Spirituality: “I’m
spiritual but not religious.” I encounter that phrase in a lot of pop cultural
settings. To be honest what I take from
that phrase is: I like the concept of God, but I don’t want to be bothered with
doing anything about it. It’s helpful to
actually have working definitions of these words.
Religion is best understood to be the actions that you habitually
do as a person. We are all religious as
human beings. Perhaps you religiously
shop at HEB or always buy your gas at the same gas station. When it comes to faith you religiously attend
Sunday service, you kneel, make the sign of the cross, receive communion. Out of devotion during the week you talk to
God, you read scripture, you volunteer at the food pantry, the choir, or the
altar guild. These are a part of a
variety of religious actions, and they reflect how we offer God our devotion,
and we benefit from these actions in the spiritual sense.
The spiritual is the benefit of these actions. When you pick up your groceries at HEB you
are satisfied with the completion of shopping and having a full pantry
again. When you set the altar in
preparation for the following day’s worship you are satisfied/blessed with
knowledge that you have done service for God.
The Christian who says, “I’m spiritual but not religious” does
not quite understand the meanings of the words.
One cannot receive the benefit of spiritual blessing without some action
that has brought about the benefit whether it is our action or God’s action in
us. Even meditation in some of its forms
is a religious practice in which you sit and “do nothing” yet receive a
spiritual blessing because you’ve taken time to be with God. This is where spiritual growth takes place,
encountering God in these intentional religious moments or actions.
The Anglican tradition understands the spiritual life is one
in which we experience God’s presence in our lives and in the world. Urban Holmes summarizes Anglican Spirituality
as sharing four common attributes.
First, Anglican Spirituality is earthy. God reveals himself in the material world,
through gardens, sky colors, flickering candles, flowing water. Simple elements of our daily life exhibit the
Divine Hand at work. Secondly, in
liturgical prayer God shows his presence through the human senses of Sight
(colors of glass, icons, architecture), Sound (recitation of prayer and song),
Smell (incense), Taste (bread and wine), Touch (kneeling, bowing, sign of the
cross). Anglican spirituality is
intended to engage the Body and the Mind.
The third attribute of Anglican Spirituality is reliance on biblical
imagery. Holmes describes the Bible as
our poetry. It is more than a guidebook
of rules on living our lives wholesomely.
It is a collection of texts that transcends cultures, time, and
geography in which God reveals himself.
The final attribute of Anglican Spirituality is that it is
collaborative. We may pray or meditate
individually and receive blessing. But
Anglicanism calls us to corporate (bodily) religious actions in order to
fulfill the church’s role on earth. We
come together with our different experiences of God and work for the
fulfillment of the Kingdom that Jesus established while he walked the Earth.
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