A Fruit-Bearing Spirituality

By Carolyn D. Prof. Reinhart

A Fruit-Bearing Spirituality is the fruit of years of formal study in the field of spirituality combined with 70 years of life experience. The book is not about religion, theology or church, but helps the reader to learn more about the meaning of the word spirituality for today. It includes a consideration of our humanity and spirituality; our spiritual journey; transformation and growth; relationships; integrating the personal and social; how to change; the context/organization and the relationship of Spirituality with Quantum Physics. .

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
• Release date: Dec 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9781780994420

Book preview

UK

Preface

This book is different in two ways from most spiritualities. First, it connects any sort of inward journey with an outward movement toward community and justice. Second, it uses quantum physics to undergird the efficaciousness of spirituality. These are not mind games; something really happens to persons as they develop a deeper sense.

This book is the fruit of a study that came out of my own life-long struggle and journey, especially in my Masters and Doctoral studies. Yet it is designed for those beginning or reassessing their spiritual journeys. My hope is that you will want to journey deeply in order to discover more understanding of your own journey and soul searching.

I completed a Masters of Arts degree in Christian Spirituality in 1999 at Heythrop College, University of London. This gave me an excellent grounding in the what of spirituality. Something seemed lacking however, so I completed my Doctorate in Professional Studies with The National Centre for Work Based Learning, Middlesex University, London, UK. My dissertation was Developing a Spirituality Praxis within a Multidisciplinary Organization. Equally important in my work is that for over 30 years, I lived in lay Christian Communities, which also yielded experiential learning at many levels.

Many persons have helped me along the way. My interest in theology and God’s presence was evident even throughout high school. I used to go on retreats, which I loved. Instead of entering the convent as some of my classmates and friends did, I decided to become a nurse so I could join the White Sisters of Africa to work with lepers. Brother Damian wrote a book about his starting a leper colony, which inspired me. Other books, such as Thomas Merton’s No Man Is an Island, were also important.

After my training as a registered nurse in Ontario, Canada, and working within the field for ten years, I moved to the United Kingdom, to join Post Green Community in Dorset. During those years, I trained with Frank Lake, a psychiatrist and Founder of the Clinical Theology Association. Several of us in the Community did the Association’s two year Pastoral Counselling Course. He then mentored me during the last two years of his life.

Several of us in the community also trained in Spiritual Direction with Reverend Brian Hawker and Reverend Christine Clarke for two years and then with Bishop Graham Chadwick and Gerry Hughes S.J. for several years. This training helped me to grow both in my personal and theoretical understanding of Spiritual Direction or what we preferred to call Spiritual Accompaniment.

In 1984, within the context of Post Green Community I founded Post Green Pastoral Centre, in order to organize formally the existing and on-going ministry we had in pastoral care, counselling and teaching. Our particular interest was to be able to help people to integrate their spiritual and emotional lives, something that many people were crying out for within the UK. We offered counselling, spiritual direction, retreats, conferences, and workshops as well as publishing small booklets on related subjects. We had on-going supervision and training.

Between 1990 and 1996, as a community, we founded Holton Lee, a Centre for Disabled People and caregivers, set on the edge of Poole Harbour. Then I spent four years in Participative Action Research with a group of five other people within the organization. Thank you to my co-researchers who met with me monthly: Tony Heaton, (Director), Jeanne Hinton and Alan Greening (Trustees), Dr Julie Walker (Land Manager) and Jean Greening (Volunteer Counsellor). They were from various denominations or faith beliefs or none. All of the Trustees were supportive as was Post Green Community and Sir Thomas and Lady Lees and the Lees family who were also founding members of Holton Lee. It was on their land that both Post Green Community and Holton Lee existed.

At the time, I didn’t know how important Holton Lee would be for me. Yet it became central as I framed my research question: How can Holton Lee best establish a Spirituality Praxis? Our attempt, as an organization, was to integrate mutually the Four Aspects, namely, the Arts, Environment, Disability, and Spirituality-Personal Growth. This book grows out of that experience. I do thank my tutors at Heythrop College, in particular, Dr Valerie Lesniak, who gave us the initial grounding and understanding of what the new academic field of spirituality meant. Then I thank the National Centre for Work Based Learning for their dedicated assistance in helping me to deal with what they acknowledged as a very complex and multifaceted Research Project and in particular Prof Derek Portwood who was the founder of the Centre, and my supervisor.

I moved back to Canada in 2005 after some 30 years in the UK. In Muskoka, Ontario, I have found a sense of community in Huntsville especially within the Arts Community and also a home within the surrounding natural environment which continues to nourish and challenge me. I have a continuing passion to share both textually and with photography.

When I mention spirituality in this book, it is not from within the context of any particular faith or religion or belief system. No one denomination or faith has ownership of spirituality. The Spirit is inclusive and not exclusive, which would, in fact, be an antithesis of true spirituality. When I talk about the Divine, the Other, Higher Power, Spirit, God, the Unnameable, Mystery, Love – it is only a matter of language difference or preference. People refer to their own Deity in many different ways. According to Norin ni Riain, Dias is the word that the Irish language uses for God; Dio the Italians, and so on. Father Adrian Smith writes that it is not doctrine which divides us but rather language itself.

