Retrieval

"I am spiritual but not religious." How often one hears this phrase, or something like it, when the subject of religious experience or affiliation comes up in conversation. Usually it means something like: "I am not affiliated with any particular tradition, but I am serious about my spiritual life." Or: "I am deeply skeptical about the hypocrisy and shallowness that seem to me to be hallmarks of traditional religious practice; I am after something deeper, more authentic, something that speaks to me personally, helps me make sense of my life." Such expressions of personal spiritual longing can appear naïve and problematic, yet another indication of the extent to which the values of a rootless, individualistic culture have seeped into the arena of spirituality. Yet there is undeniable pathos in such expressions of spiritual longing, and more than a little truth. It is difficult for a religious tradition to remain faithful to its deepest spiritual values. For the person seeking an authentic spirituality, something that goes deeper than mere formalism, the life and practices of mainstream religious traditions can and often do provoke feelings of disappointment and alienation.

It is tempting to imagine that this is a uniquely contemporary phenomenon, something particular to our historical moment. But a careful consideration of history suggests that the process Max Weber called the "routinization of charisma" is both old and pervasive. The tendency for a dynamic, charismatic religious movement gradually to give way to a more stable (and by implication less charismatic) structure and set of practices seems to be a necessary dimension in the development and maturation of any religious tradition. It is part of how a tradition gathers itself, formalizes structures of ritual and authority, how it ensures that the tradition can be passed on to the next generation. But there is a danger in such routinization—that the original spark of Spirit may be lost altogether.

The history of Christian spirituality has been punctuated again and again by renewal movements that have emerged precisely to recover or retrieve a sense of the Spirit's generative power. Sometimes the larger faith community has embraced these movements; often it has resisted them (sometimes because they were deemed to be heterodox or otherwise out of step with the tradition; sometimes, because they were perceived as a threat to the well established structures of authority). In either case, what a careful consideration of history reveals is how often we return to this basic question: how to retrieve that original Spirit, how, as persons and as communities, to live in it.

To raise the question of "retrieval" is already to place oneself in relationship to a tradition. It may be a critical or ambiguous relationship, but the desire to retrieve that which is archaic and true and alive, that which in another time and place gave life and meaning to the community of faith, suggests that one must remain somehow in conversation with the tradition. It suggests a recognition of what the early Christian community understood implicitly—that paradosis, or tradition, is not something static or unchanging, but precisely the dynamic process by which the life of the Holy Spirit is transmitted one to another.

It may be then that this moment of history does present certain challenges to the Christian tradition that are unique or are at least characteristic of our time. By this I mean the tendency, seemingly widespread among contemporary seekers, to want to live without reference to any tradition. Or, as sociologist Meredith McGuire's work has demonstrated so clearly, to live such a radically eclectic spirituality, to draw so freely on various religious traditions as to make the question of belonging to or participation in any single tradition meaningless. It may be that this eclectic practice of spirituality will turn out to be part of how religious traditions evolve and grow in the postmodern world. Yet, the largely personal, individual character of such spiritual practice makes it difficult to know whether it can be meaningfully translated...