THE TROUBLE WITH SPIRITUALITY
Raymond J. Lawrence
As a belated follower of Paul Tillich, the preeminent theologian of the last century, I resolved many years ago to avoid using the words “spiritual” or “spirituality” in ordinary discourse, for reasons which will become apparent below. The present document is a notable and necessary exception to my resolve. The recent decade has brought new and frothy attention to “spirituality,” at points almost revivalistic in its fervor, and with it a belief that spirituality can be demonstrated to promote health. Hardly anyone would dispute the claim that spirituality might connote something important, or that in some sense spirituality and health are related. Illness and health are inextricably related to various intangibles, not least of which is the inner life, so the speak, or the mental or emotional status of the person in question, all of which might be subsumed under the category “spiritual.” However, amidst all the palaver about spirituality in the past decade or so, ascertaining precisely what any particular individual means by the category is a formidable undertaking. The great bulk of recently published material on the subject of spirituality and health is riddled with conceptual fuzziness and glittering generalities, and is simply not to be trusted.
The recent precipitous ascendancy of the categories “spiritual” and “spirituality” is at once both revelatory and worrisome. Like the seven lean cows, “spirituality” is absorbing everything around it, eclipsing and supplanting all the other words in the sphere of religion. Illustrative of this is that many of the former chaplaincy departments in medical centers around the country recently changed their names to “spiritual care” departments. The courses in spirituality that have sprung up in so many medical schools recently are part of the new trend. In an earlier time they might have been called courses in “religion and medicine.” Dr. Anthony L. Suchman in a letter to the editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, discloses his view of the motivation for the emerging new terminology. Unlike the label “religion,” “spirituality,” he says, allows us to avoid the divisiveness that a focus on doctrine creates, and allows for a generic approach to the subject. Thus do the new spirituality mavens eschew doctrines. Or they say they do. In fact, their doctrines have simply gone under cover, or into the closet. One does not have to listen very long to one of the recently ascendant experts on spirituality before one picks up clues as to their covert doctrines, protruding like tips of so many icebergs.
One of the notable icebergs of the new spirituality is the contention that one can make factual, scientifically valid statements about the “other world.” The facility with which the new spirituality gurus usually drift off into the cosmic ether, making claims, at least implicitly, about intercourse with “the other world” is stunning. Such claims are made as if data about the other world were obvious for all to see, in true positivist fashion, when if fact such discourse enters the region of the imagination, without ac-knowledging a significant border crossing. As a devotee of the world of the imagination, I do not wish to demean it, but treating that world as if it were verifiable reality is to promote crazy-making, a form of schizophrenogenesis.
Paul Tillich proposed a generation ago a moratorium on the use of the words “spiritual and “spirituality.” He argued that the words had gone so far adrift in common usage from the original, ancient meaning in the biblical canon as to be effectively useless, if not misleading. Tillich’s suggestion was obviously ignored, and a generation later we are more than ever plagued by a notion of spirituality that obfuscates more than it enlightens.
The concept of spirituality itself has good bona fides etymologically. But later usage has ruined the family name. The word derives from Latin, spiritus, meaning “breath.” Spiritus was a translation of the Greek, pneuma, “lungs, breath, breathing,” and in the biblical tradition both were connected to the Hebrew, ruah, “breath.” With a long history of association with breathing, spirit can still be defined as that something that gives life and vitality, as in giving the breath of life. That tradition carries connotations of deep breathing, and by implication, fullness of life, an extra dimension of vitality. Spiritual persons, therefore, could be said to be full of themselves or filled with exuberance. Tillich says that the only residual usage in modern English that carries the ancient meaning of “spirit” appears in the word “spirited,” as when we say that a horse is “spirited.” In post-biblical times “spirit” changed its meaning effectively by changing its bodily locus, migrating first from the lungs to the brain, and finally from the brain to the invisible world of ghosts and spirits. Spiritual now come to mean “mental incorporeality.” Thus spirits in modern usage are beings who live in the invisible world, like ghosts. (“Ghosts” came into English by way of the German geist, also meaning “spirit’ originally, but later, as with “spirit,” coming to mean “incorporeal beings.”) Thus the idea of spirituality has come a long way from its roots in breathing and the working of the lungs, and all that they connote, to reside now somewhere in the ether. Linguistically, one could say that spirit in these latter days has departed the bodies of men and women and gone to dwell in the ether.
