Spirituality

‘Spirituality’ and ‘spiritual’ are words often used today, even in a non-religious setting. People seem more comfortable with them than with ‘faith’ or ‘religion’. “She’s a very spiritual person” is less problematical than “she’s a very religious person”; perhaps because ‘religion’ raises issues of belief, whereas ‘spiritual’ suggests a temperament, a style, a practice.

Was Jesus a spiritual person? He prayed a good deal, but otherwise the word doesn’t seem quite to fit. He wasn’t, apparently, much interested in cultivating his ‘inner life’; there are moments of withdrawal, but mostly we see him looking outward, dangerously engaged with the world. To state the obvious: religion was not, for him, any kind of therapy.

For Christians, a problem with the word ‘spiritual’ is that it implicitly devalues the material. It suggests living a life a few feet off the ground, in a higher and purer realm. But the point of Christianity is incarnation, the refusal to divorce matter from spirit. No more than Christ’s life does faith belong to a separate, ‘spiritual’ world. The Christian project, in that respect, has always been one of de-spiritualisation.

Yet there have always been Christian disciplines of the spirit—Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant. Christians have always known that, to live close to God, regularity and perseverance are called for. People we think of as ‘spiritual’—St John of the Cross or de Caussade, William Law or Michael Ramsey—have followed a spiritual discipline to the point at which they can share it with others.

But those disciplines all have one aim: to turn more completely to God. That is the heart of Christian (and Jewish) spirituality. In that sense Jesus was a ‘spiritual’ person; not by exuding an aura of other-worldliness, but by living and dying always toward his Father. But that did not involve rejecting the world or the claims of the material. When Lazarus died, Jesus did not offer ‘spiritual’ consolation. He wept, faced the stench of corruption, and brought him back to life. Action can be as spiritual as thought or contemplation.

Spiritualities that turn us toward ourselves—to make us more effective or more satisfied—are, from a Christian perspective, questionable. For us, God is the point. The wealth of Christian spirituality points always in that direction. At the heart of it is the (crucial) turning toward God that Jesus preached and lived and died.