When Spirituality Meets Science

What happens when spirituality meets science? 

In her brand-new book, The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life, Columbia University professor of clinical psychology Lisa Miller describes why we need to move from an external form of “religion” to a more personally appropriated “spirituality.” 

She offers this working definition of spirituality, which certainly incorporates Christian spiritual life: 

“It includes a deeply felt and perceived connection with a higher power or a sacred world—a sense of engagement and relationship, such as asking God or Source for guidance in times of struggle.”

As one specific example, Dr. Miller found that spirituality often emerges from depression. 

“And for those who were highly spiritual and had gone through major depression in the past, the protective benefit of spirituality against a recurrence of depression was… a striking 90 percent.” 

More broadly, the kind of spirituality she’s researched leads us to experience a profound connection to the world around us and to a fully alive “awakened brain.”

That sounds pretty good to me. And, if you want to read more, this piece is excerpted from a longer piece on the Science for the Church website. Let me know what you think! 

Trends: “Nones,” Kinder, Gentler Atheism, and Openness to Something Greater

I’m speaking in two weeks at Arizona State University on the COFAS Conference on Faith and Science. 

One of my talks is “Future Topics and Trends in Science and Religion With an Eye to American Intellectual History," and here’s some of the material I’m working on, which doesn’t directly address science and faith, but which does address what kind of faith—or perhaps better, spirituality—that increasingly describes Americans.

It would be hard to resist the conclusion that future American religious life will become more splintered and that the Christian church will have a decreasing influence. Almost all major polls of the past five to ten years demonstrate that, as a nation, we are less Christian and affiliated to any religion. For example, the 2014 Pew Research Center report on the Religious Landscape found that 36% of Younger Millennials (1990-1996) and 34% of Older Millennials (1981-89) were unaffiliated (or "nones"), while only 11% of the Silent Generation (1928-1945) could be placed in that category. In between these two fell Generation X (1965-80) at 23% and Baby Boomers (1946-64) at 17%. 

Put simply, in just over sixty years, the percentage of “nones” had more than tripled. The report continues to note that partly this is a generational reality. 

While some Millennials are leaving their childhood religion to become unaffiliated, most Millennials who were raised without a religious affiliation are remaining religious “nones” in adulthood. Two-thirds of Millennials who were raised unaffiliated are still unaffiliated (67%), a higher retention rate than most other major religious groups – and much higher than for older generations of “nones.” (Pew Research Center) 

I have heard it presented that “Oh, they’ll come back to church when they get older, get married, and have kids,” which have been correlations for religious affiliation in the past. Pew doesn’t give religious communities much comfort for the future:

It is possible that more Millennials who were raised unaffiliated will begin to identify with a religion as they get older, get married and have children, but previous Pew Research Center studies suggest that generational cohorts typically do not become more religiously affiliated as they get older. And the new survey finds that most generational cohorts actually are becoming less religiously affiliated as they age. (Pew Research Center) 

And so the future seems largely unaffiliated. But, here I need emphasize that "unaffiliated" doesn’t mean uninterested in God, Ultimate Reality, or spirituality. 

The "nones" check “none of the above” when asked “What religion do you affiliate with?”

Too often, however, the “nones” are thrown in with the atheists and agnostics. This is a category error if we mean that they are all against belief in God or even participation in worship services. They do belong in the same category if the topic is the answer to “Do you affiliate with a particular religion?” 

And this will mean a new future with more pluralized tinkering with spirituality. As Zoe, age twenty, told me in an interview about her views on religion and science: 

“I don’t ever think of myself as a religious person, however I prefer taking pieces of some different religions.” (Zoe, age 20)

And that means some “nones” believe in God and still worship in Christian congregations. And even those who don’t believe in God, find a bigger Something at the core of existence. As Devan, one of the older persons I interviewed, put it, 

“I don’t believe in God, but there is spiritual component to life.” (Devan, age 33)

I’ll leave it observations for now, but I wonder if you have any comments on what this means for our country.

Seven Sources for Soul Growth

Imaginary friend: So, Greg, here we are back at Chico's Upper Bidwell Park, and our peripatetic musings on the soul is about to end, and I

wonder what topic you'd like to address.

GSC: I want to put it all together and respond to the question of how do our souls get formed. What are the sources for soul growth?

Friend: And by the way, who am I?

GSC: You’re the people that have affected and do influence my life spiritually—like my pastors Earl Palmer, Mark Labberton, “the Quad” (which is comprised of me, Gary, Ric, and Dan), and my wife, Laura, and countless unnamed others.

