Recently I read an article in Zygon, Journal of Religion & Science, on “Near-Death Experiences and Spirituality” by Bruce Greyson. I will expand on what he had to say about the relationship between religion and spirituality, but first I would like to share some of my own experiences related to our understanding of these two phenomena and the tension that can exist between them.
As I have mentioned in an earlier issue of Weaving the Connections, I became part of a group in the early ‘90s that was preparing for the 1995 United Nation’s Women’s Conference to be held in Beijing. We devoted a good portion of our time trying to reach consensus on whether to call ourselves the Women and Spirituality Working Group or the Women and Religion Working Group. The cause of the dilemma lay in how one defined both religion and spirituality. There seemed to be as many views as there were members of the group—in fact, one woman felt so strongly about the issue that she flew in from Nigeria for the sole purpose of expressing her understanding of those terms! Yet, despite the heavy input, we were never able to reach an agreement and tended to use both terms interchangeably.
During the Beijing Conference, we presented a panel on “Women, the Earth and the World’s Religions.” The positive response to the panelists was most reassuring: though this was a conference in which ecology and religion were not even on the agenda, we presented to a standing-room-only crowd. One of my most vivid recollections of the conference was not related to a substantial issue, but rather to a side remark. Just before we were about to begin, our Maori panelist informed me that had she known beforehand that the title of our event included the word religion (and not spirituality), she would not have agreed to participate. (In one way, I wish she had not done so as she forced the World Council of Churches to stop the videotaping of this historical event.)
This same issue of religion versus spirituality followed me into 2004 when I considered convening a UN group to consider environmental issues from a spiritual/religious perspective. As both of the words had proven to be loaded terms at the United Nations (they never were included in official government documents), I decided to use “values” in the title of the group—hence, Earth Values Caucus. I theorized that it would be very difficult to make a convincing argument that human beings—theist, atheist or agnostic—do not live according to a value system.
Returning to Bruce Greyson’s Zygon article, what interested me and sparked this recollection was the fact that his research into near-death experiences (NDEs) led him to conclude that, because of their similarities, NDEs could be regarded as mystical experiences. He further found that those having these experiences were not necessarily affiliated with religious institutions. Of particular significance was the question he raised about whether they became more or less religious or spiritual—and how this was manifested. The trend, he found, was not toward a more distinctly religious orientation as manifested in such activities as church going or other forms of formal religious worship. Rather, it was toward spirituality as manifested in a decrease in the fear of death, materialistic attitudes and competition, and an increase in concern for others, an appreciation of life and a sense of purpose. Further, these changes in value systems appeared to remain over an extended period.
I have wondered if others (non-experiencers) might benefit from the NDEs. They very well might, Several professors who have presented the NDE to their student non-experiencers, have found that the students’ values changed in very personal ways. They became unafraid of death and found that life is meaningful. Might not the NDE, then, be a potential means of spiritual transformation, not only for the experiencers themselves, but also for all of us—especially at this particular time of Earth’s precarious situation?
The Roots of an Ecological Spirituality
Mary Evelyn Tucker
An ecological spirituality is emerging as we penetrate the earth scientifically and technically and as we examine other cultures spiritually and historically. The search for origins, for the nature of the primeval fireball, for the residual energies of the “big bang,” comes at a time in human history when we are exploring ever more vigorously the origins of our spiritual traditions for sources of wisdom in the contemporary world. As we press further into the past for guides to the future, we are translating each other’s great religious texts and experimenting with one another’s ancient spiritual disciplines. Since the end of the Second World War when we encountered Asian traditions and began to establish departments of Asian studies in North American universities, we have entered into a new phase of the dialogue of civilizations. This encounter has resulted in one of the most comprehensive processes of inter-religious dialogue the world has ever seen. The potential of this encounter has still to be fully realized, perhaps in a common concern for the ecological crisis of the planet. At the moment there are still competing claims of the religious traditions to reassert their uniqueness in the values of justice in Judaism, of salvation in Christianity, of submission in Islam, of insight in Buddhism, of liberation in Hinduism, and of integration in Confucianism.
These values were not the primary concerns of early religious beliefs among indigenous peoples. In modern times many of the world religions have confined themselves to personal salvation and interpersonal ethics which have become the norm for defining the religious life. Indigenous peoples, broadly speaking, do not isolate the human from the divine but rather relate the human to the numinous creative world of nature. This is a perspective that we need to reevaluate in our discussion of religion and its role in the future. If religious concerns are limited to human salvation and interpersonal ethics, where will we find the models for interacting with the natural world in a mutually sustainable and non-destructive manner? Our obsession with the divine-human relationship causes us to lose sight of the very sphere in which the divine has traditionally been encountered, namely, in and through the natural world itself.
