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Ingrid H. Shafer
What is "spirituality"2?  A half century ago the Jesuit paleontologist and mystic Teilhard de Chardin predicted that the spherical shape of the earth combined with exponential growth of populations and proliferation of communication -- including "those astonishing electronic machines (the starting point and hope of the young science of cybernetics) . . ."3 would lead to the convergence of previously diverging cultures. He argued that global consciousness would precipitate creative unions which would intensify and focus individuality and diversity. He used the metaphors of sexual love and radioactivity: by merging in the generative core of their being, creative nuclei release new energy which engenders greater complexity which precipitates a chain reaction of further creative unions.4 Charles Laughlin, John McManus, and Eugene d'Aquili assert that the "transcendent desire"5 which leads to mystic experiences can be explained in terms of neurophysiology, and credit Paul Ricoeur's category of "'philosophical reflection'"6 with allowing the rational integration of knowledge gained during a numinous experience into a cycle of meaning that can be shared. Physicist Fred Alan Wolf believes that "modern physics, particularly quantum mechanics or quantum physics . . . provides a theoretical basis for understanding the mind's basic functions: intuition, feeling, sensation, and thought."7 In a chapter on the "physics of love" he posits fear and love as structural elements of matter, as the particles of "annihilation-fear" we call fermions and the particles of "condensation-love" (cf. Teilhard's "convergence") we call photons -- or particles of light.8 "We are all," Wolf writes, "beings of light from the lowliest to the highest among us, from the slugs to the astronauts."9 Teilhard believed that human beings are charged by God with helping spiritualize matter and build the "Kingdom of God" by collaborating with the inherent divine purpose. In The Heart of Matter, he speaks of "a suddenly launched current of love [that] spreads over the entire surface and depth of the world"10 and in The Divine Milieu, echoing Paul, he writes that "By virtue of the creation and still more of the Incarnation, nothing here below on earth is profane to him who knows how to see. On the contrary, everything is sacred to the men who can distinguish that portion of the chosen being which is subject to Christ's drawing power in the process of consummation."11 Teilhard's spirituality was fully integrated into his fascination with investigating the processes of nature, and he spent most of his life battling the dualistic understanding of spirituality which pervaded much of the Catholic culture prior to the Second Vatican Council.12 Many of us with the Global Dialogue Institute share at least part of Teilhards's vision, especially as interpreted by Ewert Cousins who argues that the present age represents a radical quantum leap of consciousness -- the Second Axial Period13 -- which will transform individual consciousness into global consciousness -- a global consciousness, envisioned not as a simple, homogenized or empty uniformity that obliterates individuality but as fruition of the person in and through mutuality. However, we are also fully aware that the language we use and the paradigms in term of which we think are conditioned by our cultural matrix and that others need not agree with our conceptual "vocabulary" or models of reality in order to be part of the process and help make ours a better world. On the other hand, for those of us who are "online" there is empirical evidence to be accessed via our computers that vast numbers of people are involved with "things spiritual." The term "spirituality" has a number of loosely connected connotations and is difficult to define clearly, but whatever its meaning, it is certainly a much used term on the Internet14 -- from 4 to 25 times more popular than the term "materialism." On 29 March, 1997, I consulted several major WWW search engines to locate sites or documents on the web containing the word "spirituality" and -- for the sake of comparison -- sites or documents on the web containing the words "materialism" and "religion." The numbers varied widely by type of search engine but remained fairly stable in terms of the spirituality/ materialism/ religion ratio.
