Spirituality and "the World"

As I have been warning for some time, I am at Beloit college now. I just started a summer immersion program in Arabic. For the past month I have been unemployed and have had nothing to think about all day except what I might want to post on this blog. Today was the first day of classes. Now, my life is filled with verb tables, eager instructors, and desperate attempts to mimic the words coming out of their mouths. I have been meeting lots of cool people and look forward to a month full of bilingual fun.

So, on the one hand I can't offer regular theological musings like I have every night between midnight and two am for the past month. On the other hand, I do want to keep things up. So here's some thoughts that have been running through my head.
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Often there is a tendency in religious communities to think of themselves as interested in other-worldly concerns. Materiality, embodiment, contingency, and temporality are all regarded as inferior to such opposite notions as the Absolute, eternity, ideas, or even better: thought or non-thought beyond ideas. There is also a widespread tendency among the same communities to demand that religion or spirituality be grounded in living practice. Ideally, all life would be guided by these otherworldly ideas. It seems to me that these two tendencies are at odds with each other, that within these tendencies is a half truth that masks the more or less worldly, material, temporal nature of religion.

I raise this issue, not because I take an iconoclastic pleasure in "unveiling the truth about religion" or humiliating particular groups that like to think of themselves as focused on "otherworldly" concerns. Rather, I think that wrestling with this question helps deal with some of the confusion that I should hope comes up in the practice of a particular religious or spiritual tradition.

To give a more concrete spin on this let's take the example of St. Francis of Assisi. I don't think it's that presumptuous to suppose that he was wrestling with this same tension. Late in his life he was caught at a crossroads. Either he could fully devote his life to prayer, or he could continue preaching. He was in such a bind that he not only asked God for guidance, but also his fellow practitioners the Friars Minor (little brothers), something that isn't really associated with Francis' character. One would be the pursuit of a pure engagement with the other-worldly, the other an engagement with the worldly. Eventually, he decided to stick with preaching, a wise move in my opinion.

Another way of looking at this tension is to think about the sacrifices to his spirituality that by continuing to preach Francis might make. Preaching requires a very worldly engagement on a number of levels. It requires thinking about what's going to appeal to certain people, keeping up on the local news to see what topics to avoid, building alliances of friendship with people, etc. If travelling is involved it requires money, yes that disgusting archetype of worldliness, money. It requires figuring out where to sleep at night, for how long, and getting directions to places. The list goes on. And the more practical things a person has to think about, the less time he or she has to pray or meditate. Most of the time, this engagement with the world at some point involves making sacrifices in one's personal spiritual practice.

Anybody, who has ever tried to juggle spirituality and social activism (something often inspired by religious motives) knows the struggle that comes with bringing these concerns into balance with each other. I, in fact, feel a great deal of sympathy for many of the most rabidly political Christian leaders in the United States on this issue. I sympathize with them, not because I agree with their partiular agenda, but because I share the pain of being torn between spirituality and an activism that one regards as essential to spiritual commitments. Nearly thirty years after the election of Ronald Reagan, there is a deep fear among right-wing Christians that the most political churches have lost their soul in the attempt to reform the world. They did not successfully strike that balance. Thus, one was advanced to the exclusion of the other.

At the heart of this argument I would like to problematize the notion that spirituality and activism must be balanced, that they are mutually exclusive, that the progress of one results in the deterioration of the other. I think that this is based on an overextended vision of religion as something other-worldly. I do not promise that I can reconcile these two moments. I only hope to generate thought so that people might ask questions about what it means to "be spiritual."

It is my contention that every religious community worth its salt involves some sort of embodiment in social practice. Actually, I will correct myself. Let's take away the worth its salt. Every religious community necessarily involves some sort of embodiment in social practice. For this is it what it means to be a community. The question of whether a community is either worldly or otherworldly would then change to "what kind of world does this community seek?"

It is only when we recognize the fundamentally worldly nature of spirituality that we can begin to grapple with the tension between spiritual and social concerns. Towards this end, I think it would be valuable to see social interactions in general as the medium for our spiritual activity. The public must gain recognition alongside the personal as a core part of any spirituality.


I'm sure I'll be returning to this issue at a later time. So I will deliberately leave this discussion incomplete.