Tag Archives: Christianity

The Chatbox as a Spiritual Companion: An Unexpected Journey

I have a confession to make: I sometimes use ChatGPT as a kind of spiritual companion.

This is a journey I never planned to take. And I still have mixed feelings about it.

A few months ago, I decided to engage in an extended back-and-forth with ChatGPT about some questions and struggles in my spiritual life. I began with a query about my imperfect attempts to live simply – a value central to my spiritual identity. After reflecting on ChatGPT’s response, I shared more: the tension between my love of international travel and my commitment to environmental stewardship.

The conversation deepened. I wrote about what I believed and what I doubted about God, and how that related to my choices about simplicity. ChatGPT would summarize my thoughts in ways that accurately reflected my views and that helped me go deeper. Eventually, it offered me a series of queries to ponder:

“In areas where you feel restless or dissatisfied, what is ‘enough?’”

“How free am you from possessions, status, and achievement as indicators of worth?”

“What in your life feels excessive: possessions, desires, and the like?”

“How do you notice the Spirit, or Love, moving in your life, even if you can’t name it as God with certainty?”

“Can you focus more on listening deeply and responding with care, rather than needing certainty?”

I remember reading these questions and feeling… stunned. How could a chatbox so precisely grasp the contours of my spiritual life and reflect them back in such gentle, searching language? These queries have stayed with me in my thoughts. They’ve shaped choices I’ve made and continue to guide my spiritual reflections.

A Moment of Spiritual Vulnerability

To admit this publicly feels risky. Using a chatbox for spiritual direction doesn’t fit with what I’ve long believed constitutes meaningful spiritualtiy. I imagine kindred spirits of mine reading this article and being concerned about the direction my spiritual life is taking.

And yet, recent research is helping me see both the promise and the pitfalls of bringing generative AI into our inner lives.

Continue reading →

4 Life Lessons from Quaker Spirituality

“I thought I’d live a louder life…
But silence called me deeper still
Like nothing else I know ever will”
—Carrie Newcomer, Quaker singer-songwriter

I didn’t expect to experience this lesson so clearly the first time I visited a Quaker meeting. About 30 minutes into the shared silence – the community gathered in a circle, each person listening expectantly in their own way for the Spirit to move – someone stood, picked up a guitar, and began singing “This Little Light of Mine.” Moments later, another rose and spoke:

“Before we were born, there was great silence, and after we die, we will return to great silence. So, it is good to spend time in silence together today in between.”

Ten years later, I still remember my astonishment at what arose out of that silence. I still remember the goosebumps.

For Quakers – members of the Religious Society of Friends – silence isn’t empty; it’s a place to connect with the Divine.

Centre Friend Meeting House, Centreville, Delaware

One of my early Quaker Friends, Jim, also left a lasting impression. When I invited him to share his personal story with my Psychology of Religion and Spirituality class, Jim said he’d be happy to do so – provided someone give him a ride because he didn’t own a car. As I pulled up to his house, I noticed his yard consisted entirely of vegetables and native plants. As thanks for the ride, when Jim entered my car, he offered me a big bag of freshly picked kale from his front yard, something he said he regularly did for friends and neighbors. In his quiet way, Jim also demonstrated a powerful expression of Quaker spirituality.

As a psychologist of religion and spirituality, I’ve long been drawn to learning from spiritual traditions that approach life in unique ways. Quaker spirituality, in particular, has offered me profound lessons into living a good life – insights that beautifully align with the emerging psychological science of well-being.

Here are four lessons that stand out:

1. Cultivate contemplative stillness.

“Seek to know an inward stillness, even amid the activities of daily life.”
—British Quaker Faith & Practice, Advices and Queries #3

Prayerful silence lies at the heart of Quaker spirituality. Quakers often seek to quiet themselves – alone, together, in nature – to be more anchored and present in daily life.

Psychological research on contemplative practice reflects the wisdom of this, revealing benefits like reduced stress, deep rest, and improved health and well-being. Even a few minutes of stillness each day can make a significant difference.

Continue reading →

Crafting a Positive Religious / Spiritual Identity

In the religious / spiritual dimension of your life, how do you identify? For example, with respect to religion / spirituality, fill in the blank: “I am a(n) _____.“

You may find this sentence easy to complete. You may even find this to be deeply affirming. On the other hand, you may also find the task complicated or even troubling.

