The Monday Morning Quarterback

In yesterday's sermon I focused on the nature of spirituality, particularly Christian spirituality. My own experience is that spiritual and spirituality are used indiscriminately in our culture and that they means pretty much what you want them to mean.

I argued that there is no such thing as a "generic" spirituality which I think is a common assumption. I quoted Robbert Webber from his very fine book, Divine Embrace: "All spiritualities are based on a story. You have to know the story of a particular religion to understand its spirituality" (14). The Enlightenment tried to reduce all religions into a single essence. If we could get rid of the offensive particularities of each religion, it was thought, we could get to the truth which all religions share. The problem is that when you apply this reductionistic approach to religion, you end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Spiritualities emerge out of their religious story, whether or not the story is considered part of organized religion or not. And just like there is no generic animal, there is no generic religion or spirituality.

As Christians, our spirituality is fundamentally, in Webber's words, God's embrace of us and our embrace of God. We need to live out of this story which means that we need to know this story. The grand sweep of the Christian story is: creation, fall, covenant, incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, recreation, the new heaven and the new earth. Webber writes,

Christian spirituality...is God's passionate embrace of us; our passionate embrace of God. These two aspects of Christian spirituality are like the two sides of a coin--inextricably linked together, unable to exist apart. One one side we find the divine initiative, referring to what God does to make us spiritual. On the other side we find our response, referring to our reception of the union [our mystical union with god accomplished by Jesus Christ through the Spirit.] These two sides of a single coin tell us that God makes us spiritual, and we live the spiritual life (16).

Christian spirituality is not fundamentally about the self and what the self experiences and feels, but about God, and what God is doing and wants to do in our lives. Many spiritualities focus on the self and the self's experiences. In my estimation, Christian spirituality has tended to incorporate the self-focused spirituality that is everywhere present in our society.