Theology, Disability, and Spiritual Transformation: Learning from ...

points beyond these levels of consciousness to a transformed experience of ultimate reality. It also implies an exploration of the “spirituality” of L’Arche as a whole way of life experienced in relation to a “transcendent dimension.” L’Arche sees itself as offering more than a service to people with disabilities. Its vision is inspired by the Christian Gospel and the Beatitudes, which give shape to a unique spirituality or way of life in relation to God and the persons who make up the community. This yearning for personal response in the whole of one's life leads directly into the question of what constitutes “spirituality.”

Functional Perspectives on Spirituality

Spirituality as an object of study has become distinguished from religion by its less institutional and more experiential emphasis. In contrast to earlier theological approaches to the Christian life, in which the notion of spirituality was associated with the interior life of the “soul” and its perfection in holiness, present approaches have generally sought to broaden their concern to include perspectives on how the spiritual dimension of the person functions to integrate the whole of human life as lived and experienced in relation to the sacred.

Sandra Schneiders, one of the pioneers in the field of Christian spirituality, has framed her proposal for the proper subject matter of spirituality as being “spiritual experience.” Thus, she asserts, “spirituality is the field of study which attempts to investigate in an interdisciplinary way spiritual experience as such, that is, as spiritual and as experience.”⁹ Schneiders further specifies the object of the study of spirituality in formal terms as “the experience of consciously striving to integrate one's life in terms not of isolation and self-absorption but of self-transcendence within and toward the horizon of ultimate concern.”¹⁰ This definition, while admittedly formal and functional, has served as something of a benchmark in Christian spirituality studies. While variations and nuances have been added by others, virtually all generic definitions of spirituality focus on the notions of a progressive, consciously pursued process of existential life integration through self-transcendence within and toward a horizon of ultimate concern.