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Listen to thisI recently attended a panel at the International Child and Youth Care Conference in Montreal on the issue of spirituality and child and youth work. As someone who had a rigorous Christian religious upbringing with both textual and experiential dimensions, I have always held an affinity towards the possibilities of what has come to be known as the “spiritual” aspects of human life and endeavor. Indeed, my own life as a young person was filled with both strict religious training and the open avenues of “spiritual” experience afforded by the late 60’s engagement with eastern thought, psychedelic experimentation and the politics of what Timothy Leary called Ecstasy and R.D. Laing Experience. I read the beatnik and hippie mystics of the time Allan Watts, Richard Alpert (Baba Ram Dass), Gary Snyder, Allan Ginsberg, Al Huang, Suzuki, Thomas Merton, and Stephen Gaskin among many others. I then waded into the deeper end of things with some of the source materials, The Bhaghavad Gita, Tao Te Ching, The Diamond Sutra and the Sutra’s of Hui Neng, The Inner Chapters of the ChuangTzu, The Dead Sea Scrolls, and of course the traditional texts of the Judeo-Christian Tradition. Along the way I had a number of what I would call fairly serious “spiritual crisis” and experienced my share of what might be called “spiritual” phenomenon. It seemed to me at the time, and I am not uncomfortable saying now, that psychedelic drugs were an important part of that “spiritual” experience.
I make that notation with a double note of caution. First of all, when we engage what we call the “spiritual” in youth work, do we mean all types of spiritual exploration including the use of drugs to take the world apart in ways that makes alternate perception a possibility? Or do we mean “spiritual” only in the sense that it gives us a new tool to shape the perceptions of young people to the needs and desires of dominant ideologies and structures of belief? Of course this is a rather superficial and possibly even specious binary; a straw man if you will. That said, however, is “spiritual crisis” within a pluralistic, postmodern society even available for the kind of complex and potentially dangerous negotiation necessary for the true seeker within the structures and confines of government and faith based funded organizations where youth work takes place? Do we have youth workers who have enough experience on the edges of the outside of spiritual experience (where the stakes of the crisis are not the souls' salvation in the life to come; nor the discomfort of alienation or loss of faith; but the absolute threat to everything we know to be our “self")? If we have such workers, what is their role? Is it to promote a drug free workplace, sobriety and sanity, a return to the comforting folds of the bourgeoisie fantasies of late stage capital and its mega-churches or something else perhaps a bit less comforting?
For myself, my initial training as a youth worker was in my mid-teens talking other young people through the horrors of bad psychedelic experiences. Learning to establish contact with someone profoundly withdrawn into a world inaccessible from the outside and gradually drawing them back to the surface and then on to a deeper and richer field of exploration and experience than the “death trip” might afford, allows one to learn a great deal about one’s capacities for relationship and self reflection. In the late 60’s there were thousands of such youth workers across the world working in homes, communities and on the streets. There were even special tents for this kind of “spiritual” youth work set up at rock festivals and other like events.
I don’t mean to romanticize the psychedelic experience. Indeed, I am instead pointing to its danger. We lost a number of young people who never came back from such exploration of their “spiritual” crisis. The 60’s experiment in “spiritual exploration” had casualties. Indeed for myself, it ended in a complete psychic collapse which thankfully took place among friends in a large communal household who simply took it as an extended “bad trip” and allowed me to gradually reintegrate while shielding me from unwarranted psychiatric intrusion. Years later I returned to the spiritual path through the disciplines and practices of various traditions and had the opportunity to study with some rather remarkable spiritual masters before stepping out of intentional exploration and into my current discipline of what I would call “life per se.” That, however, awaits another writing.
