Spirituality as Be In Touch
Kevin O’Donnell
“Even an atheist has a spirituality.”
I made that statement when I was a Head of Personal and Spiritual Development in a large UK Secondary School. I was ordained an Anglican priest and later worked for some years as a school chaplain. I wrote several books for Hodder Educational that provided courses for students to explore religions experientially, or what I referred to then as the “spirituality approach.” These included Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism.[1] It was on the cusp of a new direction which came to be named as “Learning from Religion” rather than “Learning about Religion” in the sense that ideas, experiences, and actions should touch aspects of our own lives that might have nothing to do with religious traditions explicitly. One of my student teachers from Oxford told me later that I was probably about ten years ahead of my time. I am not sure about that, but I was at least partly pioneering. What did experiential, spirituality or “Learning from …” mean?
The approach meant the awe of the sunset, the joy of its rise, the dew on a leaf, the flutter of a dragonfly wing, a gentle touch of affection, the wonder of a baby’s first smile. Such encounters and experiences set the scene, and without this, religions can be dusty textbook things, museum pieces, or just alien and weird for many students not active in any faith. The alien quality was brought home to me whenever I asked students to imagine a new religion. The aim was to explore the basic ingredients such as awe, ethics and styles and places of worship. Too often, silly ideas resulted such as tying one leg behind your back and hopping so many times a day. And yet, and yet, that is how rituals can come across to an unconnected agnostic or atheist generation, or to those who state, “I am spiritual but not religious.” One young student once protested, “But we haven’t mentioned God, and it is nearly half term!” The fact is, they had been beginning to touch the hem of his garment all along. St John of the Cross captured this sentiment when he wrote: “My love, the mountains and the solitary wooded valleys, the unexpected islands … the music of a silence”.[2]
Time passed, and I worked in parish ministry, becoming Catholic along the way. Owing to illness (a breakdown, becoming epileptic and then struggling with PTSD), I had to leave this and now have the time to reflect, study and write as well as finding peace and ministry in a beautiful basilica and place of pilgrimage in France.[3] I received my doctorate a couple of years ago that explores spirituality in the oeuvre of the Bulgarian/French semiologist and psychoanalyst, Julia Kristeva. Kristeva seems to be little known in the UK but reading her, though difficult at first, can be invigorating and crosses genres and traditions. She declares herself to be an atheist but has a great respect for belief, Christ, and Christianity, though she has her own idiosyncratic, neo-Freudian interpretation. I have developed a model of spirituality from studying her oeuvre. Spirituality can’t be defined, only hinted at, suggested, and partly held. Spirituality is holding water by letting it flow through your fingers. I argue for a dynamic interplay, an inter-connection or perichoresis[4] between themes with language, love, alterity (Otherness), and transcendence each requiring the other. We form words and structure grammar because there is someone else to speak with. We can relate outside ourselves because we have the ability to transcend the ego. We can be open and trust relationships because of the human ability to love. We ask questions with our words because we are human, and thus the circle starts again – language, love, alterity, and transcendence.
Kristeva stands within what is commonly called postmodernism. A key tenet is that we live within language and cannot step outside it in our experience. This is to reject logocentrism, the idea that logic, reason, and language are independent from human thought and experience. Jacques Derrida famously stated that “there is nothing outside the text.” Yet, this does not mean that we make everything up like so many fantasises. We respond to life, what I describe as “encounters through interpretation.” Metaphysics should not be rejected outright as a form of thought, for it can live as reactive story, a necessary artifice, for we respond to life in certain ways that make us ask these questions and tell these stories. Avoidance of logocentrism can be understood as a form of apophatic theology in the Christian tradition, as in the mystics and The Cloud of Unknowing, which states: “Because he may well be loved, but not thought. By love he can be caught and held, but by thinking never.”[5]
An immediate corollary is that when the UK educational organisation, Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education), states that spiritual, moral, social and cultural (SMSC) education should inform the whole school curriculum, the whole of SMSC should be considered as spirituality understood in the sense that I derive from studying Kristeva. Ofsted understands “spiritual” only as interiority with its feelings and questions which can include religion but are in themselves neutral and human. If spirituality involves the dynamism of language and the ability to trust (love) the Other, transcending our egos, experiencing nature, or creating art, then the whole of SMSC is thereby “spirituality.” Ethics cannot be siphoned off, or the social and the cultural put on parallel tracks. They are an organic, human whole.
