Youth Spirituality the God-shaped hole

•Students often report that the sense of emptiness in society is so strong that they are driven to seek spirituality. And yet they are aware that their spiritual interests put them at odds with mainstream society. They are acutely aware that they are living in a time in which spirit is discounted, and they developed theories about why spirit is coming back.

• One student wrote: • “Attitudes to spirituality have changed in recent

times, and have become more receptive. I don’t think that it is seen as a weakness any more to admit to the feeling that there is something missing in our lives. In the early modern era, to refer to the spirit, and call attention to what was missing in modernity, might have raised the ire of those who felt they were getting along nicely without ‘religion’ or ‘spirituality’. Today in the postmodern world, it is more obvious that we are missing something, and to point this out is no longer seen as offensive or impolite.” – Amber

• Many students came to see that secular materialism is a mask worn by society, a mask which reduces human interactions to economic transactions. By reducing our experience in this way, the side of our nature concerned with meaning was nullified. Although the social mask is hard it is also brittle, and easily broken in times of adversity, as this student writes:

• “Underneath their hardened secular shells, people still need to believe that there is more to their existence than just one fragile life, that, in the sweep of time, is over in a blink of the eye. The majority of people still have faith, or rapidly try to recover faith in the critical and urgent moments of our lives. This is today’s reality, which is confounding to me: why do we wait for adverse circumstances to occur before we reach out to touch the face of God and to be embraced by the holy?” – Carolyn

Setting Out

• During my teaching practice I often found students grappling with basic questions in a moving way. They would ask: ‘what is the spiritual life?’ Is it a journey, as is often stated? If so, can they trust the forces of spirit to guide them? Is such a journey real, or a flight of fantasy?:

• “What is spirituality? The idea excites but also terrifies me. If I go in this direction, if I take this path seriously, then I have to know that it is right and true. What if I invest so much of my self, my energy, my identity in something that proves to be completely false or unreal? That is a scary feeling.

• But I always come back to what feels right, even though my intellect fails to provide me with the rational answers. It cannot tell me why I need spirit at all. Sometimes, when I have doubts, I remember that the spirit is ultimately a mystery, and we can never conceptualise or understand it. If I could define God once and for all, I believe God would really be dead then.” – Ambika

Attitudes to religion vary considerably

• Quite typical is the response that says spirituality ‘yes’, religion ‘no’:

“My spirituality is far too important to be gambled on a religion which I feel suspicious about, or unable to fully endorse. I have made my spirituality my religion. I realise it is a hodge podge of various ideals and moral standards, but it is all I have to go by.” – Carrie

Unreal expectations of spirituality• It is not uncommon for students to construct personal

spirituality as a kind of panacea or enduring resource, as we see in this example:

• “Western society has fallen out of love with religion. Religion no longer feeds our soul, and in searching for something else we found spirituality. Secular nonreligious spirituality is a refreshing concept, and offers us unlimited possibilities for our spiritual lives.” – Louise

I worry about this kind of extraordinary idealisation of individualistic spirituality – what ‘unlimited possibilities’ does she have in mind? This seems to suggest that spirituality has become a kind of modern myth or panacea.

Personal spirituality needs cultural support

• Some students recognise that personal spirituality quickly runs out of fuel and its resourcefulness is more limited than is often claimed:

• “Secular people are looking for spiritual renewal but don’t know where to look. I think that people who have been given the opportunity to grow up with some connection with a faith have more of a starting point to explore their own spiritual beliefs.” – Beth

Eastern European students often show nostalgia for more religious times

• “Sometimes I wish that I lived in the past, in a former time, where God played a central role in everyday life, and where people were united by a homogenous faith, but I realise this is a nostalgic attitude.” – Demitra

But Eastern European students still feel the sting of the separation between religion & spirituality

• “I never looked to my Orthodox faith for personal answers, realising at the age of twelve that it was too steeped in tradition to have any real relevance and value for a person living today. Gradually I had to separate my religion from my spirituality, and learned to differentiate between my traditional faith and my personal attunement to the universal pulse, life force, or God. This split between religion and spirituality has caused me a great deal of anguish and pain. I wanted my natal faith to be more spiritual, but it could not fulfil that function simply because it was too out of touch with society around me and the emotional world within me.”