64,707 11,111
669,686 (Alta Vista)
When people hear or use the term "spirituality" they not only understand it in widely divergent ways but assess whatever the term means for them according to disparate and potentially antithetical criteria. Hence, it is quite possible that two individuals agree on their definition of spirituality but consider the phenomenon valid and invalid respectively, lauding and criticizing -- or even ridiculing -- those who believe that there is such a thing as "spirituality." The word spirituality is derived from the word "spirit." Checking the WordPerfect (5.1 for DOS) thesaurus for "spirit" renders such diverse supposed synonyms as soul, apparition, ghost, phantom, specter, spook, animation, life, vigor, zest, allegiance, devotion, and loyalty. When we examine the word spirituality itself we discover devotion, holiness, piety, saintliness, and sanctity. The term "contemplation" which was used by the early Christian Church Fathers to indicate what we would call "spirituality" or "mysticism" is noticeably absent from the list of synonyms, and so is a clear connection to "Spirit" in the Christian sense of "Holy Spirit." As soon as we focus on the previously mentioned spectral aspects of spirit we shift into spiritualism complete with a plethora of psychic associations and the "uncanny" or "spooky" connotations of spirituality. Nevertheless, a book title such as Quaker Spirituality16, has a discernable common meaning for people reading the cover, indicating that this is a volume dealing with mystical, contemplative aspects of Quaker thought, the Quaker ways of "listening" to the Holy Spirit. Indeed, the terms "spirituality," "contemplation," and "mysticism" are inextricably linked. They all point to an immediate, intuitive experience, a way of knowing that is beyond the ordinary workings of the senses and intellect, an openness to what the Quaker scholar Douglas V. Steere called "holy nudges"17 in reference to Cardinal Suenens' insistence during the Second Vatican Council on having the ongoing "gifts" of the Holy Spirit officially acknowledged as inextricably part of the Church--though potentially shared by all of humanity and certainly not limited to any particular religion. Psychologist and Psychotherapist Pascal Baute writes in an article on Spirituality on the Internet:
Let me define spirituality as the faculty of humanity that allows people to perceive themselves as individually and socially rooted in a rationally largely incomprehensible but nevertheless profoundly "real" milieu of cosmic wholeness (even experiences of the void generally lead not to fragmentation but to a sense of meaning that is born from the void--darkness giving birth to light). Accepting cosmic wholeness (or holiness), in turn, entails trust in graciousness at the heart of things -- not necessarily faith in a personal God or gods, but confidence in a source of goodness and beauty, a hub of ultimate coherence that holds together the diverging spokes of individual existence, a center of love and justice that validates our intuited claims to the dignity of the human person. This center need not be envisioned in a transcendent "region." It is quite possible to locate this center fully within the human sphere, as goodness and compassion practiced by human persons against the background of the blind indifference of nature and the universal suffering of all sentient beings. In this perspective, spirituality is not only the method of pursuing meaning but the foundation of that very quest. It allows us to transcend and transform the indifference -- experienced as cruelty -- of the evolutionary process that produced "mind" and "consciousness" and "conscience" and use those tools to develop the uniquely human and humane faculties of rationality, empathy, altruism, and love. In the words of David Steindl-Rast, spirituality allows us to have a sense of "belonging to the universe,"19 to feel at home in the cosmos, to know ourselves as kin to other sentient beings and partners with fellow humans. For others, spirituality is the organ which helps us intuit the mystery at the core of things, the ineffable that brackets our brief life spans, Charles Long's silence between the words, Maslow's mystical peak experiences of supreme meaning, Teilhard's Noosphere, Ewert Cousins' Second Axial Period, the enigma of the deep emotions of the "limit experiences" of love and death. In addition, as mentioned earlier, spirituality precedes and fosters the emergence of institutional religions and connects men and women of all eras and life-worlds as they pass through and beyond the biological struggles of existence, the kaleidoscopic surface experiences of satiation-hunger, delight - suffering, gain - loss, wholeness - fragmentation, fullness - void, cooperation - competition, to find themselves quite unexpectedly grasped by the nape of their necks and surprised by meaning -- much as C. S. Lewis was surprised by joy. Thus defined, spirituality -- the capacity for meaning-making by dipping one's antennae into the infinite -- becomes the one characteristic which distinguishes human beings from other animals. In that perspective, we are seekers, capable of sensing "holy nudges"--whether generated from within or without. According to the ancient Greek materialist philosopher Epicurus, among the few natural and necessary desires of human beings is the desire for quiet of the mind. Epicurus already realized that contemplation is not the province of a chosen few. Even if we have never had any kind of extraordinary "mystical experience," regardless of whether we are believers or skeptics or whether we find meaning in darkness or in light, in sorrow or in joy, on a mountaintop, listening to a Bach cantata, or making love -- all of us are called to commune with the cosmos through the still center of ourselves. Those of us involved in the various Global Dialogue Institute projects believe that through "spirituality" human beings have the capacity to make sense of the world, view themselves within larger contexts, and develop appropriate ways of life in keeping with the inclusive, relational patterns they perceive. It is not accidental that this sounds like our definition of "religion" (as presented in Leonard Swidler's essays in this volume, as well as his After the Absolute20), because we consider "spirituality" the general and generative matrix from which specific religions arise. We also affirm that there is a close relationship between "spirituality" and "love." "Spirituality" invites us to understand ourselves not as closed and fixed isolated atoms in a closed and fixed world but as open, expanding, connected beings in the process of becoming in an open, expanding, relational world. In the language of analogy, we understand by "spirituality" both a process and that which is received or conceived by means of that process, generally defined as pertaining to a life or consciousness independent of the body or matter and not subject to temporality or falsifiable by the scientific method. A person's spirituality extracts from the jumble of external or internal "signals" a meaningful conceptual language that makes sense of the experience for the person him- or herself and can be shared with others much like electronic signals of a certain frequency are separated from those of a different bandwidth, decoded, and converted into images and sounds in our television sets. It is irrelevant for the purposes of this definition whether the presence of external "signals" is actually accepted or the entire process is understood as one of interpretation-as-creation. It is significant that people of vastly divergent traditions tend to use congruent images (such as doorways, bodies of water, white light, color, beauty, warmth, fascination, crystals, void, darkness, awe, terror, emptiness, stillness, a sensation of being held, the vision of a pattern that connects, and radical joy) in their attempt to clothe such experiences in words. Mystic contemplation engenders an entire set of cross-cultural archetypal symbols, such as the portal21 or limen (L. limen, threshold) which is related to what Bernard Lonergan and David Tracy call "limit-experience"22 (L. limes, boundary). Thresholds / portals / boundaries symbolize the kind of love that pulls us out of our puny selves by joining us to that which lies beyond. Spirituality invites us to project ourselves beyond the horizons of our individual life-circles and bids us pierce the confining membrane of the spatio-temporal bubble. Spirituality is the womb/crucible in which diverse religions are conceived from the amalgamation of historic conditions and the individual prophet's call. In its domesticated form as part of a specific religious tradition, spirituality uses the tools of story, prayer and liturgy to connect the people of a particular faith community to one another and an overarching sense of ordered significance in terms of their tradition and their shared, social, everyday experience. Nevertheless, spirituality never quite loses its characteristic as the universal "language" or "translator" connecting human beings with each other and the transcendent. To cite a powerful Latin phrase: Cor ad cor loquitur23 -- "heart speaks to heart." Spirituality and Love Elaborating on Pascal's well known remark that the heart has reasons which reason does not know, Bernard Lonergan differentiates among the first three levels of cognition, of experiencing, of understanding, and of judging. "Finally," he adds, "by heart I understand the subject on the fourth, existential level of intentional consciousness and in the dynamic state of being in love."24 The meaning, then, of Pascal's remark would be that, besides the factual knowledge reached by experiencing, understanding and verifying, there is another kind of knowledge reached through the discernment of value of a person in love." Lonergan connects this fourth level with the new beginning of falling in love, noting that "in religious matters love precedes knowledge and, as the love is God's gift, the very beginning of faith is due to God's grace."25 