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What is Spirituality?

 

Fr Douglas Robertson

 

To speak the truth: spiritual writers such as Thomas à Kempis and August Hermann Francke found in the phrase one definition of prayer, for from flawedness flows the need for help. A spirituality of imperfection suggests that the first prayer is a scream, a cry for help. “O God, come to my assistance / O Lord, make haste to help me,” reads Psalm 70, sung for over two millennium at the beginning of each monastic hour. At the beginning of the modern age, the nineteenth-century nun Saint Thérèse of Lisieux rediscovered the original sense of prayer as a cry for help. From total darkness, in utter desolation, she cried out, echoing the call of the crucified Christ: “J’ai soif!” (“I thirst!”)

 

The insight is constant: Our darkness - our sins, our doubts - is a thirst … for “God,” for “the spiritual,” for whatever might alleviate this painful side of the human condition, for whatever might somehow fill the empty hole in our human be-ing. We seek help for what we cannot face or accomplish alone; in seeking help, we accept and admit our own powerlessness. And in that acceptance and admission, in the acknowledgement that we are not in control, spirituality is born. Spirituality begins in suffering because to suffer means first “to undergo”, and the essence of suffering lies in the reality that it is undergone, that it has to do with not being in control, that it must be endured. We may endure patiently or impatiently, but because we are human beings, because we are not at each and every moment in ultimate control, we will suffer.

 

A spirituality of imperfection is always mindful of the inevitability of suffering. As Simon Tugwell noted in his analysis of the Ways of Imperfection: “The first work of grace is simply to enable us to begin to understand what is wrong”. And one of the first things that is “wrong” is that we are not “in control”; we do not have all the answers. The reality of that lack of control, the sheer truth of our powerlessness in the face of it, makes available the fundamental spiritual insight that insists on the necessity of kenosis - the ancient Greek term that signifies an “emptying out”. Expressed in modern vocabulary, kenosis points to the need for “surrender”. In the process of kenosis - emptying out, surrendering, hitting bottom - comes the realisation that by ourselves, we are lost.

 

“What is spirituality?” Our pursuit of the question has unearthed more questions than answers, more things that spirituality is not than features of what it is. Timeless wisdom suggests that spirituality can’t be proven; it can’t be defined; it is elusive, ineffable, unbounded; it does not involve demands for perfection; it is rooted in paradox; it is a cry for help.

 

Have we encountered an impenetrable roadblock in our pilgrimage, an unbridgeable chasm that mocks our need to know? If we can’t define, prove, or somehow pin down spirituality, how can we ever hope to understand it? Rather than abandoning the quest, however, perhaps this very frustration signals that we should try a different route.

 

Traditions as diverse as the Buddhist, the Christian, and the Muslim agree that we speak most truly of the divine and therefore of “the spiritual” by recognising what it is not. Somehow this process of the via negativa, the “negative way”, in which we wander down divergent paths exploring what something is not, brings us closer to the place where we want to go. For there is a kind of spirituality in the recognition that in our effort to understand spirituality, we have encountered something bigger than our efforts to capture it. We discover a helplessness before the very word, the powerlessness that is the necessary beginning of spirituality itself.

 

One word of necessary caution before setting out on this particular pathway. The via negativa or “route of negation”, in which we come to know something by observing what it is not, has its own pitfalls - the dangers of comparison and judgement. When examining how one thing differs from another, there can arise a tendency to assign value and priority, to proclaim one reality better or more important than another. In what follows, then, we need to remember that this particular journey aims not to compare in order to put down, but only to identify the differences between distinct realities, each of which is valuable and useful. If we remain mindful of the risks, however, much can be learned by distinguishing spirituality from both religion and therapy.

 

Spirituality is not religion

 

Distinguishing spirituality from religion is a slippery task. Some people equate the two, assuming that only religious people can lay claim to the title “spiritual”. And yet those who try to live a spirituality of imperfection consistently present themselves as “spiritual rather than religious.” What does this mean? Those who consider themselves “spiritual” and those who consider themselves “religious” seem to agree that there are differences between them, but those differences are only broadly delineated. Viewing religion, “the spiritual” see rigidity; viewing spirituality, “the religious” see sloppiness. Religion connotes boundaries, while spirituality’s borders seem haphazard and ill-defined. The vocabulary of religion emphasises the solid; the language of spirituality suggests the fluid.

 

Those who think of themselves as “spiritual rather than religious” tend to equate religion with belief, and therefore with doctrine and authority; with worship, and therefore with the organisation of community and its boundaries; with rewards and punishments, and therefore with greed and fear. Such negative consequences need not always follow from the religious impulse: they are indeed perversions of it.