– Demitra

Are students canaries in the coalmine?• Students often express profound confusion about our current

social situation, and this is registered as a deep seated anxiety or disorientation:

• “The secular and material values of the modern period have left us fragmented, confused, and undeveloped emotionally. The human spirit is now hitting back with a vengeance, and yet its traditional containers, the organised religions, are not giving us what we need.” – Demitra

What did the course contain? • The knack of spiritual education is to reach a ground

which is common to all traditions and yet prior to any one of them. Some call this pre-evangelisation. So ‘spirituality’ as I conceived it for the purpose of this course was a mixture of literary study, mystical writing, psychology, philosophy and personal reflection. I included some of the mystics already mentioned, as well as the poetry of William Blake, Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy and Les Murray. I drew from the prose works of Irishman John O’Donohue, Canadian Margaret Atwood, and Aboriginal writer David Mowaljarlai.

• Quite a few of my students suffered deeply from a sense of emptiness. During my teaching, I became aware that some of them suffered from depression, anxiety, panic attacks, social phobias, eating disorders or personality problems, and they were looking to spirituality as a form of healing. This accorded with recent medical research, which indicated that up to half of the patients suffering from mental health problems consider that spirituality is important for their recovery.

• John Swinton, Spirituality and Mental Health Care: Rediscovering a ‘Forgotten’ Dimension (London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley, 2001); Harold Koenig, Spirituality in Patient Care (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2002).

• Students in this category are not driven to spirituality by mere curiosity or academic interest, but by a sense of urgency, often sparked by a crisis in the home, family or personal relationships.

• When I started to teach this course, I was not aware of the mental health issue. I was trying to teach the course at a purely intellectual level, and did not wish to pry into their personal lives. Nor did I wish to construct myself as therapist or healer, which would be an inflated position for an academic to maintain. But as the years went on, I noticed that in their remarks in tutorials, and in essays and exercises, many said they had suffered or continued to suffer from mental health problems.

• Some openly declared they were recovering from drug addictions, and hoped they would be able to keep up with the course and attend as many classes as possible – but if they had to miss classes, would I please understand?

• When I read the first essays, in which I asked them to respond to the question: ‘What is spirituality?’ – a few wrote that spirituality was paramount in their attempt to overcome depression, which had burdened some of them since early adolescence. I realised that a significant proportion of the students were vulnerable. They had gravitated to the course as if supplementing their therapy and recovery.

• These issues prompted me to consult mental health reports from the university counselling service and national studies in epidemiology. A report on student health from La Trobe University stated that 20%, or 1 in 5, would suffer from a diagnosable mental illness during their studies. This meant that in a course with 150 students, about 30 would be suffering from a mental health problem.

• Of the 150+ who enrolled each year, I received many more affected by mental problems than the average 20%, because students with problems gravitated to the course, and surveys I conducted showed 70% of my cohort had experienced, or continued to experience, a mental health disorder. Precisely because the subject was about spirit, those impacted by problems took a bee-line to the course.

Build it and they will come

• When the idea first came to me to teach a subject on spirituality I did not know what kind of students to expect. My colleagues were suspicious and said I would probably attract two kinds: first, the ‘very religious’, who would present problems of rigidity: it was said they are Teflon-coated, because nothing will stick to them, as they already have the answers. The second group, it was said, would be the ‘New Agers’, who would present a different kind of problem, ‘flakiness’. As one colleague remarked, ‘The religious right and New Age odd-balls will sign up for your class’.

• Thus one answer to the question, ‘What kind of student is attracted to a spirituality course?’ would be: ‘Those in need’. Or: ‘Those who suffer’.

