There are different ways we connect with God. Different people connect with God better through some means than others. Below are listed nine spiritual “conduits”, which is adapted from “Spiritual Pathways”1:
- Study (Intellectual): connecting with God through study, ideas and theological concepts.
- Exhortation (Activist): connecting with God through actively challenging people in the areas of social justice, evangelism and/or morality.
- Service (Caregiver): connecting with God through serving others and helping to provide for their needs.
- Enthusiasm: connecting with God through joyful emotional expression and enthusiastic worship.
- Nature: connecting with God through immersion in nature.
- Sensation: connecting with God through artistic expressions which awe the senses; typically drawn to liturgical worship which inspires a sense of the majestic and the grand.
- Tradition: connecting with God through being disciplined in holding to long standing rituals, sacraments and other “rules” of faith.
- Reflection (Contemplative): connecting with God through contemplative reflection, spending time in God’s presence, adoring Him, listening to Him, enjoying Him and seeking to love God with the purest, deepest, and brightest love imaginable.
- Asceticism: connecting with God through solitude, meditation and prayer in an environment free of distraction.
1 I took these from LifeQuest Pathways which was “adapted from the book ‘Sacred Pathways’ by Gary Thomas”. I created my own summaries and changed the titles so that they refer to a “conduit” rather than a type of person (Enthusiasm rather than Enthusiast). The reason for this is that I believe that we can connect with God through any of these, though we do so much more through certain ones in comparison to others. If, however, we choose labels which which describe a person as the object (such as Activist or Caregiver), we suggest that a person only fits one or maybe a few of these categories.)
photo credit: Sunrise Over Haskell Canyon Open Space via photopin (license)