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.

Celtic mother figurine

The figure of mother is an example of what psychologist Karl Jung called archetypes, that is first or basic types. They are figures to which we have strong emotional and intellectual attachment. Jung claimed that the ideas and instincts associated with these figures existed as a fundamental part of our minds. For something to qualify as an archetype it has to be universal – it has to have significance in every society at every time as we would expect something basic to human psychic structure to always make an appearance.

“My thesis, then is as follows: In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but it is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.” ^{– Jung}

Some other archetypes that have been identified are father, priest, warrior, rogue, lover and husband and wife. When we turn to the world of religion we can notice that these same figures turn up again and again. The mother archetype is represented in ancient religions of Greece (Demeter), Egypt (Isis) and in the present day faith of Catholicism (Mary, Mother of God), Hinduism, (Kali) and in Judaism (Sophia). She is also undergoing a renewal in the New Age faiths as interest and devotion is centred around the figure of the “Goddess”. Other important archetypes to be found in the religious world are Father (Zeus, Thor, Yahweh), Lord, King, Monk, Priest, Mystic. The appearance of these archetypes in all religions is further evidence that they form a part of the structure of our minds.

Some archetypes within the world of religion are drawn from the family life or community structure eg. Father, Mother, Warrior, King, but others are more unique to the world of religion itself. For instance, the figure of the divine human is central to many religions. Christianity has Jesus, Buddhism has the Buddha, Islam has Mohammed, Hinduism has Krishna, the Greeks had Hermes and Psyche. Each of these figures represent a combination of God and humanity in the minds of the devotees of that religion. They represent a link between the world of humanity and the world of God. They also mirror the aspiration within each of us to reach toward our divinity – the early church fathers said of Jesus that he became human in order that we might become divine. The myths and stories around these figures explain this divine and human nature; for instance the myths of Krishna and Jesus and Hermes all emphasize how these figures had one divine parent and one human one.

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

The Post-Modern challenge to Religious Education

Over the last few decades post-modernism has influenced the way we see the world. It has moved us past a simple view of the world whereby our thoughts, ideas and theories simply mirror an objective reality. Rather, we are coming to see that reality is a joint endeavor between the external world and our own filters, perspectives and interpretations. Knowledge is the product of an interaction between our ideas about the world and our experience of the world.

As Clive Beck points out,¹

‘Postmodernist insights require a major shift in our conception of inquiry. No longer should we see ourselves as seeking to uncover a pre-existing reality; rather, we are involved in an interactive process of knowledge creation. We are developing a “working understanding” of reality and life, one which suits our purposes. And because purposes and context vary from individual to individual and from group to group, what we arrive at is in part autobiographical; it reflects our “personal narrative,” our particular “site” in the world. ‘

In recent years these post-modern insights have led to a critique of Religious Education. Books such as Andrew Wright’s Religion, Education and Post-Modernity² and Gavin Flood’s Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion³, have begun the process of questioning the philosophical and theological modernist foundations of the way Religious Education is currently taught. According to these and other post-modern educationalists it turns out that we may have been building the foundations of our Religious Education on the shifting sands of modernity. Before we can develop a method of Religious Education that makes sense to and appeals to the current generation of students we need to consider a post-modern critique of the major methods currently used in Australian schools.

Current methods of Religious Education

1. The Catechetical approach

The catechetical approach seeks to educate students in their assumed religious tradition. It is most often used in Catholic schools where many students identify with belonging to their particular religious tradition, although it is also adopted in Islamic and Jewish schools. The focus is on the elements of being part of that religion – rituals, beliefs and scriptures – and it seeks to educate students in their faith tradition. It is seldom used in non-Catholic private schools because of the great diversity of religious and non-religious backgrounds of the students particularly where belonging to the religious tradition is not part of the social identity as it is in Catholicism. It works to the degree to which the student does identify with the faith community but often alienates those who do not as it can foster a sense of being outside and may prove particularly difficult for young people who are testing the limits of belonging. This approach, if compulsory for students, can set up resistance among those who can feel, in this age of choices, that faith is being thrust upon them.

