So, where does the great evangelical gender divide come from?

I can’t find any mention of a “women’s ministry” in the New Testament. And when I read passages about growing as a Christian, no where in the Scripture can I find advice to pray only with other women or that men will have a different experience of spiritual growth than women.

So, if this separation of men and women isn’t in the Bible, where has it come from? I have a few theories:

1. Conservative evangelicals believe that women should not teach men. However, there are women who are gifted leaders and teachers. Therefore, these churches needed to invent a ’safe’ setting for these women to practice their gifts: hence, women’s ministry and women’s books. Then, in interest of fairness, churches have created men’s ministries.

2. Is the gender divide a sneaky way for Christian book companies to publish two books in place of one? Instead of writing about a Christian approach to dealing with a mid-life crisis, they can publish a book like Men in Midlife Crisis and another one for women. Or, people can buy Becoming a Woman of Excellence, a book which one reviewer says, “discusses 11 points that are necessary to understand the core of what it takes to become a woman after God’s own heart.” Whatever happened to just becoming a person after God’s own heart?

By no means do I think that men and women are exactly the same, but I am not convinced that our spirituality is so different that we can’t grow together sometimes. And I worry that instead of doing the hard work of discovering what it means for each of us to follow God, instead we take the short cut of reading a book that gives us 11 easy steps. In place of asking God who he wants us to be, we aspire to be like some cardboard cut out of the woman (or man) of excellence . . .

Belief in Salmon Fishing in Yemen

Yesterday I finished reading Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday. I enjoyed the humorous narrative and the tongue in cheek portrayal of government officials.

The sheikh, whose idea it is to introduce salmon to the wadis of the Yemen, is characterised as a wise, spiritual man.  He tells the main character, Dr Alfred Jones, a fisheries scientist, that he needs to have ‘belief’. He says:

“Faith comes before hope, and hope before love. . . You are beginning to believe it could happen. You are beginning to learn to have faith.”

 This belief in belief is a shock to Dr Jones, whose childhood associations of church were of a boring ritual that he was forced to attend in uncomfortable clothes. He has ‘moved on from religion’ and going to church on Sunday mornings has been replaced by going to Tesco with his wife. He says:

“I suppose shopping in Tesco on Sunday morning is in itself a sort of meditative experience: in some way a shared moment with the hundreds of other shoppers all wheeling their shopping carts, and a shared moment with Mary, come to that. Most of the people I see shopping on Sunday morning have that peaceful, dreamy expression on their faces that I know is on ours. That is our Sunday ritual.”

When he goes to the Yemen, he sees a world where ‘faith and prayer are instinctive and universal, where not to pray, not to be able to pray, is an affliction worse than blindness, where disconnection from God is worse than losing a limb’.

 In the end Dr Jones discovers in himself the ability to believe in the impossible. Thus, the central message of the book seems to be that it is truly human to be able to believe in something, anything.

But is belief, on its own and for its own sake, of any value?

The trite, ‘Christian’ answer is that belief doesn’t matter unless it is belief in the right thing. But I would disagree. I think moving from a state of unbelief to a place of recognising the need to believe in something is a huge step towards finding belief in God. It is just one step, but it is a giant step and an important one.