For Teilhard the concept of evolution was not only a theological category but also a principle of interpretation which allowed him to develop a Christian paradigm of the universe as process of becoming, and specifically as the coming not "of the decline of God in our minds and our hearts" but as "an undreamed-of renaissance of God in the universe, in the form of love-energy, produced as the fruit of, and within, a matter that has become for us the home and the expression of an evolutionary convergence"26 --up through countless organisms, up through humanity, up through the Christ Logos toward the Omega Point of ultimate unification. According to William Johnston, S.J., prolific writer in the field of spirituality, and traveller between the worlds of East and West, mysticism (or spirituality) is the universal core of religious experience, potentially open to all humans in every state of life, and the "wisdom or knowledge that is found through love." He calls it "loving knowledge."27 Spirituality is the desert silence which allows the Infinite to speak to us in our hearts (Hosea 2:16). At this point it becomes clear that spirituality leads to an attitude of loving concern, the key to what Ralph Burhoe calls transkin altruism: it allows us to consider all of humanity our family or at least partners and potential friends. This sense of universal connection and friendship is not new. Eighteen hundred years ago, the Stoic philosopher/king Marcus Aurelius wrote that "All things are connected with one another, and the bond is holy; and there is hardly anything unconnected with any other thing."28 In a similar vein, and of interest to ecumenically and historically minded economists, Steindl-Rast speaks of the medieval Pax Benedictina holding "the world together as an Earth Household."29 And for the Islamic world, the Hadith, the Tradition, insists: "The whole mankind is God's Family, and among you the most loved by God is he who is the most helpful for His Family."30 Friendship and Love see complementarity where indifference or hatred see antagonism. Love is inclusive rather than exclusive and not only experiences/ weaves/ projects reality in terms of both-and, it even understands why others insist on either|or. Love is a superb candidate for the position of "universal translator" because it is a universal emotion or attitude, experienced, at least in some rudimentary form, by all but the most profoundly emotionally disturbed or mentally disabled. I do not mean to say that every sloppy attachment to anything from favorite foods to special people and Country or God deserves to be called love in the full sense of the term, but I do argue that even in its lowest (per)version, love retains elements of attraction, fascination, a wanting-to-move-toward, and good-will-toward-another. "In the wild," Love is never a simple wavelength but always invokes the entire spectrum, with one or the other of the component colors more prominent and thus conferring a certain mode or unique quality. Love is possible. Scholars and non-academics who argue that we are too selfish to give love a chance ought to look at the peculiar dynamics of disaster. It brings out the best and the worst in people. And the best generally involves some praxis of loving. The nocturnal horror reports from the war torn Balkans or Somalia or Azerbaijan or Chicago's Cabrini Greens do not stand alone. There are other stories of hope, stories that don't get as many headlines, but stories nevertheless. Natural disasters in the early 90s in several regions in the United States as well as the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building led to an outpouring of compassion and help that cannot be simply reduced to kinship altruism. It represents Ralph Burhoe's transkin altruism, and it offers hope for a future in which people will befriend nature and come to care deeply for strangers in other parts of the world. If we practice love, then we will not intentionally misuse knowledge to cause pain, technology to destroy, dogma to condemn, ideology to justify wars. We will wish for others the good things we want for ourselves, we will stop the vicious cycles of revenge, and we will break the hold of the most destructive child of lack: ressentiment that wants to drag others down to whatever low point it finds itself, yelling, "If I can't have this cookie, neither will you!" Loving--like indifference, hatred, and envy--is at least partially learned behavior, and that most of the teaching involves the preconscious appropriation of the stories and rituals of the individual's group of origin. Like suspicion and hatred, love can be taught. Variants of horror stories to whip up hatred of "the other" run like a red thread through history. A favorite such tale concerns the eating of babies (satirized by Jonathan Swift in the Modest Proposal). Many "others" have been accused of that heinous practice, including early Christians (by Jews and Romans), medieval through modern Jews (by Christians), Frankish crusaders (by Byzantine chroniclers who may have