2. The Kerygmatic approach

The key feature of the kerygmatic approach to religious education is the proclamation of the good news of the Christian gospel (kerygma). This approach is taken in many Independent Schools and some Catholic schools and a strong emphasis is often placed on teaching of scripture with the idea that scripture has the power to communicate the essence of the gospel. This is sometimes mixed with a study of religion approach in traditional church schools. This method tends to offer students a choice of one, emphasis is placed on the student’s willingness to accept or reject the message of the gospel. It is clearly modernist in its approach as it presents religion as a meta-narrative, an all encompassing world view which seeks to explain everything important in life. This approach tends to assume that students will find meaning once they adopt the faith.

Many students do not necessarily feel ready to make the all or nothing choice often offered by this approach and can feel some pressure especially if this is mixed with apologetics. They are perhaps justifiably cautious in an environment where they receive a lot of mixed messages and will tend to put off decisions and commitments. This putting off of commitment often leads the students to a functional agnosticism. It can also tend towards polarization among students and and us and them type of mentality.

Furthermore, when students study the bible they bring with them a number of techniques and assumptions from their world view and from their other subject studies. One question they are taught to ask from their short understanding of history is, “Did it happen?”. They also bring from science a skepticism concerning what may be considered miraculous. Within an enlightenment context where the role of reason is elevated and physicalism is most dominant the miracles of the scriptures seem to belong to another world and the questions addressed by the scriptures seem far from the concerns of the students. Nor does this methodology help students understand their current unexamined belief framework.

A six year study by students of Christianity is not necessarily a pretty sight. Our faith contains many moments of injustice, spiritual bullying, confusion and it requires a deep maturity to put all that in perspective. This is a task best left until later. The more appropriate task of the student should be the adoption of a personal meaning system.

3. The Experiential Approach

Influenced by psychology and anthropology this approach emphasizes experience; both the experience of the student and the religious practitioner are on centre stage in this methodology. Under the umbrella of this methodology the student may try meditation in the classroom, study religious experience, undertake self examination of their current belief and value system and explore the question of “Who am I?” and their own experience of prayer and faith. The danger with this approach is that it provides too little content preventing students from taking it seriously and seeing it as a soft, “touchy-feely” subject. There are also limits on how much students at their age can reflect on what is a limited experience. Furthermore it does not address the meaning gap in their lives.

4. Liberation and Justice Approach

Justice education takes a central place in a number of Religious Education courses. Often drawing on the work of Thomas Groome, this approach emphases filling the gap between what the gospel calls us to be and the reality of the world. Focusing on poverty, the environment and charity, this approach highlights the work of the gospel in the world. Although students can see the value of this method it often left them feeling that parts of the church weren’t always on the side of justice and it had difficulty maintaining the interest of students on what is predominately ethical issues. It is very much immersed in the world of shoulds and oughts. Nor does it necessarily give meaning to their ordinary lives unless they adopt a mission to bring justice. This methodology needs to take more into account the stage of students lives and the need to develop a meaning structure out of which they can make a contribution to justice and the world.

5. The study of religions (phenomenological) approach

The study of religions is sometimes called the phenomenological approach as it aims that students become familiar with the various historical manifestations of religious phenomena. Religion is situated in a cultural and historical context and one aim is to provide young people with the intellectual tools they need to understand social and political events that have religious dimensions and that are regularly covered by the media.

Although phenomenology can be traces back to Kant and his contemporaries it has been made popular for Religious Education by Ninian Smart who posited seven dimensions of religion such as beliefs, rituals, religious experience, myths and rites of passages. This approach to religion became the basis for most texts used in Religious Studies departments firstly in England where it gained great popularity and then subsequently in Australia. The adoption of this approach in schools led to students studying the myths and rituals, beliefs and religious experiences of the major world religions in class. The goals of the phenomenology of religion were the hope that students would be able to understand how religion operates in society and in the life of the individual and that that understanding would foster empathy. However the attainment of these goals is now being called into question through a growing post-modern critique of this methodology along the following lines.

