As with the word prayer, I may be using the term spirituality in an unfamiliar way. This is largely becausespirituality has come to be considered as something outside of everyday life: attending weekly services, leaving thesecular world entirely by joining a monastery, visiting a retreat centre, or travelling to distant lands in search ofenlightenment. In recent decades, spirituality has come to be seen as a means of self-improvement, peacefulnessand personal well-being. In fact, spirituality does not need to be about any of these things. Cynthia Bourgeault,writer, retreat leader and Anglican Priest, asks: “What if transformation isn’t about attainment but about expression?It’s not about accomplishing, changing, or realizing our essential nature. In fact, it’s not about us at all.” iiAccording to Buddhist psychologist Jack Kornfield, true spirituality is not about removing ourselves fromsociety, but about engaging with the deepest aspects of ourselves, the people around us and the world itself: “Truespirituality is not a removal or escape from life. It is an opening, a seeing of the world with a deeper vision that isless self-centred, a vision that sees through dualistic views to the underlying interconnectedness of all life.” iiiThe spirituality described by Kornfield does not depend on the repeating of creeds or the following ofa given belief system, but can be felt at any time and place. Taking three deep breaths is enough to dramaticallychange our physical state and with it our emotional state, as well as our ability to think clearly. This “spirituality”,or sense of expansiveness can take place wherever we are and, after a time, without conscious effort. As CynthiaBourgeault likes to say: “what begins as a place to go to, becomes a place we move from.” iv The best way to sharethis notion of embodied spirituality is through a story, and so I will tell a part of mine.My Road to Art-MakingAs with many stories of breakthroughs, mine begins with a breakdown. It came seven years ago, at thetail end of a serious relationship and years of chasing what seemed to be an endless chain of social struggles andpolitical campaigns. I was exhausted and at the end of my rope. I was not as much frustrated with what I wasdoing as with how I was doing it. A close Buddhist friend gently encouraged me to stop my constant running,even for a few minutes. I appreciated the advice but could not find a way to begin. I was given a book by RichardRohr, a Franciscan monk and founder of the Center of Action and Contemplation in New Mexico. What Ifound in Rohr was not an escape from the world and its troubles but a way to engage deeply with it: “not fight orflight but the compassionate middle.” I learned from Rohr the practice of centering prayer, a form of meditationdistilled from a 1500-year-old Western monastic tradition into a system involving twenty-minute sessions inwhich we open ourselves to what is called the divine indwelling.I was living at that time in small-town Ontario, learning to meditate on my own, based on my readingof Rohr and others. One evening, I said to my then-girlfriend, “What are the chances of there being othersinterested in centering prayer nearby?” My question was answered a few days later when a sign promoting a newcentering prayer group appeared in front of the church at the end of our street. The next Sunday I found myselfin a United Church, sitting in silence among a small group of elderly women, all of us asking ourselves the samequestion: “Where has this been in my life?” Within a few weeks, with the help of a staff person from the nationaloffice of the United Church, I found myself leading a workshop on simple spiritual practices. A few monthslater, for various reasons, I moved to Victoria B.C., not realizing that I had stumbled into one of the centres ofChristian contemplative prayer in North America. There, I also found the Contemplative Society, a West Coast,non-denominational organization. Within a few days I had become its administrator, filling a position that hadjust been vacated, and I met the Society’s lead teacher, Cynthia Bourgeault. As one of the first (legal) womenpriests in the Anglican Church, she had a deep understanding of Christianity’s place within what she called the“wisdom tradition,” with centering prayer and other forms of silent prayer being a kind of underground meetingplace of the different faiths. Since then, she has become a core faculty member with the Spiritual Paths Institute,an organization committed to interfaith understanding. After working and studying with Cynthia Bourgeaultand other members of the Contemplative Society for three years, I decided to move to Toronto where I knewmaintaining a sense of inner silence would be a very ambitious goal!5
Community Arts A Kind of DefinitionA month after arriving in Toronto, I attended the Arts4All Essentials workshops inFebruary 2008. While I had been exploring links between society and art for the two decades predating myinterest in contemplative spiritual practice, I was excited to discover the kind of community-engaged art-makingpracticed by <strong>Jumblies</strong> <strong>Theatre</strong> and its artistic director, Ruth Howard. Through <strong>Jumblies</strong>, I found a process bothgrounded and practical, and yet very radical. In response to the alienating effects of Western society, I had spentthe previous years of spiritual pursuit exploring how we can reconnect to our deepest selves. At the same time,<strong>Jumblies</strong> <strong>Theatre</strong> was busy healing the historical split between society and artistic creation. As of February2008, Ruth Howard was describing community arts as:a force for change that aims to expand and transform the relationship between art andour own society. It places side-by-side two concepts that have become disjointed, andits eventual success might be heralded by the term itself becoming redundant, becauseart will, as it has at other times and does in other places, imply community, and vice versa. vLike centering prayer, community arts is a specific practice, developed in the previous decades, thatdraws on ancient traditions in a way that is flexible and fluid. According to Ruth Howard, the basic principles ofcommunity arts include:no set model or right way to do it,art and artists at the core,•inclusion: an open-ended definition of community,process and product: not just balanced but intertwined - all part of the art, andappropriate forms: it couldn’t be done as well anywhere else with anyone else.She continues to say that community arts share the following ingredients with other forms of art:artistic leadership, drawing on specialized skills and cultural traditions,aesthetic integrity, adventure, excitement,artistic collaboration, process of exploration and creation, andpresentation of outcomes to an audience.•Howard distinguishes the following aspects from other artistic forms:collaboration between arts and non-arts entities,relationships (of some depth),•participation (as a concept falling between artist and audience),inclusion (Everyone is welcome! no limiting categories),social change/transformation (fleeting Utopias and lasting ripples).6
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