Journal of Sacred Work

Note: The following meditation was written by Dr. Thomas Knowles-Bagwell. Dr. Bagwell is Executive Director of the Pastoral Counseling Centers of Tennessee. – Erie Chapman

   Twenty years ago, in July of 1987,
I was invited to join the staff of a private psychiatric hospital. One of my initial responsibilities was to
develop and implement a “spirituality component” for the adolescent chemical
dependency treatment program. I still
remember the panic I experienced when this particular responsibility was
explained to me. I asked, “What do you
mean by ‘spirituality?’” The response to
me was not comforting. “Well, you’re
the expert on that. You tell us what it
means.”…

   That reply was not exactly
accurate. Yes, I was a Divinity School
graduate and an ordained minister with five years of previous congregational
ministry experience. But at the time I
went through Divinity School “spirituality” was
a term nowhere to be found in the curriculum. On the other hand, these mental health professionals were thoroughly
familiar with the 12 Steps and the various programs that had grown out of that
tradition. So, I was not the expert, nor
were they without a clue about what “spirituality” meant.
   My experience working to develop
and implement that “spirituality” component with adolescents early in their
recovery process changed my life. I had never been asked to explain what
“spirituality” was to anyone, much less teenagers withdrawing from drugs and
alcohol. Teenagers are naturally curious
about many things. And these teenagers
were skilled with a particularly colorful way of expressing themselves. So, they were always coming up with different
ways of asking me what “spirituality” was all about and why it was included in
their treatment program.
   The reading that I was doing to try
to educate myself in this area kept correlating spirituality and prayer. That is, one’s spirituality was somehow
related to one’s prayer life. In fact,
there were some writers who seemed to make them synonymous. As I reflected on this I began to think that
prayer was a necessary, but insufficient element in a complete description of
“spirituality.” After all, what about
worship? Wasn’t a person’s worship life
just as important to their spirituality as their prayer life? Then I began asking more broadly about what
prayer and worship are. After all, they
are not identical phenomena. Finally, I
had to be able to talk about all of this in language that a 16 year old drug
addict could understand.
   I began to think about what prayer
was all about in broad and general terms. In this way I came to the understanding that prayer was the attempt to
get closer to and even encounter God. Then I thought about worship in the same broad and general way as how we
respond to having actually encountered God. And finally, I attempted to “operationalize” the concept of God using
some thoughts from Paul Tillich who talked about God as the object of our
ultimate concern. I decided to use the
phrase “what matters most in life” to describe this idea. After all this thinking I came up with the
definition that I would offer those teenagers: Spirituality is the way we
pursue and respond to what matters most to us in life.
   It has been twenty years since I
arrived at that statement defining spirituality. Those adolescents seemed able to work with
it. When I asked them to talk with me
about what mattered to them in life, they could reflect and respond. Of course the basics showed up on their
lists, food, clothing, and “what others think of me.” When pushed to identify what mattered MOST,
they responded with things like freedom, safety, power, respect, or love. And the conversations always became lively
when I asked them to tell me how they went about trying to get things like
freedom, power, respect and love; or what they did if they discovered that they
were free or powerful or respected or loved.
   Out of that work I came to
understand that every time I looked at the world around me I saw people busily
engaged in pursuing and responding to what mattered most to them in their
lives. In other words, I saw that
everyone was always engaged in some type of spirituality. Not all of those are particularly helpful to
them or others. For example, the
spirituality of a typical “workaholic” usually leads to breakdowns of physical
health as well as relationships. But we
are spiritual beings, and even when we are being dysfunctional, we are doing so
as a function of our spirituality.
   When I look at others whom I admire
as examples of positive spirituality, people like Jesus, St. Francis, Mother
Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, and a host of others, I now ask what
mattered most to them. I look at their
lives and ask where would lives like theirs ultimately lead. I ask: what did they encounter that led them
to respond as they did? But finally, I
have to ask where my lifestyle is leading me and how I will respond if I
actually encounter what I’m after.