• Adoption of a personal meaning system is only a by-product of the phenomenology of religion and requires a high level of thinking from students, to take the phenomena, extrapolate meaning and apply within their culture. Meaning is culturally based. Students find it hard to make the shift from the phenomenological study of religion to their own existentialist situation.
• The study of religions tends to reflect the assumptions and values of modernity and specifically the enlightenment. It presupposes the neutral stance of the interpretor and seeks to suspend the judgments of the student. This suspension of judgment is not really possible nor is it desirable because the student needs to understand their own value system rather than pretend it is not there. The reasoned objective study of religion is impossible! It is enlightenment wishful thinking. The only study of religion that is possible is subjective study.
• Gavin Flood points out that in developing typologies of religious phenomena the explanatory level is usually left out, be it cultural, psychological or other explanation.⁴
• It is assumed that bracketing together religious phenomena will produce empathy on the part of the student as they will find similarities with their own experience. However this empathy may well be overstated in the case of students with their own faith who may highlight difference and absent from students without faith who often feel there are entering an alien world of religious experience and myth.
• It presupposes that the core of religious ideas is accessible through a study of their so called beliefs or rituals and that there is somehow a one dimensional thing that can be studied called religion. It is biased towards a content approach to religion whereas religion may be just as aptly described as a process, a way of being in the world.
• The goal of religion is not religion but life. The phenomenological approach focuses too much on religion itself and not enough on how religion aids people in living their lives.
• It describes rather than analyses. Phenomenology fails to get to the underlying nature or pattern of things.
• Religious studies has withdrawn from the world’s debates to study religion as an isolated topic.
• The phenomenological approach leads to a grab-bag approach to religion, many features of which are irrelevant to the hearer.

The situation of the student

Ninian Smart commented that the phenomenological study of religion becomes “methodological agnosticism” and this methodological agnosticism easily becomes personal agnosticism. That agnosticism tends to lead also to a sense of meaninglessness as it speaks to what the world is not rather than what it is. Flood concurs, “In the end, the discourse of religion is either from within, in which case the entailment of existence is implicitly accepted or from without in which case it is denied; there cannot be both an acceptance and a non-acceptance of an existence claim”⁵

The phenomenological approach does not require the student to do or believe or commit to anything whereas the studies in meaning approach requires them to make meaning for their lives. The kerygmatic approach shares a similar problem in that it invites the student to consider the claims of the gospel from the perspective of the outsider studying the way an insider perceives the faith – a very difficult process, the difficulty of which is indicated by the very very small number of students who actually come to faith. Furthermore that outsider perspective is often the materialistic and rationalistic enlightenment attitude which the students picks up from other subjects at school. It is the perspective from which religion is studied that is reinforced not the religion itself. Effectively the way we are teaching Religious Education currently has a strong tendency to produce agnosticism and atheism in students as it encourages either methodological agnosticism or forces students into a choice based on accepting what they have been taught conflicts with rational thinking.

Flood’s solution to the problem is the study of religion using dialogue in which the student recognizes their own position within its historical context and enters into a dialogue with other traditions. While this may be appropriate for the mature student, teenagers have little understanding of their own fluid personal position which is still being formed. The position that the student needs to take then is sojourner, creator of meaning – they mine religion for meaning – which requires them to understand the meaning of that faith in context. They are given a reason to visit the world of faith – sometimes they will stay. The student learns that the meaning is dependent of the social and historical context in a way phenomenology doesn’t encourage because its typology seeks to take it out of its historical context. For instance take the story of the Incarnation, from a phenomenological perspective it is studied as a myth of Christianity comparable to myths in other religions such as the avatars of Krishna in Hinduism; in that context an agnostic stance is taken toward whether it is real. In the kerygmatic approach it is taken as a central claim of Christianity to either be believed by the student or rejected. The student compares these claims with what they have learnt in history and science and often concludes that virgin births do not happen. Within Studies in Meaning the incarnation may comes up in the context of the issue of what does it means to be human, that we are both physical and spiritual, or what is God like, not aloof and distant but manifest here among us. The step of looking at the incarnation for meaning requires the student to step inside the world view of the first hearers and assume for a while its reality. Then the student needs to evaluate the meanings – how true is it that God can be present in human form, how true is it that we are both human and physical and yet spiritual and “of God”? The issue of to what extent it happened in a historical or scientific sense is then secondary and comes under the issues of the nature of reality and is dealt with separately.

