A Buddhist might call them forms of enlightened living. A Muslim might call them forms of ihsan (feeling and doing the beautiful). But all are important.Ī Christian might call them forms of abundant living. And some, such as wonder and a sense of mystery and silence can seem a little more 'inward' in nature. Some, such as justice and peace and kindness and love, are deeply connected to our lives in society.

In the language of process theology they are subjective forms: ways of touching, and being touched by, the Spirit of life and love. These are what the Center for Process Spirituality mean by spirituality. Hybrid prehensions are physical feelings of the mental pole of other living beings, in this instance the mental pole of God's ongoing life, consisting as it does of aims for the world.īy the mystical I have in mind the thirty-seven qualities of heart and mind identified by the world's most inclusive interfaith resource: Spirituality and Practice. Indeed, t he initial aims of which process theologians often speak - by which humans and other living beings can be guided by God - often can be understood as fresh possibilities felt within the depths of experience through hybrid prehensions. Process theologians rightly speak of 'intellectual feelings.' But experience is much more than belief, and we humans meet the Spirit in the entire range of experience, through 'physical feelings' and 'imaginative feelings' and 'anticipatory feelings' and 'hybrid feelings' of the minds of others, all of which are qualities of heart and mind (subjective forms) and ways of being related to others (forms of connection). Yes, belief itself is a form of experience. Theologians are too often interested in reducing religion to belief or, worse, systems of belief. His outlook on life is quite similar to that of process theology, but he would never call himself a theologian, and for good reasons. He is an interfaith, justice-oriented, spiritually-sensitive writer for our time. Howard Thurman provides a model and needed wisdom. There is a yearning in our time, all over the world, for a way of being religious that finds the Spirit of God in the depths of life itself that is at home in the silence of the heart as well as the passion for justice that understands and appreciates the human need for localized religious and non-religious identities, while simultaneously welcoming a fellowship of all peoples whatever race, creed, or ethnicity.

The Centering Moment by Howard Thurman