Spirituality Education.

Spirituality is a never-ending topic. It gets thoroughly confused with religiosity, which is not only quite different, but may well be its opposite.
I focus here on Cathy Ota's and Clive Erricker's Spiritual Education, a compilation of conference papers from 2002. The papers give me a few pegs to hang critique on, whether I like the paper or not. Some papers are wide of the mark. Christiana Welch purports to report on North American Indian (="First Nation") Spirituality but is in fact talking superficially about how the First Nations are represented in 'cowboys and indians' narratives.

David Tacey's Encountering Tradition in a Postmodern Context. Tacey admits to being religious in a generalised radical way but part of a revisionist project [176]. He balances faith with the secular, and espouses a need for prophetic revival, that is a new critique and renovation of tradition. My problem comes with 'Tradition'. Christianity fossilises a two millenia old spirituality, which was already at second hand when the New Testament was written. I have the highest regard for Jesus the 'prophet' (that is, social critic) but despair over the quagmire he has been buried in. Liberating Jesus is part of our task of liberating the dispossessed. The radical Jesus has been colonised and exploited from 30CE until today. And may I burn at the stake for showing dissent, following his example.
Judaism fossilises a spirituality which was five hundred years older. An exile to Babylon had led to a spike of nationalism from which the Hebrew Scriptures were created. All religions attempt to fossilise an historic form of spirituality, giving peacock status to this prophet or that. Our world is rather different. It cannot be critiqued by an Ezra or Nehemiah concerned with racial purity, or a Paul, who never met Jesus, obsessed with a risen spirit. This does not diminish their contribution, but it removes their authority. Authority and spirituality do not mix, for authority removes freedom of thought and belief. Tradition enshrines the authority of this person or that. Siddartha Gautama, the Buddha made it clear that worship and blind obedience were counter to his holistic humanistic (if maybe metaphysical) philosophy, and adherents should not blindly obey.
He offers a case study of 'Elizabeth', a revisionist Catholic. She rejects secular spirituality as a cop-out without resolving her need to be spiritual and religious at the same time. She suffers from the need for external authority to ease the stresses of deciding for oneself. Tacey concludes by emphasising the micro, the personal spiritual experiences of wholeness, integrity and worth. He argues that this is a back-door into religion and will help us to rediscover tradition.
The are several problems, in addition to the fragmentation that he discusses. We may find these religious traditions wanting, with discriminations and assumptions that violate human worth and dignity. Assumptions of original sin rather than original innocence, for example. The great figures of religious traditions (Jesus, Muhammad, Nanak) were reformists with spiritual insights who declared the religions around them as unworthy. They may well continue to do so if they could investigate the religions that draw on their names. 'Rediscovery and renewal' should enable the world to escape labels, and isms, sects, cults and denominations and allow the concept of unity to mean something. It will be unity in diversity - and our individual takes on what the concept of God might mean, will be part of this diversity. But it does not have to make unity impossible.

Mike Pike asks, in 'Reading and Responding to Biblical Texts' why the Bible cannot be read as literature, for personal enlightenment and as personally relevant. The short answer is that most biblical texts were written not as literature but as preaching, so that the use of these texts for personal development is problematic. The texts demand a point of view; personal development demands openness. Interpreting biblical texts requires particular skills, such as Paul Ricoeur develops in his studies of hermeneutics (not mentioned by Pike), such as Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and Imagination (1995). The use of real literary analysis on biblical texts was pioneered by Robert Alter (The Art of Biblical Narrative, and with Frank Kermode he edited The Literary Guide to the Bible, neither cited by Pike) but this did not aim at personal fulfilment and development, but was literary criticism. Of course we want children to develop their own life stances, whether they are reading the Bible, Michael Morpurgo or Philip Pullman. The problem with the Bible is its claim (and claims on its behalf) to truth and authority which demands that the point of view stated has to be accepted as the true point of view. This is not on. It is indoctrination and not education. Education is possible when such stories are actively subjected to the form of literary criticism appropriate to the age of the child. I am developing a range of discussions on this topic on http://4004bce.blogspot.com and will be happy for comments on points of detail.

Mark Halstead, writing on metaphors for spirituality, is spectacularly wide of the mark, writing that children need help in understanding that metaphors are not literal. Children are experts in pretend play and pretend story, which is all a metaphor is - to explain A I pretend it is B. Children are also deeply spiritual, responding to life, brimming with excitement, and becoming engrossed in creative activities. The trouble is that adults mess them up by asking wrong questions and, to be frank, lying to them. Remember Santa Claus? Schools despiritualise children - extending the thought that Ivan Illich so brilliantly began in 1970. They do it by having a point of view, a set of 'truths' to be imposed, and disallowing free thought in children. Children can pretend all day, and therefore make creative links and wise observations. It is adults who cannot hear what they have to say.