II
The other two central and covert doctrines that emerge from most current discourse on spirituality are 1) that spiritual undertakings are unambiguously good, and 2) that prayer, routinely paired with spirituality, is both effective and beneficial. Each of these doctrines is so clearly overstated that it is a wonder that an intelligent person could seriously subscribe to them.
1) One would be hard pressed to think of a more ludicrous claim than the claim that spirituality or religion is an unambiguously beneficial enterprise. Religion and all that goes with it is the source of some of the noblest thinking and behavior in the human history, but also the source of some of the silliest illusions and the most vicious brutality. Neither religion nor spirituality should be elevated generically into an arena of the unexamined, or be viewed as subjects unambiguously beneficial.
Some spiritualities promote aggression and violence against outsiders. At numerous points in history Christians made converts at the point of the sword, a spiritual practice not unknown in various parts of the world even in this enlightened age. Some spiritualities promote a detachment from this world that should be suspect, a religious opiate of sorts. The leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church was said to have been debating the proper color of their liturgical vestments during the days of the Bolshevik revolution. Whatever the leadership of that Church was in fact doing, it was giving its attention to the other world, and contributed very little beneficial in the struggle for a just society in the midst of a major social upheaval that ultimately led to the dreadful reign of Stalin and suffering for millions of people. Spiritualities that promote attention to another world in the context of degradation of the social order or the environment in this one should be judged negatively.
Some spiritualities promote the teaching that god loves those best who abstain from the pleasures of sex, injunctions which bring gratuitous inner conflict to their followers.
Less subtle are the current African tribal spiritualities that practice female genital mutilation. They should be found wanting.
Even in this allegedly enlightened age countless spiritualities promote a negative view of women.
The spirituality of so much American Christianity promoted slavery and racial segregation for generations on end, and in some places still promotes racial jingoism. The civil rights movement of the 60s was in fact a conflict of spiritualities among religious people, mostly but not entirely won by the spiritualities that promoted racial integration.
Some spiritualities hold that the gods must be appeased for various human crimes or failures. The Aztecs in Mexico, for example, carved the hearts out of young living virgins in their spiritual devotion to the gods. (It is always less controversial to critique the brutalities of extinct spiritualities than living ones.)
Every spirituality needs to be examined by a critical eye, something that is absent from virtually all contemporary discourse on spirituality. When a particular form of spirituality or religion promotes justice, equity, and compassion in the social arena, and a sense of self and well-being in the personal arena, that form should be held in high esteem. But when any form of religion or spirituality supports or tolerates injustice, domination of one group over another, or a stunted development of the self, such a spirituality should be judged negatively.
2) The beneficence of prayer is a principal plank in the platform of contemporary discussions of spirituality. But prayer can’t bear the weight of this burden placed on it. Of all the many and varied practices of the religions of the world, prayer is the least interesting and least significant, the least common denominator of virtually every religion. The notion that one has the permission or obligation to address the gods verbally or nonverbally is probably a tenet of every religion. No blood has likely ever been shed in support of or dissent from that proposition. In popular lore even the non-religious pray, if one believes the old saw, “there are no atheists in the foxholes,” suggesting that anyone tends to become prayerful when being shot at.
The proposition, though, that prayer is effective and beneficial to one’s health and well-being must be subjected to a critical eye. On the one hand, few would dispute the claim that one’s state of mind or mental attitude might have some bearing on one’s health, or that prayer can help settle a mind in turmoil. On the other hand, what one prays for and to whom, are questions of import that cannot be shirked. Whether one prays to the Buddha, Lord Krishna, the Emperor of Japan, one’s ancestors, or Yahweh surely does make a difference. In the act of addressing any god the addressee is at the same time adopting a particular construct of values that profoundly shape behavior. Different gods require different behavior.
Millions of Hindus regularly pray to Shiva, sprinkling water and flower petals on the representation of the Shiva lingam, the phallus of the god. At the same time millions of Roman Catholics light candles and pray to the Virgin Mary. Can anyone doubt that it makes a difference whether one prays before a phallus or a virgin?
