The study of spirituality as spiritual discipline

Catholic Theological Union

"the [academic] study of spirituality is necessarily a self-implicating discipline.

     "In short, . . . the actual 'object' that spirituality studies [(namely, 'expressions of human meaning' 'constructed' by 'the human spirit fully in act', by 'human persons being, living, acting according to their fullest intrinsic potential', and 'thus, ultimately, in the fullness of interpersonal, communal, and mystical relationship')] cannot be approached except with the attitude like that of one who takes up a spiritual discipline. . . .  If the academic discipline of spirituality is to have any specificity, it must claim and clarify its character as [itself] a form of spiritual discipline.  Spirituality can be an academic discipline only insofar as it coheres with its deeper character as spiritual discipline.  Unless it is understood in clear relation to its real core, the academic study of spirituality will fragment across all other disciplines and lose any specificity."

     Mary Frohlich, “Spiritual discipline, discipline of spirituality:  revisiting questions of definition and method,” Spiritus:  a journal of Christian spirituality 1, no. 1 (Spring 2001):  75, 71 (65-78).  That focus on personal experience as mediated via human construction is suspect, but she does make an attempt to transcend this with those claims about other-directed relationship, including 'mystical relationship'.  Suspect, too, is that penultimate paragraph.  The study of spirituality as spiritual discipline sounds good, but this is unfortunately all too familiar (italics mine):

     Such a discipline of spirituality will, to be sure, be of a different character than the spiritual disciplines of former eras.  Rather than an obedient immersion in an institutional culture, it will require a high tolerance for aloneness, permanent quest, vulnerability, and 'things falling apart.'  It will presume a willingness to probe, experiment, and accept challenges to every element of one’s lived spirituality.  It will call for the repeated risk of dialogue with the sometimes unnerving range of interpretations applied to the phenomena of one’s own and others’ spiritual experiences.