What is Engaged Spirituality?

66 T I K K U N W W W. T I K K U N . O R G S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 8 Culture B O O K S | F I L M | M U S I C O urs is the age of a widely emerging “Engaged Spirituality .” In many religious traditions, including Judaism , Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism,andChristianity, “spiritualities of engagement ” for social change are tapping and transforming ancient spiritual truths and pathways to respond to the titanic challenges facing the planet and its inhabitants . Spiritual practices rooted in the primordial wisdom of these and other traditions are actively challenging deeply-embedded structures of violence and injustice and working to cultivate a sustainable, just, and peaceful world. While each tradition’s engaged spirituality is shaped by its own history, rituals , and symbols, in most cases these emergent paths share certain characteristics . They each: consciously grapple with the profound crises of our time; regard spirituality as a powerful force for active and nonviolent change; maintain the indivisible connection between personal and social transformation; and involve organized and public action. This is the great sacred work of our time. The question is: How does one actually live this life of engaged spirituality here and now? John Dear’s new autobiography, A Persistent Peace, is a record of one person ’s attempt to answer this question. Dear has spent more than a quarter of a century engaged in a relentless journey of peace and justice, a pilgrimage that began with a gnawing restlessness that led him to abandon his technicolor teenage dreams of rock stardom (he wrote rafts of songs and recorded them at a studio near Duke University where he studied history) and to slowly discover and test his growing faith in God. Not unlike other spiritual autobiographies, Dear’s journey to the divine is existentially harrowing and arduous yet ultimately transformative. He comes, in the end, to definitively root his meaning and direction in what he experiences as the unconditional love of God. Almost with the same breath in which he says, “I believe in God,” Dear finds himself saying, “And this God is nonviolent.” In this he was following the logic of his experience. If God is love, then God’s power is the power of love. And if we are to live in the midst of the life and power of God, then we must live [BOOKS] What is Engaged Spirituality? APERSISTENTPEACE:ONEMAN’SSTRUGGLEFORANONVIOLENTWORLD byJohnDear,SJ Chicago,IL:LoyolaPress,2008 Review by Ken Butigan this love—the active regard for every person, the embodied yearning for the well-being of all—with our entire mind, heart, soul, and body. With none of the wavering uncertainty others can experience on the question of nonviolence, Dear stepped decisively and irrevocably onto the path of spiritually-grounded nonviolent change. Once he had made his fundamental option for God, Dear sought to live out what seemed clear to him to be God’s way: nonviolent transformation for a just and peaceful world. In the early 1980s Dear sought to deepen his vocation as a faith-based peacemaker by joining the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), an international order of Catholic priests known for scholarship and intellectual rigor. While this order has included a number of Dear’s activist mentors (among them Fr. Daniel Berrigan, Fr. Richard McSorley, and Fr. Ignacio Ellacuria, president of the University of Central America, who was assassinated in 1989), it has, by Dear’s account, exhibited a perennial ambivalence (and at times outright hostility ) toward Dear’s unwavering ministry of peacemaking. This echoes a central theme of this book: if you take up culture.qxd:MA 2007 8/10/08 12:57 PM Page 66 “questioned all warfare and opened the door to a church of nonviolence.” In the documents of Vatican II and succeeding meetings , the Catholic Church articulated a central commitment to peacemaking rooted in justice that addresses the causes of war. In 1983, the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ pastoral letter, “The Challenge of Peace”, “proposed a theology of peace, explored the scriptural basis of peacemaking, imagined Jesus as a...