Spirituality and traditions

Abstract

There is general agreement today that spirituality and religion refer to specific realities. While spirituality would most often refer to a personal experience and perspective on one’s life journey, religion would be associatedwith sets of beliefs or convictions shared in a group organised within a more or less formal institutional structure. While scholars and thinkers fromwithin or from outside of religions argue that religions can bear traditions ofmany different spiritual teachings, ways of life or worldviews (Jacques 1999), it is also true that a personal spiritual journey can refer to no religion at all (Mercadante 2014). In all cases, Western contemporary societies highly value authenticity (Taylor 2007). However, the demands experienced by the younger generations of constantly referring to oneself in order to find one’s personal spiritual path seem to be burdensome to a number of them. I had a revealing discussion on that topic a few years ago with my master’s students in theology. All of them were young adults who had also studied for a year in philosophy. I had realised I was challenging them by insisting on their need to analyse and question the texts they were studying, so they could decide whether they needed to integrate their contents – or not – in their worldviews or their spiritual care practices. They needed to take a stance and neither adopt blindly the texts’ proposals nor stay on the surface and never ‘enter’ the debate opened by the texts. I felt a strong resistance, characterized by something that was more profound than a particular stance on academic learning, although I was not able to name what was at stake. When I asked them what was going on, their response sounded like a cry of the heart and went something like this: ‘From our youngest years, we have been told to decide for ourselves among an immense variety of choices. Constantly. During our studies, the complexity of the impact of our choices is laid upon us and we are again prompted to navigate, feeling as if we have no rudder.’ They seemed insecure in their maturing identity and at a lost amidst the contradictions of so many diverse societal opinions. One of them mentioned that many young people he had accompanied were looking for clear guidelines for their lives. Another said: ‘We are truly tired of trying to think from ourselves and make choices “out of nothing”! Tell us what to do!’ In there words, I thought I was hearing a frightening acquiescence: ‘If you tell us what is true, we will obey. . .’ My worldview and posture (as a Christian theologian with a socioconstructionist epistemology in a postmodern paradigm) is that I have no INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CHILDREN S SPIRITUALITY 2019, VOL. 24, NO. 1, 1–4 https://doi.org/10.1080/1364436X.2019.1619538