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Few areas of interest are expanding as rapidly to day as spirituality. Do-it-yourself versions abound, scrambling themes from world religions, New Age fads, and psychology in wildly eclectic variations. Christian offerings are also proliferating, stretching from the "Five Easy Steps" variety to scholarly retrievals of classic Catholic saints (perhaps most appreciated by Protestants). Across the board, however, spirituality is often promoted by contrasting it sharply with words like intellect, theology, and doctrine. Spirituality, one repeatedly hears, concerns the right brain, not the left; you must get out of your head and into your heart.
In such a climate, it is significant that The Shape of Living comes from a distinguished academic theologian (David Ford is Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge). Yet it is also significant that many readers may not recognize this. David Ford's image-laden prose, interspersed with Michael O'Siadhail's poetry, renders the spiritual significance of everyday joys and struggles, and of those processes and powers that shape them, recognizable to everyone. Yet barely visible beneath this highly accessible word stream runs a current of profound theological depth.
To probe at today's heart-head opposition, I want to sound that current at several points, yet not to reduce spirituality's overflow to some underlying structure. My intent is the reverse: to indicate how contemporary theological themes need not be intellectual abstractions, but can help us discern the swiftly shifting contours of our lives. Without question, spiritual reality ceaselessly surpasses all rational description. This reality is hardly amorphous, devoid of all shape. Its shaping, however, is not best conveyed by images like structure or foundation. It is more like the themes, counter themes, and their expositions that pattern a symphony whose beauty and exuberance far exceed understanding.
Ford's book "is about coping with multiple over-whelmings, both good and bad." It clearly is situated amidst the accelerating productivities, multiplying diversities, and organizational anonymities configuring much of to day's world. Through Ford's pages one often glimpses the harried, responsible, educated professional; predominantly Western, perhaps mostly urban and white. One glimpses people wrestling with overstimulation, not boredom; overwork, not unemployment; those at the center, not on the margins.
Yet Ford proposes that the experience of being overwhelmed is not unique to this culture, nor is it wholly negative. Indeed, at its core, spiritual life involves being overwhelmed: by evil and suffering, by causes and loved ones, but most of all, by God. Here is no tame, cautious rendering of the spiritual life, preoccupied with moderation and restraint. Here is a cosmic vision of daring, passion, and excess—yet one where responses call for mobile balance, permeable boundaries, and flexible shape. Here is a spirituality of responsible personal and social action, yet one whose chief decisions involve when to be overwhelmed, and by what.
Spirituality is often conceived individualistically—as mostly what one does with one's solitude. For Ford, however, selves are constituted much as current object relations theory says. Every child introjects "objects" (persons or features of persons) from its surroundings, and its emerging self is contoured around these cores. This means that various faces and voices inhabit each person's "heart" (which Ford does not oppose to "head," but describes more biblically as the center of memory, feeling, imagination, and thought). Self-formation involves continuing dialogue with the oldest, most deeply imprinted of these, but also with new ones that come along. We are most deeply shaped by those who have overwhelmed us, for good or ill. We will never fully fathom their influence. Yet this need not always be damaging, since being fully human involves the capacity to be overwhelmed.
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