This question is harder to answer than you might think! What Do We Mean by Spirituality? Tags: Catholic Spirituality , Fr. Next Do you have a minute? Share this post with your friends. Stay Connected. Sign up for our free email newsletter to stay up to date on the latest from SpiritualDirection.
Weekly Digest: Once a week on Saturday. All Subscribers. Spiritual direction as a support to lay people also began to gain acceptance after Vatican II. Having originally grown out of the tradition of companioning anam cara particularly common in the early Celtic Christian tradition, spiritual direction had developed as a distinctive feature in religious orders in the Middle Ages and remains an important role to assist spiritual seekers today.
Since , the psycho-spiritual perspectives pioneered by Wicks, Parsons and Capps have developed as an influential element in the contemporary understanding and approach to spiritual direction, lay ministry, and Christian formation. It is good for each of us to have an a nam cara to companion us to authentic vocation as catholic educators.
Such friendship is creative and critical; it is willing to negotiate awkward and uneven territories of contradiction and woundedness. You may be trying to access this site from a secured browser on the server. Please enable scripts and reload this page. Formation and Leadership. Page Content. All spiritualities share the fundamental characteristics of being: holistic an intrinsic human capacity transcendent and about meaning making.
The competing claims of different religions have to be taken seriously. I wrote my dissertation on the possibility of authentic Christian use of Buddhist practices; I compared St. Francis Clooney is a Jesuit priest who teaches comparative religions at Harvard. The publican and the Pharisee go to the Temple and pray; one is essentially telling God how great he is, while the other pounds his breast seeking forgiveness.
I go on to describe the Buddhist sensibility of paying attention to the quality of your mind, which is a huge part of Buddhism. Think about how you feel toward the Pharisee. Wonder how he dared to be such an obnoxious jerk? The reader has become the bad example. When I listen to the parable while keeping in mind the Buddhist message, the first thing I think of is how in pain the Pharisee is.
When this happens, we can be compassionate with ourselves. It gives us freedom to see our own thoughts. And it also gives us the possibility of compassion for the Pharisee, for ourselves, and for others.
Instead, it gives us another layer of engagement. Those are the kinds of opportunities we have when we investigate the spiritualities of other religions. It loses the sense of the overwhelming or the shock value.
But in Hinduism, for example, some of the expressions of God are intended to shock believers and make you rethink how you think about God. There are stories about the god Shiva doing outrageous things that are inappropriate for holy people to do, and yet he does them.
Or Kali, the mother goddess, who is a vicious warrior; she drips blood from fangs and wears a garland of skulls—the enemies who would take us from her. How are other traditions wrestling with the same questions I am as a Christian? How do other traditions explain their extraordinary experiences of God?
Different religious narratives often express the same drama, the same dynamics. Where do you put your energy and your time? Part of what you treasure involves your time and your energy, your thoughts.
For lots of people, their career is their idol or their god, without their even realizing it. On the other hand, you could discover just the opposite.
You could, in fact be following your passion unwittingly. Unknowingly, you could be realizing that this is your way to God and how you engage God. You may not care for Lectio Divina but cannot get enough of the Benedictine spirituality of work. You may not be a mystic contemplative, but love the Liturgy of the Hours.
There are many, many schools of spirituality; many tools to use in our pilgrimage towards holiness. The basis, though, the common denominator is going to be the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the Sacraments, Scripture, and faithfulness to the teachings of the Church. Here is why.
The teachings of the Church are like the boundaries, within is all freedom but without is danger. The Church shows us how to use right reason for a good life. Spirituality goes beyond natural life, though, and seeks God himself, it seeks holiness and the imitation of Christ. For this, what better basis than the Mass where Our Lord gives himself directly to us? Or the sacraments, where we receive the grace of the Holy Spirit?
Or the Scriptures, which reveal to us the Living Word? Spirituality will start with these and never leave them.
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