Why Spirituality Now?
Response from Carrie E. Neal
For me, spirituality is liberation. Spirituality is experiential and activates meaning-making, connection, and maturity. It is about both being in the moment, and having a belief that there is more than just this moment.
When asked, “Why Spirituality Now?”, I immediately find myself expanding outwards and think, “Spirituality Always”. If you are living in the United States in 2020, then you know that this has been a trying year. Living under a shelter in place order, unemployment, unsure political futures, and black siblings still being killed by police violence in very public ways.
Now seems like the exact right time for spirituality. If spirituality can help us understand what’s happening in the world around us and inside us, then this seems to be the time to activate it. Friere tells us that authentic liberation is the process of humanization [1]. Now seems to be the perfect time for more humanizing systems, organizations, communities and relationships. Spirituality humanizes us and it liberates us.
When I think about the experience of being alive, the experience of 2020, I have a full range of emotions, many thoughts, plenty of fear and longing, and some hope. I also have rage, grief and deep sorrow. And mostly I think, “I, like every human who has lived, lives with both hope, and experiences trial, recognizing that most of my experience is out of my control. There has been pain at the level I experience today in every generation of humanity.”
What do I mean when I say spirituality activates meaning-making, connection, and maturity?
My personal spirituality, as well as the cultural and societal environment that I exist within, give me language to process the world around me. If I believe that I should worry not for tomorrow (Matthew 6:34), and I am able to live into that, then I will experience the trials of 2020 in a very different way than someone whose spirituality teaches them to “share the guilt of creatureliness and the guilt for anything they ever thought.” [2] In this then, our spirituality informs our actions, our thoughts, our meaning-making and interpretation of experience. This recognition that spirituality is connected to my experience and allows for meaning-making releases me to the joy of the intellect. I love to think, research, and reflect. This is a spiritual practice for me.
When I refer to connection I think about connection to self, connection to others, and connection to the Everything. The Everything that I can just begin to recognize when I get a sense of interbeing. Interbeing is an expanded inter-relational understanding of how we are situated and interact withtime, space, humanity before us, with us now and into the future, the natural world and all of life. [3] Connection to myself is how I understand inner-knowing. Connection to others is how I practice community. And connecting to Everything positions me with humility.
And where does maturity fit in? When I think about maturity I think about personal and social development. I think about relationship to community. I think about recognizing transformation in myself and others. Maturity is a combination of synthesizing and assimilating observation, and making choices that honor oneself and one another. It is about presence, mindfulness and decision-making — it is wisdom. It is both earned and innate.
So, how is spirituality liberation? I believe that believing in something more than ourselves is liberating, brings hope, helps us feel connected and interconnected, and increases empathy. This work — the work of being spiritual beings — becomes the work of humanization and interbeing. It is what moves us towards being people with ubuntu [4] and towards the future. It brings us equanimity, and peace.
Wherever you are, in 2020 or any other point in time, I say, “Spirituality Always”.
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[1] Freire, P. (2005) Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group.
[2] Baldwin, J., & Mead, M. (1971). A Rap on Race. Philadelphia and New York: J.B. Lippincott Company.
[3] Hạnh, T. (2020). Interbeing. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press.
[4] “A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.” -Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Originally published at http://northfeatherthoughts.com on June 15, 2020.
