Icarus ignored: understanding mundane spirituality through young people’s prayer

ABSTRACT

A major international contribution to the applied philosophy of spirituality, this article builds on Wong’s description of ‘mundane spirituality’, exploring this through empirical research on young people’s approaches to prayer in Israel and the UK. The Icarus narrative is used as a metaphor for the apparent choice between the material, everyday, mundane and the heavenly, sacred and divine spiritual. Prayer is typically regarded as a spiritual activity if it makes the latter choice, and as inappropriate and unspiritual if too focused on the mundane. However, a more relational approach to spirituality sees the mundane not only as a possible route to the spiritual but as in itself spiritual. Mundane spirituality is evidenced from two projects on young people’s prayer, one based in Jewish religious schools in Israel, the other based in a range of schools (with and without religious foundations) in the UK. Young people describe the importance of the everyday, and in particular of personal relationships (with the living and the dead, and the sacred and divine), in enabling spirituality through engagement with prayer or ‘prayer spaces’ in schools. The conclusions are of significance for academic research and for professional practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Prayer
• mundane
• Martin Buber
• David Hay
• spirituality

Acknowledgments

Julian Stern is grateful for the support of the Prayer Spaces in Schools organisation, who funded the evaluation project (published as Stern and Shillitoe 2018) which generated the UK-based data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. There is a long history of noble petitionary prayer: what is described here is the more selfish or apparently trivial requests for material or sporting success, what Mason, following Weber, describes as prayer ‘intended to persuade a spiritual power to grant worldly favours’ (Mason 2015, 26).

2. These two overlapping meanings are also captured in dictionary definitions of mundane, of ‘pertaining to this world, as contrasted with heaven’ and ‘of or pertaining to everyday life’ (SOED 2007).

3. The approaches can be contrasted with the valuable research of Langford (2015) which analyses the prayers of young people in terms of ‘prayer types’.

4. http://edu.gov.il/sites/Hemed/Pages/homepage.aspx.

5. This research is methodologically distinct from that of Francis et al. (2018), which explores the relationship between prayer and spiritual well-being, but the approach to the meaning of spirituality is similar.

6. To be more religiously inclusive, but stylistically clumsy, we would say ‘God or gods’ and ‘Him or Her or them’ in this sentence, and at a number of points in this article. We have chosen the simpler terminology here, but intend the great inclusivity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julian Stern

Julian Stern is Professor of Education and Religion at York St John University, and General Secretary of ISREV, the International Seminar on Religious Education and Values.  He can be contacted by email on [email protected].

Eli Kohn

Eli Kohn is a Lecturer in the School of Education at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel.  His academic work focuses on spiritual education.  He can be contacted by email on [email protected].