Integrative Explorations Journal
Spirituality And Human Worth An Exploratory Perspective J. Norman King University of Windsor I beg you... to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without ever noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke This quotation, I believe, reaches to the essence of spirituality today: to heed the questions that arise from the depths of our human experience, rather than merely accept answers that have been handed down. One of the developments in the contemporary era is the differentiation of spirituality from religion, coupled with efforts to draw upon a variety of resources to fashion such a spirituality. A contemporary philosopher of spirituality, Sam Keen, suggests that religion is about answers, whereas spirituality is about questions, and found that his own personal journey led him, not to take the answers found in mythologies old and new, but to discern their questions and to use them to interrogate his own life experience. (1991, 76–78) An attendant factor is the search for a grounding of spirituality in some nonreligious basis, even though one may at the same time draw upon insights and images from religious and other sources. One possible foundation may lie in the conviction of the worth, value, or sacredness of the human person, and, indeed, of all life and being, such as set forth in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and related documents. The thrust of this spirituality, especially in its fidelity to the questions arising from the depth of human experience, its focus on meaning, and its impetus towards universality, is an intimation of and pointer in the direction of the integral structure of consciousness masterfully portrayed by Jean Gebser. (1991) In this paper, I shall present a few reflections on the notion of spirituality itself, its possible grounding in human worth and the human quest for meaning (as suggested by the human rights tradition) along with some examples of such spiritualities, and an illustrative image (the garden). Some recent sociological surveys (Bibby, 1993, Roof, 1993, Cimino and Lattin, 1998, Keen, 1994) have stressed that a large number of people today are engaged in a search for meaning that neither organized religion nor the secularized mythology of economic growth seems to address satisfactorily. Certainly, some authors do suggest that the recent decline in participation in formal religion in North America has apparently levelled off (Bibby, 2002, 47