been right), Muslim Turks (by early modern Christians), 1914-1918 Germans (by the English), 1914- 1918 English & French (by the Germans). Interesting variants of the baby-eating tale are the current master myths of "Baby Killers" televised in living color by pro-life forces. Into analogous categories fall the wholesale condemnation of anyone who practices capitalism as irresponsible consumerist by the religious left or of anyone who supports national health care as demonic Marxist by the religious right. Members of each faction see the others as inhuman, faceless monsters, as "foreign devils" (as the Chinese viewed the Westerners during the Boxer Rebellion). Those universal stories of the "Evil Other" show clearly that hating outsiders is passed on from generation to generation. There is no reason that stories of the "Other - as - Friend" should not be correspondingly effective in affecting the way we think and act. But first we must admit that preconscious background beliefs we picked up as children deeply affect the ways we think, see, and act. They provide the lenses through which we interpret our experience and view the world. If -- in the words of the Broadway song -- we can be "carefully taught" to hate and to distrust others, then we can surely be educated to approach them as potential partners rather than enemies. Love, like light, is a spectrum. My insistence that love is a seamless blending of many aspects, spiritual as well as physical, will seem blasphemous to some Christians (though Paul Tillich would approve). In The Mind and Heart of Love, Catholic theologian and priest, Martin d'Arcy, S.J., disagrees with the somber Lutheran Anders Nygren's denouncement of pagan Eros as against Christian Agape. D'Arcy insists that "no sharp divisions can be made at any moment in their history between the two loves. It is always, we must remember, a full human person who is loving, and in that love there are sure to be many different strands. Thought will be there and emotion, joy and sorrow, self-regarding and self-forgetting desires, the longing for fusion as well as for beatitude."31 D'Arcy also points out that just as Christians cannot imagine their God to destroy what he has created he should not be portrayed as expecting us to uproot what Nygren calls egocentric love, because that would amount to extinguishing human love altogether: "to rule out all the self entirely is to make an abstraction of love which has no life."32 Nygren, writes D'Arcy,"cuts the knot and sunders self-love and grace, nature and the supernatural completely. This does not make a peace between the two, but only a solitude in which Agape withers."33 Leonard Swidler makes that same point when he insists that genuine love of the other presupposes love for oneself. In an unpublished autobiographical essay, Rosemary Reuther reflects on her experience with interreligious dialogue and especially "the great-hearted ones who somehow understood that loving oneself and loving one's neighbor, even one's enemy neighbor, were two sides of one inseparable truth." To use a computer analogy, if we want to make the world a better place for all tenants -- human, animal, and plant -- intellectual curiosity must approach understanding through the operating system of dialogic love, and both need to flow into action-praxis. The more the quest for truth is pursued in the spirit of dialogue and love the weaker will be the temptation to absolutize a particular perspective, to insist that truth with a small "t" is Truth with a capital "T," and that humans are trapped in an atomistic word-world of multiple mutually unintelligible monologues with no chance for genuine communication. The Greeks were intuitively right when they spoke of philosophy, philosophia, love of wisdom, even though they did not put their own insight fully into practice and began the Western logo-centric tradition with its ambivalent consequences -- leading both to the universalism and respect for others of a Marcus Aurelius or a Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Western arrogance leading to political and intellectual imperialism. The more fully we can learn to see through loving eyes (to be distinguished from gushy sentimentality) while using our rational faculties to assess what we see (in as objective a manner as possible), the more effectively our interpretations will defuse envy, hatred, cruelty, prejudice, ecologic irresponsibility, and all the other evils foisted by human beings on one another and their natural environment. In fact, if we want to find a power to spread transkin altruism, there is no better innate ally than nature's fusion energy which is designed to make friends out of strangers. In Leonard Swidler's much-cited words: "Death or Dialogue." In Contemplation in a World of Action, Thomas Merton, one of the greatest practitioners of spirituality in the 20th century, and another traveler between worlds points to the ideas of Reza Arasteh, a Persian psychologist:
