A Spiritual Autobiography
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It may seem a contradiction in terms to suggest that getting away from religion is the only way to arrive at authentic spirituality, yet that, in a nutshell, is the most concise description of my spiritual autobiography. How that journey came about takes in a lifetime of exposure to traditional religious practices, in a family context of serious but not fanatic devotion to faith and religious observance. I had a parochial-school education and attended mass regularly until about three years ago; old habits and early Catholic training die hard among those who set the curve in their Bible-history classes. But a deep and decisive crisis of faith has intervened in recent years that is specifically and programmatically attributable to the rigid institutional character of organized religion--more exactly to certain of its figures of authority and reach. That crisis has not been resolved within the community of faith but instead seems to be an ongoing process of discovery and a quest for the kind of enlightenment (or anyway insight) that is commonly associated with spiritual experience.It should be noted that matters of spiritual import--the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich (1987, p. 17) uses the phrase "ultimate concern" to describe the structure and content of faith--have never been far away from my interests. But the traditional, formal, structured observance of standard institutional religion has for some time for me been a thing of my past and something that, as I write this
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e concept of the supreme being, which is the definition in Catholic tradition. Tillich sees God not as "personal" in the anthropomorphic sense but as being itself, or what he calls the Ground of Being (Tillich, 1952). That term is connected to Tillich's notion of "ultimate concern," and his idea is that what is ultimate is what makes God "divine."
What is ultimate for human beings is what gives meaning to life. The Catholic position--indeed, the Christian position more generally--is that the meaning of life is to be found in anticipation of eternal life, or salvation. Tillich (1992) refers the outmoded Christian view that salvation is attainable only through faith in Jesus Christ, by way of the Church, with all the ethical and spiritual activity and dogma that such a faith implies. Indeed, the problem with placing the Church at the center of one's spirituality is that it implies that one's own soul belongs to an institution and not to one's own being. If I had not been insulted in church by a priest who obviously did not like women, I might never have achieved that insight; however, as it is I am not at all sorry to have achieved it.
I realize that I have an impulse toward a connection with the divine that carries with it some r
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Approximate Word count = 1757
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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