Students today are seeking spirituality through interiority rather than external forms of religion. They are drawn to mysticism as it focuses on personal experience over doctrine. While some students were initially skeptical of religion, studying spirituality through poetry and writings of mystics moved them emotionally. Students see spirituality as a journey of self-discovery to address feelings of emptiness and find meaning. This interior journey involves imagination, intuition, and cultivating one's inner life rather than accepting religious truths externally. Effective spiritual development means allowing truths to mature through one's own experiences rather than accepting pre-defined doctrines.

1. Youth Spirituality: The Call
to Interiority
 Today faith requires an inner life. – Louis Dupré
 Louis Dupré, ‘Spiritual Life and the Survival of Christianity:
Reflections at the End of the Millennium’, in Cross Currents,
New York, 48:3 (1998), p. 4.
http://www.crosscurrents.org/dupre.htm
 The theological problem today is the art of drawing religion
out of an individual, not pumping it into him or her. The art is
to help people become what they really are. – Karl Rahner
 Karl Rahner, quoted in Maureen Gallagher, The Art of
Catechesis (New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1998), p. 75.

2.  Public worship and community work are good things,
but they are only half of the religious story. They are
part of the out-breath, or exhalation into the world; but
there is also the in-breath, or inhalation into the inner
world. The in-breath, in Latin, in spirare, from which we
derive the word ‘inspiration’, is missing in the external
focus of Western religion. Youth embody this in stark
relief, in their concern for meditation, interiority and the
God within.

3.  I found students did not care whether mystics were
Christian, Islamic, Jewish or Hindu, so long as their
language was not dogmatic or theological. They did not
like the way theology asserted positive knowledge of
the sacred, but were enthralled by how mystics evoked
the sacred. I could teach the Christian Eckhart, the
Hindu Kabir, the Islamic Rumi, and there would be no
protest. Why was this so? It was because the mystics
began with experience and not with doctrine.

4.  One student who denied having faith at the start of the
course had this to say at the end:
 It is hard to sway a convinced materialist like myself from his
constant scepticism about religious matters, at least I
thought it was before this course. But it is terribly hard to
continue to oppose the idea of ‘spirit’ when it is presented in
poetry and inspirational writings. Before the course, I
blocked out religion as irrelevant to my life, it made no sense
to me at all in its conventional, archaic and drab form. But
when spirituality is expressed in poetry, passion, and
subjectivity, I have to take another look, as these
expressions are inspirational and move me in an
unexpected way. I now see that emotion and spirit can be
included in my world, and I can have such elements without
straying from reality. – Steven

5.  Students often said that the sense of emptiness was so
strong that they were driven to spirit. They were aware that
their spiritual interests put them at odds with society. They
were acutely aware that they were living in a time in which
spirit was discounted, and they developed theories about
why spirit was coming back. One student wrote:
 Attitudes to spirituality have changed in recent times, and
have become more receptive. I don’t think that it is seen as
a weakness anymore to admit to the feeling that there is
something missing in our lives. In the modern era, to refer to
the spirit, and to call attention to what was missing in
modernity, might have raised the ire of those of us who felt
they were getting along nicely without ‘religion’ or
‘spirituality’. Today in the postmodern world, it is more
obvious that we are missing something, and to point this out
is no longer seen as offensive or impolite. – Amber
(background: secular)

6.  Although the social mask is hard it is also brittle, and easily
broken in times of adversity, as this student writes:
 Underneath their hardened secular shells, people still need
to believe that there is more to their existence than just one
fragile life, that, in the sweep of time, is over in a blink of the
eye. The majority of people still have faith, or rapidly try to
recover faith in the critical and urgent moments of our lives.
This is today’s reality, which is confounding to me: why do
we wait for adverse circumstances to occur before we reach
out to touch the face of God and to be embraced by the
holy? – Carolyn (family background: atheist)

7.  In my teaching practice I found students grappling with basic
questions in a moving way. They would ask: what is the spiritual
life? Is it a journey, as is often stated? If so, can they trust the
forces of spirit to guide them? Is such a journey real, or a flight of
fancy?:
 What is spirituality? The idea excites but also terrifies me. If I go in
this direction, if I take this path seriously, then I have to know that it
is right and true. What if I invest so much of my self, my energy,
my identity in something that proves to be completely false or
unreal? That is a scary feeling. But I always come back to what
feels right, even though my intellect fails to provide me with the
rational answers. It cannot tell me why I need spirit at all.
Sometimes, when I have doubts, I remember that the spirit is
ultimately a mystery, and we can never conceptualise or
understand it. If I could define God once and for all, I believe God
would really be dead then. – Ambika (family background:
humanist / atheist)

