Adolescent Spirituality

I have been deeply moved by the spirituality of adolescents since I began working with them five years ago.  Since that time, I have clearly seen spiritual needs in every single one of the hundreds of teens I have worked with, and have attempted to care for those needs by meeting students fully in the moment and writing curricula for them that supports meaningful intellectual development.    

In this article I'll describe what I mean by spirituality, what I have seen in students that I consider to be spiritual, and how I attempt to care for my students as spiritual beings.  However, I'll begin by reviewing the current state of research on the psychology of adolescent spirituality, as summarized in a fifty page article in the third edition of the influential Handbook of Adolescent Psychology, published in 2009.  The overview makes it clear that there are some inadequacies in the field that are quite important to resolve. 

The psychology of adolescent spirituality, as an academic subject, is only a decade old.  I was thrilled to discover this new field while working on my Master's thesis, and imagined that I was about to encounter a revolutionary treasure trove of insights from neuroscience, sociology, psychology and religious studies that would bring the discourse on spirituality out of its current state of murkiness and grant the subject the sort of newly found academic and public respect that meditation has recently received from neuroscience.  Although I was unconcerned about finding a definition that would suit everyone, I hoped to discover a definition and a discourse that had succeeded in looking beyond cultural assumptions of spirituality, that had developed a sophisticated analysis of the relationship of spirituality and religiosity.  I imagined an academic dialogue that was exploring the physiology of spirituality, the evolutionary reasons why the human animal is spiritual, and what spirituality looked like developmentally. 

Instead, the psychology of adolescent spirituality seemed embarrassingly stuck in some old fashioned Western binaries, as if the postmodern and post-colonial revolutions never happened way back in the 70's.    This was clear to me from the very language of the article, which was filled with Protestant assumptions of the meaning and form of spirituality and religiosity. The authors were aware of the problem:

"Leaders in the field of the psychology of religion [which has deeply informed the field of adolescent spirituality]... have acknowledged that the field has been dominated by a largely Protestant-Christian orientation to date.  What is less acknowledged is that this orientation includes a tacit emphasis on dualistic metaphysics (spirit vs. nature, sacred vs. profane, soul vs. body); theistic conceptions of divinity (God as a Being); singular pathways to spiritual development (e.g., devotion to God); and specific Western cultural issues in the study of religion and spirituality."

So much for an impartial neuroscience of spirituality and looking beyond cultural assumptions...

The definitions at play also carry cultural baggage of a different sort: for example, spirituality is "a personal quest for understanding answers to ultimate questions about life, about meaning, and about relationships to the sacred or transcendent, which may (or may not) lead to or arise from the development of religious rituals and the formation of community".  This definition has benefits: it allows for spirituality to be connected to religiosity and to transcendence, but also simply to meaning.  It doesn't get trapped in the still popular idea that while religion is rooted in groups and institutions, spirituality is an individual experience: it can be either communal or individual, supported by religion or totally secular.  Not blatantly Protestant in its approach, so perhaps a good start...

However, its a rather intellectual and action-oriented understanding of spirituality; a spirituality based on solving questions, discovering meaning, and actively pursuing or questing - particularly after something ultimate, even if that ultimate is of a non-religious nature.  The definition misses something fundamental about spirituality as I understand it: human beings, at all stages of life, simply have spiritual feelings, desires, and experiences. 

Quests, searches, answers and ultimates make up only a fragment of spiritual experience.  I think that what makes most feelings, desires, and experiences spiritual is depth, closeness, and connectedness.  I like to summarize those three words as intimacy.  We experience intimacy not only with others, but with ourselves, and also with the phenomena of the world.  For example, when I was a little boy, I would go for long walks in the hills by myself.  During these walks I would often become deeply contemplative.  Getting to the top of a ridge, I would gaze out over the land, and feel incredibly connected to it.  I became much more aware of the smells around me, of the texture of the wind, of the feel of the sun.  I felt a sense of largeness, inside of me, and out in the world. 

I understand this intimacy with the world as spiritual: it doesn't involve any realization, it doesn't involve a quest, it may even be an everyday experience for kids who are raised walking the hills.  But it is profound.  It is spiritual.   It is part of being the type of animal that we are - a human.  Another example: if I give thanks for food, I realize the depth of the food, realize my intimacy with the complicated chain of biology and human labor leading to the food that keeps me healthy.  And another: if I pause before sipping my tea, I am more likely to notice the weight of the cup in my hand, the warmth of the steam, the subtleties of the taste.  And another important example from my life: if I keep a meditation practice, I will see my students more clearly, and thus more deeply.  If I fail to meditate, I may even lose my perception of the fact that they are spiritual beings, because I need to be calm and grounded if I am to see other beings clearly.  If I lose my own groundedness and self-awareness - my intimacy with myself - I also lose my intimacy with my students.         

