SPIRITUALITY IS …
 

Diarmuid O Murchu

Spirituality concerns an ancient and primal search for meaning that is as old as humanity itself  … Spirituality tends to be perceived as a sub-system or offshoot of formal religion. In practice the reality is quite different … Spirituality is, and always has been, more central to human experience than religion.  (Reclaiming Spirituality. Crossroad. 1999. vii)
 

Nan Burgess

Today a fresh, liberating breath of spirituality is touching many lives both within and outside the church. This phenomenon expresses growing awareness of the dimensions of spirituality in daily living, and, naturally, incorporated in such awareness are varying interpretations. … The hope of increasing numbers of people is expressed in the proposal of Rebecca Propst that “spirituality should be taken out of the corners of our modern existence and become instead the defining point of our existence”. (Looking Into The Depths – Dimensions of Spirituality in New Zealand Short Story. Colcom Press 1996. 25-26)
 

Anthony de Mello

The spiritual quest is a journey without distance. You travel from where you are right now to where you have always been. From ignorance to recognition, for all you do is see for the first time what you have always been looking at. Whoever heard of a path that brings you to yourself or a method that makes you what you have always been. Spirituality, after all, is only a matter of becoming what you already are. (Source unknown)
 

Howard Rice

Spirituality is the pattern by which we shape our lives in response to our experience of God as a very real presence in and around us.  …  Our participation in the living Christ means that all human life takes on a sacred quality. The unity of flesh and spirit in Christ is the basis for taking all that is human with utmost reverence. (Reformed Spirituality. WJKP 1991. 45 & 163)
 

Joan Chittister

Spirituality is not meant to be a panacea for human pain. Nor is it a substitute for critical conscience. Spirituality energizes the soul to provide what the world lacks. … Spirituality plunges us into life with an eye to meaning and purpose.  (Heart of Flesh – Eerdmans 1998. 1-2)
 

Margaret Dunn

Christian spirituality focuses us on relationship with Jesus Christ.

(Harvest Field. 2002)
 

John North

Any definition of spirituality is not a definition but a signpost showing us the directions to search! (Refresh Editorial Group meeting 5.11.03)
 

Susanne Johnson

Christian spiritual formation is a matter of becoming the song we sing, the Story we tell.

(Christian Spiritual Formation … Abingdon. 1989)

A HEARTFELT RESPONSE TO LIVING IN THIS PLACE

by Ann Gilroy
 

When we live in a world as beautiful and diverse as that of Aotearoa New Zealand, we find its resonances, affects and challenges in the depths of our spirits. The greenness and the diversity of the landforms; the immensity of the surrounding seas and the contrasting waterscapes; the tangible, misty thermal air and the feel of the prevailing winds; and the radiance, and even danger, of the sun, are all particular to this place and to our experience of dwelling in this place.  We can discover in an increasing awareness of this place, the Spirit of God as tangibly revealing and deeply mysterious.  Yet we may find our response is at once intuitively fitting and at the same time clumsily inadequate. 
 

In this article I want to suggest five aspects that may engage us more intensely in relationship with the mystery of God in this place.¹  Fundamentally our response is to live into the meaning of the abundance, the variety, the energy and the fullness of our surroundings.  In living into this place our beings become integrated with our surroundings and those who share it with us.  The following aspects of response engage with and are called forth by our surroundings and the God of this place, - where and in whom we live and breathe and have our being.
 

In the face of abundance – of water, air, space, greenery, light, and landforms – we respond with respect.  In the presence of variety – of cloud formations, plants and trees, hills and mountains, lakes and rivers, ice and thermal waters – we respond with inclusion.  In the power of energy – hydro lakes, landslides, earthquakes, winds, solar radiation, sea waves – we respond with participation.  In the experience of fullness – rivers, forests, bays, harvests, rain, snow and ice - we respond with fairness.  In the presence of beauty, - of colour, form, variety and depth - we respond with integrity.
 

Our response of respect towards our place as a home acknowledges our relationship and interrelationship with the abundance of life we have around us.  We recognise Divine generosity at the heart of our place and we seek to practise ways of living this generosity ourselves.  While we cultivate respect as an attitude flowing from God’s abundance, we endeavour to avoid the kinds of attitudes or behaviour that deadens respect or substitutes it for good manners.  We will endeavour to prevent greediness from creeping into our lives, or miserliness with resources, or jadedness in coping with issues, or the privatization of our interests so that we relate to only particular groups.  Our challenge is to shift our boundaries more and more outwards to embrace and practise abundant respect.
 

Our response of inclusion is to have a consistent attitude of hospitality towards others, and particularly at this time in New Zealand, to new immigrants to this land.  We recognise in this place the God who makes room lovingly for a seeming limitless variety of life and we too seek to interpret this hospitality in our own response. So in our practising we look for opportunities to host, and we avoid elitism, or narrow mindedness, or racism and other –isms, as well as passivity in the face of inhospitality.  Our challenge is to widen increasingly our vision of inclusivity.
 