8.  Students are often remarkably expressive when they write on what
spirituality means to them.
 We cannot see spirituality, therefore it is hard to believe that it exists.
Those who work in the field of science believe what they see, so they
have no belief in spirituality, whereas those who think with their hearts
and have an open mind are open to believing in spirituality. – Gorica
(family background: Serbian Orthodox)
 The spiritual life is discerned and kept alive by feelings, and people in
touch with their feelings are less likely to shut down the spiritual life
because it seems absurd to the mind. Feeling discerns something
behind our emptiness:
 Spirituality to me is a particular kind of longing. This longing is almost
an intense physical feeling that haunts me, and makes me ache for
something. It is quite elusive, as what I long for is not immediate; I
cannot see or touch it. It is a longing for something that is a long way
off, and often leads me to melancholy. I recognise that what I long for
is impossible to grasp, but the intensity of the feeling is strong. I
cannot provide an easy solution to this longing, and recognise that the
search will be long and hard. I am hoping that this course will help me
to understand more clearly what I am longing for. – Leah (family
background: lapsed Anglican)

9.  Talking about what is invisible can seem absurd. The
spiritual journey is a movement beneath surfaces into
shadowy depths. It calls forth something, and students seem
to recognise that this calling forth requires a faith that there
is something ‘there’. The reaching out is an act of
transformation, because in our attempt to reach out the
object of our longing is stirred to activity:
 Spirituality is like a flower that blooms when it is seen and
acknowledged. The more you are able to nourish it, the
stronger will your spirituality become. It does not matter how
we actually conceptualise spirituality, what matters is that we
acknowledge that it exists, and with that acknowledgement
comes the support and strength of an inner life. – Gorica
 Today’s students often sound like mystics of the distant past.
They write, like Teresa of Avila or Catherine of Siena, of the
importance of imagination in the cultivation of an interior life.
They work to ‘imagine’ another life into existence.

10.  This imagining is called intuition by many students, and
intuition is a vital faculty in the development of spiritual life:
 Spirituality is a kind of inner knowing. You believe in
something that you haven’t seen before, but somehow you
know it exists. – Gorica (family: Eastern orthodox)
 By its nature, the divine is inexpressible and beyond
definition, therefore our spirituality is always an
approximation only. Spiritual knowledge is essentially
intuitive, an awareness of another reality that often begins to
manifest in our lived experience and deep introspection.
This knowledge is often due to disillusionment with a purely
profane kind of existence. Spirituality is the awakening of
innate knowledge, a return to the sacred, and a desire to
realise our true potential. It is the search for the hidden self,
for our true nature. – Joanne (family background: lapsed
Catholic)

11.  Students are reaching into their lives to find the direction that was
once supplied by religion. They are looking to their interiority to
provide this guidance:
 Spirituality expresses itself differently for each person, but for all of
us it has the similar purpose of providing inner security in times of
trouble, change, or stress. – Georgette (family background:
Eastern Orthodox)
 It is important that we begin a spiritual quest, and continue it as a
life-long search, because we ignore the inner reality at our risk,
and we nurture it to our distinct advantage. Nothing beats a
cultivated soul. – Demitra (background: Greek Orthodox)
 I remain humble to my own spirituality, because I find it has so
much to teach me about itself, and about myself. My ideas and
hunches about the spirit serve me for a time, yet they often prove
inadequate and I have to cast them aside to take on new ideas
that I am presented with. – Ambika

12.  The philosopher of religion Bernard Lonergan summed up
effective spiritual practice in a simple but profound sentence:
 The fruit of the truth must grow and mature on the tree of the
subject, before it can be plucked and placed in the absolute
realm.
 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, The Subject (Milwaukee: Marquette
University Press, 1968), p. 3.
 I could not think of a better formulation of the challenge
facing all religious educators today. Western traditions want
to hand people the fruit of the truth and ask them to accept
it. This doesn’t work anymore. The truth has to be grown
from their own experience.