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Cope with your limits. For more information, contact: Gary Schouborg, PhD (925) 932-1982 |
Schouborg, Gary
(2001). Paths to
Spirituality: A Review Article of Beyond Religion, by David N.
Elkins". The Humanistic Psychologist,
27 n.3, 369-373. David
N. Elkins Beyond
Religion: A Personal Program for Building a Spiritual Life Outside the Walls
of Traditional Religion Wheaton,
IL: Quest Books, 1998, xi + 304 pp., $16.95,
ISBN 0-8356-0764-X (pbk: alk.
paper) Elkins
is a licensed clinical psychologist and professor of psychology in the
Graduate School of Education and Psychology at Pepperdine University. A
former minister, he is also a published poet and president of the Humanistic
Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association. He
writes Beyond Religion for a general audience, particularly for those
who find that organized religion does not address their spiritual thirst. His
intent is not anti-religious, only "opposed to narrow forms of religion
that build walls around the sacred and lay exclusive claim to
spirituality". Accordingly,
the first half of the book proposes a foundation for "a new,
nonreligious spirituality", one that enables the reader "to build a
spiritual life outside the walls of traditional religion". Chapter 1
chronicles what Elkins sees as the movement away from religion (Elkins
equates the term with traditional religious institutions) to spirituality
beginning in the 60s, a movement that seeks for more than can be provided by
institutions whose structures and rules overly constrain the soul. Chapter 2
explains Elkins' nonreligious approach to spirituality, one that believes
that the needs of the soul can never be captured fully by structures and
rules. Chapter 3 identifies the soul as the "doorway to the imaginal world". Chapter 4 describes the sacred as
"the mysterious dimension of human experience". By the end of the
first half of the book we are left with an evocative understanding of a
conceptual trinity: spirituality, soul, sacred. Because
Elkins views spirituality as indefinable, he approaches it from multiple
angles. He characterizes it variously as a hunger for attention and care, for
psychological health, for imagination, for passion and depth, for the sacred
or numinous, for waking up one's soul to the wonder of life, for "the
more". The advantage of this approach is that he increases his chances
of connecting with someone for whom one phrase or another is particularly
meaningful. A further advantage is that the multiple phrases express the
kaleidoscopic richness of spirituality. I would be interested, however, in
what he thinks might be lost by summing all of what he ascribes to
spirituality in the single phrase, emotional responsiveness. The second
half of the book describes eight alternative paths to traditional religion —
The Feminine, The Arts, The Body, Psychology, Mythology, Nature,
Relationship, Dark Nights of the Soul — concluding with step-by-step
instructions on how to walk them. All the paths share in moving us beyond our
culture's over-emphasis on masculine reason, structure, tangibility by
appealing to our need for the feminine relational, intuitive, mystical. The
concluding chapter is a guide to creating a four-step "Soul Journal"
for oneself that helps: (1) identify what sorts of experiences nourish one's
soul; (2) design a program to engage in activities that will produce those
experiences; (3) engage in those activities; (4) evaluate how well the Soul
Journal is nurturing the soul. Elkins' instructions are do-able and sensitive
to the unique needs of each individual. Elkins
is often evocative, awakening in the reader the thirst for the spiritual that
he aims to slake. Readers with that thirst will find that this book helps
them locate themselves in the movement toward spirituality in the last three
decades, discriminate their thirst for spirituality from other needs, and
begin to slake that thirst. In short, they will find that Elkins has written
for them a treasure. At the
risk of appearing ungrateful, however, I would be remiss to Elkins' own
spirit if I did not also mention the one place he falls short and where
another book has yet to be written. In contrasting feminine and masculine, he
asserts both that the soul subverts the masculine assumptions of discursive
thinking and that we must create a soulful society by bringing soul (the
feminine) into the contemporary marketplace, which is dominated by those
assumptions. Unfortunately, all of his eight paths to spirituality require
us, if not to drop out, at least to take some time away from the workaday
world of business and technology. Elkins never explains how we bring back to
the marketplace what we find along these paths. Neither
does he ever explain his passing remark that the soul has its dark, violent
side, its pathological forms. If that is so, can Elkins' eight paths be
trails where we can lose as well as liberate ourselves? His failures to
explore the pathological side of the soul and to explain how to apply
spirituality to the marketplace are related to his misidentification of the
soul with suffering and tragedy, versus spirit as associated with
achievement. His contrast is between what is not in our control and what is,
respectively. But surely the spiritual, the sacred, has to do with success as
well as with failure, with what is in our control as well as with what is
not. Surely the sacred has to do with savoring life as well as acknowledging
and grieving through our failures. Significantly,
Elkins' eight paths to spirituality do not include business or science (or
philosophy for that matter). The root cause of his omission is his failure to
adequately identify spirituality. By overly focusing on the content of
our thoughts and actions, Elkins associates spirituality with the feminine
and the world of business and technology with the masculine. If instead we
identify spirituality with process, we can distinguish between the
feminine and the masculine as complementary contents of our thoughts and
actions. In short, spirituality is our relation to our experience, which
includes masculine and feminine. From
this perspective, the masculine is still associated with reason, structure,
tangibility; and the feminine with the relational, intuitive, mystical.
However, the critical spiritual issue is our relationship to either of
these complementary characteristics. For we can obsessively cling to the
intangible feminine as well as to the tangible masculine; and we can be
non-clingingly involved with either. Neither the feminine (which Elkins
misidentifies with the spiritual) nor the masculine has a dark side; what is
dark is our obsessive clinging to either. For example, I am aware of no
epidemiological studies that indicate that the mental health of those in the
arts is superior to that of those in business. Anecdotally, my friends who
are very much involved in Elkins' eight alternative paths seem more troubled
than my friends in business and engineering. And I have as many academic as
business friends possessed by career ambition. On the other hand, I once met
an accountant who talked as glowingly and poetically of his love for
accounting as any artist or guru I've known talked about his path in life.
Several years back I read of a study reporting that among various careers
those who expressed the greatest sense of well being were in mathematics,
usually characterized as stereotypically masculine. These results should not
surprise us if we focus on process rather than content. For wisdom
literatures universally tell us that what makes us truly happy is not what we
do (content) but how we relate to it (process). What
makes Elkins' eight paths plausible, and contemporary business and technology
problematic, is not the nature of those activities as such. Elkins himself
mentions the key factor, but overlooks its significance: time.
Processing our emotional response to our world (or, in Elkins' language,
spiritual nurturing) takes time. Elkins' eight paths take time away
from our ordinary responsibilities to allow us to process our emotions, to
savor our life. The problem with contemporary society is not business and
technology as such, but the increasingly complex demands to act now,
leaving us insufficient time to savor what we do. Given those demands,
Elkins' suggestion of breaking away to take time for our own emotional
processing makes sense. It also makes sense to choose an alternative path
that differs significantly (in content) from our workaday activities, since
if we are clinging obsessively to our everyday activity changing our focus
may help us let go. However, we should take heed from the cliche
— "I work hard and play hard" — that change of focus is no
guarantee of liberation, since we may be only changing our obsession from one
content to another. The
problem, then, is how to build time for emotional processing into
contemporary economic and technological processes while respecting their
intrinsic requirements. This seems a topic worth another book or two. Gary
Schouborg |