Friend: All those disparate people together?

GSC: Yes, see what you can do!

Friend: OK, maybe I’ll just ask questions! Can you list the sources for soul growth?

Seven Sources for Spiritual Growth

GSC: There are seven that I can think of: Scripture, theological tradition, art, prayer, meditation (or contemplation, mindfulness), corporate worship, and service.

Friend: Ok, speed round! Scripture?

GSC: It’s the definitive and authoritative keystone of the way God has acted and spoken. First of all, we’ve gotta read it and grasp the whole sweep of Scripture, to know God’s story and see how it becomes our story. Here’s a reading plan to grasp the overall story of the Bible that I helped put together. 

We also need to let it saturate our mind, to chew on it as a cow chews the cud. One excellent practice is lectio divina (literally "divine reading" in Latin), which leads us to find a passage of the Bible and see how it speaks to us. 

Friend: Theological tradition?

GSC: We have to get to know the masters like Augustine and his Confessions, John Calvin, Blaise Pascal, and C. S. Lewis. (And, of course, there are many, many more.)I’ll get back to Lewis and his Screwtape Letters later, but the point here is to learn from these are great minds and souls that have gone before.

Friend: Art?

GSC: Art comes in so many forms. I’ll just comment on visual art and music. When I look at this piece, how can I not take in a new aspect of God’s care for us as the Prodigal God that takes in the Prodigal Son? When I listen to great music like Hillsong, I find God’s presence.

Friend: Meditation?

GSC: This has probably been the greatest area of growth in the past few years for me—to find myself quieted and calmed like a child (Psalm 131). I’ve been drawn recently to the practice of mindfulness as a way of calming my soul and preparing me for intercession, for service, and for life generally.

Friend: Prayer as intercession?

GSC: By prayer here, I mean, with Paul (Philippians 4:6-7), intercession with thanksgiving. We lay those burdens on God.

Friend: Corporate worship?

GSC: As much as like Alfred North Whitehead, I disagree with him that religion is what we do with our “solitariness”—we need to meet together and direct our attention, our praise to God. It can be pretty wonderful. But I also have to mention C. S. Lewis’s comments in The Screwtape Letters on the disappointing reality of the local congregation, the church as it actually exists.

It’s so good, I’ll quote at length—and remember this is from the perspective of a devil who’s trying to tempt a human soul,

“One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do riot mean the Church as we see her spread but through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes I our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather in oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print.” C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Friend: Service?

GSC: Jesus tells us that he is somehow present in the “least of these” (Matthew 25:31-46). In serving in his name, we actually meet him. Which is kind of wild. It’s all about our public witness to the Gospel, which is where I’d include our testimony, our words, as well.

The Most Important Source

Friend: We’ve arrived at the end of our walk. 

GSC: Speaking of “ends” or goals, I’ll close with this: Our hope is a beautifully integrated life, fully alive. Integration—that’s what the Spirit brings. And if the soul and the spiritual life mean anything, it’s the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. And that’s where I’ll end, with this hope—the hope grounded in the One who will continue the work that has begun in and among us. That hope is the Spirit of life.

C. S. Lewis and the Humanity of Spirituality

One of the persistent temptations for those who write about Christianity spirituality is to be too triumphant—to act as if, once we profess faith in Christ, life is “all kitties and bubbles,” as one friend put it. Or to quote another, “I once was bad and, sad and now I’m good and glad.” This impulse even led to an early heresy that has amazingly persisted in various forms: Jesus didn’t really walk on this troubled, trodden, earth, but he somehow managed to float above it. (I mean literally, he walked, but his feet never made prints.) Consequently, if we want to follow Jesus, we need to move above this earthly existence whenever possible. That concept, however, strikes me as singular inhuman. 

Of course, there are great, amazing, ecstatic days of faith. But we know this unmitigated sugar-rush spirituality doesn’t last. Thankfully, C. S. Lewis agrees. And that’s what distinguishes his writing from the rest of the pack. In his imagined correspondence between a senior and junior devil on how to tempt a human soul, The Screwtape Letters, Lewis reminds us that life, by nature, has its highs and lows. Merely the fact that we are bodies, that we are physical means that we will experience waves these waves.

Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.