Feelings and experiences of depth, closeness, and connectedness often arise through calmness, groundedness, awareness, presence, compassion, and love - all of which can be intentionally cultivated.  And yet, as a society we fail not only to prioritize the cultivation of intimacy, which arguably should be at the core of life, but even to understand that cultivation is possible and rather simple.  I cannot help but feel that this is partly due to the baggage that our understanding of spirituality carries with it - baggage portrayed so well by the definition of spirituality scholars of adolescent psychology are using.  

Perhaps our society is alienated from spirituality by the heavy dedication involved in questing, by the enormity of the concept of transcendence, by the otherness of the sacred.  Such a spirituality is something for the devoted few, and something, frankly, that many good people feel is just unpragmatically abstract, overly theoretical, or based in dogma.  It differs radically from the grounded simplicity of appreciating the clouds, of feeling the breath entering the body, of being mindful of ones words, of cherishing another being.  The frame of spirituality as about questing and transcendence makes it hard to discuss the everydayness of spirituality, of the spirituality of human nature, and of course, of the adolescents whom we attempt to care for.

I believe that our society is also alienated from spirituality because it is so intertwined with religiosity and religious institutions: indeed, much of the research on adolescent spirituality is an examination not of that spirituality in the everyday world, but of how religious institutions support "positive youth development".  There is little that I value more than the opportunity for youth to have meaningful discussions about ethics, to develop networks within a community, to develop intergenerational relationships, and to have spiritual role models.  These are phenomena that religious institutions thankfully provide.  However, it is a shame that they are rarely provided elsewhere, and perhaps if we understood spirituality as more of an everyday, all encompassing human phenomenon, we could begin to provide more of these resources in a non-religious setting, with absolutely no agenda to believe this or that, in a way that many people could feel comfortable engaging in.   

If adults don't help adolescents learn the true means to cultivate spirituality, adolescents will often enter a minefield: not understanding how to pursue the intimacy they so clearly desire, they may pursue depth through the intensity of drugs, closeness through sexual encounters they do not truly desire and are not ready for, connectedness through the brotherhood of gang activity.  They may numb themselves from having to feel the opposite of connection and intimacy - alienation - through playing endless video games. They require our example.  In fact, without our example, it will be quite difficult to gain their trust.  If adolescents do not feel supported in the all important endeavor of pursuing depth, closeness, and connectedness, they have every reason to turn the other way.  The desire for intimacy is at the core of adolescent life.  They are rightly suspicious of adults for having displaced this priority.

I propose to those involved in studying adolescent spirituality that spirituality is much more about the everyday desires and experiences of normal people than our society is used to considering, and that we should take the everyday desires for intimacy and experiences of it as our primary subject of study.  In studying the everyday spiritual feelings, desires, and experiences of adolescents we should: study what leads to spiritual intimacy and what blocks it, how students conceive of that intimacy,  what language they have for it, as well as what confusions, how they strive to satisfy desires for spiritual intimacy - for better or worse, and how we can help adolescents understand and truly fulfill their spiritual needs.   

I would like to close with a few stories of student spirituality.

1) My student Mohammed would lay out his prayer rug twice during the school day to pray.  A religious activity, surely, but also a spiritual one: Mohammed was calmer and more grounded after a few minutes of prayer.  He gained confidence and strength.  His rapid, rambling speech slowed down and he became more insightful.  Mohammed's prayer was a time-tested spiritual technique of stopping ones busy activity and thought, being quiet for a moment in order to check in with the self, and reconnecting with important beliefs and values that all too easily slip away. In addition, it meant a great deal to him that I enjoyed helping him explore his belief in God, and that, although with no belief in God myself, I had considered the matter deeply.  He was not used to teachers valuing that belief, which was at the core of his life. 

2) Students - especially young men lacking strong, positive male role models in their lives - often seek me out after class or school.  I keep a tea set in my classroom, and have converted a few dozen sixteen and seventeen year olds away from soda to herbal tea.  Some have been happy, healthy AP students, and others have been involved in gangs and have been living with terrible amounts of fear suppressed through aggression.  Regardless of their background, they adore the ritual.  They love the chance to slow down and become calm.  As we talk, they benefit immeasurably from getting the chance to contemplate life through our conversation, to take pauses in their thought process, to get help checking in with their emotions, and to discuss ethics.  My gang members in particular often want to discuss honor, humility, and also family.  Many of them suffer because they know they are wounding their mothers and setting a bad example for little brothers or cousins.  They discover that if they slow down and become more present - the ritual of pouring and sipping tea is a technique for doing this - that they can actually voice these emotions and become vulnerable enough to connect with what they really feel. 

3) I wrote the story of the Buddha for a group of sixth graders, and as I read it to them, they became deeply contemplative.  (See that story here).  When I read the lines where Siddhartha contemplates the meaning of death, I felt as if the students were hardly breathing.  And when I taught a lesson on how the Buddha learned to become as calm, loving, and wise as he could possibly become, one student shyly asked me, "do you have to become a Buddhist to do that?"  "No, of course not", I said. "All people can do that, no matter what their religion is.  You don't even need a religion".

To do that, all we need is the spiritual nature that is part of being this human animal.