WHAT IS SPIRITUALITY? [Anglican Style]
- The Rev. Dr. Clair McPherson
First, it is the most personal and intimate, and therefore the most subtle and elusive, aspect of the life of faith. [Spirituality] involves how we live in the Spirit: the shape and texture of a Christian lifestyle. Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold has called it "intentional discipleship"; the great French theologian Louis Bouyer has defined it as "the concrete application of the Gospel to everyday life."
Second, in contrast to THEOLOGY - loosely, "what we believe and how we believe it" - SPIRITUALITY involves "practice and action". In contrast to LITURGY - "how and why we worship together" - SPIRITUALITY is "individual (and therefore infinitely varied in its forms)". In contrast to ETHICS - "our understanding of what we must do" to live according to God's purposes - [SPIRITUALITY] involves not what we must or ought to do, but "possibilities we might explore in order to open ourselves to the dynamic of the Holy Spirit." In short, SPIRITUALITY is "the circulatory system" of the Body of Christ: it touches everything, it suffuses the system, and without it, we perish.
Now by Anglican spirituality we mean that intimate texture of the spiritual life as it has been experienced within the larger Anglican tradition. Rooted in the medieval English church, given focus and expression by the unique experience of the Reformation in England, blossoming through the five centuries of the modern era. Anglican spirituality, like the Anglican Communion, is now a global reality, represented on every inhabited continent and by every "family, language, people, and nation" (Revelation 4; Canticle 18, "The Book of Common Prayer 1979").
The Rev. Dr. Clair McPherson is an Adjunct Professor at General Theological Seminary.
