Spirituality That Makes a Difference

Charles R. Kniker

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781666717891, 9781666717907
• eBook ISBN: 9781666717914
• Topic: Theology & Religion

Want to make your life more meaning-FULL? Most of us do. This book is a guide offering ways to do just that. Charles Kniker brings fifty-plus years of listening as a teacher, preacher, observer, and writer to a conversation with you. With questions and real-life stories and solutions, he'll support you; it won't be a one-way model.The many forms of spirituality will help explore life's big questions and ultimate mysteries.With tomorrow's climate changes, pandemics, political extremism, and battered moral boundaries, we need a transformational spirituality, a spirituality deeper than a few dusty rituals, more reliable than snappy slogans from a smart phone. This book is foryoung adultssearching for answers to major questions; mid-life seekers, thankful for family, friends, and faith, but needing more; andseniorswhose traditional communities seem irrelevant.Chapters in Part One are on home, self, voices of influence, and healthy spiritual communities. Chapters in Part Two offer a "YESS" to life, through various ways of joyousYearning, truth-seeking Education, Soul care (for yourself and others), andService to a world of neighbors.Kniker passionately believes human DNA wires us to be spiritual--transforming dreams to become deeds.

Part I

Becoming a Spiritual Traveler—From Home to Home

Forma, a Middle English word, can mean a shape, image, or figure. Shape can describe our physical or emotional state. Image reflects our current or future perceived profile. A figure could offer an imaginative metaphor. Part 1 of this book describes the ways that various forces have molded or might mold you, especially as steps in your spiritual formation. Love should be the key ingredient in shaping everyone’s life but sadly isn’t. As you are reminded of the dramatic forces that formed your soul and self, I hope you will better understand why and how your spiritual being can be a difference maker for you and others. To do this, traveler, you begin at one home, and in time establish another.

Our first conversation, chapter 1, begins by asking you to remember the experiences and stories of your childhood. Hopefully, you were formed by love, yes, tough love at times. It sustained you. Continuing through your teen and early adult years, as chapter 2 chronicles, for days, weeks, and years, you were “in-formed” about life’s values and choices. Your self began interpreting, charting meanings of life. During that time, you may have been challenged to “de-form” some of your behaviors or even body image. As you matured into adulthood, chapter 3 posits there were and still are many voices urging you to “re-form” your identity. You listen; you weigh; you decide. These forces, secular and sacred, benign to aggressive, are also seeking to “con-form” you. Chapter 4 ends part 1 by asserting that as a social and individual being you have the option of becoming part of a healthy spiritual community which will ask you to “con-form.” You must discern which of its beliefs and practices you accept. Hopefully, it will assist you in making a positive difference in the world.

1

Home—Formed by Love

I had the feeling I was coming home, and it was to a home I have never had before.

—Sam Baldwin, describing the relationship he had with his deceased wife, in the movie Sleepless in Seattle

In East Asia, we speak of the human body as a mini-cosmos. The cosmos is our home, and we can touch it by being aware of our body. Meditation is to be still: to sit still, to stand still, and to walk with stillness. Meditation means to look deeply, to touch deeply so we can realize we are already home. Our home is available right here and now.

—Thich Nhat Hanh, Going Home, 45

A longing for homeland is one of the two great pulls in the tidal ebb and flow that powers the development of meaning and faith . . . another powerful sensibility that pulls as deeply and truthfully at the core of the human soul—the call to dwell, to stay, to abide, to return home.

—Sharon Daloz Parks, “To Venture and to Abide,” 62

The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home.

—Confucius

Formed by Love: Beginning a Spiritual Journey Home

◆Invitation: to remember your home and become a sheltered seeker

◆Traveler, are you willing to go out on a limb?

◆Ready to travel from home to home to back home?

◆Why emphasize home first, then the self?

◆What’s a home? Like pieces of a homemade pie!

◆What makes homes healthy? Unhealthy?

◆How many homes are religious or spiritual?

◆What’s special about spiritual homes?

◆How can we practice homefulness?

◆Do spiritual families have some benefits?

◆Traveler: ready to be a sheltered seeker going out on a limb?

◆Activities

Invitation: To remember your home and become a Sheltered Seeker

Who can disagree that the single most powerful word in the English language is home?12 When the 2020 pandemic struck, “stay at home” became the coping mantra. Families rediscovered meals together, as well as ways to exercise and learn. They took “staycations.” Parents, grandparents, and caregivers now exchange stories about the challenges as well as the rewards of this new paradigm. Religious organizations and social service agencies, like homes, created new ways to carry out their traditional roles and responsibilities.

Many prefer to cling to the past. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books and their television progeny, Little House on the Prairie (1974–1983), proclaim home the “nicest place there is.” The film Minari (2020) paints a more honest but harder truth of family life as a South Korean American family grapples with farming in Arkansas and California. Wouldn’t we rather retain memories of sight and smell such as Grandmother’s canned pickles and rhubarb pies or neighbor Oma’s crusty...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface—Listening
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Forming
• Part I: Becoming a Spiritual Traveler—From Home to Home
• Part II: Qualities of a Spiritual Home: YESS to Life!
• Final Conversation—Going Home
• Resources for Spiritual Travelers
• Bibliography