Our response of participation means we become involved in what helps to increase community relationships in this land.  We recognise God at home in this place and we seek to respond with an attitude which promotes and enhances community well-being.  Correspondingly we endeavour to avoid behaviours and attitudes which militate against participation, such as ‘not wanting to get involved’, or an isolating privacy, or ‘taking on every cause’ without prudence, or wanting always to be the boss, or of being unwilling to share.  Our challenge is to practise collaborative participation so that the heart of the community grows.
 

Our response of fairness involves us in acting justly towards this place and the life at home here.  Our response of fairness seeks to establish what is right and also what is the right way of proceeding, so that community relationships are enhanced.  We recognise that Divine Providence is for all and we seek to respond to providence in fairness.  Consequently we will try to avoid attitudes that fudge or dissipate fairness.  Among these are being unable ‘to make up your mind’ about what is right, or always knowing what is right for others, or not recognizing our own prejudices, or having a judgemental attitude towards others.  In practising fairness we endeavour to increase our own self–knowledge and capacity for discernment.

Our response of integrity involves us in seeking to live consistently by our principles and in doing so to grow increasingly integrated in this place.  We recognise the Divine Spirit animating and integrating life in rhythmic cycles and arrhythmic happenings – the seasons, the lunar waxing and waning, the predictably unpredictable weather patterns, and the upheavals of shifting tectonic plates. We seek such integrity amidst the hope and uncertainties of our lives.  In practising integrity we move away from attitudes or behaviours that would fragment our hope.  We would avoid over commitment and over work, or being unable to say ‘no’, or compartmentalizing our lives, or avoidance and escapist behaviours, or refusal to admit our mistakes.  In the practice of integrity we recognise that the pain and suffering of life has coherence and meaning within the fullness of life.  Integrity will integrate us into the Spirit of Life revealed in this place around us.
 

For further reading:

Bergin, Helen, and Susan Smith, eds. Spirituality in Aotearoa New Zealand: Catholic Voices. Auckland: Accent Publications, 2002.

Darragh, Neil. At Home in the Earth: Seeking an Earth-Centred Spirituality. Auckland: Accent Publications, 2000.

“ A Pakeha Christian Spirituality.” In Counselling Issues, edited by Philip Culbertson, 303-31. Auckland: Accent Publications, 1997.

1    See also, Neil Darragh, “ A Pakeha Christian Spirituality,” in Counselling Issues, ed. Philip Culbertson (Auckland: Accent Publications, 1997). Neil Darragh, At Home in the Earth: Seeking an Earth-Centred Spirituality (Auckland: Accent Publications, 2000). Helen Bergin and Susan Smith, eds., Spirituality in Aotearoa New Zealand: Catholic Voices (Auckland: Accent Publications, 2002).

GOD IS IN THE DETAIL

by John Bluck
 

I’m a reluctant starter in the search for a Kiwi spirituality.  I got into it by accident because I was bored with traditional models of spiritual formation.  Bored or burnt out?  I’m not sure which.  I began my life as an ordinand or seminarian at 18 and would fall asleep at early morning chapel services, in the midst of receiving profound spiritual advice. My contemporaries who stayed awake went on to live holy lives while I wandered off into various spiritual wildernesses, rescued by inspiration from ecumenism, social action, human encounter movements and other brands of religious intensity. I never quite made the cut for the charismatic movement, though I tried hard and remain vaguely disappointed that I didn’t taste the undoubtedly exciting fruits of that tree that flowered so brightly in the seventies, and we’ve been singing about, a little wistfully, ever since.
 

It was much later, after wandering around the world and back, that I ran into a school of spirituality that I’d been living inside all my life without realising.  Call it Kiwi spirituality, or Pakeha, or Tau Iwi if you must, or indigenous.  Certainly call it incarnational, and nothing less than ecumenical.  Whatever else it is, it’s home grown, it belongs to nowhere else but in the ground beneath our feet and it’s all right here.

We began talking about this spirituality in the earliest years of Pakeha settlement and it’s grown through several self conscious forms, from a highly romanticised Victorian version in oil paintings full of brooding mountains that Wordsworth could have scribbled off an ode to with ease, through to idealised noble savages, the “tui” and “bellbird” school of poetry, the rugged bush felling, camp oven cooking pioneers who were good, keen and lonely, through to the stirrings of a national identity, monocultural with Maori decoration, then forged in war, depression, economic crisis, and finally coming of age, though still adolescent.

