Franciscan Spirituality Center
920 Market Street
La Crosse, WI 54601

https://www.fscenter.org/
Transcription for seo
Welcome to the Franciscan Spirituality Center in La Crosse, Wisconsin's “What is Spirituality?” podcast. Your host, Steve Spilde, is the associate director at the center. His guests talk about the revolving understanding of God, prayer, healing and wholeness. So, what does the word “spirituality” mean to you, Steve? Spirituality: In an earlier stage in my life, I would've said that religion and spirituality are synonymous and if they're not synonymous, then the spirituality is wrong or even dangerous. But now I understand religion to be a subset of spirituality. Spirituality is about connection and wholeness. Spirituality, in my mind, is the connection between ourselves and forces bigger than ourselves. The connection between ourselves and what we understand as God or spirit or the universe. Spirituality is about our connection between our ourselves and nature. It is about the connection between ourselves and the people around us. We are not isolated in this world. We are part of a whole that's bigger than ourselves. “We” is bigger than “me.” Spirituality is about wholeness within ourselves, connecting the various parts of ourselves: our mind, body and our spirit, our emotions. When we bring all those together, that's an important part of spirituality. You mentioned the word isolation when you just answered that and nowadays we’re all kind of in isolation and our self-imposed isolation with the pandemic that's out there and we’re supposed to shelter in place and all that. How has the time of pandemic changed your understanding, or maybe helped your understanding of spirituality and how people deal with being alone and things like that? I think my time at home as a father with an autistic child really prepared me for the pandemic because I was at home with my daughter starting at about 18 months, and my daughter didn't really start speaking until she was 4. It wasn't clear that she would ever speak, so there was a lot of silence and isolation during that two- to three-year period, early on, and so I had to do a lot of that work of just getting to know myself, living with myself in silence. I think that's what a lot of people are going through right now during the pandemic. So many people have just been so busy with day-to-day life. They just haven't had time to look at the deeper questions like: Who am I? What do I want? What am I doing? Is this what I want to be doing? They haven't had time to listen to their emotions, they’ve oftentimes not listened to their bodies; they’ve ignored their bodies. Pretty much all the things that we've neglected really come up during this time of silence and isolation, and so that’s some of the struggles that people are having. And that's really what spirituality seeks to do, is to address that, to bring all that isolation into connection. Like the connection between people. People who are living together, whatever issues that been there between them, is pretty hard to ignore right now because people are spending so much time with each other and there’s really no place to hide. They have to work it out. I think that's a part of spirituality as well, working out things that are broken, things that need healing. Are religion and spirituality the same thing, Steve? I think that religion is the way we practice spirituality or, another way of putting that, religion is how we as a group practice spirituality. It’s kind of an agreed upon way that as a group we practice spirituality. But spirituality is a personal thing: how I connect with God, how I connect with nature. Religion is basically a group of people who agree on certain ways that they practice their spirituality, certain beliefs that they hold in common. That’s my own understanding; it’s a subset. If you have any questions about any of the programs that they offer at the Franciscan Spirituality Center in La Crosse, Wisconsin. We invite you to call us at 608-791-5295. You can also visit our website at www.FSCenter.org. Thank you for listening.