And so a trough becomes not a point for despair, but for reaching to God and for God to develop our wills in the process. The prayers in dryness “are those that please Him best.” Why? Because we are freely choosing God. He closes the eighth Screwtape letter with a stunning allusion to the life of Jesus on the Cross, only too appropriate to mention as Good Friday looms in front of us: the senior tempter, Screwtape, writes to his junior apprentice,

Do not be deceived Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

So Lewis will not have an unreal spirituality, nor will he have it entirely other-worldly. God in Everyday Life. God in the Quotidian. God has given us true, good pleasures on this earth, and when we find those, we thankfully forget ourselves. Screwtape writes to Wormwood,

On your own showing you first of all allowed the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks to his new [worldly] friends. In the second place, you allowed him to walk down to the old mill and have tea there—a walk through country he really likes, and taken alone. In other words you allowed him two real positive Pleasures.”

And those real pleasures come from God who created them, the One that Screwtape complains is “a hedonist at heart.” Pleasures have to be twisted for them to be of use as temptations—that is, put in the wrong context, or for the wrong motives, or wrong ends. But pleasures with the right context, motives, and ends are pathways to God and they connect us to God. The gifts lead us back to the Giver.

And so when we find pleasure in doing what we are created to do, we lose ourselves and the stinking self-centeredness that stifles joy. There a deep paradox emerges:

When He talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.

So this is the theme in Lewis I’ve named the Humanity of Spirituality. Human comes from a root that means “earth.” And we are certainly tied to this creation. Our feet are firmly planted in this earth. Even, it’s true, when God’s finger touches our human life we never entirely leave it. I commend then this rule: Let’s be cautious about anyone who writes otherwise—who believes we can lift our feet off the ground, leaving no prints when we follow Jesus—and calls it Christian spirituality.

Use the Power of No to Restrict Technology’s Reach

I'm about to attend a conference on technology and the spiritual life, where--among others--we'll hear from the philosopher Albert Borgmann. (If you want a quick intro to Borgmann, go here.) I was reminded of a related chapter I wrote in Say Yes to No, which I've "reprinted below." (And you can always feel free to buy the whole book. Just in case you were wondering....)

It seems we are more addicted to entertainment than previous generations. (It goes along with an affluent culture.) Nonetheless, there are similarities about the human condition through various times. We haven’t really gone further than the insights of the 17^th century scientist and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, who lived when modern science—and its promise of technological salvation—began to peer into our world. This brilliant scientist and devout Christian possessed such extraordinary sensitivity into human motivations that his four hundred year old collection of reflections, Pensées, remains a perennial bestseller. In it, Pascal offers this succinct and piercing assessment of our condition, “I have often said that the sole cause of human unhappiness is that we do not how to stay quietly in a room.”

That’s a hauntingly accurate insight and one worth attempting. Try sitting in a room. No TV. No stereo. No Internet. In a weird way, the lack of distractions is distracting. Our minds wander. We become twitchy and uncomfortable. So we seek distractions. Tellingly, in Pascal’s own language French, the word distraction means “separation, subtraction, absence of mind, inattention, heedlessness, diversion, hobby.” And so we seek increasing amounts of hobbies to make us inattentive. One Microsoft executive coined a term for this state, “continuous partial attention.” Or inattention. This drive is demonstrated most notably in the lives of the rich and famous and for—the hoi polloi—our tremendous fascination with them. Pascal believed that this inherent, uncontrolled restlessness drove women and men toward wealth and worldly success:

That, in fact, is the main joy of being a king [insert rock star, CEO], because people are continually trying to divert him and procure him every kind of pleasure. A king is surrounded by people whose only thought is to divert him and stop him thinking about himself, because, king though he is, he becomes unhappy as soon as he thinks about himself.

I suspect that’s one reason people want to win the Lotto: to seek distraction from their problems.

            But at some point, the distractions cease and it’s just you. With palpable wit and humor, Anne Lamott reviewed her life of addictions and obsessions as a means of battling “aloneness.” Ultimately, she arrives at a strikingly similar diagnosis as Pascal with a different flavor. She tested all kinds of things to distract herself from aloneness “in sometimes suicidally vast quantities—alcohol, drugs, work, food, excitement, good deeds, popularity, men, exercise, and just rampant compulsion and obsession.” For awhile it seemed to work; “And I did pretty well, although I nearly died. But then recently that aloneness walked right into my house without knocking, sat down, and stayed a couple of weeks.” In find this last image of aloneness staying with us provocative. There comes a point where we can no longer hide and every technological device cannot keep out the demons. We do all we can to avoid confronting aloneness… which is one reason we need real friendships.