When I was young, I would have easily completed the sentence to say “I am a Catholic.” But then my religious / spiritual identity expanded, and for many years, I would have proudly stated “I am a Christian.” Since that time, though, the religious / spiritual world has significantly changed, and I have changed with it.

Beginning in the mid-2000s to early 2010s, there began a general decline in religious activity – and an increase in religious non-affiliation – in the United States. Young Americans, in particular, reported strikingly negative perceptions of “Christians” and “Christianity,” often making associations between these terms and “judgmental” (87%), “hypocritical” (85%), “old-fashioned” (78%), and “too involved with politics” (75%). More recently, young people who were once – but no longer – religious cited reasons for their change as including a lack of compatibility between their religion and what they knew of science (52%) and not wanting to associate with a group they felt caused trauma to themselves or others or that perpetrated hatred toward other groups they supported (such as members of the LGBTQ population; 22%).

It’s instructive to consider all of this in light of identity, which the great psychologist, Erik Erikson, referred to as involving one’s core beliefs, values, and goals that give us a unique sense of self. In general, we’re drawn to associate ourselves with what’s positive, what’s good, and what’s valued, not what’s negative, problematic, or disliked. So, the more we believe our identity is connected with something “bad,” the more dissonance we may experience within ourselves in holding that identity. I believe this is the primary reason underlying why so much Christian religious behavior has decreased in the past few decades.

Continue reading →

The Psychology of Christian Spirituality

Many of us try to balance two key sides of ourselves: a spiritual side and an analytical side. Our spiritual side seeks the Sacred – something timeless or ultimately important or beautiful to us. For many, however, what we’ve learned through our quest for the Sacred conflicts with what we’ve learned elsewhere. For example, we might learn that religious teachings we were raised with conflict with science and, so, with time, we come to view our previous religious beliefs as wishful thinking, silly, or flat out unreasonable. We might still want to integrate our spiritual side and our analytical side in a desire for wholeness, but it doesn’t seem possible.

Psychological research asking individuals who became less religious over time why they believe this happened suggests that difficulty integrating the spiritual with the analytical is one of the primary factors often reported. In historically Christian countries, such as the United States, this contributes to what has been called “the great dechurching,” as Christian beliefs and practices have become less common over the past several decades. As Elizabeth Oldfield writes in her book “Fully Alive,” one effect of this is that “the stories that used to orient and guide us, handed down through generations of our ancestors, seem to have gotten lost in transit.” Oldfield shares how, at one point in her personal journey, “I tried to find a church, but struggled to connect… I found myself muttering cynically under my breath through services, so stopped going.”

In light of this increasingly common experience involving loss of faith, I was fascinated to read Oldfield’s attempt to reclaim the core of Christian spirituality in her book. As I read it, as a psychologist of religion and spirituality, I couldn’t help but relate what she was saying with what I know of psychological theory and research. For instance, Oldfield offers what I consider a continuum of human functioning, with “fully aliveness” on one side of the spectrum and “sin” on the other. What Oldfield emphasizes in this is that how people function reflects the extent to which they are connected with themselves, the earth, others, and the Divine. In other words, to be fully alive means we are connected; to be in sin means we are disconnected. This reframe helped me to appreciate Christianity in a new way, one that fits with my understanding of psychological research that humans generally do better when they feel meaningfully connected in a web of belonging.

Oldfield ultimately reviews the historical “7 deadly sins” and what Christian tradition suggests “fully aliveness” looks like with respect to each. For instance, with regard to “wrath,” Oldfield discusses some of the reasons why people appear increasingly polarized and how stories of Jesus often highlight how he initiated relationships with the lowest status, most outsider people around, as a way to break down social walls. For “avarice,” Oldfield notes how many tend to be motivated toward extrinsic values such as money, possessions, appearance, and fame, and how social problems such as poverty and climate change could be so much better if we focused more on virtues such as gratitude and generosity. For “gluttony,” Oldfield discusses addictions, in general, and how our needs for awe and self-transcendence could be redirected to better promote health and flourishing than when we try to find ecstasy through chemical means. For “pride,” Oldfield writes about the limitations of individualism and the need for repetitive, accessible social structures that nudge us into deep community.

Continue reading →

Florilegium (I): Sermon on the Mount

Leave a reply

Literally referring to a “book of sparklets,” the identification of “florilegia” is an ancient spiritual reading practice I’ve recently been exploring in my own life. Historically, this practice was performed by monks reading and praying the Psalms. Essentially, it’s a quote journal.