It also matters what one prays for. A prayer to win the lottery must surely be qualitatively different from a prayer for the recovery of a sick child, and is as well a commentary on the one praying. A Voodoo prayer to cast a spell on one’s enemy is vastly different from a prayer of repentance. All prayers are subject to a critical eye. A prayer for the conversion of the world to Christ is subject to critique, as is the prayer of a Muslim terrorist setting off a suicide bomb. The prayers of German Christians for victory in World War II, in churches with the Nazi banner on display and their bishops and cardinals raising their arms in Fuhrer salute, are subject to critique. The prayers of George W. Bush, whatever they are—and we will all find out soon enough and feel the effects—are similarly subject to critique. Whether prayers are answered or not, it does matter what one prays for. One’s values and commitments are both clarified and reinforced in the process of making prayers. Current discussions of the effectiveness of prayer do not entertain the questions of what is prayed for or to whom prayers are addressed. Any conclusion about the effectiveness of prayer that circumvents these questions renders any discussion of prayer meaningless.
One of the principal leaders of the current spirituality movement, Dr. Herbert Benson, contends that human beings are “wired to believe...[and are] nourished by prayer and the other exercises of belief.” His claim has been carried around the world and seems to have heartened a great many religious people, a puzzling phenomenon. Whether we are wired or not is probably unknowable, and matters little. That many people are nourished by prayer and belief has never been seriously doubted. The substance of various beliefs, and the content of the prayers are matters that ought to concern us more. Too many people the world over believe and hold to values and pray for results that are tailor-made to wreak havoc on the human community, and, if effective, will likely make the world a more miserable place than it already is.
Countless varieties of spirituality are practiced in the world today. Some are malignant and some are beneficent, and most are a mixture of each. Missing in current discourse is an eye both subtle and critical, capable of assessing the quality of the various spiritualities. Until such a time as a critical approach is brought into the current discourse, one ought to be chary of categorically endorsing spirituality and prayer. In the meantime, the best posture is an arm’s length distance from any manifestations of religion or spirituality that do not explicitly promote justice and mercy in the social order and nurture a strong sense of self in the private.
_______
Written in response to and in appreciation for Richard Sloan, Larry VandeCreek, et alia’s, “Should Physicians Prescribe Religious Activity?” The New England Journal of Medicine, June 22, 2000, Vol 342, No 25.
Raymond J. Lawrence
As a belated follower of Paul Tillich, the preeminent theologian of the last century, I resolved many years ago to avoid using the words “spiritual” or “spirituality” in ordinary discourse, for reasons which will become apparent below. The present document is a notable and necessary exception to my resolve. The recent decade has brought new and frothy attention to “spirituality,” at points almost revivalistic in its fervor, and with it a belief that spirituality can be demonstrated to promote health. Hardly anyone would dispute the claim that spirituality might connote something important, or that in some sense spirituality and health are related. Illness and health are inextricably related to various intangibles, not least of which is the inner life, so the speak, or the mental or emotional status of the person in question, all of which might be subsumed under the category “spiritual.” However, amidst all the palaver about spirituality in the past decade or so, ascertaining precisely what any particular individual means by the category is a formidable undertaking. The great bulk of recently published material on the subject of spirituality and health is riddled with conceptual fuzziness and glittering generalities, and is simply not to be trusted.
The recent precipitous ascendancy of the categories “spiritual” and “spirituality” is at once both revelatory and worrisome. Like the seven lean cows, “spirituality” is absorbing everything around it, eclipsing and supplanting all the other words in the sphere of religion. Illustrative of this is that many of the former chaplaincy departments in medical centers around the country recently changed their names to “spiritual care” departments. The courses in spirituality that have sprung up in so many medical schools recently are part of the new trend. In an earlier time they might have been called courses in “religion and medicine.” Dr. Anthony L. Suchman in a letter to the editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, discloses his view of the motivation for the emerging new terminology. Unlike the label “religion,” “spirituality,” he says, allows us to avoid the divisiveness that a focus on doctrine creates, and allows for a generic approach to the subject. Thus do the new spirituality mavens eschew doctrines. Or they say they do. In fact, their doctrines have simply gone under cover, or into the closet. One does not have to listen very long to one of the recently ascendant experts on spirituality before one picks up clues as to their covert doctrines, protruding like tips of so many icebergs.