A note on the five strand approach of Peter Vardy

The most dominant approach to the religious Education in Australian independent Schools is that promoted by the the theologian and vice principal of Heythorp Jesuit college, Dr. Peter Vardy. His five strand approach is not so much a new approach as a combination of a number of different approaches. It includes the study of Christian scriptures, ethics, philosophy of religion, the study of major religions and the practise of meditation. The first strand is kerygmatic, the second and third philosophical, the fourth phenomenological and the last experiential. Vardy’s approach is very traditional and its most notable feature is the combining of a number of these methodologies, however each part suffers from the critiques above and this seems a case of the whole not being greater than the sum of the parts.

Civics education

A number of educators have advocated that the teaching of civics or citizenship as part of or an adjunct to Religious Education. If this type of citizenship is trying to merely inculcate the student into the dominate social narrative then it is going to be resisted by the student. For example Richard Rorty⁶ believes that “lower education” (primary and secondary) “is mostly a matter of socialization, of trying to inculcate a sense of citizenship.” It “should aim primarily at communicating enough of what is held to be true by the society to which the children belong so that they can function as citizens of that society. Whether it is true or not is none of the educator’s business, in his or her professional capacity.”

As Baumeister points out society does not need the individual to acquire a deep sense of meaning.⁷ All that is required is enough meaning to make them a functional member of the community. In fact as there are many jobs that must be done even if they offer no meaning to the individual. Students often understand that civics may have an implied agenda that requires the sacrifice of the individual for society as a whole. Such an approach can only really succeed if a meaning system is established first. In this sense civics can sometimes be at odds with spirituality which has a questioning role toward the dominant culture and Religious Education needs to be careful not to align itself too closely with the unquestioning philosophy of teaching civics.

Furthermore young people systematically question convention from the age of about two, a tendency which is essential for cultural renewal. Religious Education should support this tendency and maximize individual meaning making. We ought not give students something to push against – it wrecks the teaching and prevents them doing any meaning or spiritual work. They become so busy being against the system that they never do the work of finding their own beliefs.

We are too concerned that if given the freedom students would choose against faith and society so in our lack of trust we preach to them, get resistance and create the very thing we fear. But we have nothing to fear except fear itself! Most students when putting together their meaning system will take elements from the very pool of ideas we may wish to foist upon them anyway. Here it is important to remember that the medium is the message and if we model an open classroom we will get a student who is respectful and engaged in life’s spiritual quests.

A Post Modern religious Education Programme

The need for meaning

Our teenagers have a great number of needs at their stage of life, a need for a sense of identity, for a competent place in world, for significant relationships and for meaning in their lives. It is particularly the latter need that a good Religious Education programme can address. All humans have a need for meaning in their lives – we are meaning making creatures. We use meaning every time we speak or act or imagine acting. Whatever happens to us we find and assign meaning to it. Our lives are filled with attempts at giving meaning to our relationships, our work, our recreation and our difficulties.

Our students’ lives are bombarded with meanings from parents, media, friends, school, the internet as well as from their own imaginations. This does not necessarily mean that students will have an integrated overarching meaning system, rather it is likely to be fragmentary and changing especially at that age. Nor may it at that stage entail the affirmation or adoption of an already existing overarching meaning of life, a meta-narrative, such as that provided by religion or a school of philosophy. Many students do not feel ready to adopt an overarching meta-narrative but none the less are still engaged in putting together fragmentary meanings. Roy Baumeister in his book Meanings of Life⁸ identified four common human needs for meaning, a purpose in life, a sense of what we value, sense of usefulness and a sense of self-worth. These he argued are essential to a fulfilled and balanced life and teenagers are constructing meanings to meet these needs continually.

