Abstract
This essay explores the relationship of spirituality to religious practice, asserting that spirituality is directly related to ritual, but that the rituals that relay a sense of the sacred are not necessarily ecclesially-based nor are they detached from “ordinary,” material life.
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Notes
I am grateful to the Tennessee Association for Pastoral Therapists and the New Directions in Pastoral Theology study conference group for these opportunities.
Rudolf Otto described spiritual experience as an “ur-emotion” that brings together love, fear, dependence, fascination, unworthiness, and awe.
I am not naïve about the capacities of communities to impart more harm than good. Here I seek only to reclaim communal practice as important contexts for spiritual experience, especially if it is understood in a particular way.
The phrase “participation in the Life of God” is one I borrow from pastoral theologian James Lapsley (1972). He uses it to mean the active work and presence of God in the world in which human beings participate.
The following examples are drawn from these pages.
I realize that a theological or religious subtext is often not an explicit element of our work with some clients. Nevertheless, it is my assumption that the divine is understood to be present in some way, and that this awareness is largely what distinguishes pastoral counseling from other forms of interpersonal clinical support.
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McClure, B.J. Divining the Sacred in the Modern World: Ritual and the Relational Embodiment of Spirit. Pastoral Psychol 62, 727–742 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-013-0515-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-013-0515-y