Researching Spirituality

In the mid-1990s I attended a UK conference of educators and school chaplains. We spent three days wrestling with the theme of spirituality and education. Many questions were addressed but one was left unresolved, probably the most important question; ‘What exactly is spirituality?’ I’ve kept my interest in contemporary spirituality alive over the intervening years and have noticed that most authors and researchers hesitate to answer the question with anything approaching  clarity.

Of course it’s entirely possible that absolute clarity is beyond any of us. Even some Christian traditions place spirituality in the realm of the mystery of God and leave it there, beyond comprehensive human investigation. That hasn’t stopped researchers, irrespective of personal conviction, from trying to investigate spirituality. Most are interested in its impact upon how people respond to life’s many and varied experiences. Some have offered tentative definitions of spirituality. We’ll return to those later! For now, it’s more important that we consider the interest that Europeans are showing in forms of spirituality that exist beyond the church.

Spirituality and health

Five years after the spirituality and education conference mentioned above, I worked with several researchers interested in ageing and spirituality. Resources were relatively scarcer then than they are today. Happily, recent search shows significant activity in the area of spirituality and health (five conferences in the UK alone during 2013). This is particularly significant for palliative care. The European Association for Palliative Care (EAPC), for example, set up a spiritual care taskforce in 2005. In 2013 Alzheimer Europe (Luxembourg) explored how dementia sufferers drew upon their pre-dementia spirituality, typically understanding themselves in relationship to a ‘higher’ something or someone. This is something that Professor Arndt Büssing (Centre for Integrative Medicine, University of Witten/Herdecke) suggests is a form of ‘meaning-focused coping’. Others have highlighted the value of ‘hope’, rooted in spirituality, as among the more significant resources relied upon by patients facing an uncertain future.

The European Research Institute for Spirituality and Health (www.rish.ch) has organised four European Conferences and published a quarterly newsletter since 2006. One of its goals is to identify ways that healthcare agencies can promote spiritual competence among employees.

Spirituality and Education

In the area of Higher Education in Europe, the European Research Area (ERA) is an emerging political reality. There is always the danger that shared European convictions about any EU-wide activity become a value-free zone. Working to avoid this are individuals like Dr Diana Beech of Cambridge University’s Faraday Institute for Science and Religion. She chairs the European Spirituality in Higher Education (SHE) which lobbies for the EU to recognise the impact of spiritual values upon contemporary postgraduate research. The vitality of this area of  research can be seen in the fact that Watson & de Gouza’s 2014 book Global Perspectives on Spirituality and Education, features seven European contributors from countries including Belgium, Malta, the UK, and Finland.

Teachers at secondary school level across Europe continually face the question, ‘What are Religious and Spiritual Education Good for?’ The European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction has a special interest group called ‘Religious and Spiritual Education’ which advocates for research into cognitive, social and emotional components of the educational process. This is another area where there has been a growing concentration upon ‘hope’ as a personal reservoir for professional teaching practice.

“some Christian traditions place spirituality in the realm of the mystery of God and leave it there, beyond comprehensive human investigation”

Spirituality, Economics and Society

The European Spirituality in Economics and Society Forum (SPES) explores the interface between spirituality, economics and culture in the EU. It takes a cue from research commissioned by the European Commission in 2005, The Spiritual and Cultural Dimension of Europe. Their work has suggested that links can be made between the current crisis of European identity and increasing levels of spiritual illiteracy and poverty. Diana Beech’s research has also addressed the disconnect between the spiritually defined political vision of EU figures such as Robert Schuman and Jacques Delors and the current sole focus on economic survivalism. Dr Beech has the distinct advantage of a platform from which to address European policy makers.

Spirituality and ecology

Some researchers are enthusiastically exploring the connections between ecology and spirituality. The European Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies (Normandy) promotes a form of eco-spirituality that values the interconnections of the earth and human beings. This might not be such a surprise from an organisation that tends to be pantheistic (seeing ‘god’ in everything) but a 2011 European research programme researching the cultural and spiritual values associated with woodland sites is perhaps more surprising. The Forestry Commission (UK) took part in this programme, along with other national forestry agencies within the EU. The results were published as ‘The State of Europe’s Forests’.

Contemporary spirituality: what are we talking about?

A fifth of the UK population now describes itself as ‘spiritual’, according to Prof Michael King of University College, London. A BBC report in 2013 of Prof King’s work described these as a wide range of people including pagans, devotees of crystals, and people who feel there must be ‘something else’ to life. The practices that accompany these expressions of spirituality are equally diverse: meditation, attending a summer solstice, silence, healing, prayer, channelling energies. This tendency has given rise to the description ‘spiritual not religious’, a term that some sociologists believe says little about a person’s beliefs or principles/

Given this diversity of expression, and the failure to provide a widely-accepted definition, should Christians conclude that ‘spirituality’ is a totally unhelpful term?

Woodhead and Heelas (2005) work has convincingly demonstrated the shift from religiosity towards spirituality. They argue that this represents a ‘turn to the self’. In other words, this is a spirituality that is focused on ‘me’ rather than on anything transcendent. Breen & Reynolds (2011) claim to see evidence of this in increasingly secular Ireland and describe a ‘transference of allegiance from institutions to self’. Büssing (2010) is one among others who argue that religion is institutional and cultural whilst spirituality is individual and open.

Intriguingly, the Finnish researcher, Kirsi Tirri (2008), welcomes the opportunities this presents for the greater participation of young people in ‘communicative action concerning religion’.  However, there are more cautious assessments of what may be a growing phenomenon: ‘International demographics of spirituality and religiosity among youth and young adults suggest that spirituality varies widely in this age group around the world and that variation may be linked to historic, cultural and economic differences’ (Lippman, 2010). Showing a similar sensitivity to Europe’s cultural and social history, researchers at the Max Planck Institute (2012) suggest that spirituality and secularity are in fact both distinctive responses of European modernity to institutional religion.

How should the churches and mission agencies respond?

If contemporary forms of spirituality are a response to institutional forms of religion; if they are a coping mechanism in the face of change or trauma; if they provide a vocabulary for young people to discuss religious realities; then how do we respond to spirituality rather than merely defining it?

Frustratingly, two counter-cultural elements are required in any response. Firstly, the ‘self’ at the centre of Heelas and Woodhead’s ‘turn to the self’ is a self that requires sacrifice as much as it needs to be fulfilled. It’s a ‘self’ that needs to be put to death as much as it needs to be ‘actualised’. Secondly, the vision to achieve this is nurtured and sustained communally.

There is certainly a case to be made for forms of Christian faith and practice that generate open spaces for engagement without pre-condition and yet which don’t confuse active engagement with membership in the body of Christ. The former may become the latter in due course but this always involves a putting to death of the self. To turn from a spirituality of the self to a more adequately Christian spirituality will always involve a conversion.

Darrell Jackson

References

Breen and Reynolds, 'The Rise of Secularism and the Decline of Religiosity in Ireland’, IJRSS, 1, pp.195-212

Lippmann, The Demographics of Spirituality and Religiosity among youth, Child Trends Research Brief, Sept 2010

Tirri, Spirituality as expression of post-secular religiosity in Ziebertz and Riegel, Europe as a post-secular society, Muenster: Lit, 155-166

Watson et al. (eds.), Global Perspectives on Spirituality and Education, London: Routledge, 2014

Woodhead and Heelas, The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is giving way to Spirituality, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004