If a sense of meaning is so central to an individual’s well being it is important for us as educators to ask where, within their school experience, students are given an opportunity to examine the meanings already attached to their lives by their society and to explore and develop their own sense of meaning. There is no doubt that values are offered in the school context often centred around honesty, respect, learning and care for others. However these values still need a meaning structure to lend support to them otherwise they can appear arbitrary and fail to be integrated into the students own view of life. There is also no doubt that meaning is sometimes addressed in English Literature, History and Science but overall these references tend to be fleeting and occasional. Generally speaking schools have abandoned the task of exploring meaning as too hard and focused their attention on occupational subjects, the arts and literature. The two main contenders for teaching in our independent schools may be Philosophy and Religious Education but issues of meaning are often occasional to the study of epistemology, ethics and ontology for the former and phenomenology of religion for the latter. During the first half of the twentieth century while Sartre was discussing the meaning making needs of humanity and Heidegger exploring the nature of being Wittgenstein was teaching that meaning was something which grew out of our social behaviour and was primarily a linguistic phenomena – it seems in our schools at least that Wittgenstein won the day.

This meaning making aspect of religion is not its only one, of course. Religion is also engaged in religious experience, worship, morality and ritual. However few of these are appropriate to the classroom though some may be addressed in chapel. This can lead to a sense of disconnectedness in students: they study aspects of religion in class that they do not have access to. It is the meaning making aspect of religion that is most applicable and accessible to students and the most appropriate for the classroom. This meaning making element also runs through all other aspects of spirituality as it gives shape to and explains why rituals are formed and what interpretation is given to experience. It also adds a great deal of depth to religious education, just the study of the phenomena of religion can be frustrating to students; to describe a religion without an attempt to understand it leaves students with a sense of confusion and often alienation toward religion. They may not agree with the answers a religion gives to certain problems but they need to understand the questions and basic human needs which are addressed by that answer.

Students do not come to this search for meaning without significant presuppositions. Haing grown up in a post-modern context they tend to be attracted to what French thinker, Jean-François Lyotard, called micro-narratives rather than one over arching theory which attempts to explain everything. It is my experience that they will work with the teacher who enables this search and integration of micro-narratives and against the teacher who seeks to impose their own or the teacher who has none. Added to this it must be remembered that students are schooled within the enlightenment ethos where reason is seen as paramount and where there is a bias towards for physicalism (everything that exists can be explained in terms of the material world). What tends to happen is that Religious Education re-enforces this Enlightenment world view as it is the critical unexamined philosophy from which religion is studied. As the rational enlightenment philosophy starts with a view of religion as irrational, historically questionable and scientifically unprovable, the whole study of religion will often be seen by the student as supporting this hypothesis.

Australian social researcher Hugh McKay has labeled this generation the choices generation because in an era of pluralism and consumerism their lives are bounded by the making of choices from amongst the products, lifestyles and philosophies on offer. Furthermore they have become sophisticated consumers and choosers. They are also experts at mixing and matching and as much as their elders may want them to adopt a particular set of values or beliefs by nature they tend to pick and choose. It is not that they are not interested in issues of meaning but that they want to determine the basis on which they acquire it. As educators it is wise for us to work with our students in this task.

A Studies in Meanings (SIM) approach to Religious Education

The Studies in Meaning approach to Religious Education is based on students asking a number of significant questions and looking, with the assistance of the teacher, through the history of human thought for some answers. The basic questions addressed are of concern to most people. They can include:

What happens when I die?

What is the good life?

How did everything begin?

What is the nature of love?

What is beauty?

Where does human worth lie?

What is mean by the idea of God?

Is there any meaning to suffering?

As can be seen the questions do not necessarily always appear to be overtly religious but that is because both faiths and philosophies provide the answers to many life-centred questions and not just religious questions. This approach allows students to explore the significant issues of life and develop their own world view firmly steeped in the wisdom of the ages. For example when studying the question of what happens when we die Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Materialist, near death experiences all need to be explored for students to get a rounded view. Because the area of study begins with a question it usually develops an open inquiring approach within the classroom. Students are encouraged to “try-on” ideas and see how they fit with their goals and with their experience so far. This approach also lends itself to a variety of teaching techniques. These basic questions of life can be explored in film, poetry, songs as well a religions and philosophies and the way different peoples and societies have approached these questions can provide a breadth to the studies as well as the depth of the question of meaning.

