Too late to be posting... WARNING: Incoherence may be a consequence

Constellation Building: Spirituality Through Creative Narratives

Working definition of spirituality:

Spirituality is a way of life that affects and includes every moment of existence. It is at once a contemplative attitude, a disposition to a life of depth, and the search for ultimate meaning, direction, and belonging. The spiritual person is committed to growth as an essential ongoing life goal. To be spiritual requires us to stand on our own two feet while being nurtured and supported by our tradition, if we are fortunate enough to have one (Teasdale, 1999, 17-18).

The Armstrong definition that we reviewed last week made me a little uncomfortable as it seemed to diminish the validity of religious experience. The last thing I want to do to anyone is to diminish (or even to appear to attempt this) the faith that they have in their beliefs. What I do think is important in this area of research is creating a community on university campuses that offers an opportunity to share values across cultural, religious, and identity boundaries that will afford individuals the opportunity to broaden their experience in these areas. The aim of offering these types of experience to students is to pose an opportunity for a filling in of the blank line of spirituality that has existed in higher level institutions for quite some time. As JMc stated last week, more or less, there is a dichotomy that exists between intellectualism and spiritualism in the collegiate and greater academic world. Bridging that gap, while most certainly is questionable project, is certainly something that must be explored with due process in order to get an understanding of what higher education is for or, at least, could be for. If one of the goals of higher education is to develop well rounded individuals capable of fulfilling of perceived and desired potentials (and this could very well include more than just those perceived and desired potentials of the students), and I think it is, then it is an imperative that the university offer experiences to broaden students exposure to cultural, religious, and identity groups.

One of the problems that I’ve run into that led me to this conclusion is that colleges feel as though they are against indoctrination of any kind. Anything that has the slightest connotation of a spiritualist bent (outside of philosophy and religion departments, generally) is regarded as taboo. However, in that move colleges are indoctrinating people into an ideal of non-spirituality if not anti-spirituality. “A great Irony is that while spiritual indoctrination, in particular, has been banned from our classroom, indoctrination and imposition continue unimpeded. Students aren’t indoctrinated into religious liturgy but instead into dualism, scientism, and most especially consumerism. We have been indoctrinated into a severely limited, materialistically biased world view” (Glazer, 1999 – Chickering, Dalton, Stamm, 9-10). I feel as though this irony is damning our generation and those that follow to a void that will be addressed by organizations and groups looking to recruit to accomplish their own ends rather than those of the common good. I don’t know whether that is an exaggeration of the problem or not, at this point. However, the potential for such a calamity appears to be there. I’ll ultimately need to find some sort of statistical data to bare this point out. Regardless, not addressing this problem falls beyond the consequences themselves and into the realm of responsibility. We simply must find a way to offer a complete experience to students on university campuses. If you consider everything else that campuses offer, it becomes rather clear that a student could have a moderately meaningful life without leaving the campus for four years (cut me some slack here, for the moment) with the exception of the spiritual experience.

On a different note, I’m still committed to this idea of storytelling as a very important piece of spirituality. I haven’t found any real texts that speak to this subject so I’m going to end up having to pull together disparate texts in order to find a cohesive system here.

A major problem that I’m working on now (internally, at least) is that this idea of storytelling as spirituality is not as operationally conceivable as I originally thought. There are two very important people involved in the process of storytelling: the speaker and the listener. My original focus was on the listener as authenticating the validity of stories with which the listener can connect to in some foundational way. But that hermeneutic is a shallow one that I think we all maintain already. Further, the problem here is that the listener has a foundation that already exists in which they glean from the experience of the story only that which they already subscribe to. I think that finding a way to expound upon the meaning of a foundation in one’s life is crucial. However, if that’s the only goal, there seems to be a lack of understanding in the sense of expanding one’s horizons, of understanding what was not once understood. To me, at least, the original hermeneutic doesn’t really focus on the appreciation of the right for everyone’s story to be validated and understood (in as far as they can be). I think that I need to shift focus from this foundational view to a more complex and integrating hermeneutic. This new hermeneutic means that we can learn from all of our encounters with the other through an appreciation of vantages that we may not have any experience in. In order to do this there must be a cultivation of empathy and desire to connect with all of those stories that not only illustrate shared foundations in some real way, but also those stories that lay outside the domain of our foundational beliefs. If anything, it is a project to develop within each person an appreciation (or possibly a desire to appreciate the idea) that all the speakers at the table of the conversation of life have input into that conversation that shouldn’t be ignored.

In closing, I have to admit something that may damn this project… or may make it some of the best work I’ve ever done. I’ve always maintained this idea that some of those that the world would consider to be the dredges of society because of their station in life are ignored simply because they were born into the wrong place or the wrong class, race, gender, sex, etc. Further, I’ve made it one of my missions in life to pay attention to people who otherwise might be overlooked as a testament to this idea and to be able to point out that I was right. If there was ever an example of reasoning after the fact, this is a good one to use. However, I still feel very strongly about this idea, especially in relation to spirituality. I think a good example of this is illustrated in the opening scene of O’ Brother, Where Art Thou? After a group of inmates escape the chain gang they end up hitching a ride on a handcar that is being powered by a blind, black man. This iconic figure, who is not only diminished in communal value because he is blind but further because he is black, prophesies to the escapees about their upcoming trials. While most would point out that this character, in a sense, is appropriated by the outlaw white males (which could be extended to the Western white male [or patriarchal] class in general) who bear the fruits of his labor, I tend to see this character as an exemplification of what I’m talking about here. He offers some real insight into the situation of these escapees that they could not have perceived themselves. His particular situation as the subjugated (or, more realistically, the marginalized) offers a real world consequential interpretation of the subjugation that all humans have to the experiences that they endure. In his words, although they are portrayed as prophecy, he endeavors to give a richer value to the meaning of life itself. He exposes the frailty of what it means to be human, no matter what our station in life is. He, being the “lowliest” of people on the planet, has a special understanding of that which no one else could comprehend unless they were to experience his life as their own. But his words, nonetheless, can have some kind of essential meaning, if we are willing to stop and listen to him and take him seriously. We can appreciate his ability to pierce the veil that exists between the stories that we tell ourselves and the real world.

I certainly hope I haven’t waxed too much here. I offer my deepest inclinations to pursue this project only to exhibit why it interests me as much as it does. I may be ending up here with an idealist kind of approach, but can’t that be an instrumentalist (pragmatist) approach, too? Ultimately, if it serves the end of perceiving all others as having some fundamental role in the process of communal life, I think it’s worthwhile. Further, if it gives meaning to others who might have not found any before this, I think it serves the same purpose.