With an ongoing theme of spirituality, the Explore Lifelong Learning Group explored a third form of connected body and spirit.

Herald photo by Jodi Schellenberg

Bishop Michael Hawkins speaks to the Explore Lifelong Learning group on Tuesday about Christian Anthropology.

Bishop Michael Hawkins, the 12th bishop of the Diocese of Saskatchewan, spoke to the group about Christian Anthropology during their gathering at the John M. Cuelenaere Library during the Tuesday lunch hour.

I was invited and honoured to be invited because these are people who are keen on learning, Hawkins said. It is a little intimidating -- I saw they had some excellent presentations so far on Indigenous spirituality and meditation and the next one is on Buddhism, so it is an honour to be invited and to think with people. I hope I dont lecture, but we think and talk together.

He was asked to speak about spirituality from a Christian point of view, so he chose to approach from Christian anthropology.

That is, is there a distinct Christian understanding of who we are as human beings and talk about that in relation to our spirituality? he explained. It is just who do we understand we all are fundamentally as human beings -- where we come from, who we are now and what our destiny is.

Since Christian spirituality is an enormous topic, he decided to just take one edge of it.

What I hope to do is look at the relationship between Christian theology -- what we think about God, Jesus and ourselves and what that says about theology and also, finally, we are going to look at what is called the theology of desire as a kind of meeting point, he said. We all have desires and to think about what they mean in terms of our spirituality, the fulfilment or non-fulfilment of those desires.

Some of the topics he used to demonstrate Christian spirituality were the Sermon on the Mount, which discusses spirituality versus morality, the three Christian teachings around the trinity, incarnation and atonement, which looks at answers to who are God, Jesus and people, and the story of Gilgamesh, a pre-Christian work about human destiny and human desire and whether or not desire is fulfiled or will be unfulfiled forever.

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Lifelong Learning explores another facet of spirituality