Would we understand death and rebirth symbolism as well without its constant reflection to us in the natural world? Would our sacramental symbols, such as water for baptism, have the same rich implications if we were not first to witness its natural cleansing and purifying powers? With our divorce of the natural from the supernatural begins the burden of secularization, the loss of transcendence. We now lament the death of God, the impact of atheism, and most especially, the absence of the sacred in the modern world.
One may wonder if this yearning for transcendence and mourning of the impact of secularization does not represent on another level the subconscious search for an ecological cosmology that would reintegrate the supernatural and the natural. How to do this, at what cost, and for what ends are questions that may be justly raised. Yet the issue of an ecological spirituality presents itself in many forms today with a resurgent interest in mythology, in ritual, in symbol systems, in native religions, in esoteric traditions, and in feminist spirituality. These may very well be elements of a more widespread groping toward a convergence of the natural and the supernatural spheres. How this can be done is an issue that deserves to be at the forefront of our thinking, theological and otherwise.
We cannot simply turn to native traditions in a romantic back-to-nature quest that tries to incorporate ancient mythologies or symbol systems into a contemporary setting. Yet we must not merely dismiss as so much superstition or pantheism the religious beliefs of much of the human community that searches for an intimate spiritual experience of the natural world. Indeed, we may be well advised to take seriously their experience of the numinous in nature and thus realize a spirituality that embraces the very life process which sustains us.
Thoughts from Thomas Berry: Two Excerpts
From: The Great Work (1999)
My own understanding of the Great Work began when I was quite young. At the time I was some eleven years old. My family was moving from a more settled part of a small southern town out to the edge of town where the new house was being built. Down below was a small creek and there across the creek was a meadow. It was an early afternoon in late May when I first wandered down the incline, crossed the creek, and looked out over the scene.
The field was covered with white lilies rising above the thick grass. A magic moment, this experience gave to my life something that seems to explain my thinking at a more profound level than almost any other experience I can remember. It was not only the lilies. It was the singing of the crickets and the woodlands in the distance and the clouds in a clear sky. It was not something conscious that happened just then. I went on about my life as any young person might do.
Perhaps it was not simply this moment that made such a deep impression upon me. Perhaps it was a sensitivity that was developed throughout my childhood. Yet as the years pass this moment returns to me, and whenever I think about my basic life attitude and the whole trend of my mind and the causes to which I have given my efforts, I seem to come back to this moment and the impact it has had on my feeling for what is real and worthwhile in life.
This experience, it seems, has become normative for me throughout the entire range of my thinking. Whatever preserves and enhances this meadow in the natural cycles of its transformation is good; whatever opposes this meadow or negates it is not good. My life orientation is that simple. It is also that pervasive. It applies in economics and political orientation as well as in education and religion. That is good in economics which fosters the natural process of this meadow. That is not good in economics which diminishes the capacity of this meadow to renew itself each spring and to provide a setting in which crickets can sing and birds can feed. Such meadows, I later learned, are themselves in a continuing process of transformation. Yet these evolving biosystems deserve the opportunity to be themselves and to express their own inner qualities. As in economics, so in jurisprudence and law and political affairs—what is good recognizes the rights of this meadow and the creek and the woodlands beyond to exist and flourish in their ever-renewing seasonal expression even while larger processes shape the bioregion in its sequence of transformations.
From: “On Biocide and Geocide” (1996)
What is happening now is of a geological and biological order of magnitude. We are upsetting the entire earth system that over some billions of years and through an endless sequence of groping, of trials and errors, has produced such a magnificent array of living forms, forms capable of seasonal self-renewal over vast periods of time.
We find ourselves ethically destitute just when, for the first time, we are faced with ultimacy, the irreversible closing down of the earth’s functioning in its major life systems. Our ethical traditions know how to deal with suicide, homicide and even genocide, but these traditions collapse entirely when confronted with biocide, the killing of the life systems of the earth, and genocide, the devastation of the earth itself.
Perhaps a new revelatory experience is taking place, an experience wherein human consciousness awakens to the grandeur and sacred quality of the earth process. Humanity has not participated in such a vision since shamanic times, but in such a renewal lies our hope for the future for ourselves and for the entire planet.
Thomas Berry, a Passionist priest, is an historian of religion. The first excerpt is from his latest book The Great Work; the second is from a paper “The Universe and the University” delivered at Harvard University, April 9, 1996.
