Apology:

Let me please offer apologies for not being present yet again for the In-Depth Group, despite repeated stated intentions to come. This is because I delayed a job interview in Portsmouth by a week to Wednesday 17 October in order to look after my mother on a visit, while my sister went to a hospital. I would have attended this evening, then gone home to bed, got up very early tomorrow and driven to Portsmouth for a 1:45 pm arrival on the south coast. However, Elena has told me she wants to go to see her potential future employer, who is interviewing me, and it means I can travel to Reading first today and go on a slightly more sane length of journey, with her, from Reading to Portsmouth tomorrow, 17th October. Also it is an opportunity to talk matters over a little longer as I must be back by Friday afternoon.
I would have offered some additional thoughts on spirituality as follows:

Spirituality: How Repetition
Relates to Change

One role of spirituality seems to be an expression supporting and developing a theological or religious position. This supporting act involves repetition. Repetition reinforces and supports, but adjustments can be made for a little variety perhaps according to the seasons or the stages passed through in life. So the expression that reinforces is relational between the individual self, the community and the environment we are in.
Repetition through such expression also facilitates remembering and reliving, drawing on some history moment or history-like moment or story moment to make it come alive again, and concise repetition means that the history moment, the history-like moment or the story moment is stylised.
The expression - the supporting reinforcement of a religious view, relating it to the self and the environment through variety, the bringing alive of the past or the story - is liturgical. A liturgy becomes in part a microcosm of the stories and events that it recalls and almost aims to reproduce, not just remember, within its stylised form.
The individual and group is thus joined to the reproduction of the history-like moment, and becomes another participant (individual or collective) in the big event being celebrated.
Of course the key element here is the infusion of the divine, that the event reproduced has the significant point going through it. So - all coming together: the individual, the collectivity, the environment and the history, the history-like and story are sacrilised. The product of these joinings is to bind together the people involved into a purpose - a divine purpose indeed. The connection between all these bound together and repetition realises and releases some sort of ethical drive given a divine sanction. The reliving draws out the ethical purpose into one's own contemplation and ones own action, and that of the community. The absorption of the ethical drive is seen as an essential part of salvation.
As a result of the reinforcement through spirituality that binds and releases, the absorbed ethical purpose remoulds and reshapes the individual and the group. It changes the worldview held.
Because the person and group become reshaped, and a new worldview happens, makes a new reality is forged.
Thus repetition of spiritual practice leads to a fundamental change, a created new reality from a recreated significant history, history-like or story moment, and a new people.

 

Adrian Worsfold

This page at:

http://www.change.freeuk.com/learning/relthink/repetitionchange.html

Pluralist - Liberal and Thoughtful