One of the notable icebergs of the new spirituality is the contention that one can make factual, scientifically valid statements about the “other world.” The facility with which the new spirituality gurus usually drift off into the cosmic ether, making claims, at least implicitly, about intercourse with “the other world” is stunning. Such claims are made as if data about the other world were obvious for all to see, in true positivist fashion, when if fact such discourse enters the region of the imagination, without ac-knowledging a significant border crossing. As a devotee of the world of the imagination, I do not wish to demean it, but treating that world as if it were verifiable reality is to promote crazy-making, a form of schizophrenogenesis.
Paul Tillich proposed a generation ago a moratorium on the use of the words “spiritual and “spirituality.” He argued that the words had gone so far adrift in common usage from the original, ancient meaning in the biblical canon as to be effectively useless, if not misleading. Tillich’s suggestion was obviously ignored, and a generation later we are more than ever plagued by a notion of spirituality that obfuscates more than it enlightens.
The concept of spirituality itself has good bona fides etymologically. But later usage has ruined the family name. The word derives from Latin, spiritus, meaning “breath.” Spiritus was a translation of the Greek, pneuma, “lungs, breath, breathing,” and in the biblical tradition both were connected to the Hebrew, ruah, “breath.” With a long history of association with breathing, spirit can still be defined as that something that gives life and vitality, as in giving the breath of life. That tradition carries connotations of deep breathing, and by implication, fullness of life, an extra dimension of vitality. Spiritual persons, therefore, could be said to be full of themselves or filled with exuberance. Tillich says that the only residual usage in modern English that carries the ancient meaning of “spirit” appears in the word “spirited,” as when we say that a horse is “spirited.” In post-biblical times “spirit” changed its meaning effectively by changing its bodily locus, migrating first from the lungs to the brain, and finally from the brain to the invisible world of ghosts and spirits. Spiritual now come to mean “mental incorporeality.” Thus spirits in modern usage are beings who live in the invisible world, like ghosts. (“Ghosts” came into English by way of the German geist, also meaning “spirit’ originally, but later, as with “spirit,” coming to mean “incorporeal beings.”) Thus the idea of spirituality has come a long way from its roots in breathing and the working of the lungs, and all that they connote, to reside now somewhere in the ether. Linguistically, one could say that spirit in these latter days has departed the bodies of men and women and gone to dwell in the ether.
II
The other two central and covert doctrines that emerge from most current discourse on spirituality are 1) that spiritual undertakings are unambiguously good, and 2) that prayer, routinely paired with spirituality, is both effective and beneficial. Each of these doctrines is so clearly overstated that it is a wonder that an intelligent person could seriously subscribe to them.
1) One would be hard pressed to think of a more ludicrous claim than the claim that spirituality or religion is an unambiguously beneficial enterprise. Religion and all that goes with it is the source of some of the noblest thinking and behavior in the human history, but also the source of some of the silliest illusions and the most vicious brutality. Neither religion nor spirituality should be elevated generically into an arena of the unexamined, or be viewed as subjects unambiguously beneficial.
Some spiritualities promote aggression and violence against outsiders. At numerous points in history Christians made converts at the point of the sword, a spiritual practice not unknown in various parts of the world even in this enlightened age. Some spiritualities promote a detachment from this world that should be suspect, a religious opiate of sorts. The leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church was said to have been debating the proper color of their liturgical vestments during the days of the Bolshevik revolution. Whatever the leadership of that Church was in fact doing, it was giving its attention to the other world, and contributed very little beneficial in the struggle for a just society in the midst of a major social upheaval that ultimately led to the dreadful reign of Stalin and suffering for millions of people. Spiritualities that promote attention to another world in the context of degradation of the social order or the environment in this one should be judged negatively.
Some spiritualities promote the teaching that god loves those best who abstain from the pleasures of sex, injunctions which bring gratuitous inner conflict to their followers.
Less subtle are the current African tribal spiritualities that practice female genital mutilation. They should be found wanting.
Even in this allegedly enlightened age countless spiritualities promote a negative view of women.
The spirituality of so much American Christianity promoted slavery and racial segregation for generations on end, and in some places still promotes racial jingoism. The civil rights movement of the 60s was in fact a conflict of spiritualities among religious people, mostly but not entirely won by the spiritualities that promoted racial integration.
Some spiritualities hold that the gods must be appeased for various human crimes or failures. The Aztecs in Mexico, for example, carved the hearts out of young living virgins in their spiritual devotion to the gods. (It is always less controversial to critique the brutalities of extinct spiritualities than living ones.)
Every spirituality needs to be examined by a critical eye, something that is absent from virtually all contemporary discourse on spirituality. When a particular form of spirituality or religion promotes justice, equity, and compassion in the social arena, and a sense of self and well-being in the personal arena, that form should be held in high esteem. But when any form of religion or spirituality supports or tolerates injustice, domination of one group over another, or a stunted development of the self, such a spirituality should be judged negatively.
2) The beneficence of prayer is a principal plank in the platform of contemporary discussions of spirituality. But prayer can’t bear the weight of this burden placed on it. Of all the many and varied practices of the religions of the world, prayer is the least interesting and least significant, the least common denominator of virtually every religion. The notion that one has the permission or obligation to address the gods verbally or nonverbally is probably a tenet of every religion. No blood has likely ever been shed in support of or dissent from that proposition. In popular lore even the non-religious pray, if one believes the old saw, “there are no atheists in the foxholes,” suggesting that anyone tends to become prayerful when being shot at.
The proposition, though, that prayer is effective and beneficial to one’s health and well-being must be subjected to a critical eye. On the one hand, few would dispute the claim that one’s state of mind or mental attitude might have some bearing on one’s health, or that prayer can help settle a mind in turmoil. On the other hand, what one prays for and to whom, are questions of import that cannot be shirked. Whether one prays to the Buddha, Lord Krishna, the Emperor of Japan, one’s ancestors, or Yahweh surely does make a difference. In the act of addressing any god the addressee is at the same time adopting a particular construct of values that profoundly shape behavior. Different gods require different behavior.
Millions of Hindus regularly pray to Shiva, sprinkling water and flower petals on the representation of the Shiva lingam, the phallus of the god. At the same time millions of Roman Catholics light candles and pray to the Virgin Mary. Can anyone doubt that it makes a difference whether one prays before a phallus or a virgin?
It also matters what one prays for. A prayer to win the lottery must surely be qualitatively different from a prayer for the recovery of a sick child, and is as well a commentary on the one praying. A Voodoo prayer to cast a spell on one’s enemy is vastly different from a prayer of repentance. All prayers are subject to a critical eye. A prayer for the conversion of the world to Christ is subject to critique, as is the prayer of a Muslim terrorist setting off a suicide bomb. The prayers of German Christians for victory in World War II, in churches with the Nazi banner on display and their bishops and cardinals raising their arms in Fuhrer salute, are subject to critique. The prayers of George W. Bush, whatever they are—and we will all find out soon enough and feel the effects—are similarly subject to critique. Whether prayers are answered or not, it does matter what one prays for. One’s values and commitments are both clarified and reinforced in the process of making prayers. Current discussions of the effectiveness of prayer do not entertain the questions of what is prayed for or to whom prayers are addressed. Any conclusion about the effectiveness of prayer that circumvents these questions renders any discussion of prayer meaningless.
One of the principal leaders of the current spirituality movement, Dr. Herbert Benson, contends that human beings are “wired to believe...[and are] nourished by prayer and the other exercises of belief.” His claim has been carried around the world and seems to have heartened a great many religious people, a puzzling phenomenon. Whether we are wired or not is probably unknowable, and matters little. That many people are nourished by prayer and belief has never been seriously doubted. The substance of various beliefs, and the content of the prayers are matters that ought to concern us more. Too many people the world over believe and hold to values and pray for results that are tailor-made to wreak havoc on the human community, and, if effective, will likely make the world a more miserable place than it already is.
Countless varieties of spirituality are practiced in the world today. Some are malignant and some are beneficent, and most are a mixture of each. Missing in current discourse is an eye both subtle and critical, capable of assessing the quality of the various spiritualities. Until such a time as a critical approach is brought into the current discourse, one ought to be chary of categorically endorsing spirituality and prayer. In the meantime, the best posture is an arm’s length distance from any manifestations of religion or spirituality that do not explicitly promote justice and mercy in the social order and nurture a strong sense of self in the private.
_______
Written in response to and in appreciation for Richard Sloan, Larry VandeCreek, et alia’s, “Should Physicians Prescribe Religious Activity?” The New England Journal of Medicine, June 22, 2000, Vol 342, No 25.
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