Spirituality in Education in a Global, Pluralised World

Marian de Souza

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317619123
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A particular problem associated with international research in the field of spirituality and education is the reluctance of scholars to agree on what spirituality means, with numerous descriptions increasing ambiguity and reducing the impact of research in the discipline. This book argues that it is important to understand spirituality as a unifying concept that has the potential to be meaningful in its application to the lives of children and young people in areas of learning and wellbeing. Chapters show why and how spiritual learning should be addressed across the curriculum, with implications for the design of learning programs and environments.

Chapter 1

Spirituality, children and young people

Perspectives from research

In order to understand the role of spirituality in the learning process I needed to discover how contemporary perceptions of and attitudes towards spirituality impact on the lives of children and young people. Given the dominance of a secular culture and the receding influences of traditional religion, many young people have little experience of religious and spiritual practices. On the other hand, alternative practices, such as yoga, meditation and ecological concerns, have become widespread over the past forty years and they are easily accessible and attractive to young people in their search for meaning. This chapter, then, will explore the changed understandings of the concept of spirituality and the implications for the expression and practice of the spirituality of children and young people today.

Concepts of human spirituality: Perspectives from West to East

Western culture, derived as it was from a 2,000-year-old Christian history and consciousness, traditionally treated spirituality as an offshoot of religion. Spirituality and religion were used synonymously so that spirituality came to have little life of its own (for instance, see Hughes et al., 1995 and Ó Murchú, 1997 among others). In addition, with the birth of an industrial and technological age during the previous two centuries, the dominance of scientific and rationalistic thinking meant that spiritual matters became of less concern in human affairs. Indeed, in the years following the Second Vatican Council in the Roman Catholic tradition, mystical theology, which explored the spiritual realm in the Christian world, was not taught in Catholic seminaries (Johnston, 2000). At the same time, traditional religion slowly began to lose its foothold in society. People started drifting away from institutional Christian churches (Francis, 1989; Kay & Francis, 1996; Rymarz, 2006) and many found themselves floundering in the mass of information and misinformation generated by media and other outlets that purported to offer answers to the big questions. In describing this situation at the turn of the century, Carroll (1998) argued that the West is ‘lost in a crisis of meaning’ (p. 1). The reasons that have given rise to this situation is that answers to the big questions about the meaning of life have become swamped by a materialistic culture, leaving many individuals confused and unsettled as they struggle to find purpose in their everyday.

Ó Murchú (1997) recognises spirituality as more central to human experience than religion. His Christian viewpoint acknowledges that the spiritual consciousness of our time is about leaving behind the familiar – the era of ‘mechanistic modelling, patriarchal control and the triumph of rationality’ – and yielding to the deep yearning to outgrow, transcend and evolve towards the new, ‘to outgrow the stultifying and crippling boundaries with which we have tried to hem in the human search for meaning over the past 300–500 years’ (p. 14).

Tacey (2000) supports the notion of spirituality without religion but observes that while expressions of this ‘new’ spirituality is about connectedness to nature and the cosmos, it also draws on our religious history and tradition (p. 15). Lyons (2000) concedes that while links to an institutional church may have become somewhat problematic for many Christians, their relationship with Jesus remains an important one. He uses the metaphor of Jesus in Disneyland to discuss the commodification of spirituality, rather than religion, where a post-modern image of Jesus has become popular. In this guise, Jesus is seen as inclusive of outsiders and minority groups; he is critical of organised religion and promotes social justice. This image of Jesus, then, has been made into an icon to embellish T-shirts and other accessories or referred to in popular music and books. ‘Jesus comes dressed up in the clothes of our own culture’ (pp. 136–137).

Beaudoin (1998), a Generation Xer, concurs. He suggests that if we seriously explore the cultural symbols and practices of Gen X¹ we would find a people whose search for God remains at a personal level. Many engage in a serious study of the Christian tradition which then positions them to offer critical and constructive comments on Church teachings and practice. Beaudoin’s opinion is that if the institutional Church wanted to attract Gen Xers, it needed to hear their voices and respond by bringing its ‘practices and preaching back to its origins and its centre – Jesus’ (pp. 64–65).

Certainly, the human search for meaning and transcendence has been the subject explored by many philosophers and theologians. Evelyn Underhill’s thesis on mystical theology, written in 1910, argued that the human search is a distinctive feature of humankind:

The most highly developed branches of the human family have in common one peculiar characteristic. They tend to produce – sporadically it is true, and often in the teeth of adverse external circumstances – a curious and definite type of personality; a type which refused to be satisfied with that which other men call experience, and is inclined, in the words of its enemies, to ‘deny the world in order that it may find reality’ . . . their one passion seems to be the prosecution of a certain spiritual and intangible quest: the finding of a ‘way out’ or a ‘way back’ to some desirable state in which alone they can satisfy their craving for absolute truth.

