What is the Role of Spirituality in Life?
Spirituality, the Interface Between God and a Person
Mar 29, 2009
Life is fragmented and so are the lives of many people. It is often difficult to see how all of the pieces fit together. Christians believe that God, as the Creator, has a unique plan for each person; a plan that will ultimately "make sense."
The Complexities of Life Result in Stress and Fragmented Lives
A common way of describing someone is to identify the many hats he or she wears: parent, breadwinner, coach, volunteer, chef, nurse or teacher.
Such descriptions also reveal how fragmented countless individuals feel with their fast-paced, multi-tasked, overly-full and crammed lives. Many people long to have their separate identities, their fragmented selves, knit together into complete and useful wholes.
Like hats, a person may be dressed in multiple forms of spirituality. There are many ways that Western spiritualities are often identified:
- Religious spiritualities – Protestant, Catholic, or Buddhist;
- Cultural spiritualities – African, Hispanic, or Celtic;
- Gendered spiritualities – Male, female, heterosexual or gay;
- And many others like naturalist, social justice, pacifist, or vegan.
Regardless of the number of sources that contribute to it, each person’s spirituality is a blend of the experiences, beliefs, and ideas that make him or her a unique individual. How can all of these multi - faceted pieces be put together to create a cohesive being?
A New Philosophy of Spirituality
Physical, emotional, mental, social and spiritual — these are often described as the primary spheres of life, but perhaps there’s another way of looking at all of these hats, forms of spirituality and areas of life.
Rather than five sectors, what if one’s spirituality was the foundation for all physical, mental, emotional and social activity? In the same way a home’s foundation keeps everything straight and provides stability for building, one’s spirituality provides the kind of perspective or understanding that can be the glue of life, holding all things together and providing an atmosphere of balance. Under this foundation are the footings, sunk deeply into the bedrock of God.
Defining spirituality in this way explains why the closer someone gets to God, the more likely he or she will see life from God’s perspective. Having a relationship with the God who created life provides a new and different vantage point for understanding how things work together. With this view, it is easier to believe — and in so believing, one may choose to act accordingly — God is in control, and that nothing happens without God’s approval.
Such a perspective influences or even dictates how a person will react to danger, conflict, temptation, or blessings. When a person’s focus is on God’s agenda rather than his or her own, especially when combined with an attitude of humility and a belief that God is love, the impetus to react to any situation in a purely selfish way is curtailed.
Even the most incongruent parts of a person’s life, when fused and bonded to God, with the passage of time can become stable and complete. This connection or relationship with the Almighty provides a way of prioritizing desires and needs, of defining goals and achievements, and leads to a process of assimilating a better understanding of God, self and others.
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