Hooked on Spirituality, Pt 2"I think in some ways I define spirituality as a receptivity to mystery, a sense that there’s more to reality than meets the eye, that there are forces at work in life and even beyond life which a materialist world view doesn’t get at, nor does a humanist world view get at. And I would like to think to some extent of spirituality as almost prior to religion, that is to say, it’s the realisation that there is mystery and that there is spirit in the world before we’ve actually categorised it or before we’ve systematised it.
So what I try to do is work prior to religion. It’s almost my course is pre-theological, and you ask what’s on it: quite a few poems are on it, English Romantic poetry; I teach Aboriginal spirituality through the work of the Kimberley law man, David Mowaljarlai(see left); I teach eco-feminism and its point of view about the relationship between spirit and nature, and there’s also a component in the course on Celtic spirituality which is very popular, and I use the works of John O’Donohue, the contemporary Irish writer there. There are also other elements of the course, for instance I teach Margaret Atwood’s novel, Surfacing, which is very much about a personal spiritual quest of a young woman. That book of course was set a few years ago now. And those are the books which I use. So none of them are actually explicitly religious, but they’re all you might say, working on the spiritual level and trying to generate in the reader a sense of spirit."
David Tacey, Hooked on Spirituality, Sunday 23 February 2003 on The Spirit of Things with Rachael Kohn.
What are your thoughts on faith-spirituality-religion? Where do they differ?
Where do they overlap? How would you illustrate them to explain your understanding?
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