Theology, Disability, and Spiritual Transformation: Learning from the Communities of L'Arche By Michael Hryniuk

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

Chapter 1:

Transformation and the Study of Christian Spirituality

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or the falling away of the impediments to the realization of the essential unity of the human with the divine. Thayer thus employs a definition of the spirit that is open to the mystical depths of participation in and union with the Holy.

Thayer's usage is close to the meaning of heart in the anthropology of Greek and Russian Orthodox Christianity. In this tradition, the term refers to the center of the person where, as Timothy Ware puts it, the person discovers “first the God-like spirit which the Holy Trinity implanted in (man) at creation, and with this spirit…comes to know the Spirit of God…”⁵ The terms heart and spirit are thus transpersonal concepts that point to a dimension of the human being in ontological continuity—even identity—with God. These are terms that are also inclusive of the imagination, emotions, will, and conscience.

How is this state of heart and spirit experienced? Gerald May's phenomenological inquiry into the spirit focuses on the basic dynamics of desire that manifest the immediate felt yearning of the human spirit for union with God. May's conviction, in continuity with Augustine and the mystical tradition of Christianity, is that this desire for God is experienced interiorly as a desire to give and receive love. As he puts it,

There is a desire within each of us, in the deep center of ourselves that we call our heart. We were born with it, it is never completely satisfied, and it never dies. We are often unaware of it, but it is always awake. It is the human desire for love. Every person on this earth yearns to love, to be loved, to know love. Our truest identity, our reason for being, is to be found in this desire. …In all my studies of psychology and spirituality, I have found hope for real wholeness only in the human heart's desire for love in the present moment. The experience is utterly simple. It exists before any words or symbols are applied to it, and it is who we are. In one silent breath, the love force in us gives us our identity and draws us toward our home and destiny. We are created by love, to live in love, for the sake of love.⁶

As a psychiatrist, May is making a judgment about the essential quality of the human spirit on phenomenological and empirical grounds.