In a manner more reminiscent of Jesus’ teaching style than St. Paul’s this pedagogy is designed to confront the student with the meaning of their own lives. It seeks to deconstruct the world views that they may currently hold in a similar way in which Jesus shed light on the religious and political assumptions of his day, but not in order to disorientate his hearers but to help them confront what is important in their lives. It goes far beyond moralizing or preaching at people and helps them to sift through their inherited meaning system and make realistic choices based on considered thought and study.

The advantages of the Studies in Meaning approach.

• It changes the role of teaching from either apologist for Christianity (Kerygmatic approach) or knowledge provider and interpreter to guide.
• It is an excellent foundation for further philosophy and Religion and Society studies.
• It promotes conceptual thinking. Much of students learning is on the descriptive level or the learning of facts or techniques. Studies in meaning asks the student to consider symbolism and meaning.
• It allows the student to explore ideas. A sense of freedom is essential in learning.
• It is the search for meaning that is itself transformative. The search for meaning is a sacred task in itself and this search may be a students first taste of the sacred. It is not just the answers to these questions of meaning which are sacred.
• The medium is the message. Studies in meaning models a spirituality which is open to the spirit and inquisitive and is respectful of peoples’ ideas and choices. Faith is a way of being in the world. It includes a radical openness to the truth.
• It engages students in the task of theology rather than in learning about other people doing theology.
• The studies in meaning approach places the student on a quest for meaning – it gives motivation and purpose to the religious Education task which is often lacking.
• It promotes continual learning. Studies in meaning promotes a micro-narrative approach which considers that truth emerges out of a large number of smaller meanings. The model is the tangential circle. The more ideas that go into making up a students meaning system the closer it approximates to reality. The student is therefore encouraged to continue learning. This is in contrast to a meta-narrative approach whereby once the “truth” has been ascertained no further learning is required, only a filling out of the narrative.

Studies in Meaning and Philosophy

The question arises as to what extent studies in meaning falls within the realm of philosophy. There is no doubt that meaning from time to time becomes the study of philosophy but as Baumeister has pointed out the study of the meaning of life has been out of fashion in philosophy for a long time.⁹ It is perhaps rightly an interdisciplinary concern, for philosophy has also many other interests which may only be of tangential interest to studies of meaning such as ontology and epistemology. Philosophy perhaps most naturally studies the work of philosophers which is but a part of the studies of meaning. Nor is Studies in Meaning approach is not the same as Philosophy of religion. The traditional subject matter of philosophy of religion includes arguments of the existence of God and theodicy and these usually only provide limited assistance in students finding meaning.

Studies in Meaning and Jesus’ teaching method

Although it would be difficult to directly apply Jesus’ teaching methodology to the classroom, a few observations could be made. Firstly unlike the Pharisees, to whom Jesus as a teacher was often compared, Jesus neither taught an exegesis of scripture or a systematic philosophy or theology. Instead Jesus seemed concerned to confront the meaning of the lives of those individuals who crossed his path in the light of their social and intellectual environment. What does it mean to be happy, to give taxes to Rome, to love, to be healed? Who is my neighbour, what is the truth, what makes you free, how do I live eternally? All these questions forced his hearers to look at the meanings they and others around them placed on their lives. And as Jesus’ disciples followed him they saw people who met Jesus confronted by these issues. They learnt a great amount from him, not through a systematic study of religion but through an encounter with the God and the meaning of each individual’s existence. The religious Education teacher could do no better for their students than to imitate the way Jesus helped each person he met grapple with the what it means to be God’s creation set into this world of meanings.

9Baumesiter p4

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/

What is post-modernity?

Many of us have heard the term, “post-modern” applied to ideas or art or theater but have a only a vague idea of what it means. Post-modernity is a complex social movement and few commentators would agree on all its features, its champions and its history. But like many social descriptors it persists as a set of ideas and movements. Although a sure definition of post-modernity is elusive (which may be a good sign, for simply defined ideas are seldom true) there are a number of significant elements of post-modernity that many of its supporters and critics have identified. They are:

1. A suspicion or rejection of meta-narratives.

A meta-narrative is a total narrative scheme which claims to explain the whole of knowledge and experience. It is not hard to find examples of meta-narratives. Communism is one such narrative that attempts to explain the whole of human history and social dynamics in terms of class struggle. Christianity is another meta-narrative that tells a story which explains human history and human nature through a story, in this case with reference to relationship to the God of Jesus. Other meta-narratives may include Neo-Darwinism that looks at all of life through the lens of evolution or Freudian theory which explains humans history and psychology through response to libido.

