Spirituality, what does it mean in general, and what it means to me?

In this paper, I will briefly discuss how I understand the term ‘spirituality’. How it has impacted on my own life and the ways people throughout history have understood the term. I will also touch on the many varied understandings of what the term has come to mean in our contemporary world. In many ways in our ever changing world, it can mean whatever an individual ascribes to it, this has led to movements that promote the ‘mind, body, spirit’ which are very far removed from the ‘biblical’ or ‘revelation’ understanding of the term.

Spirituality has found expression throughout history in many ways not least of which in nature itself. Some link meditation to real spirituality through say Buddhism or Hinduism, others again through organic means (such as the use of drugs, illicit or otherwise) others through music, dance or other forms of self-expression, however we term it, spirituality has taken on many forms. Mystery or mysticism seem to be the catalyst to invoke spirituality and spirituality in essence is about self-revelation.

In my own view Catholic spirituality has suffered in the past primarily from a ‘propositional’ and correspondingly impersonal tendency. That is to say, it has understood ‘revelation’ and ‘spirituality’ very much as though it were a set of truths and very little as the unfolding of a dialogical relationship between God and the world. Today, on the other hand, most Christians interpret ‘revelation’ and ‘spirituality’ fundamentally as God’s personal self-gift to the world.

Although Thomistic and later scholastic philosophies are rightly criticized for their rationalistic excesses, they did not totally obscure the personal dimension of revelation, but in their own way kept it alive. Aquinas himself did not lock revelation up in a purely logical mould, but instead saw it fundamentally as the presence of the Lord in the heart as well as the mind (Summa Theologiae I a. 8, 3; 2, 3, 5, 6.). It is my firm conviction that unless the mind is connected with the heart, a true Christian spirituality cannot be manifest. Religions all have an informational component which requires some sort of propositional formulizing, and Christian faith is not exempt from this requirement. But even the most ‘scholastic’ theology of the late Middle Ages did not entirely reduce revelation to a set of sentences. Hidden beneath its rigorous preoccupation with dogmatic clarity, there was still the often inadequately articulated confession of the sense of God’s personal presence to the world and to faith and it is this that constitutes self-spirituality in my view. It is this lived faith that revelation ideally attempts to clarify.

The conviction that mystery is revealed to us is not unique to Christianity or to all biblical religions. Religion in its entirety can be viewed as the disclosure of a transcendent mystery. In my own cultural context I call this mystery by the name “God” and manifest perfectly in the person of Jesus, but peoples of other times and places have also experienced the breaking of mystery into their lives, and they have related to it, talked about it, and worshipped it through many different verbal and iconic designations. We cannot appreciate the Christian understanding of ‘revelation’ and ‘spirituality’ unless we keep this wider religious world before us. A Christian understanding of revelation will become distinctive to us only if we view it in the context of other kinds of religious awareness. Pope John Paul II’s own praise of Aboriginal spirituality in my view is evidence of this awareness.

In speaking about the perfection in the person of Jesus, it is His call to action to all of us to be the ‘good Samaritan’ that stands out. Of all of the parables that have survived to this day, this parable speaks volumes to me in many ways. His call to us spiritually, morally and physically is to never see a need and do nothing about it, something that our own Saint Mary Mackillop (as well as other saints) knew well and lived throughout their own lives, hence their sainthood.

In my humble opinion, in the Church’s desire for dogmatic clarity it had taken on too much of the Hellenistic understanding and language of the ‘body’ and ‘spirit’ and incorporated this into binding Catholic doctrine and dogma. This in my view has had the effect of actually imprisoning Jesus in such doctrines. Jesus became like us in order to win us to himself. Our whole theology of the incarnation, of God becoming man in Christ, is about compromising for the sake of the Gospel, therefore we need to cross the cultural gap between Christians and non-Christians in order to help them see Jesus.

To be blunt, Christianity and Christian spirituality in my view adopted so much of the cultural milieu of that era to the detriment of a flourishing Christianity. All too often, I now feel that Jesus is being used purely as a prop for a whole invisible metaphysical system which is the product of someone’s mind, and the fact that a majority agree with it does not make it right in my opinion, after all it is Aquinas himself who concludes his whole Summa treatise with “the uneliminability of mystery” a phrase I wholly agree with and that feeds my desire to serve God in any way that I can.