The Challenge of Relating to Contemporary Youth Spirituality Professor David Tacey “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born.”

The Challenge of Relating to Contemporary Youth Spirituality

Professor David Tacey

“Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born.”

– Matthew Arnold (1855)

Reaching Out in Ministry: Embracing Contemporary Spirituality

Two books on contemporary youth spirituality

David Tacey, Re-Enchantment (Sydney: Harper Collins, 2000).

David Tacey, The Spirituality Revolution: The Emergence of Contemporary Spirituality (Sydney: Harper Collins, 2003; London & NY: Routledge, 2004)

New Wine, Old Wineskins

• “Neither do men put new wine into old wineskins: else the wineskins break, and the wine runs out, and the wineskins perish: but they put new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.” – Matthew 9:17

Distinguishing between Grassroots Spirituality and the ‘New Age’

• David Tacey, Re-Enchantment (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2000); and

• David Tacey, Jung and the New Age (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).

‘No thanks’, says the Resistant Adam,refusing the religion of the ages

What is spirituality?

One might define spirituality as the search for connectedness, which seems to operate in four main areas: •connectedness to others and society; •to nature and environment; •to the interior self or soul; and •to the cosmos and to what some still call God.

Two-Way

• Spirituality, like breathing, involves a two-way rhythm which includes an in-breath and an out-breath. The in-breath is the interior, inward experience of spirit, the out-breath is the external, social expression of spirit. The interior in-breath has been sorely lacking in Western religion, found only in cloisters and monasteries.

Western religious exhaustion

• Public religion in the West has been largely expressed in external ways: public rituals and prayers; an historical focus on what happened two thousand years ago; charity and social work; the God above and beyond us, not the God within. The West has been breathing out for centuries, until it is blue in the face, and out of puff.

Mystical interiority

• Youth are not exactly deserting religion, but they are making us face our religious failings. With their interest in interiority, meditation, contemplation and exploration of self, all fostered and encouraged by the East, youth are reminding the West of the forgotten or hidden dimension of religion, namely, mystical interiority.

Backlash against Youth

• Religious conservatives are bewildered and often outraged by the inward turn of contemporary youth. They often hit out at the inward turn, referring to it as narcissism or empty naval-gazing. Why is this the case? Because religion in the West has been without interiority a very long time, and conservatives believe it can continue to be without it.

Original Blessing• This is another way in which youth are

reminding religion of something it has forgotten: in Genesis, man and woman are made in the image of God. True, there is original sin and the fall from grace, but the fall does not entirely erase the image of God in the human self. The Bible invites us to view this as a paradox: original sin side by side with original blessing.

• “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” – Genesis 1:27

• “But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the children of God, even to them that believe on his name.” – John 1-12

• “And I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.” – 2 Corinthians 6:18

Within

• “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed: nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is! For, in fact, the kingdom of God is within you.”

– Luke 17:21.

What do youth want?

• Youth want God-experience, not God-talk, and God-experience is what the mystics are about. Again there is a vast gap between this attitude and the conventional churches. Religious people say: ‘What has got into young people today? Why do they demand what in the past has been confined to special people like saints, mystics and prophets?

The Unholy Hunger for God

• ‘Why can’t youth be content with what the churches provide? Why are they so hungry, so impatient, so ambitious in their spiritual striving?’

• Such views are basically saying that the hunger for spirituality is demonic, not divine. It shows impropriety, impetuousness, bad manners.

Poor in spirit

• The modern secular person is poor in spirit, and has great hunger, but then again, Jesus said: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’. – Matthew 5:3.

Inside us or Nowhere

• The spiritual hunger of youth is wonderfully exemplified in Bertolt Brecht’s play, Life of Galileo. In this play, Sagredo asks Galileo, ‘Where’s God?’ and Galileo says, ‘Inside us or nowhere’.

Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo (1940), in Ralph Manheim and John Willett, eds., Bertolt Brecht: Collected Plays, Vol. 5 (New York: Vintage, 1972), p. 23.

Truth and Change

• Jung put the situation in paradoxical terms: “Eternal truth needs a human language that alters with the spirit of the times”.

• And more radically: “All the true things must change and only that which changes remains true”.

Tradition stood on its head• Today the religious process has been

reversed: experience is primary, and theories and beliefs come after experience. Today’s generations, brought up on science and critical thinking, must experience something first, and only then they can reflect on it and perhaps connect with tradition. We have moved from a world where tradition came first and experience second, to a world where experience is first and tradition second.

The Birth of Mysticism

If this is carried through, the result will be mysticism, that is, the experience of God, not second-hand thoughts about God. And this could be the secret hidden meaning of our break with tradition. Secularisation has unwittingly set the stage for a widespread or universal interest in mysticism.

“The future Christian will be a mystic

or he [or she] will not exist at all.” – Karl Rahner

The church of the future

Rahner added this trenchant remark: “By mysticism we mean a genuine experience of God emerging from the very heart of our experience.”

Karl Rahner, ‘The Spirituality of the Church of the Future’, in tr. Cornelius Ernst, Theological Investigations, Vol. 20 (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1981), p. 149.

