Spirituality in the News

Welcome to the Spirituality and Transformative Leadership blog series!

There is no doubt that today’s global leadership is at a crisis point. Leaders of principle are in short supply, politics has become reactionary and isolationist and there is a crying need for leadership that can unite multiple interests into a coherent vision for the reality of today’s world. The model of ‘servant leadership’ that believed in service to a higher cause than oneself, embraced by such visionaries as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Churchill, Mandela, seems extinct in today’s world. As recent events have seen, we need a new vision of leadership that can steer the course of our globalised world, whilst having the humility to recognise the challenges that ordinary people face in their day to day lives.

What started as a discussion within the community of the Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum has now resulted in a series of blogs from both Young Global Leaders themselves and others, that touch on a wide range of themes within the idea of spiritually-based leadership. Writers were asked the following questions:

The revolution we need is, as with all revolutions that have occurred, a spiritual one — a deep awareness with profound and pervasive material manifestations, a transformation that changes the way we do everything, think about everything and act in the world. We are not the same people.

The revolution will involve a change in the way we understand what justice is and how truth is measured. We need to see the world through a lens of meaning that immediately shows us the deep interconnections and interdependencies among everything that exists, so that we imagine patterns of interaction that enhance and encourage flourishing at every turn.

HOW THE OCCUPY GENERATION IS RE-ENVISIONING SPIRITUALITY.

“We must all achieve our identity on the basis of a radical authenticity… [for] it is only in the real world of the person – neither singular nor plural – that the crucial factors influencing the course of the universe are at work.”

– Raimundo Panikkar, “The Silence of God,” Introduction p. xviii

There can be little doubt that traditional religious frameworks are no longer speaking to new generations as they have in the past, especially in the West. In a recent article in the LA Times, Philip Clayton, Dean of Faculty at Claremont School of Theology, writes that the fastest growing religious group in the United States is “spiritual but not religious,” containing a shocking 75 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29. Clayton argues that young people are not necessarily rejecting a sense of God, rather they feel that religious organizations are too concerned with money and power, too focused on rules and too involved in the structures of the political status quo.

The world continues to weep daily for the senseless violence that so devastates families and communities. Today it is San Bernardino, California. Yesterday it was Cameroon, and Jerusalem, before that Baghdad, Beirut, Bethlehem, Nigeria, Tunisia, and Paris. And tomorrow…? The daily violence reflected in these and so many more incidents is deeply shocking and stirs up powerful feelings of fear, anger, outrage and sadness. The questions swirl, and consume our thoughts. Why? Who? How? It is natural to feel this way. Violence is horrible and the purpose of violence is to horrify and paralyze.

Is saying publicly that you are a Spiritual person one of the last great social taboos?

Why, with so many striving to deliver greater social justice, is being actively and purposefully spiritual still such a heresy?

Over half of Canadian teenagers openly say they have spiritual needs, whilst only 15% of Americans say that they are neither spiritual nor religious. Over 75% of Brits claim that they are aware of a spiritual dimension to experience (a rise of 27% in 13 years); about 70% sit within a grey area between being religious and anti-religious. So why do so many of us hide away our spiritual contemplations, intuitions and convictions?

Our lives depend on them.

With water, sun and soil, a tiny seed can grow into a majestic tree. The seed’s power to transform so dramatically seems almost mythic in proportion, which is perhaps why seeds appear in many religious parables.

Today we’ve lost our connection to the life-giving properties of seeds as a by-product of our highly industrialized and “materialistic” culture, according to author and Sufi mystic Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee.

“We have not only lost the sacred dimension of the seeds but a lived connection to the sacred Earth,” Vaughan-Lee told The Huffington Post.

When people think of spirituality, we often have images of angels singing, wise men in rapture, saintly women with modest demeanor, monks in meditation, masters benignly guiding us and God or some kind of greater spirit above us, leading us unerringly with total wisdom, certainty and compassion. This could not be further from the truth, which should be obvious from a cursory glance around our universe. The “heavens” are full of turmoil, as we can only conclude from the expression: As above, so below. All of creation is in constant flux and evolution, and we and the heavens are One in that tumultuous process.