(Underhill, 1993, p. 3)

While these views reflect a perspective influenced by Western Christian thought, Gilbert (2010, p. 5) points to the fact that the notion of returning to the Godhead is contained within different religious traditions where earthly life is seen as one of suffering. Thus, the human search for meaning is about returning to our origins. He describes, for instance, the concept amongst Muslims and Christians that suffering is attributed to the separation from God. Consequently, humans yearn to return to and be united with God. He discusses, as well, reincarnation amongst Buddhists and Hindus, where a breakthrough to freedom from the endless cycle requires an enlightened mind and doing good works. The common theme underlying these notions is that the goal is to escape this life and to return to an Absolute Reality.

Echoing Underhill’s thesis nearly a hundred years later, Karen Armstrong asserts that ‘religion was not something tacked on to the human condition . . . the desire to cultivate a sense of the transcendent may be the defining human characteristic’ (2009, p. 19). She further argues that the Ultimate Reality is not a personalised god. Rather, it is a transcendent mystery, the depths of which can never be comprehended. It is Armstrong’s contention that – while different faith traditions have their own ‘unique genius and distinctive vision: each its peculiar flaws’ – there are some fundamental principles common to most faith traditions: ‘when one loses all sense of duality and is “oblivious to everything within or without”’ (p. 31). Thus, Armstrong speaks of the self-forgetfulness that is experienced by people who become so practised in their skill that it becomes second nature to them – the depth of their absorption unifies them with whatever they are doing. Citing Zhuang, an important spiritual figure in ancient Chinese history, she says it was ‘an ekstasis that enabled you to “step outside” the prism of ego and experience the divine’ (p. 5). She goes on to say this was the way in which individuals were able to discover that the transcendent dimension in their lives was not something ‘out there’, but something that they drew from the core of their existence (ibid.). Furthermore, Armstrong refers to the fact that, historically, we can find evidence that many men and women have had experiences which allowed them to transcend the ordinariness of their daily lives:

Indeed, it is an arresting characteristic of the human mind to be able to conceive concepts that go beyond it in this way. However we choose to interpret it, this human experience of transcendence has been a fact of life.

(Armstrong, 1993, p. 6)

Importantly, Armstrong does admit that not all people will recognise this transcendent dimension as divine; for instance, Buddhists do not attribute it to a supernatural force but, rather, recognise it as a natural aspect of being human. Nonetheless, Armstrong stresses this human need to reach out to something beyond as a ‘yearning for the absolute’ when people ‘sensed its presence all around them, and went to great lengths to cultivate their sense of this transcendence in creative rituals’ (2009, p. 23). Like others, Armstrong recognises that people have different names for this reality: God, Dao, Brahman or Nirvana (p. 5).

This argument is reinforced by Nakagawa who refers to D.T. Suzuki’s discussion on the Eastern perspective in 1963:

Eastern perspective is different from the Western perspective that is based on ‘dualistic divisions’ of things. It refers to the state of ‘unitary One’ – Tao, li, t’ai chi, absolute Nothingness, absolute ne, Emptiness – before a dualistic division takes place . . . The ‘unitary One’ does not mean the union of the two separate realms such as subject and object, or God and human, but the undifferentiated primordial state prior to division of any kind.

(Nakagawa, 2000, p. 10)

Simply put: Western thinking seeks a unio mystica between God and human while Eastern thinking is based on the non-dualistic ground of Being prior to dualism (ibid.).

Dualism has, without doubt, been central to Christian theology and doctrine. Nonetheless, many Western Christian mystics – for instance, Bede Griffiths, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, Teresa of Ávila, Teilhard de Chardin – found a transformation in their perceptions and experiences of a God ‘out there’ to a sense of oneness and union with God. This is captured by Robinson’s (1963) classic discussion on God in Christianity, where he describes how the theologian Paul Tillich influenced him to speak of God ‘with a new and indestructible relevance and (which) made the traditional language of a God that came in from outside both remote and artificial’ (p. 22). To Robinson, Tillich had moved away from the understanding of God as a separate being. Rather, Robinson says Tillich spoke of God as ‘the infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being’ (p. 46), as Ultimate Reality.

Significantly, the Western Christian concept of a God ‘out there’ made God a distant figure for many, known only through the description offered by others rather than through personal experience. This distant God in his heaven, implicit in the Christian tradition of the West, was often reflected in literature and the arts; for instance, in Browning’s line from the poem Pippa Passes: ‘God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.’ The comfort, consolation and intimacy that humans find in tangible relationships may remain missing in such a relationship. A distant God for many, then, persists as an intellectual concept of an Unseen Presence, a presence that they may be unable to experience through their physical senses which define them in their human reality – and therefore, for some, this Unseen Presence may remain a relatively elusive Unknown Presence.

