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Extracts from a talk for the Milton Keynes Interfaith group in February 2008
Reproduced by kind permission of Living Spirituality Network/

Religion is moving rapidly up the global political agenda because of its link, at least in the popular and media mind, with conflict and violence. For the sake of world peace and security, and for the future survival of the planet, more and more people are recognising that closer, warmer relationship and collaboration between the faiths is an urgent need in our time, and a number of commentators are beginning to suggest that a focus on spirituality, rather than on religion, might prove a new and creative approach to interfaith dialogue. A focus on spirituality, they suggest, could circumvent some of the tensions, anxieties, and stultifying courtesy that can lead to deadlock and disappointment in conventional interfaith dialogue.
The Hindu monk and Delhi-based social activist, Swami Agnivesh, presented a paper on this theme at a major conference in South Africa in 2006. His paper was called 'A Spiritual Vision for the Dialogue of Religions¹. What he said was provocative, iconoclastic even, but it resonated deeply with much of my own work at the interface between traditional Christian faith and practice and the newly emerging spirituality.
For Swami Agnivesh, as for increasing numbers of people generally, there's a clear difference between spirituality and religion as it's now understood. However strongly one might want to argue for the 'true' meaning of religion as rich, deep and profoundly spiritual, in common usage religion now means institutional religion: that thing, according to a well-known religious publisher in the States, with doors and windows, clergy and tax exempt status, moral expectations and social implications.
Religions, in Swami Agnivesh's argument, are based on territory (real or symbolic), conformity, and self-interest, or at least the interests of one community over against other communities. Religions quell the prophetic and critical spirit to preserve their clerical elites. Religions are threatened by individual mystical experience and have lost their ability to communicate a sense of the numinous. The religiosity we have developed, he argues is the religiosity of rejection and exclusion.
I did say he was provocative!
Spirituality, however, is something, in his mind and experience, quite, quite different: Spirituality, he writes is like an ever-expanding ripple. From the individual it spreads and embraces the world around. Spirituality integrates the salvation of the individual with the transformation of society. That is why values such as love, truth, 'justice and compassion are basic to spirituality. ... Spirituality puts the spotlight on our shared destiny as a species and not on the metaphysical profit or loss that an individual might incur.
And he continues: Spirituality seeks to bring about change. But that change is not the process of fitting everything into a fixed framework. It's a change from is to what might well be ... Spirituality is a sphere of ever-expanding responsibility. That is why it's also a medium of [humanity's] on-going evolution.
Swami Agnivesh acknowledges that spirituality once lay at the core of all the major faiths - the lived experience of the divine; the profound sense of encounter with God, or with the deepest reality. - was the fire that inspired and forged the faiths. But he believes that this fire has been largely lost as the faiths have become increasingly institutionalised religions. Yet it is this fire that so many spiritual seekers today, of all faiths and none, are longing to recover, or to discover for the first time.
Swamiji draws together in a succinct and powerful way what many other writers, commentators, activists and practitioners are also saying, and what many of the people I'm in touch with through LSN and other networks are experiencing.
He highlights, as they do in different ways and different faith traditions, the healing potential of spirituality. Rippling out from the individual's commitment to a personal spiritual path, spirituality has the potential to bring transformation at every level: from the transformation of the individual to the transformation of local, national and international relations. It's this transformation, and perhaps this transformation alone, which will bring justice to global economic systems and restore health to the planet.
A recurring theme in contemporary writers and commentators in this field is that we are facing a moment of global crisis, but some writers add to this doom-laden scenario the belief that humanity is also, potentially, on the threshold of an evolutionary leap, a leap in spiritual development.
Judy Cannato, in her book 2Radical Amazement: Contemplative Lessons from Black Holes, Supernovas, and Other Wonders of the Universe² writes:
There now exists an. urgency fo engage our consciousness that we have never experienced before. Our existence as a species depends on how we respond to the many issues that threaten the survival of the Earth. Materialism, political egocentrism, religious fanaticism, and human ignorance have spawned a political and environmental crisis of epic proportion. The crisis involves every relationship on the planet: person to person, person fo creature, person fo organic and inorganic life. Nothing is exempt from the dangers which confront us.
But she continues: As urgent as the current crisis is, we must nevertheless respond deliberately, with care rather than anger, with wisdom rather than fear. The consciousness with which we respond is as significant as the response itself, for in our responding we are becoming - we are taking the next evolutionary step towards homo universalis. Universal humans, described by Barbara Marx Hubbard as those who 'are connected through the heart to the whole of life, attuned to the deeper intelligence of nature, and called forth irresistibly by the spirit to creatively express fheir gifts in fhe evolution of self and the world'.
Thomas Berry, who has been called the leading spokesperson for the Earth, in an unpublished paper³, makes explicit the link from spirituality, to interfaith dialogue, to the survival of the planet. He observes that human beings desire to communicate intimately and on the level of deep inferiority - from the feeling human heart - where they experience fhe numinous. The future adequacy of individual religions, he continues, as well as fhe emergence of global harmony, will depend on achieving this. ... achieving intimate communication at the level of deep interiority.
And another American writer, Beverly Lanzetta, who founded the Interfaith Theological Seminary, expands on Berry's observation in her book Emerging Heart: Global Spirituality and the Sacred⁴:
Members of diverse religious traditions, she writes, as well as people who claim no-religious affiliation or belief, are aware of and committed to inter-religious dialogue as an essential dimension of world peace. They recognise in fhe external works of greater understanding and co-operation among religions an interior work of spiritual unity taking place in the depth of their souls. Today's religious seekers find in the call to discover the spiritual foundations of our common humanity a need to find in oneself the inner peace that helps heal the fractures and violence within our world.
In practicing this interior integration, spiritually attuned people realise that it is truly not possible to conceive of fhe individual spiritual life in isolation from the fortunes and fates of creation as a whole. This reciprocal relationship between the dialogue of world religions, the inner life of the person, the fate of the earth, and the transcendent aspects of the human spirit is leading people today to a new revelatory vision based on the awareness of fhe common spirituality that binds us info one earth community.
But this may be beginning to sound somewhat overblown and over-optimistic - what about the practicalities: the down-to-earth realities of what we're suggesting? And the questions are valid, of course, for there is cost and challenge in committing to living this vision. Courage, self-knowledge and generosity of spirit are demanded, as Frederica Halligan, in her book Listening Deeply to God: Exploring Spirituality in an Inter-religious Age⁵ makes clear:
To find a universal spirituality we must, first of all, be willing to surrender our. preconceptions and beliefs that 'our way' is the 'right way'. There is truth to be found in each of the traditions ... We musf be willing fo lef go of our sense of superiority and our emphasis on differences in order to find the value of cross-cultural similarities... we have to surrender our rational theologies in order to move beyond conceptual thought into the realm of mystical experience. The mystics have all told us that we cannot think our way into unity.
But even as Halligan looks to the discovery of a universal spirituality she is also very clear that: we must treasure fhe differences. She quotes Mike Bastia, the Native American spiritual leader, who said: If we look into the natural world we see that the Creator loved to have diversity, which brings us to a point that many commentators are at pains to emphasise. We're not talking about losing diversity but about discovering a new unity and a new relationship with difference. In The Experience of God: Icons of fhe Mystery⁶, Raimon Panikkar says something similar to Mike Bastia: Pluralism he writes is inherent fo fhe human condition and prevents us from speaking of God by starting from a single perspective or a unique principle of intelligibility.
And Professor Keith Ward, the respected Christian academic in Oxford, in his God, Faith and fhe New Millennium⁷ says; In fhe third millennium many possibilities exist for bringing the various religious info a positive and mutually enriching relationship. For that to happen, the traditions must not be destroyed, but must remain as witnesses to the diversity of human understanding of God, a diversity which will remain within any wider convergence of traditions.
So if, as Swami Agnivesh acknowledges, the great religions began with spirituality- living, vibrant, spiritual passion - how can that spiritual core be recovered in order to nourish, sustain and direct the contemporary longing for spirituality, .and the transformations that could result from it?
All the major faiths have traditional resources which are vital to this contemporary quest: prayer, meditation, contemplation, silence, retreat, study, self-examination, spiritual direction and discernment, rules of life, ritual, sacrament, insights from the mystical and apophatic traditions, insights into spiritual development, insights into the nature of community, insights into the crucial relationship between action and contemplation.
These are all extraordinary treasures, but most important of all in our context is, I suggest, the teaching in each tradition on the practice of meditation and contemplation.
Martin Laird, in Into the Silent Land⁸ writes Contemplation is the way out of the great self-centred psychodrama. When inferior silence is discovered, compassion flows. If we deepen our inner silence, our compassion for others is deepened.
Echoing that, Judy Cannato writes Fidelity to a silence that penetrates the heart and soul enables us to connect to the whole of life with hearts filled with peace, wisdom and compassion for all that is.
Swami Agnivesh says Spirituality liberates us from our religious ghettoes. It dismantles barriers and enables inter-religious partnerships. This is basic to the liberation that spirituality affords. And basic to such spirituality are silence, stillness and contemplation.
References:
1. Swami Agnivesh: A Spiritual Vision for the Dialogue of Religions in Secular Spirituality as a Contextual Critique of Religion, ed Cornel W du Toit and Cedric P Mayson. Papers presented at the Forum for Religious Dialogue Symposium of the Research Institute for Theology and Religion held at the University of South Africa, Pretoria 11-12 May 2006.
2. Judy Cannato: Radical Amazement: Contemplative Lessons from Black Holes, Supernovas, and Other Wonders of the Universe, pub Sorin Books.
3. Thomas Berry, unpublished paper Religious Studies and the Global Human Community quoted by Kusumita Pedersen in her paper On What Ground Do We Meet in the journal Interrligious Insight January 2003
4. Beverly Lanzetta: Emerging Heart: Global Spirituality and the Sacred, pub Fortress Press
5. Frederica R Halligan: Listening Deeply to God: Exploring Spirituality in an Inter-religious Age, pub Twenty-Third Publications
6. Raimon Panikkar: The Experience of God: Icons of the Mystery, pub Fortress Press
7. Keith Ward: God, Faith and the New Millennium: Christian Belief in an Age of Science, pub Oneworld
8. Martin Laird: Into the Silent Land: The Practice of Contemplation, Darton, Longman & Todd