Patterns of the Wind: Reflections on Christian Spirituality Over the Past Century

Abstract

Patterns of the Wind:Reflections on Christian Spirituality Over the Past Century1 Glen G. Scorgie (bio) So go ahead. Gather your findings into a plausible arrangement. Make a story.Show how love and joy, beauty and goodness shine out amongst the rubble.2 INTRODUCTION The Western Canadian prairies are a windswept land. Canadian novelist W. O. Mitchell has written a "story of a boy and the wind." The narrative is pervaded by the wind's presence, from the Springtime, when the townsfolk are "waiting for the unfailing visitation of wind, gentle at first, barely stroking the long grasses and giving them life." All the way to late Autumn, when "the wind turns in silent frenzy upon itself … breathing up topsoil and tumbleweed skeletons to carry them on its spinning way over the prairie, out and out to the far line of the sky."3 The title of Mitchell's book poses a simple, rhetorical question: Who Has Seen the Wind? Of course, no one is able actually to see the wind. Yet how could anyone remain unaware of its ubiquitous presence? The same question might be posed, in its fuller symbolic sense, of Western society across these last one hundred years. The good news is many have still felt the divine pneuma, experienced its effects, and sought a deeper attunement to its movements. My goal is to shed some light on the historic ebb and flow, since around the 1920s, of Christian attentiveness to the interior dynamics of the Spirit, and to the outward effects and actions that these dynamics stimulate.4 My intent is simply to help move the conversation forward, and to allow others to add their own corrective and enriching insights.5 There is, obviously, something awkward about taking a cleaver to the seamless fabric of history and hacking off a short piece of it for analysis. On the upside, most readers of this article will already be conversant with the full span of the history of Christian spirituality, and quite capable of picking up the story at any point along the way. [End Page 23] Hopefully, going forward there will be greater rapprochement between two frequently siloed spheres of endeavor: the academic study of Christian spirituality, and the more explicitly practical, applicational work of Christian spiritual formation and soul care.6 Meanwhile, it helps that quite a few persons already belong to both camps, and for a long time now have been functioning quite splendidly in their amphibious vocations. Allow me just one preliminary observation. These categories of persons engaged in the field of Christian spirituality are very different size-wise. Worldwide, there are literally millions of Christians providing pastoral care each and every day. There are considerably fewer providing formal spiritual direction, yet their numbers too are substantial. Membership in the Spiritual Directors International organization, founded in 1990, is currently more than six thousand trained individuals, and that is probably just the tip of the spiritual direction iceberg today.7 By comparison, persons engaged in the academic study of Christian spirituality are an exotic minority. If for no other reason than this, these academics deserve the protections accorded to other rare species. Admittedly, there are those who question the very legitimacy of the academic study of Christian spirituality. Perhaps the simplest answer to such skeptics is that in every other aspect of life we carefully study, rather than just casually engage, whatever we deem important and valuable, and essential to our survival and wellbeing. This is exactly why Christian spirituality scholars, to borrow a fine phrase, mind the Spirit.8 THE CHALLENGE OF MODERNITY AND SOME FIRST RESPONDERS The story of Western civilization is, from a global perspective, one provincial narrative alongside others. But this is the province in which most of us are presently located, and we therefore have a responsibility to attend to it. We must do so, however, with a chastened realization that ours is just one story, and not the whole story, or even the main story anymore. The previous century is frequently characterized as one in which late-stage modernity begins finally to give way to something new. Modernity has had a long run. But let us make no...