The following is a brief excerpt from my book, The Integrated Self: A Holistic Approach to Spirituality and Mental Health Practice. In this passage, I explain that the commonly used distinction between religion and spirituality is very narrow and prevents us from appreciating that spirituality is a dimension of all human experience.
To learn more about this book, visit: https://www.amazon.com/Integrated-Self-Holistic-Approach-Spirituality-ebook/dp/B007JK5H02/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1548258311&sr=8-2&keywords=Kavar+the+integrated+self
Spirituality versus Religion
One approach to defining spirituality is by distinguishing it from religion. When this distinction is made, it suggests that spirituality is about some kind of pure experience, or a positive feeling, or something that is a unique aspect of life events. Religion, in turn, is defined in terms of institutional membership, dogma and beliefs, or ritualistic observances. From this distinction, spirituality and religion are understood as unrelated to each other and comprise two separate domains.
While this distinction makes sense from a theoretical perspective, when examining the lives of many people living in the United States today, spirituality and religion cannot be easily confined in separate domains. For some people, spirituality and religion have no connection at all. For other people, spirituality and religion cannot be separated. Perhaps more common is the intertwining of some aspects of religious expression and observance with personal spirituality. At the same time, people often have spiritual experiences apart from their religious practices but may interpret those experiences from the perspective of religious beliefs. In other words, spiritual experience may or may not be related to religious practice, observance, symbols, or beliefs even for a particular individual. Because of this, separating the terms spirituality and religion is no more helpful to a clinician that using them interchangeably.
Spirituality as a Dimension of Human Experience
Spirituality functions in our lives in ways that are both transcendent and imminent. Spirituality is transcendent in that it opens the individual to experience something more than what is tangibly present in a particular situation. Simultaneously, spirituality is imminent in so far as it also draws an individual back to the individual’s lived experience. In other words, spirituality functions as a dialectic between intangible concepts and constructs beyond the self, while also providing a heightened sense of integration within the self.
Spirituality is a dimension of human beings, just as our bodies and mental capacities are dimensions of the self. While philosophical, theological and metaphysical writers have expressed this understanding about spirituality for generations, contemporary research in genetics and neurology demonstrate that spirituality is a foundational part of the human makeup.
Based on this framework, the book explores genetics and neurology related to spirituality and presents a model that integrates the spiritual dimension of an individual with other dimensions, like the cultural, physical, and other aspects. While the book is written for clinicians, it will provide insights to anyone interested in spirituality and personal growth.
On reading the brief on spirituality vs religion, I can understand the rationale presented. However, I’m often told by people, particularly Xgeners and younger, that they attend religious worship to feed their spirituality, and that they’re not necessarily interested in membership, nor express loyalty to a particular denomination.
I’ve thought about that a lot, and I’ve professed with such discussions, that both spirituality and religious beliefs nurture one another, and should be the basis for both.
In other words, if one’s religious practice doesn’t benefit one’s spirituality active participation in a church/worship experience becomes a negative, draining situation resulting in church drop-out.
The spiritual-religious experience is a very deep interaction in one’s life, and takes virtually a lifetime to comprehend, accept, live through, and be the vital purpose of one’s life.
Bottom-line: religion is a sense of one’s role in one’s own life, one’s family relationship, and one’s community participation.
Spirituality is a sense of one’s being in relationship to God, and in particular to the Holy Trinity of the Christian arena of its perception.
An old devout man, in the Roman Catholic tradition, with some Scriptural background in ministry and teaching, I have come to a united view of a particular religious-spirituality bond that, however, I am extremely reluctant to share, much less teach. In the end, I in the Trinitarian tradition, but not as scholars–particular the Greek fathers–taught it at all. I believe the Trinity to be the x, y, and z of all experience–and that not only Jesus, of Nazareth, understood it that way, but, in the end, so did all the great religious teachers, not excluding either Siddhartha or Muhammad, But it is wordless and experiential, the actual existence, and descriptions of the mystery therefore end in mysticism or its ilk. There is a “creator”–as Dawkins, the atheist, is willing to admit, some source of the four forces, their consistency (which enables both science and reality itself), and the mystery of time. Then there is human nature and animal life and the various kinds, degrees and–again–mystery of consciousness–but that word is inadequate to cover the range of affection, fear, choices, mother-love (and aunt love, as in elephants), etc. If “creation” is the x, and “choice-life” is y (and I have to confess that I acknowledge my nearly infinite grandparents were a couple of wet noodles in a sea far prior to dinosaurs)–then there is a “z”–which is the reality of “the kingdom of God” to use Jesus’s expression or “nirvana/satori” or some of the “sufi/mystics” of Islam. A choice of live a Life that is “other” or “more” or “love.” again, it is wordless. Jesus will also use the expression “faith,” but it is all of these combined–a gift in some ways (“charis”) and not achievable by trying–but by the paradoxes of which the great teachers speak–letting go, submitting, accepting the seed rather than trying to be good, non-ego, etc. It is the “z” dimension.
These are my view, and I find them (as in Mark’s Gospel) and similarly in the Buddhist one–unable to share with any “disciples”–beyond words, beyond words. Even Examples are not sufficient. As I write these for you, I can only offer them, suggest you take what is good (as Jesus says of stuff in the cupboard) and sift their value and go on. While I certainly wish every one alive had the peace and joy which has been given me, I realize that I am an obscure little man, quite content to offer what I can, even anonymously, aware that this “spirituality” is more insight and less intellectual, more practical and less verbal–and includes all serious religious traditions. I claim no possessiveness and hope it is of some use to you.
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Thanks for the comment. Yes, that’s true. The cards can be used in ways that are very consonant with Jungian psychology. Lou