The demands of becoming authentic "citizens of the world" challenge us to push beyond the present tendency toward psychological cynicism, ontological dualism, or yearning for the dead husks of past certainties, and to develop -- if not a meta-Hegelian/Einsteinian "unified field theory" -- so at least a "sense" of the possibility of a dynamic multi-focal unity beyond diversity, some sort of Teilhardian ultimate harmonizing round a dynamic central axis based on an evolutionary model,35 a cosmic hologram, which allows for the interplay and mutual support of traditional opposites. During the first half of this century Teilhard developed precisely such a dynamic, organic, porous, pregnable paradigm of becoming. "From the vantage point of a traveler between different worlds -- that of East and West . . . he observed that, in many respects, humanity already possesses a common global culture in a material sense . . . [and] pointed to the urgent need for sharing ideas and spiritual values which . . . can provide people with a coherent view of reality . . . [and] energize human beings into action to bring about the greater unity of humankind."36 Global civilization is not a future possibility; it is a present-day
reality. While the Internet, World Wide Web, interreligious and intercultural
dialogue, and even the various ongoing global ethics projects do not propagate
a single, already existing faith or ideology, they all are rooted in the
newly emerging master paradigm of dialogue, collaboration, mutuality, and
interconnectivity (a paradigm already intuited by such ancient thinkers
as the Taoists or Marcus Aurelius), and that paradigm is bound to affect
the way people understand their various worlds including their religious
doctrines and rituals. In fact, the process of engaging in these kinds
of linking or integrating activities has itself the potential of becoming
the catalyst of a genuine change in the way human persons understand themselves,
one-another, the world, and ultimate reality. The key term at the edge
of the 21st century is the prefix "inter-" -- a prefix that
posits a "both-and" ontology of mutuality, a blancing of the "one and the
many," humanity and the biosphere, individual and Gemeinschaft,
analysis and synthesis, reason and insight, self and other, and alludes
to the processes of life-giving, growth-enhancing, holistic exchange --
in other words: the primacy of dialogue, spirituality, and love.
(click on BACK in your browser to return to the text) 1.This is in part a further development of my article "From the Senses to Sense: The Hermeneutics of Love" in Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 29.4 (December 1994): 579-602. 2. According to Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language, unabridged, 2nd edition, (1955) the term "spir'it.u.al, a. [Fr. spirituel, from L. spiritualis.]" has the following meanings: 1. of the spirit or the soul, often in a religious or moral aspect, as distinguished from the body. 2. of, from, or concerned with the intellect, or what is often thought as the better or higher part of the mind. 3. of or consisting of spirit; not corporeal. 4. characterized by the ascendancy of the spirit; showing much refinement of thought and feeling. 5. of religion or the church; sacred, devotional, or ecclesiastical; not lay or temporal. 6. spiritualistic or supernatural. The term "spir''it.u.al'i.ty, n.; pl. spir''it.u.al'i.ties" means: 1. spiritual nature, character, or quality; spiritual-mindedness: opposed to worldliness, sensuality. 3. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1960), p. 109. 4. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1960), p. 262. Teilhard appears to be a "Man for all Seasons." His thought has been appropriated by a wide range of disciples from academics -- scientists, philosophers, and theologians -- to an online "Noosphere" website featuring a vast list of such links as Angel Star, Animal Essences, Astral Projection, Astrology, an Aura Book with Glasses, the Bhagavad Gita, the Calm Center, the Church of All Worlds, Cosmic Consciousness, the Crystal Ball, Dolphins, Dream Crystals, the Einstein Factor, a Global Awakening, Hypnosis, Health Wealth, Holo-Dynamics, Integral Yoga, Moksha Foundation, Palmistry, Sacred Geometry, Scientific Spirituality, and the Zohar. This Aquarian cyber supermarket has attached itself to a multi-year ongoing mega project at the Free University of Brussels, the "Principia Cybernetica Web," started in 1993, which currently has close to 2000 nodes. Under the leadership of Professor Francis Heylighen, this international organization is dedicated to "computer-supported collaborative development of an evolutionary-systemic philosophy. Put more simply, PCP tries to tackle age-old philosophical questions with the help of the most recent cybernetic theories and technologies." In fact, the site includes a "collection of basic references, grouped by author, that explore the idea of the emerging planetary organism and its global brain. . . . Further references to be added are very much appreciated. This material will serve as the basis for a "Global Brain" study group". 