From Notes on "Spirituality"

One of the myriad problems surrounding many contemporary attitudes to "spirituality" is that the doctrine of an Ultimate Reality (by whatever name - the Absolute, God, Allah, Atman-Brahman, Nirvana/Sunyata, the Tao, Wakan-Tanka) and the elaboration of a spiritual method attuned to our relationship therewith, are left out of the picture altogether!  What we are offered instead is a notion of "spirituality" as some kind of subjective inner state, a kind of "warm fuzzy glow", sometimes harnessed to formulations such as "the kingdom of Heaven is within you" - as if by these words Christ meant that the kingdom of Heaven is of a psychological order!  This is all of a piece with the notion that "spirituality" is a private affair, and that the spiritual life can be fashioned out of the subjective resources of the individual in question. Some of the factors which, over several centuries, have conspired to create a climate in which such ideas could take root include the rebellion against all authority, the cult of the individual, the humanistic prejudice that "man is the measure of all things", the triumph - even in the religious domain itself - of sentimentalism over intellectuality, the shibboleths of "egalitarianism" and "democracy", and the emergence of a rampant psychologism which usurps functions which properly belong to religion.  In recent times we have seen many attempts to assimilate spirituality into the domain of psychology, a move which fails to distinguish between the contingent plane of the psyche and the inviolate Self, or Spirit - this failure generating confusions of all kinds, on full display in "occultist", "New Age" and purportedly "Eastern" movements which lay claim to some kind of spirituality but which scorn traditional religious forms and practices."

- Notes on "Spirituality", Harry Oldmeadow

"Spiritual But Not Religious"

As part of an ongoing conversation about the SBNR phenomenon, I came across this article by Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick.  While it is written from a traditional Orthodox perspective, I think it raises some valid points and questions:

At its heart, I believe that the SBNR person simply does not want to worship. At least, he doesn’t want to worship anything other than himself. (This sounds really bad, and it is. But we all do it, SBNR or not, in various ways.) Worship is fundamentally about giving oneself over in complete union to the Other, which involves sacrifice and risk. It is love, but it is a much higher order love than the “love” which is spoken of in the idolatrous language of popular eros. Worship requires submission, freely offered, and that is something the SBNR person is, by definition, simply not going to do. Once there’s a divine Thou to go with my I, then that means there’s religion, for religion is the reconnecting of what was separated (re+ligio). When there’s connection going on, then that means there must also be some sort of arrangement between those being connected, and that is, once again, religion.

Fundamentally, the SBNR person is cheating himself out of the real transcendence he is probably longing for. After all, transcendence means ecstasy (ek+stasis), standing outside yourself, and that means that your own ideas about what’s true don’t matter in the face of what really is the truth. There cannot be “your truth” and “my truth” in transcendence. There is only the Truth. After all, if we are transcending to a somewhere, then it’s certainly not a somewhere that we make up for ourselves. Nor is it a place that can be navigated by our opinions. One does not step into outer space without a spacesuit.

the full post is here