• “Experience is a fundamental part of spirituality. It is through experience that we learn about ourselves, others, the world, and how we relate to it all. Experience is powerful because it is your own. What has attracted me to practising Buddhism is its emphasis on listening to the teachings, and experimenting with them in our actual experience. You are encouraged to ask questions about the religion, such as ‘How does this relate to my life?’ and also, ‘Is this actually true?’ Then, through direct experience of the truth of the teachings, you develop trust in them, can realize them, and know that it is your experience.” - Jason

• “This was what I found lacking in my education and upbringing in Christian institutions. At school and again at church, I was simply told that this is the truth, that these are the rules, and urged to believe in and subscribe to them. I was never encouraged to experiment with or test the church’s teachings, and so I never developed the feeling that this was my truth, or these were my rules. I could never embrace what I was being taught as it all felt so alien to me, and I felt removed from it. Mass was just a hollow ritual, the Eucharist was cardboard. It was all quite easy to set aside, as I had never really felt part of it.”

• “What I feel to be spiritual – the intuitive, interior or mystical side of things – I tend to locate not in church but in nature, in other people, and in social justice or community service.”

A Post-Modern Riddle• “ I think it is a very sad state of affairs concerning the

church that the only way I found out about the interesting work of Father Thomas Merton, a mystic whose writings speak directly to me because they are so liberating, was through reading the wonderful autobiography of the Dalai Lama. This was the year after I finished secondary school. Ironically, it is only now, through my growing understanding of Buddhism, and through my readings of Merton, that I have begun to glimpse the spirituality and mysticism of Christianity.” – Jason

• Once young adults feel something mystical or spiritual in their experience, they are able to take another look at religion:

• “Before I started this subject, I was confident in ‘bagging’ Christianity for the way in which it had failed me. Empty rituals, outmoded morality, and corrupt institutions, etc. Yet as the weeks have passed, I have come to realize that a more sophisticated dialogue is at my disposal. I have discovered that my childish repudiation of the Christian Church revealed a lack of knowledge into the nature, depth and multi-layered appearance of spirituality within religion. I come away with greater respect for my religion of origin, and for the presence of spirituality in what I had thought was a dead and moribund institution.” – Jenny

• The philosopher of religion Bernard Lonergan summed up effective spiritual practice in a simple but profound sentence:

“The fruit of the truth must grow and mature on the tree of the subject, before it can be plucked and placed in the absolute realm.”

Bernard J. F. Lonergan, The Subject (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1968), p. 3.

Drawing faith out of individuals

Karl Rahner put it well when he said:

“The theological problem today is the art of drawing religion out of an individual, not pumping it into him or her. The art is to help people become what they really are.”

Many times I have listened to this kind of narrative from my female students: •“I am trying to discover what God means to me, and that’s why I’m interested in spirituality. My mother is religious but I can’t support her religion because it is too traditional and old-fashioned for me. I sometimes talk to her about God, but I can’t get on her wavelength.” •“I can’t talk to my father about God, as he dismisses it all as nonsense. I don’t know how my mother and father have stayed together, because mother lives for her faith and my father threw it away when he was a young man.”

• Here is one example from a student of mine, Joshua:

• “The notion of God that I grew up with in the church was, I see now, extremely limited. To think that God disapproves of certain styles of dress, music, or words, or any other thing that my church did not like, seems insulting to the infinite beauty and wisdom that is behind the creation of the universe.”

• “After ‘losing my faith’ I spent some years as an atheist, variously an existentialist, solipsist, nihilist, hedonist. But I was attempting to fill a spiritual hole with an intellectual peg. This, I think, is the problem with most of the world’s philosophies, and goes a fair way to explaining why philosophers tend to be so depressed, and often insane or suicidal.”

• “When I found God again, I was amazed to find that there was no intellectual support for the notion of God’s existence, and yet it was something I knew through sheer intuition. On one occasion, I feel that I met God, not in body or in mind, but in spirit. I felt as if the whole world fell into place, as if it made new sense in its own way. Everything that exists is a product of God’s imagination, and God loves his Creation.” – Josh

• “The idea that we are part of God and that God is part of us has never been looked upon favorably in the West. This idea is usually seen as blasphemy; the apartness of God must be preserved. Yet there are times when there is nothing we could be more sure of than that God exists and it is our communion with him that feeds our lives. I believe every woman and man has had communion with God whether they recognise it as such or not; whether they remember it or not.” - Adrian

• “But we are reluctant to refer to this experience as ‘God’, because we say to ourselves, ‘What could a mere nobody such as myself have to say about such an important subject?’ When we feel the presence of God, many of us are afraid to call it ‘God’ because it does not fit any image of the divine that has been recognised in history.” – Adrian

• “It is hard to sway a convinced materialist like myself from his constant scepticism about religious matters, at least I thought it was before this course. But it is terribly hard to continue to oppose the idea of ‘spirit’ when it is presented in poetry and inspirational writings. Before the course, I blocked out religion as irrelevant to my life, it made no sense to me at all in its conventional, archaic and drab form.” - Stephen

• “But when spirituality is expressed in poetry, passion, and subjectivity, I have to take another look, as these expressions are inspirational and move me in an unexpected way. I now see that emotion and spirit can be included in my world, and I can have such elements without straying from reality.”

– Steven

Bumper sticker seen in traffic:

“God is dead” - Nietzsche“Nietzsche is dead” - God