Is a Sense of Self Essential to Spirituality?

Abstract

Within the Baptist faith tradition to which the author belongs, spirituality is about human beings encountering the presence, activity, and reality of God, and then each person living out the practical consequences of that encounter. However, a sense of God as Other presupposes ability to recognize the reality and significance of ‘the other’ over and against ‘the self.’ This in turn seems to require a process of self-differentiation, self-awareness, and other awareness, and thus suggests that a sense of personal identity is integral to such spirituality. The question asked in this article is significant because generic views of contemporary spirituality and a considerable range of contemporary Christian theology tend to emphasize, self-fulfillment at the individual level, but also emphasize the significance of community and social relationality as integral to self-definition and a self-conscious search for personal identity. If there are assumed connections between a sense of self, capacity for differentiation between self and the other, and some social facility in interpersonal relations, and if these capacities are integral to definitions of the human person and spirituality, the presence or absence of such connections carry such significant implications for the person with autism, that both ‘spirituality’ and ‘humanity’ require broader definition. If the connections between spirituality and interpersonal connectedness are assumed in definitions of spirituality, whether generic or arising out of a specific faith tradition; if they are believed to arise from the nature of human experience; even more, if they are assumed to be essential in the shared beliefs, communal practices, and moral expectations of religious traditions, then such redefinition is required to avoid defining the autistic person out of significant dimensions of human experience. The article will attempt to broaden these definitions with regard to the Christian tradition, seeking theological ideas and communal practices that enable the Christian tradition to accommodate those who may have an impaired or different sense of self.

KEYWORDS:

• autism
• community
• hospitality
• kenosis
• self
• spirituality

Notes

1. The word normal is deliberately used to indicate the prevalence of ‘norms’ in many mainstream definitions of such terms as spirituality, community, and relationality, norms that I wish to challenge within this discussion.

2. Isanon argues (2001, 12;14) that human experience is ipse facto spiritual experience. I have preferred to link spirituality to that aspect of human experience we term religious, though without further narrowing definition. However my approach is informed by my own religious tradition, in which I explore possible resources for understanding ‘autism and religion’.

3. The Greek term psyche refers to the seat of the self, and the life centre of the ego. See Colin Brown, “Soul”, in New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, Vol. 3 (Exeter, 1978), pp. 682–687.

4. See Paul Fiddes, “Creation out of love,” in J. Polkinghorne, The Work of Love. Creation as Kenosis (London: SPCK, 2001), pp. 167–191.

5. See S. Evans, “Kenotic Christology and the Nature of God,” 196–217, in S. Evans, Exploring Kenotic Christology. The Self-Emptying of God (Oxford: OUP, 2006).

6. See C. Ellis, “Kenosis as a Unifying theme for life and cosmology,” in J. Polkinghorne, The Work of Love. Creation as Kenosis (London: SPCK, 2001), pp. 107–126.

7. See E. Newman (2007) for an important theological critiques of indiscriminate inclusivity in religious community.

8. Jim Cotter, quoted in Herrick (1998, 158).

9. Isanon (2001) uses more neutral terminology for the same radical availability, “unqualified existential presence” (121–122). For an honest response to mixed experience of the Church as a healing community, see Howson, 2007. Peter Howson is a former soldier who served in Bosnia, a recovering alcoholic, an accomplished artist, and his daughter is a person with autism.

10. See Swinton (1999) for a brief and sensitive exposition of hospitality as accomodation. (details as in Bibliography).

11. See Pohl (1999), pp. 150–169.