 

How does spirituality differ from this? Spirituality has nothing to do with boundaries: Only the material can be bounded, and the first thing that “the spiritual” is not is material. The term spirituality was first used in ancient times as a contrast to materialism and signified attention to spiritual as opposed to material realities. “Spiritual realities” were understood quite simply as those that, like the wind or the fragrance of a rose, one experienced but could not literally see, touch, or especially, possess in the sense of command.

 

I have heard the difference between “religion” and “spirituality” expressed as follows: Religion can be seen as a behavioural check-list; whereas spirituality is the process of finding God in the reality of everyday life. It should be pointed out that this comparison of religion and spirituality also looks at ‘a perversion of religion’ in its practice.

 

Religion, of course, can also be aware of its own imperfections, as a delightful story conveys:

 

When the bishop’s ship stopped at a remote island for a day, he determined to use the time as profitable as possible. He strolled along the seashore and came across three fishermen mending their nets. In pidgin English they explained to him that centuries before they had been Christianised by missionaries. “We Christians!” they said, proudly pointing to one another. The bishop was impressed. Did they know the Lord’s Prayer? They had never heard of it. The bishop was shocked.

“What do you say, then, when you pray?”

“We lift eyes to heaven. We pray, ‘We are three, you are three, have mercy on us.’”

The bishop was appalled at the primitive, the downright heretical nature of their prayer. So he spent the whole day teaching them the Lord’s Prayer. The fishermen were poor learners, but they gave it all they had and before the bishop sailed away the next day he had the satisfaction of hearing them go through the whole formula without a fault.

Months later, the bishop’s ship happened to pass by those islands again, and the bishop, as he paced the deck saying his evening prayers, recalled with pleasure the three men on that distant island who were now able to pray, thanks to his patient efforts. While he was lost in that thought, he happened to look up and noticed a spot of light in the east. The light kept approaching the ship, and as the bishop gazed in wonder, he saw three figures walking on the water. The captain stopped the ship. And everyone leaned over the rails to see this sight.

When they were within speaking distance, the bishop recognised his three friends, the fishermen. “Bishop!” they exclaimed. “We hear your boat go past island and come hurry hurry meet you.”

“What is it you want?” asked the awe-stricken bishop.

“Bishop,” they said, “we so, so sorry. We forget lovely prayer. We say, ‘Our Father in heaven, holy be your name, your kingdom come …’ then we forget. Please tell us prayer again.”

The bishop felt humbled. “Go back to your homes, my friends,” he said, “and each time you pray say, ‘We are three, you are three, have mercy on us!”

 

Spirituality is not therapy

 

Although spirituality is not interested in measuring, proving, or manipulating, the boundaries between spirituality and therapy are often confused because both are concerned with making whole. We come to therapy and to spirituality when we are in pain, and therapy seeks what spirituality seeks: a mending to our brokenness, some soothing relief for our “torn-to-pieces-hood”. Nevertheless, the paths of spirituality and therapy, while not in conflict, are divergent. A story told by an Anglican priest relating her own experience may shed light on the difference.

 

Once, on her annual retreat, she sought out as a confessor a Jesuit priest of long experience. In that context, she rehearsed with him the behaviours that troubled her, especially those prominent in the past year - a dawning area of insensitivity, a tendency to domination, and so forth. Then, drawing on what she had come to know of herself from recent reading and especially from her participation in groups, she began to detail how these behaviours seemed connected to her experience of being related to an alcoholic.

At that point, the grizzled veteran confessor reached out and, gently patting her hand, asked: “My dear, do you want forgiveness … or an explanation?”

 

Therapy offers explanations; spirituality offers forgiveness. Both may be necessary, but one is not the other. The therapeutic approach looks to origins, to push forces that compel, as the psychological language of “drives” and the sociological focus on “the shaping environment” attest. Spirituality, in contrast, attends to directions, to the pull-force of motives, which attract or draw forward - the language of spirituality is the vocabulary of “ideals”, of “hope”. Therapy may release from addiction; spirituality releases for life.

 

Therapy’s goal is happiness, in the modern-day sense of “feeling good”, while spirituality suggests that valid feeling follows be-ing, and that the more realistic goal is therefore the time-honoured one of “being good”, of finding a real fit between self and reality outside of self.

