Spirituality is boring, irrelevant and a waste of time. A lot of students either don’t believe in God or aren’t sure about what they believe. There are so many different pressures that capture their attention; getting through classes at school, surviving at home, surviving the emotional rough and tumble of their classmates.  Spirituality class is for some students just one more thing to endure, one more thing that doesn’t seem to connect to their lives. So they play up, swap their names, wander off, talk amongst themselves. Despite these difficulties we; Guy, Tash, Bee, Dave and The Rev are not going to give up.

Since I missed the first class (being away doing my study week) I joined in with Dave who did a great job. Today we watched a clip from the Matrix. We tried to get the students to think about whether they believed in fate. Interestingly most of the students didn’t like the idea of not being in control and so they didn’t believe in fate. The Matrix is about exposing a system of controls that are invisible. The Matrix was a computer simulation of ordinary life while in the real world humans were being used by the machine world as a source of energy. The Matrix was a prison for the mind.

Here Dave and I challenged the students to think about the possibility that there is more to our world than just the physical reality. Perhaps life is not like the Matrix where people are hooked up to machines. Perhaps the problem is that human beings live with a spiritual disconnection. They don’t readily feel or think about spiritual issues because they are too busy concentrating on the physical. Perhaps what we need is to consider our need to plug into (not the Matrix) but the spiritual world. Maybe spirituality class is more relevant than what the students think.

After that we watched a clip from the City of Angels. This time Dave and I split up and were able to have a better chance of talking more openly with the students. We started a discussion about what we base our decision on. One student said ‘right and wrong’ which Dave and I thought was awesome. So we asked him, where do you get right and wrong? Parents, School, government was the response. Another student suggested that we base our decisions on our personality. Now we’re really getting somewhere. You can see I hope that this class is practical. Right and Wrong, personality, our feelings are all within the realm of spirituality. Any moral question places itself in our class. So when we struggle with anger, fear, guilt suffering, addictions, we are in the domain of the spiritual.

Sometimes good work is hard work. The Rev