Spirituality

Chelle at RedDress has posted about 'spirituality' in some modern re-adoptions of mystical Christianity. This is an interesting subject, because I always feel that the word spirit is one which stands for 'something that we don't know what it is' in a lot of Christian thinking. Chelle has provided me with the first explicit definitions I think I have ever read.  The quotes and discussion concern the mystical/experiential approaches to knowing God.  I don't have much direct experience of that practice of contemplation, and reading her post through was nowhere near enough to connect with it, so I'll touch on it only briefly.

I think the english word is given its most intelligible meaning in the phrase 'the spirit of the game'.  The spirit of soccer is the promotion of flair of the feet, graceful intersecting arcs of ball and head, adroit slide tackles, discipline, tough defence, running down the clock.  The rules as written can't help but permit a 'run into the box and fall over' approach - but it's not in the spirit of the game.  The spirit of AFL is different, more about being a mob and outrunning and outfighting and outcatching and out-kicking and out-teaming your opponents on a huge field over a long period. Bumping between players without the ball is intrinsic to AFL, anathema to soccer.  The spirit, then, is a set of background values on certain feelings, gestures, images, movements, which exist behind the rules and represent the life, the framing good thing attained when the compact to play by rules is entered into. It is a shape for the collective intentionality of the playing community.

Evil spirits speaking through man of Gadarenes said: 'My name is Legion, for we are many.'  This is a chilling verse for me (Gene Wolfe has an excellent short story about this too, btw). The best interpretation of this man's affliction that I've heard is that he is casting himself out of his community, and his cutting and stoning himself is enacting his cast-out-ness, by the many, who live in him. Jesus then casts out his cast-out-ness, rejecting what should be rejected, freeing him to return to a community. Somehow, casting out by many was so rooted in this man that it gave itself a name and presumed to answer questions for him.  It was a large and complex, self-maintaining shape in his intentionality, a sinister one, a person or more.

Conversely, Jesus said 'My words are spirit.' What Jesus says enters one's intentionality, it becomes part of the aboutness possible to one, it builds up a stance one can take. They are the words of eternal life, of great resolving power.  Paul says 'It is sown a mortal body, it is raised a spiritual body.' The spiritual body is permanent, perfect and powerful.

I think spiritual being has no gap between its meaning and its being.  I think it is these intentional patterns and shapes, poorly realised in human grey and white matter, but perfectly realised in the new matter of the resurrection.  (I do also think there is enough process going on in the air and earth that a spiritual being need not be bound to a human mind, although a mind becomes is a natural home.)

To return briefly to contemplation, what little I know about the psychology of meditation is from John Kihlstrom at Berkeley.  His account is that serious meditation disrupts established habits (specifically, automaticity of them), and that makes it easier to learn new ones. To my idea of the spiritual, this could be powerful.  By contemplation of the cross, I break down a habit of self-condemnation and self-indulgence.  By heavy contemplation in a rigorous course of meditation, perhaps I break it down more deeply.

Anyone follow all that?