Spirituality
It is not uncommon for me to experience the "intersection" and "cross-fertilization" in the books that I read. During the last six months or so I have read a couple of Eugene Peterson's books about spirituality, Eat This Book and The Jesus Way, I recently finished Dallas Willard's book, The Great Omission, which is on discipleship and spirituality, and I am currently reading an excellent book by Robert E. Webber, Divine Embrace, which is explicitly about spirituality.
I am very interested in the Christian spiritual life and helping people to both embark and grow in the Christian spiritual life. One of the problems I have, though, is that over the last couple of decades the word "spiritual" has entered our common language and has replicated itself so completely that I find it nearly a useless word. It can mean just about anything. It is not uncommon for me to hear a person say, "I'm spiritual" or "I'm a spiritual person." I have to confess that that statement means virtually nothing to me.
I think that for most people who use the term there is the assumption that there is a generic spirituality that just happens to manifest itself differently: yours might be Christian, his might be Muslim, hers might be Wicca, theirs might be Buddhist, others might be New Age, etc. It is all basically variations on a theme. No one's spirituality is better than anyone else's--they're just different. A Newsweek article in its September 5, 2005 issue defined spirituality as "the passion for an immediate, transcendent experience of God" (as quoted in Webber's book, 15).
Robert Webber disagrees with this definition and assessment. He writes in his book, "All spiritualities are based on a story. You have to know the story of a particular religion to understand its spirituality" (14). He argues that while spirituality involves experience, "the experience is always in keeping with the story from which it arises" (15). The purpose of his book which I intend to cover in this blog over the next several weeks "is about the Christian story of the divine embrace, the spirituality that proceeds from it, and how this spirituality may be recovered in a relativistic, postmodern world where spirituality is viewed as a common, contentless experience of otherness" (15). Stay tuned...
I am very interested in the Christian spiritual life and helping people to both embark and grow in the Christian spiritual life. One of the problems I have, though, is that over the last couple of decades the word "spiritual" has entered our common language and has replicated itself so completely that I find it nearly a useless word. It can mean just about anything. It is not uncommon for me to hear a person say, "I'm spiritual" or "I'm a spiritual person." I have to confess that that statement means virtually nothing to me.
I think that for most people who use the term there is the assumption that there is a generic spirituality that just happens to manifest itself differently: yours might be Christian, his might be Muslim, hers might be Wicca, theirs might be Buddhist, others might be New Age, etc. It is all basically variations on a theme. No one's spirituality is better than anyone else's--they're just different. A Newsweek article in its September 5, 2005 issue defined spirituality as "the passion for an immediate, transcendent experience of God" (as quoted in Webber's book, 15).
Robert Webber disagrees with this definition and assessment. He writes in his book, "All spiritualities are based on a story. You have to know the story of a particular religion to understand its spirituality" (14). He argues that while spirituality involves experience, "the experience is always in keeping with the story from which it arises" (15). The purpose of his book which I intend to cover in this blog over the next several weeks "is about the Christian story of the divine embrace, the spirituality that proceeds from it, and how this spirituality may be recovered in a relativistic, postmodern world where spirituality is viewed as a common, contentless experience of otherness" (15). Stay tuned...
posted by UCC Medfield at 7:36 AM
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