Book Review: Spirituality: A Postmodern and Interfaith Approach to Cultivating a Relationship with God by Carl McColman

(Here is book review I did for the Ooze. You can find my review and others here)

Wasn’t it the great mid-20th century philosopher and social critic Lucy van Pelt who once said, “I love humanity, it’s people I can’t stand”? Lucy’s (or maybe it was Charlie Brown’s) words come to mind as I read Carl McColman’s Spirituality: A Postmodern and Interfaith Approach to Cultivating a Relationship with God (White River Press, 2008, $18.00). The author seems more taken by the abstract category of spirituality then the concrete work of the spiritual life with its tendency to demand from us a parochial allegiance that offends our preference for the abstract over the concrete, the imaginary for the real, a self-generated life of meaning over a meaningful life that comes to us as a gift from God and neighbor.

Coming from an academic background in personality theory and religion, and with a marked personal love of theory and philosophy, I was excited and hopeful about the book. But as much as I wanted to like the book, and try though I did to like it, in the end I simply could not. While McColman makes a number of very good points about the spiritual life, in the final analysis his unwillingness to roots his own work in a specific religious tradition makes him not a scholar of spirituality, much less a guide to the spiritual life, but a mere tourist.

The topics he covers are, in my own view, certainly foundation to Christian spirituality and indeed common to many, though certainly not all, religious and spiritual traditions. As an Orthodox Christian and a priest who says the Jesus Prayer and who has served rural parishes, I am especially gratified to read about the first two chapters that discuss spirituality as breathing (chapter 1) or as cultivation (chapter 2′s tillage in McColman’s language). And the author’s emphasis on the importance of culture or tradition to our spiritual lives is also something I much appreciate.

Other chapters discuss foundation elements of the spiritual life. His chapters on wonder and belief, for example, help move us beyond a merely intellectual approach to the spiritual life. This is brought home to me in his discussion of belief as an openness to God and requiring from us a decision, an act of the will and not simply the mind. Again a good, and necessary, balance to the tendency in some circles to over think the Christian life.

Subsequent chapter also address what I see as essential elements of the Christian life(for example icons and prayer). And the author’s suggestions for what he calls “a discipline of wonder—for nurturing the spiritual life within yourself” (p. 226) contain a good share of practical wisdom. But, as with the rest of the book, it is wisdom that must be carefully discerned since the author seems unwilling to take his own advice and root his discussion in the rich soil of a particular spiritual tradition.

Where I in the end part company with the book is in the author’s attempt, as he says in the introduction to the current edition, to write “not so much a Christian treatment of spirituality as an interfaith exploration of the topic” (p. ix). I part company with the book not because I would reject an ecumenical or interfaith conversation about the spiritual life but because such a conversation requires multiple voices but because I am an advocate, and frequent participant, in such conversation. For all that the author references writers in any number of traditions, in the end it is his voice, his experience, his thought, and his alone that dominates the conversation. It is all well and good for me to quote a variety of authors and spiritual guides, but the fact remains that ultimately I pick and chose those author’s according to my own, often unarticulated standard, of what really matters.

The indomitable G. K. Chesterton is probably the first (and to mind the best) Christian apologist to the themes and concerns that we now collect under the phrase “postmodern.” Chesterton says that “The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.” A truly interfaith approach to spirituality requires us to be fellow travelers who see what we see, even if we see things differently and disagree sharply with each other as a result Alas, I think that Spirituality: A Postmodern and Interfaith Approach to Cultivating a Relationship with God is the work of a tourist who see in the spiritual life what he has come to see—himself.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory