The pastor: quest for spirituality

The closer we get to the year 2000, the more apparent will be the paradox of religion: even as organized religion is losing its appeal to a growing segment of the educated populace, there is a general increasing interest in spirituality. Because many perceive organized religion to be more focused on ritual and trivia than on spirituality, they seem to be searching for spirituality elsewhere---outside "brand name" churches.

This demands a reordering of priorities to emphasize the spiritual and to make faith relevant. Faith must speak to the current and future concerns of our time. Such concerns include: environment, poverty, diversity, racial/ethnic conflict, respect for the other, and a purposeful existence.

Among the problems the twenty-first century will pose for people, a major one will be a result of the information highway and the technological reconstruction of all aspects of life. Wherever people go they will be interconnected with others through computer technology. At some point people are going to want to be alone, away from it all, with all systems turned off. They would need silence and quiet zones where people can separate themselves from the wired life of technology and experience peace, sanity, and rest from "technoise." Such a need raises a crucial issue on the quality of our well-being in the twenty-first century. Will the information highway have a "rest area"? The answer is yes. In spirituality. But this quest for tranquillity gives rise to another issue: that of the general sense of alienation that is so much a part of twentieth-century life.

Human alienation and the quest for spirituality

The reality of human alienation and estrangement from all life forms is a most evident social fact in our day. This reality is not a sudden phenomenon, but one that has been gradually growing throughout human history. Albert Bergensen, in an important article, "Eco-Alienation," published in a special issue of the Humboldt Journal of Social Relations (vol. 21, No. 1, [1995]) suggests that humankind has gone through "three stages of alienation"---alienation from the divine, alienation from the human, and alienation from nature.

The original, and the fundamental alienation is from God and emerges in a primal or "Edenic" beginning as a break with the divine, an estrangement from the sacred world. This manner of describing the human experience as estranged and separated from God pervaded human understanding until the fifteenth century with the rise of the Renaissance. Up until this time period theology was the queen of the sciences, and humankind's world view had a predominant religious framework.

From the sixteenth century to the twentieth the focus shifted from God as the center of the cosmos to humanity as the locus of the center of meaning. Alienation took on another form as separation from ourselves, our work, our fellow human beings. This was also a period of extreme forms of inhumanity. Fueled by an insatiable greed and an excessive quest for materialism, this period saw the rise of European expansionism, the imposition of slavery, genocidal acts on indigenous populations, and the reordering of the world into the haves and the have-nots. But such thirst for self-aggrandizement at the core of a secular humanism already had within it the destructive seeds of the third alienation---separation from nature, or ecological alienation.

From the twentieth century on, the forces of human greed have marched steadily forward in an endless wave of environmental destruction, with little thought for the future of our planetary home. The result is that in the latter part of the twentieth century a new awareness of estrangement has emerged, alienation from the natural world and from our "ecological" selves---the human interconnectedness and interdependence with all earthly life forms.

The cumulative result of these three forms of alienation has been spiritual disintegration. Along with the disintegration has come a disconnected, fragmented social self without a sense of meaning and purpose to life, destitute of a connection to God, to ourselves, to other humans, and to nature.

There is a natural flow to all these forms of alienation: first separation from God, then separation from ourselves and from one another, and finally separation from our natural environment and all the lifeforms to which we are related and indebted.

What human beings are now beginning to discover, acknowledge, and experience is that we are not merely religious, or human, or ecological beings, but spiritual beings. We are at odds with the divine, with each other, and with nature, because our human spirit has lost its moorings from God, the origin of our need for interconnectedness. The result of this loss is a progressive alienation from everything else. All three forms of alienation are in their essence a spiritual estrangement a separation of the human spirit from the Spirit of God and from nature. When such a separation takes place it is easy to see how human thinking has evolved---from God as the creator of life, to humans as the creator of God, to all life-forms being God.

Our table of life

In order to understand this spiritual estrangement we need to recognize that there are four dimensions or entities to human well-being: the physical, the social, the mental/emotional, the spiritual. Any semblance of a healthy human life needs these four dimensions in an operative condition. By this I don't necessarily mean they should be perfectly sound (for who of us is perfect in any one of these dimensions?), but at least functional. The physical is the area of the body; the social deals with our relations to others; the mental/emotional is concerned with the mind and attitudes; and the spiritual focuses on meaning and purpose.

The interrelationship of these four dimensions can best be illustrated with a table. Our "Table of Life" is in balance when all four legs or dimensions are developed in a harmonious or proportionate manner. When there is a balance to the table, when all four legs are squarely on the ground, it can withstand a great deal of pressure as weight is put on it. A table can appear to be balanced, however, even if one leg is short. But the resulting imbalance is not easily detected until pressure is put on the table. We only see the imbalance when whatever is on it, spills. Some people look reliable and dependable, but when pressure is placed on them, they prove to be untrustworthy, and cannot be counted on. For most people the one leg that is usually short or the one dimension that receives minimal attention is the spiritual.