            Nevertheless, all these technological advances are fascinating, aren’t they? And increasingly, they’re just cute. Something so small and endearing can’t be evil. The new iPod shuffle is advertised for its tiny-ness. Hardly bigger than a quarter. Up to 240 songs. Hangs on your back pocket.

Or pick a movie—the 1987 Wall Street for example—and grok that behemoth mobile phone on the ear of Gordon Gecko (Michael Douglas). While “Greed is good” Gecko walks on the beach, he controls the destiny of companies simultaneously and gets a workout. Compare that device with the parody in 2001 Zoolander of the micro-size cell phone, which looks about the size and heft of a matchbook. Technology in its cuteness and ease insidiously wheedles their way into our lives.

They’re also new. Imbedded in our thinking is the evolutionary dogma that newer is better. So we trust in the recent, the fresh. And with technology, I’d be hard-pressed to defeat the contention that my previous laptop zipped through my programs and websites as the one I’m typed on right now.  I placed above the picture of what the RAND Corporation proposed in 1954 as the look and size of a potential “home computer” in 2004. By my lights, it was ten feet tall and twelve feet wide, and when you add the gargantuan dot matrix printer (and a steering wheel that looked like it was taken from Giligan’s Island’s S.S. Minnow), it would fill most of a small bedroom. 

So what’s the immediate conclusion? “Look how fast science and technology move—even quicker than we could expect.” But, God and all things spiritual, seem, well, so old… and therefore inferior. I doubt we’d admit our bias that directly, but we might state that technology obviously progresses and religion just stays the same.  So a technological prejudice lurks around our lives and can stifle spiritual health.

            Now, as I’ve already confessed, I realize the difficulty at putting techie toys aside for me. I love gadgets. I don’t think they’re Satan with transistors and silicon chips. To have a portable device that carries hundreds of songs is still amazing. It almost achieves the category of “miracle.” I’m old enough to remember the advent of the Walkman and how astounding that moment was as we snuck into the library, studied for finals, listening all the while to Toto and Hall and Oates. I like to make calls when I’m in my car. To be connected is to be productive. I live in a technological world. As I type this into my laptop, iTunes plays music downloaded from the web on the hard drive, my cell phone rests in my briefcase, and two email accounts are retrieving messages (with an enormous quantity of spam).

So I find these gadgets really helpful. Despite how much I used the power of no to weed out unnecessary elements in my life, I’m still reasonably busy. And I have a lot of tasks to attend to. If I can save some time through email and cell phones, I may actually find some for activities I really enjoy. And technology can make me more productive, especially with all the options available for communication. I still marvel at email and the wonder of sending the same document with efficient simultaneity to a committee in preparation for a meeting, and of checking in briefly with friends across massive distances without stamps, envelopes, and annoying time delay. When I arrive at work, my first thought is whether I’ve received any exciting emails. (Naturally, I’m not nearly as thrilled about spam.) It’s a direct way to connect with hundreds of people. Office voicemail eliminates the problem of calling someone at 10pm (which frankly is when I often have time to return calls). And I have a particular weakness for cell phones. I mean, my wife, Laura, could reach me on my cell even when was biking home through Central Park.

            And yet, to be honest, there’s a downside: these alternatives often complicate instead of simplify our lives. The ease of communicating becomes a curse. At times I feel obligated to check messages on the email accounts 24/7. ITunes doesn’t load properly, and I spend two hours of frustration making sure I can download my next recording effortlessly. Laura and I spend a week of frustration and experience collateral marital damage trying to load Windows.

Nonetheless, as Lamott and Pascal point out, it’s also about boredom. When I sit by myself, I’m challenged by silence, by inner desires and fears. I don’t like quiet. It’s disturbing. I want to be entertained. It’s probably also about fear. I’m afraid that deep down I’m missing something when I’m not plugging into the iPod or letting the music from my computer fill the air. I tremble at the thought of missing the up-to the minute Dow report or of having someone send an email that doesn’t get a 30-minute-or-less response. Will they think I’m inefficient? Will I miss out?

            So, as a family, we have created a few guidelines to restrict technology’s reach. We ignore the phone at dinner. We limit our kids’ “screen time” (computers, TVs, iPods) during the day so that our lives aren’t one continuous video feed. We find that a couple of hours a day is a good target. And, as yet, there is not Wii or XBox in our house. A friend takes a weekly Sabbath from email, and so we too have blackout hours from Entourage and Outlook. The net result? A fuller, richer, more centered life.