5. Charles D. Laughlin, Jr., John McManus, and Eugene G. d'Aquili in"Mature Contemplation" in Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 28.2 (June 1993): 133-176, p. 162. Zygon has been at the forefront of connecting the neurosciences and religion - spirituality. In 1966 alone Zygon published 15 articles in that field. See Carol Rausch Albright, "Zygon's 1996 Expedition into Neuroscience and Religion" in Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 30.4 (December 1996): 711-727. Also, take a look at the website I publish for the Chicago Center for Religion and Science, CCRS, where Zygon originates. 7. Fred Alan Wolf. Star Wave: Mind, Consciousness, and Quantum Physics (New York: Macmillan, 1984), p. 12. 10. Cited in Claude Tresmontant. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: His Thought (Baltimore: Helicon, 1959), p. 86. 11. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1960), p. 66. 12. The Second Vatican Council (also known as Vatican II), the largest, and arguably the first truly ecumenical council in the history of the Catholic Church, with some 3000 participants drawn from all over the globe, was called by Pope John XXIII to promote "peace and unity of all humankind," and was in session from 1962-1965. It opened the Church to the modern world and radically changed the traditional official attitudes toward non-Catholic Christianity, non-Christian religions, and Catholics who called for freedom of thought and conscience. Self-segregation, condemnation, and proselytizing gave way to constructive dialogue with the secular world and other denominations or religions. 13. Ewert H. Cousins. Christ of the 21st Century (Rockport, MA: Element, 1992), pp. 7- 10. 14. In the WWW Page of the Centre for Creation Spirituality we are challenged:
to honour diversity, affirm differences and value voices from the margins; to value women's wisdom and the prophetic voice of artist and poet; to let go of the compulsion to dominate and control. to embrace mystery, paradox and uncertainty; to learn to think 'both . . . and' rather then [sic] 'either . . . or'; to repair the ravages of dualistic thinking, separation and fragmentation. to demand a great deal more of our religious traditions and in the process revitalise them; to see the whole of creation as a sacrament, a channel of grace; to behold Nature as a great teacher and revelation of the divine. These concept are cosmic in their breadth and implication. Trying to catch them in these few concentrated phrases is quite inadequate. Much meditation, prayer, experiential and inner work is necessary to lift them off the page and to form a solid foundation and holistic perspective for our lives. Then we can be truly at home in all aspects of life, whether in pleasure or pain, action or contemplation, since the divine is to be found in all these experiences. As we each individually do this, we help create a peace-making, ecological and just world community. 16. Douglas Steere. Quaker Spirituality: Selected Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1984). 18. See at http://www.lexpages.com/SGN/ paschal/SPIRDEF N.html. 19. Fritjof Capra and David Steindl-Rast. Belonging to the Universe: Explorations on the Frontiers of Science and Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991), p. 108. 20. Leonard Swidler. After the Absolute: The Dialogical Future of Religious Reflection (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990), p. 19. 22. David Tracy. Blessed Rage for Order (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), pp. 93-94. Tracy refers to Bernard Lonergan. 24. Bernard Lonergan, S.J. Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), p. 114. 26. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Activation of Energy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963), p. 280. 27. William Johnston, S.J. The Inner Eye of Love (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978), p. 20. 28. Cited in Donald S. Gochberg, ed. Classicsof Western Thought, Vol. I: The Ancient World. 4th ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), p. 511. 30. Fathi Osman. "Through the Human Approaches to the Transcendental Truth" (unpublished essay). 31. Martin C. d'Arcy, S.J. The Mind and Heart of Love. Lion and Unicorn: A Study in Eros and Agape (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1956), pp. 59-60. 34. Thomas Merton. Contemplation in a World of Action (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), p. 212. This passage is cited in a fine article by Fr. James Conners, OCSO, "The Meaning of the Contemplative Life according to Thomas Merton". 35. Mathias Trennert-Helwig. "The Church as the Axis of Convergence in Teilhard's Theology and Life" in Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 30.1 (March 1995): 73-89, p. 82. 36. Ursula King. "Teilhard's Reflections on Eastern Religions Revisited," in Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 30.1 (March 1995): 47-72, p. 68.
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