 

A spirituality of imperfection suggests that there is something wrong - with me, with you, with the world - but there is nothing wrong with that, because that is the nature of our reality. That is the way it is, just because we are human, and therefore limited, flawed, and imperfect. The name of the game, according to this vision, is I’m Not All-Right, and You’re Not All-Right, But That’s OK - THAT’S All-Right.

 

The ancient tradition that we are exploring suggests that spirituality involves first seeing ourselves truly, as the paradoxical and imperfect beings that we are, and then discovering that it is only within our very imperfection that we can find the peace and serenity that is available to us. This is not an ideology claiming to have discovered immutable truths, but a vision celebrating experience and enabling choice; it is not a therapy interested in explanations and techniques, but a way of life; it is not exclusive, dogmatic, and authoritative, but open-minded, questioning, and capable of laughing at itself. The spirituality of imperfection is above all a realistic spirituality: It begins with acknowledgement and acceptance of the dark side, the down side, of human experience. Rather than seeking ways to explain away or ignore suffering and pain by focussing on sweetness and light, the spirituality of imperfection understands that tragedy and despair are inherent in the experience of essentially imperfect human beings.

 

“Man is the creature who wants to be God,” Jean-Paul Sartre observed. The spirituality of imperfection wrestles directly with that quest, assuring that - although “first of all, we have to quit playing God” - whoever or whatever “God” is, He, She, or It does not scorn our quest or despise us for our defects and imperfections. Imperfection is rather the crack in the armour, the “wound” that lets “God” in. As Meister Eckhart wrote almost seven hundred years ago: “To get at the core of God at his greatest, one must first get into the core of himself at his least.”

 

“God comes through the wound”: Our very imperfections - what religion labels our “sins”, what therapy calls our “sickness”, what philosophy terms our “errors” - are precisely what bring us closer to the reality that no matter how hard we try to deny it, we are not the ones in control here. And this realisation, inevitably and joyously, brings us closer to “God”:

 

One of the disconcerting - and delightful - teachings of the master was: “God is closer to sinners than to saints.”

This is how he explained it: “God in heaven holds each person by a string. When you sin, you cut the string. Then God ties it up again, making a knot - and thereby bringing you a little closer to him. Again and again your sins cut the string - and with each further knot God keeps drawing you closer and closer.”

 

A good friend of mine, Fr. Terence, told me a story he had heard, which really brings this idea that “God comes through the wound” home to me. He titled the story Cracked Pots and typed it out for me:

 

The village of Pots was in pandemonium. All the pots were preening and beautifying themselves. The old and tarnished were burnishing their exteriors; the dull and faded were buffing their outer glazing, and the perfect pots were revelling in their unsurpassed beauty. The reason for all this was quite simple. The Master Himself was to pay the village an extraordinary visit. The reason for His honoured and much awaited appointment with the villagers of Pots was that the much-esteemed Master was seeking a very special pot for His unique purposes. The great day arrived with the streets of the village lined with pots, all eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Master. A hush descended upon the streets as the Master arrived and began inspecting all the pots, each hoping to be chosen by the Master, and thus be venerated for their beauty. There were all shapes and manner of pots: tall and elegant; medium of size but masterfully crafted; squat, rounded and sturdy; each proud of their particular attributes. There were pots with intricate designs carved on them, other pots with beautiful artwork adorning their glazed exteriors, and others remarkable by virtue of their many adornments and variety of uses. But the Master was clearly disappointed and walked past each of these pots. While admiring their beauty, they were all unsuitable for His purposes. He asked if there were any other pots in the village. The beautiful pots grudgingly agreed that there were other pots in the poorer part of the village. The Master ordered that these too be displayed to Him. As these pots sheepishly emerged from their homes, the perfect pots were both amused and embarrassed by the many faults and imperfections of their fellow villagers. You see, these were all the cracked pots. Some had only hairline cracks while others had shards of pottery chipped off them. Each of them was cracked and damaged in some way. The Master was delighted and immediately chose the cracked pot with the most fractures, fissures and cracks in it. The perfect pots were horrified and questioned the Master for his odd choice. The Master explained: “You are all beautiful, but for my particular purposes it is your very beauty and perfection which is unsuitable. Your perfection draws attention and admiration to you, and that in not what I want a pot for. You see, I need a pot in which I can place my light, a pot that will be the best bearer of my light for others to see. This is why I admire the cracked pots and have chosen this particularly cracked pot. When I place my light in it, the many cracks and imperfections will allow my light to be seen by many – I do not need a pot that will obscure my light by its perfections, but a cracked pot to which all can come and see my light in and through its cracks, and so be blessed by my light shining from the cracked pot.”