What does it mean to "live according to the Spirit?" What can these words of Paul signify -- not only for Christians who believe them to be divinely inspired, but for all people of good will? To be "spiritual," or to live according to the Spirit, is to know, and then to live by the knowledge, that there is more to life than meets the eye, that there is a deeper dimension to reality than first appears.

To be "spiritual" means, beyond that, to know, and to live by that knowledge, that God is present to us -- to all of us -- as the source of ongoing personal and communal growth and renewal. Christians call this divine presence the Holy Spirit. The theological term for the indwelling of the Holy Spirit within us is grace, which means literally, "gift."

Grace is the gift of God's presence. And the God who is given to us as grace, the God who is present within us as grace, is the Holy Spirit. The term "spirituality," therefore, embraces everything that we are, everything that we think, and everything that we do by the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit.

Since the Spirit of God is not present to Christians alone, spirituality is not exclusively Christian. Other religions have their own spiritual traditions: Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu. On the other hand, Christian spirituality does have certain defining characteristics, to which I now turn.

For Christians, spirituality is a quality and style of life that flows from the presence of the Holy Spirit -- not only within us as individuals but also within the Church, which means that Christians believe it to be the Temple of the Holy Spirit. For Christians, spirituality is rooted in the life of the triune God -- Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Christian spirituality is also centered on Jesus Christ. It is nurtured within the Church, and is oriented to the coming of God's reign, or kingdom, a reign of justice, love, and peace at history's end -- a justice, and a love, and a peace that are promised to all people of good will.

In addition, Christian spirituality is visionary, sacramental, relational and transformational. What do all these mean? Christian spirituality is visionary in that it involves a new way of seeing reality in Christ and then of seeing through things to their spiritual core, of thus "interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual," to cite the words of St. Paul from the first letter to the Corinthians, 2:13.

Christian spirituality is also sacramental because, according to Christian faith, every created reality is imbued, or permeated to one degree or another, with the hidden presence of God. Sacraments, after all, are visible signs of the invisible presence of God.

Christian spirituality is also relational because we are intimately linked with God and with one another. Each of us has come from the hand of the same creator-God and each of us is destined to return to the same creator-God for all eternity.

Christian spirituality, therefore, evokes from us a sense of responsibility toward the needs and the gifts of others, and indeed toward all the created goods of this earth. Concern for the environment, therefore, is as much a spiritual posture as it is political.

Finally, Christian spirituality is transformational. That is, we are suffused with and draw upon the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit -- a power which heals, reconciles, which renews and bestows peace, which sustains hope and brings joy, and creates unity.

The Second Vatican Council, held between the years 1962 and 1965, offered some particular guidelines for Christian spirituality in the Catholic tradition. Because I believe those guidelines to have wider application than to Catholics alone, I want to share them with you here.

First, the council laid to rest, once and for all, one hopes, the assumption that spirituality is for clergy and members of religious communities alone. It is for all the laity as well. The point is clearly made in the title of the fifth chapter of the council's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, entitled, "The Call of the Whole Church to Holiness." Earlier in the same document, the council declared, and I quote, that "all the faithful ... of whatever rank or status are called to the fullness of the Christian life and to the perfection of charity."

The next sentence in that text is equally significant: "By this holiness a more human way of life is promoted even in this earthly society." Holiness, therefore, comprehends much more than the soul's personal relationship with God. Holiness has a social, even a political, dimension. And that is the council's second principle of spirituality.

Thirdly, although each of us must adapt the call to perfection to her or his own situation in life, what will always be common to every form of spirituality is love of God and love of neighbor. On these two commandments of love, Jesus reminded us, the whole of God's law depends. Quoting from the Second Vatican Council again: "For charity, as the bond of perfection and the fulfillment of the law, rules over all the means of attaining holiness, gives life to them, and makes them work. Hence it is the love of God and of neighbor which points out the true disciple of Christ."

The council's fourth and final principle of Catholic spirituality is that spirituality is primarily nourished and deepened through communal worship. According to the council, worship, or liturgy, is the summit and the source of the whole spiritual life. For Catholics, as for many other Christians, that liturgy is centered in the Eucharist, or Lord's Supper.

We live in a time of a renewed and deepened interest in spirituality -- one might even describe the phenomenon as a new hunger for spirituality. But for what kind of spirituality? There are many. Even in the Catholic Church itself there are varieties of spirituality: Dominican, Franciscan, Benedictine, Cistercian, Ignatian, and so forth. And today many new forms of spirituality, not linked with religious orders as the older forms were, are vying for our attention and engagement. There is creation spirituality, new age spirituality, charismatic spirituality, feminist spirituality, liberation spirituality, and many other forms as well.

How is one to decide which of these and other spiritualities offers a genuinely healthy and balanced approach to a life lived "according to the Spirit?" I offer a few additional criteria now to assist us -- Christians and non-Christians alike -- in making that judgment.

First, spirituality must always be holistic. God created us, body and soul, flesh and spirit. Therefore, spirituality is for the whole person, body and soul alike. A spirituality which depreciates the body, or which sets the body against the spirit, distorts our humanity and its intended relationship with God.