In this practice, as you read a sacred text, you look for sentences, phrases, or words that “sparkle” in the material. You then record those. When finished, you put all these separate quotes together to create a new text – a florilegium – that may allow the quoted material to take on new meanings, as each thought gets embedded in a different context than the original.

In engaging in this practice, it’s important to consider what text you consider sacred that you want to draw spiritual meaning from. To begin, I started my practice with Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7, but I started with 4:12 for more context). What sparkled for me recently appears below. (If I had done this practice 10 years ago, or even 10 days ago, my florilegium may be entirely different!)

“When Jesus heard that John had been put in prison, he withdrew to Galilee” (Matthew 4:12).

“From that time on, Jesus began to preach, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near'” (Matthew 4:17).

“Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people” (Matthew 4:23).

“Now when Jesus saw the crowds… His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them (Matthew 5:1-2):

“Blessed are the poor in Spirit…
Blessed are those who mourn…
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…
Blessed are the merciful…
Blessed are the pure in heart…
Blessed are the peacemakers” (Matthew 5:3-9).

“Love your enemies and pray for those who persectute you” (Matthew 5:44).

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth… But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven” (Matthew 6:19).

“Do not worry about tomorrow… Each day has enough trouble of its own” (Matthew 6:34).

“In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you” (Matthew 7:12).

For me, then, at least in this most recent reading, this florilegium summarizes what sparkled for me in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. To take this a step deeper, I could consider this and reflect on what individual sparklets or the overall message may mean for me and what actions I feel called toward.

Quaker Advices and Queries

Leave a reply

Within Christianity, some traditions emphasize a more mystical and spiritual approach than others. One tradition I’ve been particularly intrigued by is Quaker spirituality.

Part of Quaker spiritual practice is to identify, share, and meditate on specific advices and queries. Some of these can be traced back to George Fox in the mid-1600s. In some ways, these advices and queries translate Quaker experiences and insights about the Gospels into modern life.

Communities might lead a service with reference to an advice or query, and individuals might meditate on one for an hour, a day, a week, or a year.

I’ve been studying Quaker advices and queries shared by meetings across the world for several years. Below I’ll share some of my favorites, which mostly come from the London, New York, and New England yearly meetings.

Apponegansett Meeting House, Jean Schnell

Advices:

Take heed to the promptings of love and truth in your heart.

Bring the whole of your life under the ordering of the spirit of Christ.

Seek to know an inward stillness, even amid the activities of daily life.

While respecting the experiences and opinions of others, do not be afraid to say what you have found and what you value.

Try to find a spiritual wholeness which encompasses suffering as well as thankfulness and joy.

Each of us has a particular experience of God and each must find the way to be true to it.

Listen patiently and seek the truth which other people’s opinions may contain for you.

Avoid hurtful criticism and provocative language.

Think it possible that you may be mistaken.

Try to make your home a place of loving friendship and enjoyment, where all who live or visit may find the peace and refreshment of God’s presence.

Let your life speak.

Responding to divine guidance, try to discern the right time to undertake or relinquish responsibilities without undue pride or guilt.

Search out whatever in your own way of life may contain the seeds of war.

Do not let the desire to be sociable, or the fear of seeming peculiar, determine your decisions.

Try to live simply.

Stand still, wait for divine guidance, then act.

Be grateful for the gifts you have. Neither be too proud of them nor value them too little. Do not waste time coveting the gifts of others.

Attend to what love requires of you.

Queries:

Are you open to the healing power of God’s love?

How does Jesus speak to you today? Are you following Jesus’ example of love in action? Are you learning from his life the reality and cost of obedience to God?

Do you respect that of God in everyone though it may be expressed in unfamiliar ways or be difficult to discern?

Continue reading →

The Emotional Life of Jesus

Leave a reply

When I imagine Jesus – similar to when I imagine the Buddha – what initially comes to mind is someone who was pretty emotionally flat or emotionally neutral. If there’s an emotion I associate with Jesus, it’s one of serenity. Maybe this is because, when I consider Jesus, my mind’s eye turns to paintings and statues I’ve seen throughout my lifetime, such as the one my mom hung in our living room when I was a boy. In these, Jesus seemed to be beyond human emotion.