Be in Touch: To Wonder, to Feel, to Share
I am too out of touch to write professionally for schools now, and though publishing some of these ideas in academic journals,[6] I have begun to self-publish material on Amazon free of charge.[7] My dynamic model has evolved into a simpler, more accessible scheme of the Be in Touch project that I am building, though this is in its infancy.
Be: questions of meaning and existence (“to Wonder”)
In: the inner life and wellbeing (“to Feel”)
Touch: relationships with others (“to Share”)
Spirituality involves all of these in a delicate tapestry.
So far, I have produced a little book of mindfulness upon the request of a teacher friend for her year 12/13 students.[8] It is concerned mainly with IN, but a section encourages involvement in exercises with others. There is a mention, albeit brief, of transcendence as we are more than biology and psychology. That is left as an open question. Imagination is promoted as creative, and creativity as a spiritual gift, as it were. Thus, there is Guided Fantasy (“Mindjourneying”) and the use of koans (“Mindflipping”). The latter are considered as particularly useful during an exam when the mind goes blank, or the student struggles to make sense of a question – eyes closed, ten slow breaths, flip. The students devise their own koans (or “flips”) and sit with these for several seconds, then open eyes, think afresh. The flip switches the brain from discursive to non-discursive thought.
At the time of writing, I have planned a scheme to explore spirituality with health care workers (at all levels) that can be run between three or six sessions in an imaginative, interactive, and accessible way.[9] I will eventually produce a booklet to help facilitate this. A guide for teachers will also follow that opens up the concept of spirituality across the whole of SMSC and reveals how it is more than just the religious. Obviously, with my background, education is important. Health care touches me because of my pastoral ministry and my own illness. In the shadows can life be found, and what we need most is often just a touch of love. How very Christlike!
Kevin O’Donnell is an author, a priest of the diocese of Arundel and Brighton, and an auxiliary chaplain at the Basilica of Notre Dame de Pontmain in France.
[1] Kevin O’Donnell, The Jewish Experience, the Christian Experience, the Muslim Experience, the Hindu Experience (London: Hodder Educational, 2000).
[2] The Poems of Saint John of the Cross, translated by Wills Barnstone. (New York: New Directions Books, 1972), 47.
[3] Notre Dame de Pontmain.
[4] Perichoresis was the term used by some of the Church Fathers for the mutual indwelling of the Holy Trinity in an eternal, round dance of love.
[5] The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works. Translated by A. C. Spearing. (London: Penguin Random House, 2001), 27.
[6] Kevin O’Donnell, “Spirituality as Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural Education (SMSC). Using Julia Kristeva to Rethink a Spirituality of Education,” JRS 71 (2023): 109-122, doi.org/10.1007/s40839-023-00199-9; “‘Be in Touch’ – A Kristevan Model of Spirituality in Health Care Education,” LJRHS 24, 2 (2024): 15-43.
[7] Amazon prints a copy if ordered. I am only using this platform as I do not have the finances otherwise. I am just putting things out there and giving some people hard copies. To really launch the Be in Touch project properly, funding and distribution would need to be provided.
[8] Be in Touch: Mindfulness. There are three formats of magazine size, large paperback, and small paperback, published by Amazon.
[9] The outline has been published in O’Donnell, ‘‘‘Be in Touch’ – A Kristevan Model of Spirituality in Health Care Education,” LJRHS 24, 4, compilation 1.0 (2024).