In September, the Fetzer Institute published What Does Spirituality Mean to Us? A Study of Spirituality in the United States, a fascinating snapshot of spirituality across the country and its relationship to community and civic action. One of the most interesting takeaways from the study is that while there seems to be a strong correlation between spirituality and pro-social action, fewer people explicitly make a connection between the two in their own lives. Or at least didn’t until they started talking about it in focus groups with each other. Many came out of the focus groups with a greater sense of a connection between their spirituality and their civic and community action than they went in with.
Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. While some of us are lucky to have found or created communities that weave together faith and action, for many, spiritual communities are separate from civic engagement communities. But when the two come together, it’s powerful. As Krista Tippett articulates in an “expert insight” in the study, it turns out that “spiritual inquiry and practice have civic heft.” We should be talking a lot more about that.
The emerging focus on “purpose” in the secular, professional world seems to tap into this insight that looking inward impacts how we look outward. But a lot of this work focuses on our individual, rather than collective, purpose. The Fetzer study hints at how the threads of a flourishing common good may be found in our individual spirituality. The first step requires individuals making the connection from spirituality to community care. But we must see this as much more than individual work. Beautiful and necessary complexity emerges in the step from individual awareness and inclination to communal negotiation. That connection in our social tapestry is weak and fraying, and the more those threads get pulled, the more our individual well-being also suffers. Our individual spirituality tells us we are connected to the rest of humanity, but every day, the world tries to convince us otherwise. That is unsustainable.
In the Fetzer survey, more than 8 in 10 respondents identified as spiritual, 7 in 10 both spiritual and religious. We have an opportunity as faith communities to offer spaces that nourish individual spirituality, strengthen its ties to community care, and actively weave together the tapestry of the common good. It is not easy work in a world of such diverse backgrounds, beliefs, and perspectives, but perhaps our spirituality gives us a place to start.
As Fetzer President and CEO Bob Boisture writes in the study’s introduction, “To achieve the great potential of spiritual agency there is still much work to be done.” Luckily, the divine is already at work within us. We just have to open the door to its potential. Let’s get at it.
Explore the full study at fetzer.org.
Photo by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash