A Flourishing Spirituality

This past weekend was the President’s Inaugural Prayer and Blessing Service and included prayers and blessings from a collection of local religious and spiritual leaders. Each one shared from their own tradition a few words of blessing on President Alison Morrison-Shetlar. Seeing a diverse group of religious and spiritual leaders reminded me of the importance of understanding the word ‘spiritual,’ which I briefly shared in my homily. 

I have come to realize that spirituality is a wildly inclusive and utterly expansive term. It is not simply a belief about a particular religious idea or tradition. It is not solely feelings, doctrine, or one particular religious path one must follow. 

Instead, as Dr. Emmanuel Lartey, Professor at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, puts it, spirituality is the flourishing of relationships in five main areas or dimensions. These areas include the flourishing of relationships with the transcendent, with self, with another individual, with a community, and with a place or thing.

What I love about Lartey’s explanation of spirituality is that there is an interconnectedness with these dimensions. Our flourishing relationship with the transcendent, for instance, impacts our relationship with others. Our relationship with creation or place impacts our relationship with our community. 

At their core, I think you can see such interconnectedness in almost all religious and secular traditions. In the Buddhist tradition, for instance, how you live out the Dharma, the teachings, affects your Sangha, your community. For Humanists maintaining their personal responsibility to live an ethical life affects the common good. Christianity teaches the way to love the Divine is to love your neighbor as yourself. 

Perhaps I am biased, but I am convinced that part of our role on campus is to help students discover the Divine, flourish in their personal relationships, find community on this campus, connect with a place, and journey with others as they become their truest and fullest selves. It definitely is part of our role as a Spiritual Life Center. We are not convicting or converting students to one particular religion. Instead, we long to help them flourish in all dimensions of life and expand their own spirituality. 

And if we took a moment to think about it, I think we could share stories of how we have seen this on our campus. Whether it is those students who have expanded, deepened, or even changed their religious path, many are discovering the Divine in new ways. Many students are on a journey of understanding their truest selves while others are discovering the sacredness of community through a team or club. And, as students hang out on the Dell, refuse to step on the emblem in Friendship Circle, or see the tips of the Blue Ridge Mountains on their way to their residence hall, they are connecting to their place in this Hive. 

It is truly my hope that we might all reimagine our relationship with the transcendent, with self, with others, with a community, and with a place, so that we might flourish and live a life to the fullest. Because, when we experience such flourishing relationships, we will proudly say, it is a great day to be a Hornet.