In a 1999 interview with journalist Bill Moyers, Star Wars director George Lucas said, “I put the Force into the movie to try to awaken a certain kind of spirituality in young people—more a belief in God than a belief in any particular religious system.” [Christianity Today]
Fantastic. God is so much bigger and better than a religious system. But has this left us with a generation that who sees God more as fate than as an intelligent and purposeful deity?
Several people have spoken to me recently about how they long to hear God speak to them, but how they never have. Some say they’ve prayed all their lives and never felt God’s presence. Do you think that anyone can learn to hear God’s voice? Or are some people more sensitive to the spiritual realm than others? Just as some people have better eye-sight than others, are some people just naturally more open to hearing from God than others? I’ve always assumed the former, but I’ve started to wonder whether the latter might be true on some level.
Barbara Doubtfire writes that “Hearing God’s voice is an intriguing concept/experience. I think the simplest way I view it is that so many experiences, when I reflect on them, are ‘as if” God has spoken….experiences of fulfillment (feeling full)…of penitence…of a shove to change direction…a ‘knowing’ – out of the blue but with certainty …”
The Jesuit priest Gerard Hughes puts it in his classic book God of Surprises, “God is mystery, a beckoning word, and He calls us out beyond our narrowness … The journey to God is a journey of discovery and it is full of surprises.”
I think that God speaks to people more than they realise. I remember when I first recognised that the soft, gentle ‘niggle’ in my mind was God’s voice. I then realised that he had been speaking to me for a long time, I just hadn’t fully understood that it was him.
For those who want to hear from God, I think they could pray and ask God to help them recognise his voice. Jesus’ words at the end of John 9 seem to indicate that he opens and closes people’s spiritual eyes, so I imagine this applies to people’s spiritual ears as well.
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.
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 . . .
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.
Bizarrely, this crazy Japanese human tetris game reminds about what Orthodox Archbiship Anthony Bloom writes about time:
“There is absolutely no need to run after time to catch it. It does not run away from us, it runs towards us. Whether you are intent on the next minute coming your way, or whether you are completely unaware of it, it will come your way. The future, whatever you do about it, will become the present, and so there is no need to try to jump out of the present into the future.”
We are standing still and time comes toward us. Bloom tells us to stop and embrace the NOW and appreciate our present situation – this very second of time. This, he tells us, is where we will encounter God, and where we will be most able to meet with others.
I have been thinking lately about the affect my soul has on what I do and say. I’ve begun to suspect that most of the time I do things in reaction to an outer impetus. Someone says something to me, and I respond. I see an advert for something and I think about buying it. I see a scenario played out in a film and I contemplate what I would do in that situation. These outer influences are not necessarily negative, but they come for outside myself, causing me to react. I’ve been thinking that I’d like to see what it might be like to act instead of reacting. I beleive God is present within my spirit and I’d like to see what life might be like if I responded to this inward impulse more often.
Anthony Bloom, in Beginning to Pray, writes that it is greed, fear and curiosity which make us live outwardly. Our personality becomes extroverted, engaging with everything around us. He says that we cannot go inwards if we are completely focused outward. It’s as though we have tentacles that reach out and attach themselves to everything around, leaving us empty inside.
I long to tap into that life-giving, creative force within my spirit.
