Philozed

If spirituality is about the essential nature of things and about what gives our lives energy, then how does it relate to religion. I like to think about religion as structured spirituality. It may be structured into a community or institution with a hierarchy and a variety of roles or structured into a system of beliefs and rituals.

Modern day people sometimes find those structures around religion restrictive on their person spirituality and indeed they sometimes can be. Most spiritual leaders have warned about rigid, restrictive religious practices and Jesus saved his harshest words for the most religious people of his day. Yet on the other hand there is no really escaping some structure to our spirituality – most of our beliefs, practices and ways of seeing the world have a history. As soon as we come together in groups to share or practice spirituality it begins to form structure.

Perhaps it is about finding the right relationship with the past and structures of religion, enough so we do not have to repeat all the mistakes of the past, can mine the riches of our tradition and can find healthy ways of living out our spirituality with others.

Too much structure can make something rigid and inflexible … too little can invite a lack of strength and eventually collapse. It can also blind us to where the ideas which shape our lives actually come from. Our spirituality is really a dialogue with the past and with others as well as something which uniquely defines us.

Below is a short course on spirituality I have planned. I hope to run it late 2010

Week 1   The role of spirituality

connectedness
meaning
sense of sacred
worship
individuation
community
personal growth
energy

Week 2   The elements of spirituality

sacred space
language
sacred objects
rituals
myths

Week 3   Working with spirituality

fundamentalism
inflation
transformation
transfiguration
shadow, darkness and sin
union
religious experience

Week 4   Spirituality and Religion

being spiritual, being religious
the shopping approach
eclecticism
religion and change
demythologising, remythologoising

Week 5   Images of God

monotheism
polythieism
archetypes
masculine and feminine divine

Week 6   Continuing the spiritual journey

putting it together
the spiritual community
being symbolic
generativity

Eco-spirituality is about having a spirituality which is tied to and inspired by God’s creation. It is about being motivated to care for the environment by that sense of God’s presence revealed in nature.

Eco-Spirituality and the Christian way of life

The Christian story traces its roots back to the beginnings of creation through the message of Genesis.  The picture portrayed there is of a world which is created as a work of art by God – the creation of the world is how God expresses himself. In Genesis this world is constantly declared as good. This work of creation by God is filled with beauty, wrought with love and given as a gift to all living things. This expression of God in creation has over the ages been one of the ways in which people have experienced the presence of God and discerned something of his nature. Just as my art work cannot help but reveal something of my inner life, so God’s art work cannot help but reveal him.

But the story of Christianity may begin with Genesis but its focal point is Christ. God doesn’t just create the world and leave it he becomes a part of it in Christ. This is incarnation – the becoming flesh of God.  Christ is there from the beginning of creation – he is the one through whom all things are made. He is the logos or the pattern for being – one who has become incarnate in God’s creation.

When God created he created the web of life – everything is inter-dependent. There is not really us and the environment but the environment cycles through us. This has profound implications for those interested in the Christian approach to spirituality. Christians do not speak of the  immortality of the soul but the resurrection of the body – in other words we are our bodies as well as our minds and our spirits. You could easily say that we are incarnated and bound up in the environment ourselves and, as many have put it, what we do to the environment we do to ourselves.

If you would like to be involved in an eco-spirituality discussion check out

http://eco-spiritualityontap.blogspot.com/