Heinrich Hofmann’s 1894 Painting | Wikimedia Commons

I’ve long been fascinated by emotion. Part of what inspired my calling to Psychology as an undergraduate were experiences at the University of Wisconsin helping to do research in influential emotion labs exploring embarrassment (with Dacher Keltner) and interest (with Judy Harackiewicz). In graduate school, at the University of Minnesota, I conducted research investigating correlates of emotional well-being, including anxiety, depression, hostility, and happiness (with Pat Frazier). I’m generally curious about how individuals feel, and I watch for non-verbal indications of how people react to life. It seems to me that someone’s emotional life reveals something deeply important about who they are.

I’ve also long been a follower of Jesus. Surely, a lot of this has to do with being raised in a Christian family in an often times Christian-dominant culture. But, there’s also something about the stories of Jesus that intrigue me. There’s something about who Jesus was that seems different, countercultural, and stunning.

It wasn’t until recently that I started to seriously explore the intersection of these two parts of myself. That is, I’ve started to wonder about the actual – not the imagined – emotional life of Jesus. In contrast to the sense I’ve received in some parts of Christianity to which I’ve been exposed, as I read it now, Jesus was a person of deep, passionate emotional intensity.

To explore Jesus’s emotional life, I did a focused study of the Gospel of Mark. This Gospel generally is considered by Bible scholars to be the earliest Gospel – written about 40 years after Jesus’s death. As the progressive Bible scholar, Marcus Borg argued, this account of Jesus’s life likely includes elements of both metaphor and remembered history, but the emotions attributed to Jesus, as discussed below, seem most likely to be traceable to the historical Jesus. As one reads this Gospel, there’s also an evident sense of immediacy to it, which lends itself to an investigation of Jesus’s emotional life.

To better understand context, as I read through Mark, I noted passages that described where Jesus chose to spend his time. He seemed to spend a lot of his days by the water (1:16; 2:13; 3:7; 4:1; 5:1), in the mountains (3:13; 6:46), in Synagogue (1:21; 3:1; 6:2) and, maybe not surprising for someone who didn’t seem to have a home of his own, in other people’s homes (1:29; 2:15; 3:20; 14:3). He seemed to frequently withdraw into nature to get away from the demands of the crowds, and to pray (e.g., 1:35; 6:46). This begins to give an indirect glimpse into Jesus’s emotional life.

In looking for more direct descriptions, what most surprised me in studying the Gospel of Mark was how often Jesus seemed to experience great irritation, sometimes to the point of almost seeming impatient. Jesus was said to speak “sternly” (1:25). On several occasions, he was described as being “indignant” (1:41; 10:14). At one point, Jesus looked at his skeptics “in anger… deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts” (3:5). When he finds people selling in the temple courts, he drives them out, overturning tables in anger (11:15-17).

Continue reading →

Why Religious Fundamentalism Can Inspire Hatred (and what to do about it)

Leave a reply

Intermixed with much of the worst of human history is a religious motivation. This can be seen in the involvement of a religious motivation in the genocide committed against American Indians and the Holocaust. More recently, this can be seen in the motivation behind tragedies such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the January 6 attack on the United States Capital. Other examples include the involvement of religion in motivating prejudice and violence directed toward members of the LGBTQ population and various cases of religious persecution.

Hooded Members of the Ku Klux Klan Displaying Christian Imagery, 1935.

As Blaise Pascal once reflected: “human beings never do evil so completely and so joyously as when they do it from a religious motivation.”

How can great world religions – which generally teach love, compassion, and justice – become powerful instruments of prejudice and violence?

Although acts of religiously-inspired hatred are complex and caused by many variables, one common factor concerns religious fundamentalism.

Religious fundamentalism involves a rigid kind of certainty in the possession of the “one truth” and the “one way” to live. It typically relies on a literal interpretation of a sacred text and an absolute reliance on that text. Other sources of knowing what’s true or other ways of determining what’s valuable are rejected – such as when science or a different group offers an alternative perspective – in favor of what’s unquestioningly accepted within the group.

With this all comes a strong urge for fundamentalists to form a sense of who are “insiders” and who are “outsiders.” Explicitly or implicitly, it’s easy for all of us to believe members of our groups are superior, while others are inferior. One way for religious fundamentalists to address this is to develop an evangelical zeal to bring outsiders to the inside through attempts to convert them. However, when individuals reject their arguments or invitations, fundamentalists can develop even stronger attitudes against them, to the point where outsiders can become seen as less than their human equals, sometimes even leading to consciously or unconsciously dehumanizing them. At this point, prejudice and violence toward members of the outgroup become more likely.

