Chapter 2 - Spiritual Practice as a Foundation for Peacemaking

Summary

I begin with the observation that to sustain a life focused on peacemaking and issues of justice—the two are closely related—sustenance for the journey is found, as often as not, within a spiritual tradition. More particularly, it is the practice of spirituality in a MacIntyrean/Aristotelian sense (which I will explain my use of below) that is profoundly important. The intent is not to turn atheists into theists, nor to proselytize for any religion. Rather, the general notion is that for those of religious persuasion, practice (which I emphasize rather than any beliefs or propositions which a religious person may hold) is important in shaping the life of a would-be peacemaker.

Of course, to say so begs the question, “What is spirituality?” In the answer lies the first major problem as any definition will run the gauntlet of being either too particularistic or too reductionist. To sidestep the complexity (as did Weber in his Sociology of Religion refusing to grant a definition before his analysis of substance) and following William James's example, I will develop an understanding which is adequate for this chapter but which is inadequate, perhaps, in other contexts. By “spirituality,” then, I mean a focus on what we might call the “interior life” and those religious, ritualistic activities which sustain each of us in our deepest and truest selves. It may be said that spirituality is a movement toward the true knowledge of the divine (in whatever way conceived—personal, impersonal, the transcendent, and the One) together with the true knowledge of the self. In neo-Platonic terms, “the fully real is fully knowable, not fully known here, but fully knowable” (Inge 1947, 15). James's definition of “religion” comes close as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men [sic] in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”