• There is nothing new about broken lives being attracted to spiritual life. All religious traditions tell the same story, about the wounded seeking healing, while the healthy often remain sceptical and distrustful of spirit.

The parable of the great banquet

• We think of the parable of the great dinner in Luke, in which a man prepares a feast, but those invited do not attend. They are too busy or self-preoccupied to respond, and when questioned they all have reasonable excuses. So the man asks his servant to ‘Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town, and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame’. The parable is of God’s love and generosity: many are called to the banquet, but few respond. Those who see themselves as self-sufficient, who remain in the busyness of normal life, are not moved to attend the banquet. Only those who recognise their inadequacy, who have felt despair and need, are prompted to partake in the nourishment of spirit. Luke 14:21.

The Death of God in the West?

Since the 18th century Enlightenment belief in God has been declining in the West, as secularisation and ‘disenchantment’ (Max Weber) have progressed.

But although intellectuals continually talk about the death of God, he has not disappeared. In numerous ways he is making a comeback, thus prompting an angry tradition of ‘New Atheists’, who are reacting to the persistence of belief with a firebrand atheism.

Bumper sticker seen in traffic:

“God is dead” - Nietzsche“Nietzsche is dead” - God

• In popular culture, as well as high culture, God is coming back. Continental philosophy, fiction and poetry, music, physics, biology, environmentalism, psychoanalysis are some areas in which religion is returning. Even Jacques Derrida, inventor of postmodernism and labelled a relativist and nihilist, reappropriated his Jewish faith at the end of his life. His last dozen books were all on religion and philosophy.

The complexity of the world situation

Many today are doubting the theory of secularisation.

The US remains as religious as ever; in former atheist nations, such as the former USSR and China, religion is coming back with a vengeance. Religion is strengthening in Africa and South America. Although modernising, India is not witnessing a decline of religion. Has the theory of secularisation been proved wrong?

Are we seeing the return of the repressed? Have Western intellectuals been living in a bubble of their own making?

Shifting assumptions in sociology of religion

In 1968 American sociologist Peter Berger wrote: “By the twenty-first century, religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture.”

Thirty years later, in 1999, this same writer said: “The assumption that we live in a secularised world is false: The world today, with some exceptions … is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever.”

Mind the Gap

• It is imperative that knowledge keeps pace with the return of faith. If it doesn’t, the world will be besieged by resurgent fundamentalism, superstition, and reactionary ideologies.

• Mainstream knowledge in the West is still in the old, debunking, secular mode, so the gap between reason and faith is wider than ever.

Continuing role of atheism

If God is coming back, we need new images of God and not the old, obsolete, anthropomorphic images.

This means there is still a place for atheism, if atheism represents ‘a denial of an image of God which is no longer adequate to the problems of our time’ (Karen Armstrong).

Philosophy of Religion• In this interval, between the death of old images of God

and the birth of possible new images, the philosophy of religion is arguably more important than confessional theology. Because the latter continues to be based on an archaic mythology.

• Any ‘return of God’ must be accompanied by an increase in philosophical knowledge and enquiry. In particular, a critique of the anthropomorphic, and hence false, images of divine reality. Such images are permissible only if understood as humanly manufactured and mythopoeic.

‘No thanks’, says the resistant Adam,like so many thinking people today

Hegel on God “God is no longer to be conceived as a person or as a being above and beyond this world” said Hegel•Some of our ideas of God, he said, are transparently anthropomorphic, that is, a projection of human attributes upon the divine. Hegel’s student, Ludwig Feuerbach, took this a step further: he said ‘God did not make man in his image, but man made God in his image’.

•Hegel and Feuerbach said it is obvious that we have fashioned images of God which are projections of our selves. However, and this is the point, they were both passionately religious and wanted to rescue God from these man-made images.

God not ‘a being’ but Being Itself

Theologian Paul Tillich took up the challenge of Hegel, Feuerbach and said yes, we can no longer imagine God as a being. However, he admitted that people needed to love and befriend God, and in the past the best way of doing this was indeed to picture God ‘like ourselves’.

