GG: Thanks, Greg. I find myself talking a lot about this idea of Big C Church when I speak in churches, about the larger Body of Christ, and I do think this is one way the Episcopal Church can model that larger connection, as challenging as it might be.
I have one last question—we've been talking about Church, but I wonder if we might look at something a bit more personal. You and I both run into people who describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious." I fear a lot of church-goers in America might be described as "religious but not spiritual." I've long admired your practice of Benedictine spirituality, and I wonder if you might talk a little bit about your own spiritual practice and how personal spirituality might lead us to be "religious AND spiritual." Thanks so much for the chance to ask these questions, and for all you do.
GR: My favorite description of Benedictine spirituality is to look at the ordinary as extraordinary. Benedictine spirituality is living a special spiritual awareness in the course of everyday life, so that the act of washing dishes, say, becomes a holy and prayerful event, the act of playing with your child becomes a holy and prayerful event, and so on. The basic trinitarian "skin" of a Benedictine spirituality to me has always been stability, obedience, and conversion of life. I define these, with much help from others who have followed this path, as follows:
Stability is balance, and a rootedness which is not afraid to be vulnerable, is not afraid to ask for help, is not afraid to be held accountable, and has the courage to acknowledge when we run away, and to look deeply at why.
Obedience may be the most unpopular of these qualities today. Often when I discuss these three, this is the one that makes people squirm. Obedience has taken on a bad connotation. It is often more correlated with submission, or in some minds even oppression. This is not the point at all of obedience in the monastic sense. Joan Chittister, in her The Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages says that "lived out" obedience is "the ability to hear the voice of God in one another, in the members of the community, both old and young, in the person we married and all whose aphorisms we know by now, in underlings and in children, in old parents and boring in-laws." This is an obedience that calls us to empty ourselves so we can truly listen to the voice of God, sometimes in very unlikely, ordinary places.
And finally, conversion of life. Conversion is a word we tend to not be comfortable with either. Conversion comes from the Latin "conversio," to turn, or more clearly, "to go another way." Through stability and obedience we can find the space and the ears to listen to the voice of God. By doing that, we can begin to transform ourselves and the world around us.
I am actually worried about the whole "I am spiritual but not religious" movement. I get where it all comes from, but what it really is saying is that no church or other organized religion (I always loved this since it has never seemed very organized to me!) feeds them or supports their practices or spirituality. I do think these go together. In some ways, it is impossible to have one without the other. We have defined these terms in a way that make them very distinct, and no longer reflect totally what they truly mean. It would take too long to mine the depths of that too much, but let me say that "spirituality" comes from the root word "ruah," or "breath." We are spiritual beings, interacting with our environment, sensing our environment. Religion (or religiosity) is how we act that out. I would argue everyone has some rule of life—brushing our teeth every night, walking a certain way to the bus, going for a cup of coffee first thing in the morning. It is to what or whom we offer those acts, attribute to them any sharing in the greater realm of life, that determines our spiritual awareness and willingness to then practice out of that awareness. I just don't think "I am spiritual but not religious" is quite as simple as the statement has become. Benedictine spirituality, I think, operates out of the belief we are all both.
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