A profound article about spirituality, community development and imagination
From Druidchat September 2007
Spirituality is found in those actions that bring about liberation from selfishness, ego and pride and that build justice, harmony and sustainability.
Community development cannot happen without the exercise of the imagination. How can we connect reflection and action into a method that has spiritually rooted into community development? Can we open up new creative ways to integrate imagination into the cycle of experience - analysis - reflection - action?
At its most basic level empathy begins as we imagine the life of someone else.. Community development has to start with the move beyond ourselves and into someone else's shoes. This is essential if collective experience and language is to be established. Building this idea into an appropriate methodology is especially important in a diverse, multi-cultural and individualistic society. How do we develop the skills for this task with the greatest sensitivity and in the most empowering way?
Imagination is needed as we fit together an analysis of a particular area and map out the needs and strengths with which we must work. Making connections between incidents, people and attitudes demands that we go beyond the immediate, and start forming pictures to help us to see what is going on. Can we find effective ways to discern what are the dynamics of a community and gain direct means to test these out?
Reflection demands imagination as we assess the everyday life of our communities against the values, faith and principles that we hold. Prayer is an act of the imagination. As we bring our material reality into the spiritual realm we can only make sense of what we are doing if we use our imagination. Faith is also an act of the imagination. Faith is real if rooted in practical realities, but it will not survive unless it sees beyond those realities and holds a vision of what could be.
To know what action to take to bring about change we first need to see things differently. We must have a solid grip on the nature of our time and place, but we must also learn to enhance our perception of how to renew, regenerate and reaffirm the life around us. Perception links reality to vision. Vision has to be at the heart of all good community development. As well as cultivating our own powers to create visions of our communities and how they may develop, we need to have the skills to encourage the power to envision within other people, and create the methods by which visions can be shared and built up collectively. How do we make real our faith in our communities and how do we bring them closer to what our world needs or our Creator desires?
Community Development And Spirituality- A Motive
Spirituality is about the imagination but has to be about practical material realities if it is to mean anything. Smells, bells, chants and candles have been used for centuries to evoke the spiritual in a material world. They have received a revival in a truly materialistic way as the secular consumerist spirituality of 'Gregorian Girl Bands', gift shops and candle manufacturers attempt to grab the action.
Spirituality is not a higher plain, it is the world in which we all interact. A deeper spirituality is making connection with the other. This has to be more than just contact, for that can be creative or destructive, and is rarely neutral. The spiritual connection will be judged by its material outcome. Selfishness, abuse, exploitation and cultural imposition will soon be revealed through the nature of the contact. Spirituality is about motive, intent, respect for the other and these can produce beautiful and succulent fruit, but fruit can be grown that is deadly or tasteless. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility and self control are fruits of the spirit. Jealousy, self pride, arrogance, greed would be the start of a list to identify seeds that would produce poisonous or ugly fruit.
Otherness can be understood in many ways. Here it is explored in three ways that relate to community development. The first of these are the socially and economically marginalised. The realization that our spiritual health is determined by our inclusion of the poor and excluded is a central tenet of many faiths. This teaching has to be applied individually, communally and in society as a whole.
The second element for spiritual growth concerns the acceptance and celebration of those who are ethnically and culturally different from ourselves. There may be a challenge to our perceptions, values or even faith through a genuine meeting with people who we have to connect with through a leap of the imagination. It is this that can stir our emotions and even disrupt our balance. This is what can lead to fear of the other and on to anger and hatred. The challenge can also develop into an interest, an admiration and a creative interchange and relationship. All the nuances of the two sides to this same experience of meeting the other need to be part of our awareness as we work towards community and spiritual understanding. The importance of the stranger is recognised in almost all faith traditions as an expression of spirituality.
Ecological commitment is the third area that provides a sustenance and expression for the spiritual. Our relationship with the rest of creation has to move beyond that of exploiter and even of steward to accepting an integrated role for humanity.
You will be right to think that this form of spirituality is very earthbound, material and practical. Spirituality is found everyday in the commonplace. It is usually in those actions that bring about liberation from selfishness, ego and pride and that build justice, harmony and sustainability.