Leader, Volume 14 #2

We Are Hungry for Things of the Spirit

Every morning when I arrive in my office I play back my answering machine, sweep up the scrolls of fax paper lying on the floor, collect my e-mail messages and have a quick look at the Internet to see if a new paradigm shift occurred during the night that I ought to know about. Already overwhelmed before I even start work, I pause to look out of the window where a group of elderly Chinese women in the park are silently dancing together in slow motion, practising the ancient spiritual art of tai chi. I am drowning but they seem to know how to swim. I am tempted to join them.

Perhaps fourteenth-century peasants struggling in their squalid hovels to make it through until tomorrow needed the ornate extravagance and sheer immensity of a medieval cathedral to have an experience of God. In my world, where extravagance and immensity remind me of the Eaton Centre, an experience of slow, quiet, spacious attentiveness is as rare and precious as the Rose Window.

For others it's JoJo Savard and her psychics who remind them, at three in the morning when they're sadly and insomaniacally watching TV, that there's another world here too. Pilgrims to Midland Shrine bring their crystals to be blessed by the priests. People flock to retreat houses to analyse their dreams and discover their enneagram numbers. Religion, physics and philosophy have found new currency. Whether it's the frenetic nature of modern life, the proximity of exotic spiritualities in our cosmopolitan midst, our cynicism towards institutions, our consumer fatigue or the looming millennium, people in North America are hungering for things of the spirit. We may, as Lucinda Vardey suggests, be on the verge of "a huge spiritual renaissance."

Some new spiritualities arise within Christianity itself: Kathy Curtin describes how the Charismatic Renewal has served as an entrance way leading Catholics towards a deeper appreciation of their own mystical traditions. Others may be drawing cynical or bored Catholics away from those traditions, but they are also drawing the nonreligious into the world of the spirit for the first time. This issue of Compass seeks the source of the burgeoning interest in new spiritualities. Is traditional religious language no longer meaningful, too familiar, or too demanding?

To be safe, the secular media may ignore spiritual things, new or old, or judge them as baloney. But as people of faith we take things of the spirit seriously. Many of us believe in miracles, life after death, healing through prayer and mystical experiences. How, then, are we to understand psychic powers, channelling, auras, distance healing, the pursuit of higher levels of consciousness? Do we know about all this already, or is it something different? Charles Taylor, while finding some fundamentally new elements in today's spiritual landscape, also sees continuities with earlier spiritualities.

We need the tools to sift through and discern which elements of these new spiritualities will lead ultimately to God and to others, and which are self-validating spiritual experiences, a fresh but terminal kind of consumer satisfaction. Fortunately, as Robert Egan SJ explains, we have an expert at the discernment of spirits on hand: St. Ignatius, who five centures ago developed the tools for precisely this purpose.

Louisa Blair is an associate editor of Compass.