“We must seed a new consciousness … drawing its inspiration from perennial spiritual and moral insights, intuition, and experience. We call this new awareness interspiritual, implying not the homogenization of religion, but the recovering of the shared mystic heart beating in the center of the world’s deepest spiritual traditions.”
—Wayne Teasdale, The Mystic Heart
The Fetzer Institute published What Does Spirituality Mean to Us in the spring of 2022. This report highlighted shifts and trends that hold great significance for a place like Prairiewoods. Two findings really got me thinking:
In recent decades, a growing number of Americans have indicated that they are more spiritual than religious. The more spiritual than religious group rose from 18.5% of American adults in 1998 to 33.6% in 2020.
When asked to draw spirituality, people from different backgrounds, beliefs and experiences expressed many shared ideas.1
Prairiewoods serves a community where fewer people identify with or seek membership in traditional faith communities, yet most identify as spiritual. Fetzer found more than eight out of ten respondents consider themselves spiritual to some extent, and six in ten aspire to be more spiritual.1
How can Prairiewoods serve this “world hungry for spiritual growth” 2, shared practice and connection? Prairiewoods strives to welcome all, no matter where they are in their spiritual journey or how they identify that journey. The Fetzer research has shown that how people picture and experience their spirituality may share common patterns but also reveals great diversity. This requires us to become “multi-lingual” and “interspiritual.” This is and will be an evolutionary journey for us. We have much to learn.
So this year we will be inviting diverse individuals to share their perspectives on and images of spirituality with us. We hope to explore questions similar to those that Fetzer asked. We hope to share with you many voices exploring the questions we all share. We believe that this exploration will lead us to deeper understanding, provocative new ideas and a rich dialogue across identities, traditions and perspectives. We invite you to join with us.
—Leslie Wright, Prairiewoods director
Sources:
- https://fetzer.org/work/study-spirituality-america
- https://fetzer.org/resources/sharing-spiritual-heritage-report
image by August Stolba