So let us blend our words and insights until we understand and keep each other safe. Over the past several years, I have especially appreciated and benefited from The Wisdom University, The Mystery School, Ions, Deepak Chopra, The Shift, Diarmuid O’Murchu, Brian Swimme, Judy Cannato, Thomas Berry, Cynthia Bourgeault, David Abram, Caroline Myss, Norm Sheely, Jean Houston, and others. They are exploring spirituality, consciousness and awareness-raising and quantum physics at various levels for the sake of our earth home. We are in a global crisis at so many and escalating levels, as we all know. The general intention is to gather together, somehow, with shared intent, to become more healthy, integrated and authentic as individuals and collectively, so that more sound decisions are made within our personal and global lives and home.

I want to thank all the many people who have helped me and accompanied me in my journey over the years: teachers, mentors, friends, and family. All were and are important and too numerous to mention. I would particularly like to thank two specific mentors who were so influential in my life for many years. They are Faith Lees with whom I worked for twenty years and Dr Frank Lake. Most latterly, however, I would like to thank Dr Marge Dennis, who initially laboured for long hours with me in a process of creativity, also my housemate and community friend Geraldine O’Meara. We ran the Pastoral Centre together and then she had to put up with so many years of my study and the accompanying crises and needs. My sisters have supported me through prayer all along; they are Pat, Sandi and Diane. Dr Michael Higgins suggested several years ago over a cup of coffee and discussion about my doctorate that I should make the Doctoral Thesis into a book. I took his suggestion seriously and now eleven years later I have done it. So thank you, Michael.

In addition, there have been many readers whose comments have helped shape and re-shape the various drafts of this book. In particular they are Sharon McNally, Geraldine O’Meara, Sandi Reinhart, and Timothy Staveteig. Jeanne Hinton, a writer, and Debbie Thorpe, a retired publisher, both long-standing friends in the UK were specifically helpful and encouraging from their professional perspectives.

Introduction

Fruits from the Bottom Up

On the South side of England on the English Channel is the Holton Lee Centre, situated on acres of virgin land. I have many fond memories of the lush countryside, especially many of the oak trees with large canopies of leaves that bud, blossom and shade, and of the acorns dropping and finally the leaves falling after displaying their orangish brown colours. These trees were my inspiration and deliverance because they offered such a clear model of the spirituality displayed at this Centre for Disabled People and Carers (or caregivers). Picture nourishment, wisdom, vision, insight and experience moving up from the roots through the trunk and out into the branches. The leaves cause this inner siphoning action as they draw on the inner moisture while sending their juices out into fruit (acorns) and back down to the earth to create more trees.

If one day lightening were to strike one of these trees, then after the storm had passed we could examine the exposed bark, which attempted to protect the tree; phloem, which transports sap from leaves to the rest of the tree; a thin layer of cambium, which is the growth layer; and the sapwood, which is a pipeline for transporting moisture up to the leaves. At the centre is the heartwood, which is dead sapwood. The leaves, whether skinny pine needles or broad oak leaves and branches, would have served the same purpose of converting carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight into sap (a sugar with nutrients). The roots, which often are as large a bundle underground as the tree’s branch-and-leaf crown above ground, complete the system by drawing up moisture and using the sap for growth as enlargement and extension.

Trees and Spirituality

A first connection of the tree with spirituality is that both grow from the ground up. A tree places its roots in the soil to draw up only the nutrients needed while ignoring, even resisting things that are not healthy for it. We have already taken in unhealthy things. We need to identify those attitudes and beliefs which are contrary to living and bearing the fruit of good trees.

The parts and functions we see are really a whole thing that works together to grow, blossom and produce. In humans, what is produced is the key to understanding that spirituality. As Jesus says in Matthew 7: Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but every bad tree bears bad fruit. Every religion seems to make a similar affirmation.

A second connection is that both are influenced by their soils or contexts. As I grew in understanding and spiritual expression, I had several major questions about my own context, wondering how to appropriate and truly live out my own new deep learning. Patriarchy, dominance, and power-over people, I learned, were not an authentic or a loving way of living, nor was living in oppression and under that dominance a healthy way of life. I began to see so many places where this way of life was being lived out, and this presented so many challenges to me.

These places were within the Church, my ecumenical lay Christian community, which I had been part of for thirty years and even within the structures of the charity organisation. The suggestion of our tutors was to see things through the lens of our contexts. In the masters, we also studied third world spirituality, women’s spirituality, the Church structure and context and the concern for the environment. I could no longer, for the sake of justice and my own integrity, ignore what I saw and experienced. I began to challenge, ask questions and change or leave those unhealthy, inauthentic contexts—which stated one thing and practiced another—because those structures were oppressive.

There are two basic models of systems and how they operate. One is dominant, top-down, power hungry, unjust, not living out right relationships. Even after years of countering sexism, racism, classism, and all the other -isms, these systems are still generated. One model that is promoted in this book – and that fits the metaphor of a tree – is bottom-up, vision sharing, just, and seeks to live in harmony with others. The first type tries to make things grow by pulling on the branches; the second type makes things grow by sharing the soil and its nutrients.

The second model emerged over the years in the actual research process as we continued to be alert to combine theory