Inspired by the philosophy of Heidegger, he famously said we should no longer imagine God as a being, but as Being itself. By dropping the indefinite article ‘a’, we enter a completely new world, where God becomes possible to science and to philosophy.

It’s a good time for apophatic theology:

‘There can be no descriptions of God, only interpretations’ – Jacques Derrida ‘How to avoid speaking’, in Ward G (ed.) The Postmodern God

“There is no objective view of God: each generation has to create the image of God that works for them. The statement ‘I do not believe in God’ has always meant something different at each period of history. Those who have been dubbed ‘atheists’ over the years have always denied a particular conception of the divine. Is modern atheism a denial of a God which is no longer adequate to the problems of our time?” – Karen Armstrong, A History of God

Apophatic = apo (no); phasis (to speak). Apophasis means to say no, to avoid speaking, to deny something

Contrasts cataphatic = cata (to descend) phasis (to speak) ‘to bring God down in such a way so as to speak of him”

•Has modern atheism, then, played a role in allowing us to transition from conventional, comfortable but illusory images of God? Old images have to be deconstructed before we can move forward with our religious life.

•Apophatic theology says God cannot be defined in terms of space or time, is not a thing or any type of being. Therefore God does not ‘exist’, and if we say he does exist, it is a form of blasphemy. This puts a new, theological, or mystical spin on atheism.

God is no-thing Apophatic theology is found in Eastern Orthodox tradition and has a long and venerable history in Western mysticism. Western churches are suspicious of it, as they suspect it undermines revelation and is agnostic (lit. ‘not knowing’). However, the apophatic is convinced there is divine reality, and thus is not agnostic in the ordinary sense, but says we do not know what God is. It does not present God as a ‘person’. Western church protests: How can we love and form bonds with an abstract mystery? The apophatic is not sentimental about God as a father, but philosophical, as in John Scotus Erigena: “We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being.”

• The Bible constantly condemns complacent familiarity with God. The 2nd commandment warns against creating images of the divine, because it limits God to our own images. And herein is the important spiritual lesson of so-called ‘atheism’ for our time, as Karen Armstrong suggests:

“Atheism has always been a rejection of a current conception of the divine.”

Boys more ‘atheistic’ than girls

• In one of my classes, every male declared himself to be an atheist, while only one or two females did the same. Most females in the class said they were in search of God; or, if not, they were agnostic. Some males claimed the agnostic females were fence-sitting, and should come over to their side! They were accused of being closet-atheists, who were lying to themselves. This would precipitate vigorous debate in class.

God versus the Male Ego

But one of the young woman said: “Why do you guys think of yourselves as atheists? What’s with you guys? And why would you even enrol in this course on spirituality if you have these attitudes?” One young man ventured an awkward reply: ‘I just wanted to find out what youse others believe’, he said, as if the matter had nothing to do with him. But the young woman would have none of this, and replied: “In my view you guys are so full of yourselves that you can’t imagine an authority greater than your own egos. That’s what your atheism is about – a refusal to accept a higher authority.”

Many times I have listened to this kind of narrative from my female students: •“I am trying to discover what God means to me, and that’s why I’m interested in spirituality. My mother is religious but I can’t support her religion because it is too traditional and old-fashioned for me. I sometimes talk to her about God, but I can’t get on her wavelength.” •“I can’t talk to my father about God, as he dismisses it all as nonsense. I don’t know how my mother and father have stayed together, because mother lives for her faith and my father threw it away when he was a young man.”

• Here is one example from a student of mine, Joshua:

• “The notion of God that I grew up with in the church was, I see now, extremely limited. To think that God disapproves of certain styles of dress, music, or words, or any other thing that my church did not like, seems insulting to the infinite beauty and wisdom that is behind the creation of the universe.”

• “After ‘losing my faith’ I spent some years as an atheist, variously an existentialist, solipsist, nihilist, hedonist. But I was attempting to fill a spiritual hole with an intellectual peg. This, I think, is the problem with most of the world’s philosophies, and goes a fair way to explaining why philosophers tend to be so depressed, and often insane or suicidal.”

