Spirituality: Part One

I was on the radio recently and the subject this time was spirituality and how to develop spirituality. It's an interesting subject, and one which isn't easy to pin down. Especially when we consider the bigger question: What is spirituality?

It's that strange, gooey feeling we get sometimes. To give it some big impressive sounding words we could even call it an esoteric matter. Some people would use it to describe how they feel about God, or what happens during prayer. Some form of knowledge of something other than ourselves. For those who have recently been to the cinema and watched the Star Wars revival on the big screen, maybe we'd liken spirituality to the Force. Alas after many years of prayer and seeking God, I still can't move large boulders with my mind.

Maybe it's like love. It's something you can never explain, it's something you have to experience. How exactly do you know that you're in love? Can we ever truly know that we are loved? Maybe all love is is a state of deep trust that the bond between us exists. But anyone who has ever been in love will know with a concrete certainty that love exists, even if they can't put their finger on it exactly. Love is out there, and so is spirituality. So how do we go about nurturing it?

One of the best descriptions I've ever heard on nurturing and progressing spirituality is that it's what happens when teaching meets experience. We go through our whole lives with a set of principles and teachings, the things which build us and make us who we are, and then one day something happens which causes us to stop and question these key beliefs. Maybe it's the loss of a loved which shifts our stability, or maybe it's finding friendship and support from an unexpected place. These shifts in expectation cause a pivot point in our lives. They make us as questions which are maybe painful and might even make us have to change our views on some things. Sometimes they solidify and edify our existing stance. But all of these little pivots, each of these small interruptions on our road of life, they too build us up in the same way that our initial teaching did.

And this is something that I love to explore with my church and small groups. I'll often forego a Sunday sermon and instead read a newspaper article with my church and ask one of the hardest questions of all time: What would Jesus say were He reading this? This brings us away from the abstract questions what we often avoid when we stick to our rigid traditional teachings. I'm sure that not many of you have coveted your neighbours oxen or manservant. If you have then lucky neighbour. But when we ask how Jesus might vote on the fox hunting ban, or if Jesus would say something about budget cuts to the poorest communities, well that's something wholly different.

Those are the times when when our teaching encounters something we might not have considered before, where teaching meets experience. And that's the start of developing spirituality. And hopefully we'll take our own journey together on this subject soon.