The “spiritual” aspect
What I want to explore here at the end of this short bit of reflection
is the danger inherent in assuming that we have any idea what we are
discussing when we talk glibly of the “spiritual” aspect of child and
youth work. I remember a wise teacher of mine, Marian Skottmyhre, once
told me a story about her initial encounter with Kudalini Yoga. She had
gone to take a class with a young yoga instructor on this form of
spiritual discipline. She learned that the purpose of the practice was
to awaken one’s Kundalini or one’s primal spiritual force. The various
body postures involved were to open one’s chakras of energy points along
the spine in order to loose the serpentine force of the Kundalini so
that it would be free to travel up the spine to the crown chakra and
open one’s awareness to the infinite. Of course, in the practice of most
yoga classes this seldom if ever actually occurs. One gets some
exercise, a bit more energy and some time to reflect. It occurred to my
teacher that if this yoga was successful that such a sudden release of
force within the confines of the conventional western “self” would
undoubtedly cause a “crisis” of significant proportion. When she began
to feel the first stirrings of the Kudalini in her practice, she asked
herself, can this yoga instructor handle what might happen here? She
decided he could not and ceased the practice immediately.
Within the pre-colonial world and even well into modernity there was within community a general consensus of what the world consisted both metaphysically and physically. The spiritual practices of a community evolved over time, based on the idiosyncratic struggles and environmental developments of a particular people in a particular place or series of places. The community members who managed the spiritual affairs of a community were selected by that community based on the belief system about how such things ought to be done. Often times in the Shamanic tradition this was based on their own unique capacity to have weathered a life threatening “spiritual crisis.” Such people were called to their task by the community based on their abilities.
My friend and colleague Jim Nelson, who ran the program City Inc. in Minneapolis during its most revolutionary period, introduced spiritual elders into the work of his agency in the inner city as a way of working with severe gang violence and community disintegration. He told me many times that perhaps the most important thing that happened to him during his work with these elders was that they kept asking him, what community had called him to be a youth worker? I think if we are to do “spiritual” work in Child and Youth Care we should ask this question. What group of people called you to do this or are you self appointed?
In our postmodern late stage capital world, of course, the question of community becomes problematic in and of itself. In the institutional settings of Child and Youth Care work, who calls us – the government, the agency, the church, the non-profit funding group? Under the older ways it would need to be the youth and families, but how many of us can claim to have been selected in such a fashion. Even if we were given “spiritual” mandate what kind of spiritual consensus would we draw upon to found our practice. We often refer to the rubric of “holism” to promote or defend the introduction of the spiritual into Child and Youth Care practice. We say that the spiritual is as important a dimension as the psychological. In doing so, we claim a certain ideological innocence, as though either psychology or the “spiritual” were neutral political categories.
Without belaboring the point, let us remember that both psychology and the church have a deep history complicit in the horrors of past two hundred years. The introduction of any set of religious beliefs by staff into an institutional setting holds a particular force when that setting holds access to food, shelter, work, safety and relationship. There are no neutral religious or spiritual beliefs politically within the world of post-modern, post-colonial capitalism. Across the globe religious and spiritual beliefs are at war in the most literal sense. Do we imagine that we can remain pure and untouched in our own distribution of spiritual belief, dogma and text?
Finally, like psychology, Marxism, neo-liberalism, medicine, biology or any other set of descriptions of how the world functions, spirituality holds a double function. It can either open the door to an increase in the free expression of the capacities of life or it can serve the interest of the dominant state or economic apparatuses of capture available in any historic moment. In introducing the long personal narrative about psychedelic drugs which began this piece, I am suggesting that we are not serious about real open exploration of the depths of possible spiritual experience in our programs including the use of such things as psycho-active drugs, sacred sexual practices, orgiastic meditations, life threatening fasts, or body mortification to name but a few traditional “spiritual” practices and disciplines. Indeed, I would suggest that we would be arrested, shut down and publicly exorcized for even suggesting such new program ideas.
Instead I would suggest we have a tamer spirituality in mind; a more middle class spirituality – perhaps a return to some pluralistic Habermasian equivalent of religious tolerance in our programming within which the church can once again find its role alongside psychology in disciplining the postmodern excesses of our children. On the other hand, perhaps I am mistaken and there are still spiritual revolutionaries among us who wish to explore the capacities of that force we call life in all its mad edges and open frontiers. While this is no longer my work, I would be very interested to see what they might get done and what the costs will be.
