Fr Jim Cogley
This is one of the most often heard statements of our age that, ‘I’m not religious, I don’t go to church, but I am spiritual’. The latter part about being spiritual is quite nebulous and can range from having a deep awareness of God in my life and being committed to a spiritual discipline, to having given up on church but still holding on to vestiges of former beliefs. Any claim to being spiritual that is isolationist and doesn’t carry a good degree of interconnectedness and belonging has to be considered suspect. Spirituality and relatedness are like the two sides of the one coin and so to believe that one can maintain a spiritual life while living in splendid isolation is simply not possible. To paraphrase the Book of Genesis, ‘It is not good for man/woman to be alone; we need helpmates for our journey. It is worth noting how in that account of Creation God saw all that He had made and saw that ‘it was good’. The only thing He declared that was not good, was ‘for man to be alone’.