idea magazine

Talking about ... Spirituality

January / February 2007

Whether we are talking from a pulpit or over a garden fence, Nick Pollard helps us to give relevant answers to the big issues raised by contemporary popular culture...

Oh no it doesn't." "Oh yes it does." I have had a number of these conversations recently. This is not because it was pantomime season, but because many people who support activist organisations don't seem to realise that they had a Christian origin.

How many know that Dr Barnado was on his way to Christian missionary work in China before he stopped off in London and started serving homeless children? How many know that Eglantyne Jebb, founder of Save the Children, was a Christian committed to reaching others with the Gospel? How many know the Christian origin of our hospitals or our schools and universities? The list could go on.

It seems as if our increasingly secular society is rewriting our history, removing all recognition of our Christian heritage.

I hope this might be different this year, as we celebrate 200 years since the abolition of the slave trade and talk about William Wilberforce, the driving force behind it. I hope people will read for themselves Wilberforce's own book, Real Christianity, which shows his great passion for people to understand and live out the Christian Gospel. His faith was not just some sideline to his life; it was central to all he thought and felt and did. It was because of his faith that he stood out against the slave trade. His faith led to action; he had an integrated spirituality.

There's a lot of talk about spirituality these days, but most people have no clear idea of what it is. Is spirituality about strange rituals practiced by esoteric religions? Or fuzzy feelings experienced on mountaintops?

Many films have explored the specific concept of supernatural entities that interact with the material world - from It's a Wonderful Life in 1946 to Ghost in 1990 up to the latest Almodóvar movie Volver. More generally, the continued success of the TV programme Lost (now in its third series) shows that people want to talk about the possibility of supernatural answers to life's big questions.

Meanwhile, cultural commentators such as Jean Kilbourne are reflecting upon the relationship between advertising and spirituality, pointing out how our desire for the spiritual is used to sell us something. So Eternity is a perfume by Calvin Klein, Infiniti is an automobile, Hydra Zen is a moisturizer, and Jesus is a brand of jeans.

As a result of all of this, many people puzzle over what we mean by "spirituality". I notice this particularly amongst teachers who are required to help all students' spiritual development, but don't know quite what that means.

Spirituality and activism

Thankfully, the contemporary philosopher Peter S Williams has been doing important work in this area, and his findings provide an important link between spirituality and activism. He has been rediscovering and updating the medieval approach to spirituality that integrated orthodoxy (the mind), orthopathy (the heart) and orthopraxy (the hand).

He says that this was essentially restating Jesus' call to love God with all our mind, heart and strength, and he is now restating it in today's language. Williams argues that an integrated, reasonable spirituality starts from a worldview (what we believe about reality), which leads to certain attitudes (how we feel about reality) and then to certain behaviour (how we will live in this reality, and might seek to change it). He therefore is calling for spiritual education to begin with worldview education, which leads to reasoned emotional intelligence and reasonable practical action.

Not all of us can engage at Williams' level, but we can all do our bit. Some day I hope someone will write the story of Anna Maria Milles, who seemed like a nobody to her contemporaries. She was a poor servant who, by the turn of the 19th century, had become so weak that she could no longer work - and was only kept in her mistress' house because she had nowhere else to go.

But each night she read the Bible to her mistress' young son. He grew to love those Bible stories and eventually he came to a very real faith in Christ. When he grew up he became the great Lord Shaftesbury who did so much to transform our society for good.

Anna didn't know what a worldview was, but by reading Scripture to this young boy she helped to shape his worldview, which led him to certain attitudes that resulted in great action. He had an integrated spirituality that derived from the action of an old lady who could do little more than read him Bible stories.

In the same way, surely, we can all play our part.

• Find out more about the issues raised in this article at www.damaris.org/ideamagazine
• www.ToolsForTalks.com provides a onestop shop to help teach the message of the Bible in the language of contemporary culture. The site contains quotes and illustrations from the latest films, music, magazines and TV and is updated weekly.

Nick Pollard is the co-founder of Damaris