The spirit-flesh opposition that we find in St. Paul, for example, is not an opposition between our bodies and our souls, as if our bodies were evil and our souls alone were good. It is an opposition, rather, between the whole person as oriented, on the one hand, toward God, and the whole person as oriented, on the other hand, away from God in the pursuit of selfish and destructive interests.

Second, spirituality must be other-oriented. We are created by God as essentially social beings. Accordingly, an inability to relate to others isn't necessarily a sign of personal intimacy with God. On the contrary, we must never conclude, as if by a process of elimination, that because someone can love no one else, she or he must love God very intensely.

Why was it ever said, for example, that "It's impossible to live with a saint?" Is it because people have been accustomed to identifying holiness with oddness? So that sitting at table with a saint means never telling a joke that might be even slightly off-color? Or having a saint as a collaborator in ministry means being forced to pray interminably at the strangest times? Or being married to a saint means never looking at, or touching, the saint with loving passion?

This is all nonsense, of course. Holiness is not oddness. Holiness is wholeness. If it should be difficult to live or work with a saint, it should only be difficult because the saint's personal example reminds us of our own failure to live up to the highest standards of our faith; namely, the love of God and the generous, self-sacrificing love of neighbor.

Real saints, in fact, possess a healthy sense of humor. Because they see reality with a truly spiritual vision, they perceive the inevitable and always amusing discrepancies between our grandiose human pretensions and the real grandeur of God's glory and saving grace.

Authentic Christian saints, therefore, are not people who always look as if they've heard some bad news that the rest of us haven't heard yet. Authentic Christian saints, like authentic saints in every religious tradition, are filled with confidence in the power of God to bring good out of evil, to bring hope out of despair, to bring life out of death. Saints know how to smile and laugh.

Third, spirituality must be humane and even, in a sense, worldly, if that doesn't sound too strange. The founder of the Jesuits, St. Ignatius of Loyola, urged his followers to see God in all things. And the founder of the Franciscans, St. Francis of Assisi, called upon his followers to love the sun, and the moon, and the stars, and all the living things of this earth, animate and inanimate alike. The invisible God is ever present and active within the visible, created order.

Spirituality, therefore, cannot be closed off from important components of human reality -- from art, from politics, from science, and even from play -- nor from the material environment in which we live. Everything and everyone offers the possibility of an encounter with God, for God is present to everything and to everyone. A spirituality that confines the presence of God to the tabernacle or the sanctuary, or to the church, the synagogue, or the mosque puts limits on the Holy Spirit and closes off avenues of spiritual growth and renewal.

Fourth, spirituality must be responsible -- responsible to the demands of justice, of peace, of human rights, and of human dignity. The authentically spiritual person cannot be insulated from, or indifferent to, the needs and cries of the poor and the oppressed, whether that oppression comes in the form of AIDS and the discrimination that accompanies the disease, or in the form of spousal abuse, or in more recognizably political forms in various countries of the world.

Concern for the poor and the powerless was, of course, at the center of Jesus' own preaching and ministry. When asked by the disciples of John the Baptist whether he was the one who was promised or should they search for yet another, Jesus answered: "Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the good news brought to them"

Fifth, and finally, spirituality must be universal in scope. It is never hierarchical, elitist, or exclusive. Spirituality is for everyone, because God is the creator and destiny of everyone. God is offered to everyone as a gift, as grace. And the ultimate gift is the gift of eternal life.

That gift awaits "those who live according to the Spirit and who set their minds on the things of the Spirit."

Lydia Talbot: Fr. McBrien, you began your message with Catholic theologian Karl Rahner's warning that spirituality is a mysterious and tender thing that we must only talk about with great difficulty. Having said that, how would you discern the difference between an American Catholic and Protestant approach to this quality and style of life?

Richard McBrien: That's a big question, but there are different approaches. I think the Catholic tradition at its best is, as I have tried to bring out in my presentation, tries to adopt a very positive attitude toward the body, toward the world, toward the created order. Protestant spirituality historically, now I'm not saying all Protestants are this way or always have been this way, but Protestant spirituality classically has been much more concerned about the dark side of life, if you will, the corruption, the sin, the proclivity to temptation and all that, and it has always warned the Catholics, "Hey, you are getting a little too comfortable with material reality. We have to remember that these are really snares of sin" and so forth and so on. I think that may be one of the reasons why many Protestant Christians are so attracted to the various Catholic spiritualities today. I think they find in it kind of a nice complement to their own emphases of the past and see it as a way of bringing some balance.

Talbot:  Well, you said that holiness conveys a social-political dimension. Now, how does that principle defined by Vatican II inform you about some of the tough issues facing the Catholic Church today, human sexuality, for example.

McBrien: Well, I think if there is any area which tests out one's spirituality, it is in the area of human sexuality. Even as I would praise my own tradition, the Catholic tradition, I have to also acknowledge it has had some pretty serious deficiencies and still does, in the area of human sexuality. In other words, I think Catholic spirituality becomes something other than Catholic when official Catholic teaching approaches the question of human sexuality. It becomes then very guarded, very pessimistic, very negative, very standoffish, very controlling and it doesn't work because it is inconsistent with our own tradition. I mean, after all, sexual intimacy, sexual love is a sacrament of God's love for us and our response to God's love, and all this, you know, you can't do this, you can't do that, hedging in, that has turned off so many Catholics even and I'm sure the Protestants aren't all delighted by it either.