Without the transcendent and the transpersonal, we get sick, violent, and nihilistic, or else hopeless and apathetic.
(Abraham Maslow: Toward a Psychology of Being: iv.)
Spiritual education draws no sharp line between sacred and secular concerns, for properly speaking, the universe is one creation. All education is one, because all learning is one. Learning is one because education exists, finally, not to serve the interests of the state and not just to train students for some vocation. It exists to develop the whole person, heart, soul and intelligence, in the restless expansion of consciousness through an exploration of reality in all its facets and levels. As much as training the logical and aesthetic faculties, full education must train what we might call the religious faculty resident within the human reality.
Religion is a universal spiritual, cultural and psychological phenomenon. Only modern western man feels he can do without it, and he is paying the price. The religious spirit, which should never be wholly and exclusively identified with any particular religion, will not be denied. It is a permanent endowment of humanity. It is not some ancient need that, like childhood, can be outgrown, but a perennial power needed to fully investigate reality. People cannot function effectively or for long without religion, and can function even then only so long as their world is materially secure. We cannot function without religion because religion puts us in touch with dimensions we cannot otherwise know about. Historian Christopher Dawson writes: “Whenever genuine religion exists it must always possess this quality, since it is of the essence of religion to bring man into relation with transcendental and eternal realities.” (Religion and the Rise of Western Culture: 25)
True religion is marked by a love or attraction for the unknown, for the religious impulse is fundamentally a seeking after transcendence. Thus it actually strongly opposes the stick in the mud attitude, the safe and secure blandness that characterizes materialistic life and, to be honest, most of established religion. This same attitude of caution has also conquered education. Real religion has a permanently revolutionary thrust. It is the power to transform hearts, minds and spirits, since it must always try to incorporate new experience, new knowledge, and new perception of the eternal. Religion taps the deepest springs of human motivation, the eternal quest for God and self-knowledge. It arouses our faculties and fuels the actualization of our powers, for we must wrestle to assimilate transcendence and in this way we learn of our strengths and limitations. True religion, the religion of the Prophets not the theologians, says every encounter with the unknown is an opportunity to achieve more self-knowledge.
I am not advocating for religious indoctrination or even strictly religious instruction in schools. Neither am I just arguing for some comfy spiritual purpose that can be held quietly in common by students, teachers and administrators; even if that purpose is in harmony with the unifying and globalizing forces at work in the world today. I am advocating for an education that holds the active and open investigation of the spiritual to be not just a legitimate field of inquiry, but an essential one, and an awakened religious consciousness is essential for this.
The accelerating breakdown at every level of our social order calls out desperately for a renewal not of established religion, but of the religious spirit so that the sacred may once again exert the healing, energizing influence of which it is capable. That healing, like most healing, is best accomplished not through invasive surgeries and poisonous chemicals, but by properly adding more energy and life to an ailing body. In this case it is the body of human thought desperately ill from a toxic ingestion of secularism and materialism
If we ask: Should schools concern themselves with religion? The answer is: “By all means, yes!”, but with some provisos. Traditionally, religion makes up our primary education in the sacred and this education develops consciousness. “Religion is the consciousness of society,” writes Daniel Bell. (The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism:155) When it is good, religion is a society-building force. But, generally speaking, today religion is not good. At best, it has become little more than a means of personal comfort or belief: at worst, a set of narrow dogmas and antiquated moral injunctions that cramp reason and thought. In neither case is it generating new knowledge by unlocking the mysteries of mind and creation or bringing forth people capable of building an ever-advancing civilization. In these debased forms religion MUST be kept out of schools.
But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. It is often argued that education should be neutral, balanced and objective. I agree. But that is precisely why we must be concerned with religion and the sacred. Removing religion from education does not make education neutral. Rather it makes it one where only a nonreligious view of things can be expressed, and thus there is no chance for dialogue and the development of the full range of human capacities.
Religion, like education and science, is also a public institution, though it is neither a governmental nor an academic one. Rather it is a congregational one. Socially, religion takes place within a community of faith with the sacred text as the primary instrument for the education of the faithful, and worship, prayer, service based upon moral principle, and other spiritual practices the content of faith. It is an impoverishment of education to leave religion out of schooling altogether. The separation of church and state cannot also mean the separation of spiritual and moral values from everyday life. The changes in consciousness and society of the past few hundred years have made sacred knowledge more critical rather than less critical than ever to know and use. The goal of a value-free science has made it nearly valueless in many arenas of human questioning.
Let us be clear: what is missing in our culture is not a lack of religiosity, but a pervasive lack of spirituality. David Sehat in his book, The Myth of Religious Freedom, argues that the supposed decline in religion in America is a myth. Only between 10 and 20 percent of the U.S. populace were church members in 1776. But during the Second Great Awakening early in the nineteenth century, church membership expanded rapidly, doubling to 35 percent of the population by 1850. Church members became a simple majority in 1906, and 62 percent of the American populace belonged to religious institutions in 2000, though not exclusively Christian churches. Religion, he believes, has become more important in the public life of the United States over the last 200 years, not less. But though it is important, religion is not articulating a religious social answer to our ills.
Thus, I am not arguing to introduce religion into schools, but spirituality. I believe that we have lost a sense of the sacred, and, indeed, traditional organized religion has played its part in depriving us of this, because it has lost its own transcendent impulse. If students are to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the world, which must include awareness of the sacred dimension of the world and themselves, schools have an obligation to teach, not religious dogma, but what religion tells us about the mysteries of human existence and the fundamental principles of life. In discussing the sacred dimension of life I am merely calling attention to the inescapable fact that the human spirit longs for transcendence and that without it we become, as Maslow warns, "sick, violent, and nihilistic, or else hopeless and apathetic."
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