Spirituality as Struggle: Poetics,experience and the place of the spiritual in educational encounter

This paper begins to explore and interpret the unsatisfactory conditions surrounding the term spirituality. It finds in this unsatisfactoriness a set of contradictions producing a sense of struggle. Using poetry, narrative and experience, it locates spirituality in contexts of struggle. It argues that if spirituality can be interpreted in certain senses as struggle, spiritual education (or development) becomes education in and for struggle. This in turn suggests lessons for our future treatment of, and practical approach to, world religions and other forms of experience in the classroom.