What problems do post-modernists have with meta-narratives? There are several. Firstly they cannot all be true. The Hindu explanation of the universe and the Jewish description cannot both be true for they posit a very different beginning to the universe and offer very different pictures of God. Here we can see that post-modernism has gone hand in hand with globalization which has made it increasingly difficult for one group to claim exclusive access to truth in the light of all other claims.

A second difficulty post-modernists have with meta-narratives is their inability to come to terms with the chaos and complexity of the real world. The collapse of the Soviet Union is testament that human nature is too diverse and complex to be bent to serve some imposed narrative. Likewise the struggle the Christian church has had with feminism and now homosexuality has shown that complex human behaviours and relationships will not fit into precisely defined dogmas on what it is to be human. Meta-narratives by their nature tend to simplify history into an easily understandable (if not always entirely believable) schema and seldom allow the real complexity and diversity of humanity. This leads to a tendency to treat those outside this simplified narrative as in some way deviant or alien.

Within post-modernism the centrality of a single meta-narrative may be replaced by local narratives or micro-narratives (see Jean-François Lyotard). Rather than one all encompassing theory which seeks to explain everything a micro-narrative approach describes reality through a series of micro-narratives. I often use this circle to illustrate how micro-narratives work whereby the picture of reality emerges from many stories and theories rather than a direct attempt to describe in one overarching world view.

It may well be that truth is best given by the intersection of the micro-narratives rather than dependence on a meta-narrative. It can be argued that truth is only revealed by the intersection of micro-narratives because it always too complex to yield up its mysteries to one interpretative structure and it is only through micro-narratives that the interpretative structure becomes clear in comparison to others.

2. A questioning of power-structures and authority.

Post-modernists have noticed that meta-narratives often support and are supported by authorities. Every religion has its official interpreters and gate-keepers to the community in the form of priest, popes and theologians. There power derives from the meta-narrative and they reinforce it. Communist party officials support the Marxist analysis which supports them. The American president goes to war to spread the democratic system which elects and empowers him. This power-structure is used to modify behaviour and can become self serving. Post modernism also questions the authority of “experts” as their authority may rest in a paradigm which may in future be overthrown. Instead in a world of multiplicity there can be many authorities which each bear their own expertise and talent.

3. Challenging Utopian goals

Meta-narratives usually have some sort of goal that forms the ideal end of their stories. This may take the form of the classless society or a theocracy where all of society shares in their religious beliefs or may be expressed on an individual level as the fully realized person. The trouble that post-modernists have with these Utopian goals is that they would all require the fitting of an individual into a proscribed persona. It is clear that many people or cultures cannot be forced into being religious or to fit a particular psychological or political type. Great utopian movements such as communism or religions that seek political dominance such as Christendom often become repressive because they seek force individuals or groups into ideological visions rather than letting people be what they are. Nor is post-modernism enamored of the idea of man come of age or that we will be saved by technology or science; it rejects the future vision of the age of enlightenment where we are led by rationalism.

4. The medium is the message

Post-modernism does not hold strongly to the traditional view of the separation between the content of a message and the way it is communicated. You cannot enforce democracy at the end of a gun because the medium with which you deliver your message is communicates more than your supposed message itself. Nor can you necessarily communicate a message of equality and freedom of the Christian message through a highly authoritarian and structured institutional church.

5. An embrace of popular culture

Post-modernism tends to reject the idea of high culture – that one form of culture is extrinsically superior to another and sees all cultures as being valid and valuable reflections of human experience and ideas.

6. Man in not the measure of all things

Post-modernism tends to reject the idea that humans are at the centre of the universe. It sees that other living and non-living things have value in themselves apart from what they can offer humanity.

7. Reality is in flux – it is not eternally unchanging

Our individual identity is dependent on our culture which writes many of the scripts which we live by. Therefore as society changes so do we. On a cosmic level post-modernism realizes that life is evolving and the universe is constantly in motion.