Religious Growth: the Spiritual Demand of Modern Times

To grow immaterially in a world characterized by power, money, and influence is a Herculean task. Modern conveniences such as electronic equipments, gadgets, and tools as well as recreation through television, productions, and the web have predisposed us to confine our attention mostly to physical needs and wants. As a result, our concepts of self-valuable and self-meaning are confused. How can we strike a balance between the material and spiritual features of our lives?



To grow spiritually is to look inward.



Reflection goes on the far side recalling the things that happened in a day, week, or month. You need to look closely and reflect on your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and motivations. Intermittently examining your experiences, the decisions you make, the relationships you have, and the things you interest in provide useful insights on your life goals, on the good traits you must sustain and the bad traits you have to discard. Moreover, it gives you clues on how to act, react, and conduct yourself in the midst of any situation. Like any skill, introspection can be learned; all it takes is the courageousness and willingness to seek the truths that lie within you. Here are some pointers when you introspect: be objective, be forgiving of yourself, and concentrate on your areas for improvement.



To grow spiritually is to develop your potentials.



Religion and science have disagreeing views on matters of the human spirit. Religion views people as spiritual beings temporarily living on Earth, while science views the spirit as just one dimension of an individual. Mastery of the self is a recurring theme in both Christian (Western) and Islamic (Eastern) teachings. The needs of the body are recognized but placed under the needs of the spirit. Beliefs, values, morality, rules, experiences, and good works provide the programme to ensure the growth of the spiritual being. In Psychology, realizing one's full potential is to self-actualize. Maslow identified several human needs: physiological, protection, belongingness, esteem, cognitive, aesthetic, self-actualization, and self-transcendence. James earlier categorized these needs into three: touchable, emotional, and spiritual. When you have satisfied the basic physiological and aroused needs, spiritual or existential needs come next. Achieving each need leads to the total development of the individual. Perhaps the difference between these two religions and psychology is the end of self-development: Christianity and Islam see that self-development is a means toward serving God, while psychology view that self-development is an end by itself.



To grow spiritually is to search for meaning.



Beliefs that believe in the existence of God such as Christianism, Judaism, and Islam suppose that the purpose of the human life is to serve the Creator of all things. Several possibilities in psychology propose that we ultimately give meaning to our lives. Whether we believe that life's meaning is pre-discovered or self-directed, to grow in spirit is to understand that we do not merely exist. We do not know the meaning of our lives at birth; but we gain knowledge and wisdom from our interactions with people and from our actions and reactions to the situations we are in. As we discover this meaning, there are certain beliefs and measure that we reject and affirm. Our lives have purpose. This purpose puts all our physical, emotional, and intellectual potentials into use; experiences us during trying times; and yields us something to face forward to---a goal to achieve, a destination to limit. A person without goal or meaning is like a floating ship at sea.



To grow spiritually is to recognize interconnections.



Religions stress the concept of our connectedness to all creation, live and inanimate. Thus we call other people "brothers and sisters" even if there are no direct blood dealings. Moreover, deity-centered religions such as Christianity and Islam utter of the state between humans and a higher being. On the other hand, science expatiates on our link to other surviving things through the evolution theory. This relatedness is clearly seen in the concept of ecology, the interaction between living and non-living things. In psychology, connectedness is a peculiar of self-transcendence, the highest human need accordant to Maslow. Recognizing your relation to all things makes you more humble and respectful of people, animals, plants, and things in nature. It makes you appreciate everything around you. It turns you to go beyond your pleasure zone and stretch out to other people, and become stewards of all other things around you.



Growth is a process thus to grow in feeling is a day-to-day encounter. We gain some, we lose some, but the significant thing is that we learn, and from this knowledge, further spiritual growth is made possible.