Davies (2006) illuminates this relationship in his examination of different experiences of mysticism, which he defines as ‘an experience of God’ (p. 1) – or what some may refer to as experiences of transcendence. The most common within the Christian context is through attendance at a church service. Here, the experience of God is mediated through communal liturgy, prayer and ritual – but, nonetheless, it is real and meaningful for the individual (ibid.). The second most common form is when an individual’s relationship with Jesus is illuminated by the Scriptures and Church teachings and is so profound that it finds expression in a ‘visionary and particularly intense form of Christocentric spirituality’ (p. 2). Interestingly, Davies identifies an influence of the secular world in this second form since the visions are described through the use of romantic and almost erotic imagery and language. Davies goes further to suggest that the visions may have been prompted by the medieval practice involving severe forms of mortification which weakened the physical body, thereby increasing the susceptibility of the individual to visionary experience. Davies contends that these two forms were reflective of a particular time and setting within the Catholic world, but the third form is not so restricted. It is found amongst mystics of many different traditions and it takes the shape of ‘a direct and unmediated experience of God in which the soul rises or is raised beyond the material world to share, briefly, in the glory of the Godhead’ (p. 3). To sum up, Davies calls the first form of mystical experience the mysticism of the sacrament and liturgy; the second is a Christocentric spirituality; but the third:

aims specifically to transcend images and to enter the ‘darkness’ and the ‘nothingness’ of the Godhead itself in a journey which leads the soul to the shedding of all that is superfluous, contrary or unequal to God as he is in his most essential Being.

(Davies, 2006, p. 4)

According to the third form, then, we find a sense of union with God, the unity and oneness that has been described by others from both Christian and non-Christian, Western and Eastern worlds. That this concept of oneness can be found across Western and Eastern thinking suggests that it not only transcends cultural and religious preconceptions but, potentially, has significance and relevance for the human search for Ultimacy or Absolute Reality, or the host of names found across the human world for a Transcendent Other, or for deities that are believed to be incarnations of the Transcendent Other.

Certainly an idea of oneness may be found embedded in the philosophies and practices of many Christian writers. For instance, Thomas Merton speaks of a thread of unity that runs through his thinking and writings:

What every man looks for in his life is his own salvation and the salvation of the men he lives with. By salvation I mean first of all the full discovery of who he himself really is. Then I mean something of the fulfilment of his own God-given powers, in the love of others and of God. I mean also the discovery that he cannot find himself in himself alone, but that he must find himself in and through others.

(Merton, 2005, p. xv)²

Chittister (1991) too speaks of humankind as a people who lack awareness and a sense of balance which has ‘frayed’ our wholeness (p. 69) and asserts that ‘Benedictine spirituality asks us to recognize our connectedness . . . calls us to be mindful’ (p. 70). She acknowledges the dualistic feature apparent in traditional spirituality when it is packaged through religious frameworks which substitute religious formulas for spirituality:

Real spiritual wisdom knows that spirituality is not packaged and not processed and not produced for the mass market. Real spirituality is something that brings us now in touch with God here. It does not take formulas or imprimaturs. It takes consciousness . . . We have all been taught, whoever we are, that God is just a notch beyond and above and unlike ourselves. It is time to find out where God really is for us.

(Chittister, 1991, p. 206)

Further, Paul Nangle conducted a doctoral study into the contemporary understandings and practices of spirituality of the Irish Christian Brothers in Australia. He concluded that a concept of universal connectedness provided a foundational basis for the perceptions and expressions of spirituality of many of the Brothers he interviewed (see Nangle, 2014, pp. 242–246).

Another advocate is Bede Griffiths, whose exhaustive study of Western Christianity and Hinduism led him to discuss a new vision of reality. He noted that a universal wisdom, or perennial philosophy, prevailed from about 500 ce to approximately 1500 ce, which explained that ‘the material world was pervaded by, and would find its explanation in, a transcendent reality’ (1989, p. 11). He echoed Armstrong and Nakagawa when he recognised the different names by which this reality was known: in China as the Tao, in Mahayana Buddhism as the Void or Sunyata, in Hinduism as Brahman, in Islam as the al Haqq or the Reality and in Christianity it was known as the Godhead or Supreme Being (ibid.). It was Griffiths’s contention that a transcendent reality had been studied with some accuracy for many years in the East. However, it was done in a manner that differed from the rationalistic, objective scientific approach that was later developed in the Western world, and which gave no credence to an Ultimate Reality. Griffiths felt that some of the problems in the world today were a result of a rather restricted view, and if humankind was to survive, it needed a change of heart where science was to become subordinate to wisdom:

The discursive reason which seeks to dominate the world and imprisons the human person in the narrow world of the conscious mind must be dethroned, and must acknowledge its dependence on the transcendent Mystery, which is beyond the rational consciousness.

(Griffiths, 1976, p. 19)

Ultimately, Griffiths is claiming that there are things beyond the scientific mind so that a Western rationalistic, reductionist, objective approach to understanding the world would not provide all the answers. Nor could it express the ultimate meaning and purpose of life which always appears out of reach but ‘is the “Ground” of all existence, that from which all things come, to which...