the word: Body

From Jessie Thompson, Associate for Youth and Children’s Ministries at St. David of Wales, Portland and adjunct religion professor at Warner Pacific College.

When I teach my Spiritual Formation classes, I often start with my broad beliefs to get folks in the room who have avoided a required class on spirituality until they meet me (much like I did to required math classes), to find accessible language to enter the conversation. I assert, “I believe everyone has a spirituality, conscious or unconscious. Spirituality is not concerned in the first place with religious beliefs or obligations, but with the experience of the sacred precisely as experience.” Then I share the four things I believe to be true about Spirituality:

1. Spirituality is cultivating a conscious and active relationship to our deepest selves, to the Other, to Creation, and to the Holy.
2. Spirituality is incarnational—embodied in a particular way of life unique to who we are
3. Spirituality is both personal and communal, an individual experience and one shaped by the communities of which we are a part and in response to the needs of those communities.
4. Spirituality is about the journey, process, movement toward greater freedom, wholeness, love, and transformation
   
   

I walk students through these four areas and usually everyone can agree with them. After asking them to name who might be the Other in their lives (usually that person you’d rather not cultivate a relationship with), discussing how what we do is our spirituality, thinking through the feedback loop of communities as participants in and with our personal spirituality, and sighing in relief that the spiritual life is a journey towards rather than a destination, students generally relax their tense shoulders and say, “Yeah. I can agree with that.”

Later in the course (after I’ve earned their trust as a safe person to have these new conversations with), I ask, “Looking back at my broad definition of spirituality, describe the spirituality of your body right now. What is your body’s role/relationship to spirituality? What keeps us from believing our bodies have a role/relationship to our spirituality?”

Blank stares usually follow.

Around the Diocese

Congregation Close-up: Calvary, Seaside

Although the old “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You” sign captures an essential part of our vision, in a small parish such as Calvary that takes on more significance. As a church in a “destination resort,” one of our primary values is of hospitality. We are not a magnet with a specialist agenda or liturgical style. We try to be an inviting and comfortable community for people from various different congregational settings. Many Episcopalians who live elsewhere have made Calvary a second church home, and we try to let any Seaside visitors know they are welcome.

Safe Church Trainings: June 17, St. David of Wales, Portland.

Contemplative Summer: responding to change and difficulty with prayer and activity. St. Philip the Deacon, Portland. June 17.