Interspirituality. Many people talk about spirituality, but what is interspirituality? The term was coined by Wayne Teasdale in the 1990s. While the word isn’t known by many people, many people embody interspirituality. Let’s explore this concept and its importance today. You may find out that you’re not just a spiritual person but an interspiritual person.
The following is a text version of this blog posting.
Among the most read spiritual writers today is Thomas Merton. Merton was a monk and priest, a Roman Catholic. In his writings, he explored the richness of the spiritual dimension of life. Merton died in 1968. He was in Thailand at the time of his death. What was a monk from a monastery in Kentucky doing in Thailand? He and other Christian monastics were meeting with Buddhist monks to discuss their experiences of meditation and spirituality. Sharing the experience of spiritual things across traditions is what today is called interspirituality.
The term interspiritual or interspirituality was coined by Wayne Teasdale in the 1990s. Teasdale, a Christian monk, was drawn to both Christian and Hindu spirituality. He also had a working knowledge of beliefs and practices from many other religions and traditions.
Interspirituality is different from an interfaith perspective. An interfaith perspective looks at each faith or religion for what it is, considering the dogma and practices of that faith. Many religious people engage in interfaith dialogue which serves to compare and contrast dogma and practice, finding both commonalities and differences. Interspirituality isn’t focused on dogma. Instead, it’s focused on spiritual practice. It considers things like the experience of meditation in Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, and other wisdom traditions. It asks about how the teachings inform the spiritual practice. In doing so, it looks for a fuller, richer understanding of the human experience of spiritual practices that can be gained from understanding a variety of religions or traditions.
For many people, the word interspiritual sounds odd or somehow on the fringe of what’s acceptable. However, whether people use the word or not, interspirituality has quickly become part of Western culture. Many people know about and understand mindfulness. It’s a Buddhist concept that is taught in business, schools, healthcare settings, and many other places because of its benefits. Yoga is very popular. That’s Hindu. Within Hinduism, there’s much more to yoga than what goes on in an exercise class, but yoga as a physical exercise is a Hindu practice. Many people practice mindfulness, yoga, and say traditional prayers. That’s essentially the practice of interspirituality.
One of my favorite Christian theologians is Karl Rahner, who wrote in the middle of the last century. Rahner looked at all of the intricacies of institutional religion and understood that while he was devout at the same time people were increasingly alienated from institutional religion. From that perspective, he said that the Christian of the future, if a Christian exists at all in the future exists, the Christian of the future will be a mystic. A mystic is someone who experiences the Divine, who understands that this experience is the foundation of life. I believe that Rahner is correct and that his statement isn’t just about Christianity. In the future, people will continue to move further from the institutional trappings of religion, whatever their religion may be. They will focus on spiritual experience, on mysticism. Further, they will find what supports their spiritual and mystical experience from whatever sources are available to them. To that end, I believe we are moving to a time when interspirituality is becoming a new norm.
Consider your spiritual practice. Have you learned from teachers from religions other than your own? Have you learned from non-religious sources that have empowered the spiritual dimension of your life? Are there practices you engage in that originally came from a different tradition? If you answer yes to these kinds of questions, you’ve entered the realm of being an interspiritual person.
Everything in my life is connected to spirituality. That, to me, seems the whole point of living. Everything that I experience informs my understanding of the glorious world around me. My Christian teachers taught me to love the divine; Rumi taught me to seek the divine as one would seek out a lover; Krishna taught me to see the divine in everything; the Vajrayana teachers taught me to see that the divine is perfectly ordinary – “extra-ordinary” as my teacher liked to say.
I am learning to give up my need for others to understand things the way I do, and to give up needing things to be different. All the expressions of humanity are praise, despite my own judgement. I can work to ease suffering, but the song of humanity with all it’s discordant notes must go on – and, naturally, eventually conclude.
Jane:
Thanks for sharing wisdom here. Yes, we can be enriched from the wisdom of the great spiritual traditions as well as from the people we encounter throughout our lives.
Lou