Book Review

An aerial tour of postmodern life

The New SCM Dictionary of Christian Spirituality

The word “spirituality” might evoke different responses. Probably few would say it is a bad thing but some might have thoughts they would not make public. For some it is the essence of religion. For others it is marginal, flaky or involves an unjustifiable expense. But it is not a word anyone can ignore today. Sometimes a few words can define an era and then it helps to know what new layers of meaning have contributed to their becoming so significant. Philip Sheldrake and his team of contributors to this new landmark volume in the study of Christian spirituality clearly sense that the word “spirituality” is one of those words for our time.

One of the striking differences between our age and the past is the depth of distrust and breadth of rejection of what we now refer to as “organised religion”. Opposing the “secularisation” of Europe is said to be Pope Benedict’s priority. But even if fewer people want to wear a religious label, more than ever today claim to be “spiritual” and to be on a “spiritual journey” or trying to construct a “daily spirituality”. This New SCM Dictionary of Christian Spirituality does not waste time judging this development but takes it as the starting point for a creative and fascinating exploration of the meanings of this new key word of our time.

Thirteen excellent short introductory essays put spirituality in context within other fields of knowledge or behaviour, such as culture, interreligious dialogue, psycho-therapy, science and the social sciences. Behind this is the attempt to have spirituality taken seriously as an academic discipline. It seems it was first designated as such in France about 50 years ago. As spirituality invaded new fields, it aroused suspicion among academics, often wary of interdisciplinary fields. But as Sheldrake (Professor of Applied Theology at Durham University) points out in his essay on the interpretation of texts, the particular difficulty for academia is that spirituality is ultimately concerned with wisdom. How on earth do you set an exam on wisdom and then grade it? It is no small achievement, then, that researchers of spirituality like Sheldrake and the theologian Sandra Schneiders, whose first essay explores definitions, methods and types of spirituality, have succeeded in establishing their field as an academic discipline.

The New SCM Dictionary establishes brilliantly that spirituality no longer means just asceticism and personal prayer, a thin extension of monastic praxis into theology. Until its new manifestation spirituality was deductive in method and prescriptive in character, as Schneiders says. Then, in the Seventies and Eighties, publishing projects like the Paulist Press’s The Classics of Western Spirituality put great texts into the hands of lay people both feeding and stimulating their spiritual hunger. Many who had despaired of finding the contemplative tradition in Christianity and had gone East were now able to return home with a mature spirituality based not only on reading but on the contemplative practices now being taught from their own tradition.

Spirituality had been democratised. Since then there has been exponential growth, a ramifying of the tree of spiritual knowledge. People have not rejected religion as much as embraced this new field in which they have discovered hidden treasure. But “organised religion” flounders in distress to the degree that it distances itself from this remarkable, global awakening and spiritual maturing which has such potential for our time.

The potential of spirituality is to establish a unified field of meaning linking fragmented and proliferating areas of universal and pressing concern such as prayer, dialogue, politics, healing arts, social action, science and ecology, which so often distance themselves from each other. Ken Wilber, an American writer on spirituality, is attempting this grand unity at a theoretical level. This well-organised and well-produced volume shows both how practical and enriching to religion this contemporary venture could be – and how little religious institutions (or universities) that are open to change actually have to fear from it. Browsing the entries and cross-references in the New Dictionary is like taking an aerial tour of post-modernity. It is a tour worth the price of 680 pages because it also shows how the post-modern has evolved and incorporates what has gone before.

The introductory essays cite the three main approaches to contemporary spirituality, historical, theological and anthropological, but this underestimates the range of views that follow. There are good solid surveys of the major historical schools of spirituality, like Desert, Benedictine, Mendicant, Carmelite, Dominican, Jesuit. These are freshened up by being interspersed with Russian, Scandinavian, Taizé, Daoist, Pentecostalist and Hispanic traditions. An informative and insightful entry on Islam and Christianity rubs up against Jansenism.

The reader can then surf the classic themes of Hope and Virtue, and the mystical dimension of the Summa under Thomism. Following Marxism, the entry on Mary surveys both the history of Marian devotion and her significance for the contemporary attempt to reintegrate the human body in Christian spirituality. All these throw light on the spirituality of Music, Zen, Leadership, Homosexuality and Mujerista (the spiritual traditions of Latin and Hispanic women).

The diversity of the book has a method which a quick flick through might not iden-tify. There is a strong inclination towards the contemplative dimension which suggests the traditional roots underlying the master approach. The emphasis on social justice could be stronger, but the imbalance of the Christian neglect of the body is redressed with entries like the one on Desire.

The whole work, however, cannot be judged merely by the titles of the entries. The entry on Disability, for example, is a brilliant, elegant and moving essay on all its aspects, from the psychological to the social, while nuancing the different ways in which disabled persons can accept and grow closer in union with God through their suffering. This comprehensiveness is reflected in the entry on Singleness which begins with the ancient ideal of monasticism and then moves to the theme of modern lifestyle. A chapter on Clothing might seem superficial but it unexpectedly illuminates the interaction of contemporary spirituality with consumer-ism. The research cited in entries such as Ageing (largely a sociological view) and Science is up to date. Depression (“see Desolation”) perhaps shows the Jesuit influence in the methodology.

If a good book is one that breaks the spell of the preconceptions you were held by until you opened it, this is a very good and useful book. I learned, for example, how sensitive the understandings of spirituality are in the Reform traditions, and that it was the Baptist F.B. Meyer who in 1920 told the Keswick Convention that “My remedy for all our ills is a deeper spirituality.” He must have known what the word meant.

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