Spirituality and traditions

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 associated with sets of beliefs or convictions shared in a group organised within a more or less formal institutional structure. While scholars and thinkers from within or from outside of religions argue that religions can bear traditions of many 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 socio-constructionist epistemology in a postmodern paradigm) is that I have no right to impose my beliefs on them. And that it would be unethical and disrespectful to tell them what to do with their life. They are adults, although young and I highly value the andragogic process that can support them in developing a mature identity. I also realise that my refusal may be perceived as imposed on them. But I hear their cry.

While I cannot or will not tell them what to believe, or even how to believe, my contribution to the reflection is to suggest that, in order to make sense of ones’ life, a narrative is useful, if not necessary. Our narratives are what connects us to our past and to our future. They are what help us learn from our choices and give us frameworks to interpret what it means to live. I understand narratives not to be our spiritual life, but our recognition and interpretation of that life. When my students told me their story, they helped me – and possibly themselves as well – recognize what they were experiencing and make some sense out of it. What they explained connected them to their past, present and future, and to how they experienced their relationship to self, others, and world: they had been and still were insecure and fearful. A narrative will not provide a single definitive answer to their fears, but it may help them to explore concrete views and possibilities of actions rather than the ‘nothingness’ of confusion, particularly if the story they embrace is both their own, and one they share with their family, their community, their society, etc.

I perceive traditions to be the raw material with which our spiritual stories can be constructed and told. Traditions, understood from a very broad perspective, come from our families, our milieus, our cultures, as well as from institutions. Of course, institutions, amongst which religions can be counted, can contribute to sustaining and developing our collective or personal lives as well as refraining from them. However, traditions can be compared to language elements, which make possible the expression of our narrative – the recognition and the development of our spirituality. Traditions offer resources available to us and from which we need to discern who we are becoming and what we wish to become. As with any language, we need to learn the vocabulary and the grammar of a tradition, but the writing of our lives in relation to that tradition belongs to us, and is unique.

Traditions are also about transformation, evolution and interpretation. Traditions of interpretation of daily life are in constant evolution, transforming our view of ourselves as well as our perception of the traditions themselves. As an example, I think of this fantastic video of a lively and profound reinterpretation of Caravaggio, the very famous Italian painter of the seventeenth century (Youtube, April 1, 2019). A painting, even the liveliest one, is static piece of art. In Caravaggio living paintings, the actors not only integrate movements into the stories told by the painter, but they reinterpret the paintings, restaging the characters, retelling the stories from a new perspective. An experienced observer, familiar with the original paintings as well as with the Christian tradition, which they depict, will notice that the actors never copy the master: they transform the scene in a way that questions the viewer, who in turn, participates in the retelling of a story.

Children’s and adults’ spirituality needs gestures and languages, practices and rituals, customs and stories that help organise our fragile grasp on our world or, rather offer us a glimpse of the promise our world and lives can be. Spirituality needs traditions in order to help us actively relate to ourselves and to what is beyond ourselves – to discover the sacred and the mystery within, everywhere, at every moment. Traditions remind us, at present, of the roots and grounds of all the stories yet to be unfolded and to be told.

The articles in this special issue explore this useful and transformational relationship between traditions and young people’s lives and spirituality. They echo the 2018 International Conference on Children’s Spirituality, which was held at Université Laval in Quebec, under this theme. The participants to the conference gathered from very diverse countries of origin (Canada, Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, Malta, Myanmar, the Netherlands, the Philippines, UK, USA and Venezuela) and shared multiple experiences and views on cultures, traditions and spirituality. The care for children was at the core of our discussions. Participants remarked, at the closure of the conference, the quality of relationships that were sown and developed, as well as the high capacity to welcome the differences among us. That certainly speaks of a shared, although nuanced perspective on what is spirituality and why it is so important that we foster it in our own lives, in children and with the children and the young.

Some of the participants have contributed for a long time to the field, others are newcomers trying fresh ideas or actualizing in their own context ideas that we all need not to forget. This issue of the Journal will offer you a glimpse of ways in which the topic was addressed, looking for example at the construction of identities, the role of rituals and symbols and the importance of play and languages in the spirituality experienced by both the children and the young.

Together, we can tell our individual and collective stories. We can describe the traditions from which they emerge. There are many questions raised, and no overall universal conclusions found. There was, and there still is a journey shared; and spirituality, children’s spirituality to grow into.