How Spiritual Are You?

The cover story for this week's Time magazine is on The God Gene.  Is there a gene hardwired in us that causes us to be spiritual?  I haven't combed through the entire article yet, but I did take this handy-dandy quiz, "How Spiritual Are You?"  It's twenty questions, but here are just a few.  Answer true or false to each question.

• I often feel so connected to the people around me that it is like there is no separation between us. 
• I often do things to help protect animals and plants from extinction.
• I am often called absent-minded because I get so wrapped up in what I am doing that I lose track of everything else. 
• I love the blooming of flowers in the spring as much as seeing an old friend again.

I scored "Spiritually Average."  The quiz is "adapted from a personality inventory devised by Washington University psychiatrist Robert Cloninger, author of Feeling Good: The Science of Well-Being."

Mark McIntosh defines spirituality as the "discovery of the true self precisely in encountering the divine and human other who allows one neither to rest in reassuring self images nor to languish in the prison of a false social construction of oneself."  Spirituality "calls one out of one's self and into the truth of one's mission in life, out of provisionality and into the adventure of incarnation." 

The encounter with God is the common ground of spirituality and theology.  Spirituality is the "impression that this encounter makes in transforming the life of people" and theology is "the expression that this encounter calls forth as people attempt to understand and speak of the encounter."  Spirituality is not something we have, but a pattern of growth taking place in the community of those gathered and loved by the Risen Christ.

McIntosh makes the point that searching for our inner selves to construct our own inner private world is a reflection of our consumer mentality.  The study cited in the Time article measures spirituality through "self-transcendence, which consists of three other traits: self-forgetfulness, or the ability to get entirely lost in an experience; transpersonal identification, or a feeling of connectedness to a larger universe; and mysticism, or an openness to things not literally provable. Put them all together, and you come as close as science can to measuring what it feels like to be spiritual."

For Christians, this connectedness or oneness, is with the Triune God.  For us "the reality called human selfhood is constituted by its basis in the infinite self-giving of the trinitarian life...this is an invitation to something that transgresses the boundaries of what we tend to think of as a human being; it is an invitation to the form of absolute self-gift to the other which is simulanteously the very energizing of the one who gives."