A table can also be unbalanced if a leg is too long. This type of unbalance is more easily detected, since it tends to stand out. We tend to have special names when there is an unbalance in each of the dimensions at the expense of the others. People with too long a physical leg are often called "jocks" or "babes." If the social is too long, they are called "party animals," "socialites." If it is the mental leg, they are called "geeks," or "nerds." And if the spiritual leg is the longer one, they are called "religious fanatics."

While all four dimensions are important for a balanced life, the most important of the four is the spiritual dimension. This is the one that gives meaning and purpose to the other dimensions. If one of the other dimensions undergoes transformation or sudden change, the spiritual anchor leg provides a sense of well-being, purpose, and significance.

The concern today with the recovery of the spiritual as the fourth dimension of life is an effort---jaded as it may be in its many and diverse expressions---to reconnect us once again with God, alienation from whom results in all the other forms of alienation. What we are calling for today is a wholistic form of spirituality that not only seeks to connect humans once again to God but also to other humans and to the natural/ecological world, our environmental home, of which we are all responsible stewards. The result is a coming full circle.

How did concern for this kind of spirituality emerge?

The rise of spirituality

Following the restructuring of world society after World War II, humanistic science took center stage as the great savior of humankind. After all, it was the deployment of the best of scientific research that produced the atom bomb and brought an end to the war. With the launching of Sputnik and the race toward the moon, science was seen as the solution to human problems. Interest in religion appeared to wane. In the 1960s, with the rise of secularism as a way of life devoid of God, sociologists began to predict the demise of religion as a soon-to-be-forgotten footnote of history. Liberal theologians and secular humanists pro claimed the "death of God."

Throughout the seventies and eighties Americans rushed toward materialism and greed, including the continued destruction of the environment. Voices of concern from various parts of the world, however, were already raising a cry of warning above the din of materialism and scientism coming from the money changers in the temple of capitalism. These voices began calling people back from a mechanical, fragmented, isolationist, dehumanized view of the world, to a world view permeated much more with human and environmental concerns.

The late 1980s and early 1990s has seen a turn toward spirituality. The global concern for human connectedness and communalism and the realization of our interdependence with the ecosystem is part of this turning, limited as many Christians may see it to be.

This global awareness of the commonality of humanity was made possible in part by two factors. First, an advanced technology that has turned our world into a telecommunications electronic village, where each instantly knows what is happening to the other. Second, the realization that scientific materialism, instead of being a savior to solve human problems, is in large measure responsible for the destructive dualism that fragments the human spirit and leaves us alienated from our natural environment.

A new paradigm or way of perceiving our world has emerged as a "global consciousness" focused on the interconnectedness of all life-forms, both human and environmental. This wholistic---and very biblical---view of life has a profound spiritual undergirding.

With much of religion losing its focus, a whole generation disappointed with the trivia of organized religion is now turning to New Age forms of religious expression in hopes of recovering a sense of the spiritual. But the essence of New Age is an inward turning, a self-help style of religious experimenting that connects the human with nature and with the super natural. This has resulted in an inadequate, popular new kind of spirituality.

But what is "spirituality"?

A definition of spirituality

I teach in a state university, world-renowned for its environmental programs of study. It is also located, not coincidentally, in an area in which New Age thought is highly valued Arcata, California. Many of my students are concerned with spirituality. In my classes, especially my sociology of religion course, I have to define spirituality in such a way that it encompasses the needs of all groups and extremes, from born-again Christians to those earth-first environmentalists en thralled by New Age forms of thinking.

Let me put forth two working definitions of spirituality pulled together from various sources and developed after years of seeking to communicate this elusive concept to different audiences with varied but often vague understandings of the term.

Spirituality is an intangible reality and animating, integrating life force that cannot be comprehended by human reason alone but is nonetheless as important as reason, intellect, and emotion in ac counting for human behavior; and is the center of our devotion, loyalty, and concern for that which gives us security and a sense of worthful purpose, the worship of which constitutes our god whether that god be our self, race, or ethnic group, church, money, ideological beliefs, sex, another person, Allah, Buddha, the Great Spirit of Jesus Christ and is the object of our ultimate love, human drive, commitment, and source of power; and is the interconnecting bond between humans, humans and the natural world, and with the divine.

In this definition of spirituality, God is spelled with a small g because the god at the center of most people's lives, even among many professed Christians, is not the biblical God, but a human construction---an idol. An idol is any product of human construction, whether material or nonmaterial, to which people give their ultimate devotion, loyalty, and concern, and around which they organize their lives.'

Langdon Gilkey, in his outstanding book, Shantung Compound gives us the reason that God must be the center of our spirituality.

"The only hope in the human situation is that the 'religiousness' of [human beings] find its true center in God, and not in the many idols that appear in the course of our experience. If [people] are to forget themselves enough to share with each other, to be honest under pressure, and to be rational and moral enough to establish community, they must have some center of loyalty and devotion, some source of security and meaning, beyond their own welfare.

"This center of loyalty beyond them selves cannot be a human creation, greater than the individual but still finite, such as the family, the nation, tradition, race, or the church. Only the God who created all [peoples] and so represents none of them exclusively; only the God who rules all history and so is the instrument of no particular historical movement; only the God who judges His faithful as well as their enemies, and loves and cares for all, can be the creative center of human existence" (p. 234).

Let me, in light of this, now give a simpler definition of spirituality. Spirituality is that intangible reality and animating, integrating life force that connects us to the divine however defined to each other, and to the natural world, resulting in a state of security with a sense of worthful purpose. This is wholistic spirituality, spirituality in three dimensions, that connects the human center, our social self, with: a vertical to God, the world of the sacred; a horizontal to humankind, the world of people; and a downward to nature, the world of all nonhuman life-forms.

Most Christians tend to see only a one-dimensional form of spirituality---the vertical, as a personal devotion to God divorced from concern for humankind. This was the type of spirituality that led to the rise of monasticism early in Catholicism and later to pietism in Protestantism, and eventually to the rejection of Christianity by humanism. Other forms of one-dimensional spirituality have been humanistic approaches focused only on the horizontal realm. Pulling strongly from popular, self-help forms of psychology, there is a growing spiritual movement seeking to get human beings in touch with their feelings, their emotions, and connections to each other through Eastern philosophy, meditation techniques, and personality development theory. Along with this, the "New Age," quick fix, trendy form of spirituality is invading the corporate structures, university campuses, and suburban communities of America, in an effort to get people more in tune with their "true inner selves."

Many of these spiritual forms eliminate the need for the vertical dimension to God, since divinity is believed to be within and not without. According to this form of spirituality we are all gods, and all one has to do is to discover the god within and in nature. Neopagan groups, Wicca, and some forms of Goddess spirituality are examples of this one-dimensional form of spirituality.

The Social Gospel movement in Christianity around the turn of the century and liberation theologies since the 1960s have both emphasized a two-dimensional form of spirituality---the vertical to God and the horizontal to humankind. The result has been much political involvement focused on social change and socioeconomic justice. Yet a missing element in both approaches has been a concern for our ecological/environmental home.

All these forms of spirituality, however, are one---or at best two-dimensional constructs of spirituality. What is needed is a three-dimensional, wholistic spirituality that connects us to God Himself, to humankind, and to our ecological world. This is a spirituality that serves as an integrating life force that dissolves all forms of alienation religious, human, and ecological and infuses all three worlds of dimensions with meaning and purpose.

People today are searching for meaning in all the chaos of society and in their lives. This is the driving force behind the quest for spirituality, a desire for a sense of meaning to life, a sense of worthful purpose---the why behind the what.

Gilkey tells us that "meaning in life is the spiritual fuel that drives the human machine. Without it we are indifferent and bored; there is no ambition to work, we are inspired by no concern or sense of significance, and our powers are unstirred and so lie idle. Without 'meaning' we are undirected and a vulnerable prey to all manner of despair and anxiety, unable to stand firm against any new winds of adversity." This spiritual depletion lies at the heart of the hollow meaninglessness experienced in so many of the Christian churches of our time. A recovery of authentic Christian spirituality in its three dimensions will change much of this.

We find genuine or wholistic spirituality, security, meaning to life, when our lives are centered in that which cannot be taken away from us. Why? Because only that which cannot be taken away from us is able to give us a sense of genuine security, and is the only thing that can qualify as God in our center of spirituality. Everything else dissolves under pressure or changes with time.

The source of spirituality

In an unstable age of rapid socio-political change, people are desperately searching for a reliable soul anchor. Many are now seeking for it in spirituality. But this area can be just as bankrupt as science, if people place at the center of their life that which is not eternal and divine, but temporary and transitory. Failure to center life on the sacred has resulted in the various forms of alienation throughout history religious, human, ecological, and now spiritual.

A balanced Christian approach calls for a wholistic spirituality that is centered in God, the true object of our worship. It calls for a God who does not change but is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and who thereby creates a sense of integrated balance between the human, the natural, and the spiritual worlds. This kind of spirituality is found in none other than the Holy Spirit, who creates a longing and yearning for God in the human heart, along with a deep respect for but not worship of nature and our fellow human beings.

Augustine (A.D. 354-430), recognizing humankind's need for spirituality, declared: "Thou hast made us for Thyself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee." Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), reminded us that "there is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each [person], which cannot be satisfied by any created thing but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus Christ." This is the essence and source of genuine, wholistic spirituality.

The challenge posed for the Christian Church and for Christian ministers is to model authentic spirituality, and to fashion paradigms of ministry built on wholistic spirituality, rather than on traditional one-dimensional or at best two-dimensional patterns. Only then will churches come alive, carrying on a mission relevant to the deep-seated spiritual needs of the twenty-first century.