• “When I found God again, I was amazed to find that there was no intellectual support for the notion of God’s existence, and yet it was something I knew through sheer intuition. On one occasion, I feel that I met God, not in body or in mind, but in spirit. I felt as if the whole world fell into place, as if it made new sense in its own way. Everything that exists is a product of God’s imagination, and God loves his Creation.” – Josh

• “Experience is a fundamental part of spirituality. It is through experience that we learn about ourselves, others, the world, and how we relate to it all. Experience is powerful because it is your own. What has attracted me to practising Buddhism is its emphasis on listening to the teachings, and experimenting with them in our actual experience. You are encouraged to ask questions about the religion, such as ‘How does this relate to my life?’ and also, ‘Is this actually true?’ Then, through direct experience of the truth of the teachings, you develop trust in them, can realize them, and know that it is your experience.” - Jason

• “This was what I found lacking in my education and upbringing in Catholic institutions. At school and again at church, I was simply told that this is the truth, that these are the rules, and urged to believe in and subscribe to them. I was never encouraged to experiment with or test the church’s teachings, and so I never developed the feeling that this was my truth, or these were my rules. I could never embrace what I was being taught as it all felt so alien to me, and I felt removed from it. Mass was just a hollow ritual, the Eucharist was cardboard. It was all quite easy to set aside, as I had never really felt part of it.”

• “What I feel to be spiritual – the intuitive, interior or mystical side of things – I tend to locate not in church but in nature, in other people, and in social justice or community service.”

• “ I think it is a very sad state of affairs concerning the Catholic church that the only way I found out about the interesting work of Father Thomas Merton, a mystic whose writings speak directly to me because they are so liberating, was through reading the wonderful autobiography of the Dalai Lama. This was the year after I finished secondary school. Ironically, it is only now, through my growing understanding of Buddhism, and through my readings of Merton, that I have begun to glimpse the spirituality and mysticism of Catholicism.” – Jason

Drawing faith out of individuals

Karl Rahner put it well when he said:

“The theological problem today is the art of drawing religion out of an individual, not pumping it into him or her. The art is to help people become what they really are.”

“The future Christian will be a mystic

or he [or she] will not exist at all.” – Karl Rahner

• “The idea that we are part of God and that God is part of us has never been looked upon favorably in the West. This idea is usually seen as blasphemy; the apartness of God must be preserved. Yet there are times when there is nothing we could be more sure of than that God exists and it is our communion with him that feeds our lives. I believe every woman and man has had communion with God whether they recognise it as such or not; whether they remember it or not.” - Adrian

• “But we are reluctant to refer to this experience as ‘God’, because we say to ourselves, ‘What could a mere nobody such as myself have to say about such an important subject?’ When we feel the presence of God, many of us are afraid to call it ‘God’ because it does not fit any image of the divine that has been recognised in history.” – Adrian

• “It is hard to sway a convinced materialist like myself from his constant scepticism about religious matters, at least I thought it was before this course. But it is terribly hard to continue to oppose the idea of ‘spirit’ when it is presented in poetry and inspirational writings. Before the course, I blocked out religion as irrelevant to my life, it made no sense to me at all in its conventional, archaic and drab form.” - Stephen

• “But when spirituality is expressed in poetry, passion, and subjectivity, I have to take another look, as these expressions are inspirational and move me in an unexpected way. I now see that emotion and spirit can be included in my world, and I can have such elements without straying from reality.”

– Steven

• The philosopher of religion Bernard Lonergan summed up effective spiritual practice in a simple but profound sentence:

“The fruit of the truth must grow and mature on the tree of the subject, before it can be plucked and placed in the absolute realm.”

Bernard J. F. Lonergan, The Subject (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1968), p. 3.

Bumper sticker seen in traffic:

“God is dead” - Nietzsche“Nietzsche is dead” - God