Because fundamentalist groups also tend to draw like-minded people to their communities, individuals in these groups often decrease or completely lose contact with those different from themselves. As a result, the kinds of reality checks most people tend to naturally have happen to them when they interact with people different from them become less likely, creating the conditions for stronger stereotypes and prejudices to develop.

Continue reading →

What It Means to Have a Relationship with Jesus

Leave a reply

One of the most basic – and yet for me, personally, one of the most confounding – aspects of Christian faith involves what it means to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I’ve always been confused by Christians who talk about their personal relationship with Jesus with total certainty, as if it was as obvious as their personal relationship with their spouse. To me, it hasn’t been obvious what it means to have a relationship with a Being I can’t directly perceive.

In light of this, I’ve been thinking a lot about a story that appears in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 24:13-35). For context, this occurs after Jesus was said to have been resurrected.

“… two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem. They were talking with each other about everything that had happened. As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them, but they were kept from recognizing him.

He asked them, ‘What are you discussing together as you walk along?’

They stood still, their faces downcast. One of them, named Cleopas, asked him, ‘Are you only a visitor to Jerusalem and do you not know the things that have happened here in these days?’

‘What things?,’ he asked.”

They then proceeded to discuss Jesus, particularly his death and rumors of his resurrection. They talked about the Scriptures.

After this discussion, “as they approached the village to which they were going, Jesus continued on as if he were going farther. But they urged him strongly, ‘Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over.’ So he went in to stay with them.

Later in the story, the two friends walking to Emmaus recognize Jesus (after which Jesus mysteriously disappears, raising other questions). But, at this point, the two friends don’t recognize him.

So, here’s my question: Even though they didn’t recognize him, were they in relationship with Jesus?

It would seem to me the only fair answer must be “yes.”

Continue reading →

The Ways of the Fundamentalist and the Mystic

Leave a reply

For many people, being religious means being a religious fundamentalist. From the media, this is the impression often given. However, decades of thinking and research in the psychology of religion suggest there are multiple ways of being religious, with distinct pros and cons.

Let me elaborate with a few personal stories.

About 20 years ago, I happened to be visiting a conservative Christian college when I was somehow invited to a retirement party for a faculty member – I believe a Theology Professor – who had worked at this college for many years. At one point, this man took center stage and spoke about his long and distinguished career. The Professor’s speech started as you might expect – with references to the meaningfulness of his work, gratitude for colleagues, etc. – until he took a surprising turn and honestly reflected on some of his struggles. The Professor started crying. He had a difficult time finding his words. Eventually, though, he explained how he called himself an “Agnostic Christian,” someone who wasn’t certain about religious and spiritual truths but still felt like he knew enough to make a commitment to Jesus and his interpretation of a Christian lifestyle. He discussed how the juxtaposition of “Agnostic” and “Christian” was sometimes not welcomed by conservatives at this college, but how this self-understanding felt so important to him and to his identity that he was moved to tears in sharing it.

For me, the Professor’s presentation felt like a revelation, for a few reasons. First, and most importantly, this was the first time I had ever heard someone openly acknowledge how they were both deeply uncertain about religious and spiritual truths while still being deeply committed to a faith. There was a raw honesty in this confession, and the juxtaposition created a new way for me to start thinking about my own religious and spiritual identification as well. Second, the Professor demonstrated to me the importance of adjectives in the religious world. Apparently, some people don’t simply identify along the lines of “Christian;” some identify as “Conservative Christian,” “Agnostic Christian,” “Social Justice Christian,” or “Mystical Christian.” In these cases, which of the two words is the adjective and which is the noun also can be enlightening to consider.

Fast forward a few weeks, when I found myself in a large group discussion about religion and spirituality at my public college. People were sharing their diverse ideas about religion and spirituality, and I thought I would “float” the above story and how it fit with my own self-understanding. A few people I didn’t know had joined us from a conservative Christian student club on campus, and after I shared, they walked over to me. I will never forget what happened next. One of them bent down and whispered into my ear: “you can’t be Christian and not know.”

Many people do not seem to recognize there are different ways you can be religious.

Source: Volodymyr Hryshchenko | Unsplash

Continue reading →