Apostleship of Prayer Spirituality WHAT IS SPIRITUALITY

    The word “spirituality” is a relatively new word to our dictionaries. Nevertheless no matter how we defined spirituality, integral to that spirituality is the possibility of God's activity in the lives of people. Any person, then, is able to have experiences of God. Without that actuality the whole religious enterprise is doomed. Throughout history the question concerning religious experience has had a difficult and torrid time, for an awareness of Gods presence engenders hope and healing to many, besides disclosing mystery and meaning to life.

    All religious experience is a disclosure of a mysterious, transforming, and claiming presence which can be not only affirmed but because it possesses an elusive quality it can not be absolutely defined. Attempts at capturing this elusive quality have resulted in the claiming of different kinds of religious experience, depending on which of the five senses was involved in the experience. The key problem of any spirituality is coming to an understanding of the possibility of God’s Presence in the lives of people. Underlining difficulties for faith and religious experience emerge from an inadequate or insufficient awareness of the contextual, cultural and psychological factors and the underlying philosophical paradigms.

    Now within these primitive kinds of spiritualities various developments have arisen because of the dissimilar cultural milieus of the different ages leading to the emphasizing of some diverse element in that age to produce a new spirituality, e.g. the emphasis by St Francis of Assisi on poverty in an age that was becoming very opulent. Thus, in a specific historical age, Jesus' redeeming activity will become concretized in ways that makes use of the characteristics of that age in a new creative spirituality.    In this way disparate schools of Spirituality emerged as the people struggled to meet God, all springing from the needs of the people as they persisted in their search for unity.

     Spirituality can never be a private affair for it can only be sustained by a group of believers in a definite period of history taking into account how that period orients itself to the Bible and tradition. All this means that that in any spirituality there will be relationships not only between God and humans beings but also between human beings themselves. . One definition of spirituality, given by McBrien, is

‘Spirituality has to do with our experiencing of God and with the transformation of our consciousness and our lives as outcomes of that experience.  Since God is available in principle to everyone, spirituality is not exclusively Christian.’

Gutierrez presents an explanation of Christian spirituality in keeping with McBrien's:

‘Every spirituality receives its initial impulse from an encounter with the Lord.  That experience determines the path to be followed; it bears permanently the mark of the divine initiative and of the historical context in which it occurred.’

Thus, when we look at any spirituality, there is a need for us to take into account the divine initiative and the historical context in which it arose. Spirituality, or the relationship between the person and God, belongs to both the internal and external world of a person. Religion, itself, then, is a public affirmation of the meeting point between God and man. Humans are natural religious.

 "If man leaves his dreamy conceptions aside and focuses on his naked poverty, when the masks fall and the core of his Being is revealed, it soon becomes obvious that he is religious by nature, that religion is the secret dowry of his being.   In the midst of his existence there unfolds the bond (re-ligio) which ties him to the infinitely transcendent mystery of God, the insatiable interest in the Absolute that captivates him and underlines his poverty."

Religion is the binding that goes on between God and man, their mutual presence to each other.   It takes place in this world because God is present in this world and it is here that God meets man.  God is not remote from his creation, but is dynamically present in it as the creating force that is continuously, moment by moment, keeping it in being.  God is the very ground of our being.
 

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