Real spirituality found through Christian faith

By DEBORAH GYAPONG
Canadian Catholic News
Ottawa

The author of a recent book on the Holy Spirit is concerned "the disease of generic spirituality" will rob people of a genuine experience of God.

"If the Christian story is true, authentic spirituality has been given a distinct shape," New Testament scholar Edith Humphrey told a March 30 gathering.

Generic spirituality has no shape and focuses on subjective experience, said Humphrey, author of Ecstasy and Intimacy: When the Holy Spirit Meets the Human Spirit.

Jesus may be forgotten, and people may not know the mystery of God as three persons in one, "yet they are central to the being of everyone," she said.

Humphrey, who teaches at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, said the West has undergone a massive shift in recent years.

She said when she was a student, the academy stressed "objectivity, neutral observation and proving one's point."

"Now the spotlight is upon 'my story', 'my response;' and 'celebrating diversity,' she said.

"The world has, in the last generation, looked everywhere but to the Christian tradition for an understanding of the spirit," Humphrey says in her book's introduction.

"But it is just when God's people come face-to-face with the mystery of the Triune God, and fall on their faces before God's own great humility, astounded at that ecstatic action in which God became human for our sakes - it is at these moments that we find our own meaning and our own healing.

"It is in gazing at him that we find our own place and start on the way to health."

Humphrey said she wrote the book to help draw people to authentic Christian spirituality.

"We inhabit a world unpractised in the disciplines that form the mind and life of Christ," she wrote.

"We may feel spiritual, but we need to watch the checks and balances that have been given to us - the story of Scripture, the witness of the Church through the ages, and the voice of the entire communion today."

Humphrey said part of the problem is that people with "correct doctrine" have not taken it from the head to the heart.

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