This spirituality can be traced through our literature and art and even our cinema, but you’re hard pressed to find it in the theology of our churches, which remained colonial and import dependent for well into the 1960’s, long after the rest of the society gave away import licencing and controls.  And if you listen to the choruses we sing still and the adulation we heap on visiting American preachers and authors, you might well wonder if there’s still some way to go in trusting our own spiritual voices.

I started coming to terms with Kiwi spirituality when I settled again in New Zealand in the early 80’s at a time when Maori sovereignty and identity was being clearly staked out in the public domain, as a mainstream issue that couldn’t be sidelined any longer.  The signs were everywhere around me: Bastion Point, the land marches, the momentum gathering around the Waitangi Tribunal, and in the Anglican Church, the preparations for a Tikanga based church and a prayer book that addressed a God who awaited me here rather than somewhere else. Couple all that with the challenge that came from the Christian feminist movement (women I knew ten years before as easy going colleagues were now monitoring my pronouns and holding me personally responsible for the sins of patriarchy), and I found myself a stranger in a familiar land. There was nothing else to do but set about trying to give an account of the hope that was in me, in a whole new way.

Back then, we started talking about Kiwi spirituality in bold generalisations.  The sheer novelty of talking about it at all allowed us that luxury.  “Struggle and hope” described it well and a little collection of essays called “Long, white and cloudy” confessed to the open ended and often fuzzy way we talked.

I wouldn’t use that title now. It’s long, white and a little clearer now, and the lines around spiritual identity and belonging are much sharper.

We’ve pushed the debate about separate, distinct and definable identities to their limit and the postmodern worldview that says such contrasts are artificial and overplayed is catching up with us.  Hybrid identities are overtaking old separations. Younger Maori see no contradiction in claiming the Pakeha part of their whakapapa even as they support an iwi claim under the Treaty. Androgynous images muddle gender separations in popular music and art. The freedom that Generation X enjoys in holding multiple and changing loyalties to brand names and institutions all conspires to make our statements of faith and our places of belonging harder than ever to pin down.  World views, credal statements, canon laws and authority figures that define the big picture become obsolete the minute they pretend to have the last word. The only person to dares to claim that is Pam Corkery.

Any sort of exclusive claim on truth of any sort is written off by the postmodern way of seeing the world. Any lingering hope that the church, or any faith tradition for that matter, might have a corner on the spirituality market is surely dismissed by the sight of multi national corporations selling their products as spiritual assets, be that an airline ticket, a bottle of Steinlager or drive in a new Nissan.

In that setting, national let alone indigenous ownership of anything is constantly undermined by a global culture that homogenises everything into a mongrel mix, available to anyone who can pay the price. Consumerism has no scruples and respects no boundaries.

And yet, amazingly enough, despite all those hybridising, homogenising forces at work, we see proudly owned, passionately expressed beliefs and identities commanding attention and respect.  Consider the success of moves like “Whale Rider’, poetry like Glen Colquhoun’s “Playing God” collection, the transformative power of Kura Kaupapa schools, and even the pride most cynical and worldly wise New Zealanders feel when they see underdogs like the Silver Ferns or the Tall Blacks triumph against the odds.  These are very local, very particular, very focussed expressions of energy, skill and belief.  Yet they speak universally while they last and even after they have been superseded and changed into something quite different, their legacy lives on.

A clearly lived out, well owned and proudly held spirituality for Aotearoa can have that sort of transformative power, regardless of whether it’s experienced by people who stand inside or outside the familiar circle of religion, even when they are unable to find any traction from the traditional language and disciplines of church.  But for that to happen, we need, I believe, to shift gear in the way we express that spirituality, namely from the general to the particular, the conceptual to the concrete and from fixed categories to fluid processes, the tightly defined to the openly dynamic, from hoping to find the big picture out there somewhere to trusting that there is truth enough and more to be going on with in the bits and pieces right here in front of us.

My claim then is that when it comes to a spirituality for Aotearoa that embraces our struggles and hopes, God is to be found in the detail, in the fine print of this gospel–culture contract that we inherit and constantly need to rewrite.

And we look to the detail not in order to check up on whether some universal laws of theological grammar are being followed, but rather because God is in that detail in every fragment of it, in every dot on every “ i “ and every cross bar on every “ t “. We’re accustomed to looking through telescopes to find evidence of the divine spirit in the universe.  Let’s spend some time looking through the microscope as well, to find that same spirit in the smallest detail of the most local, the most ordinary, the closest to home. To do that, you have to trust the ground on which you stand to be worth the effort of such close scrutiny.

And equally if not more importantly, let’s expect to find God in the way those details connect.  For it’s in those interconnections that we find new reasons for getting excited about the God in whom we live and move and have our being in Aotearoa.

This is the introduction of John Bluck’s paper to the Association of Christian Spiritual Director’s conference in August this year. Copies of the full text are available from Bishop’s Secretary, Box 227, Napier. Enclose $2.00 for photocopying and postage.