Moreover, pathways to the sacred can take the form of spiritual practices, such as meditation and prayer spiritual beliefs, such as beliefs in an afterlife or karma spiritual relationships with family, friends, or institutions and spiritual experiences such as mystical encounters and sacred moments ( Pargament et al., 2013b). People can search for the sacred within traditional religious contexts as well as nontraditional contexts. The term “search” refers to the process of discovering, maintaining, and at times transforming a relationship with the sacred. People can experience the sacred through a variety of channels, such as a sense of connection, closeness, or oneness with the transcendent, a theistic being, oneself, humanity, all living beings, or nature ( Davis et al., 2015). The word “sacred” most commonly refers to God, higher power, divinity, or qualities associated with the divine, such as transcendence, ultimacy, boundlessness, and deep connectedness. In this way, spirituality could be both a result of meaning/purpose or the source of meaning/purpose. Embedded in this definition are three core concepts – the sacred or the transcendent (beyond the ordinary), a connection or relationship with the sacred, and the search for ultimate meaning or purpose ( Mayseless and Russo-Netzer, 2017). This has become nearly a consensual definition among scientists in the study of spirituality as this definition is reflected in approximately two-thirds of studies on the topic ( Kapuscinski and Masters, 2010). Spirituality is consistently defined by scientists as the search for, or communion with, the sacred ( Pargament et al., 2013b). The specific content of spiritual belief, practice, and experience varies, but all cultures have a concept of an ultimate, transcendent, sacred, or divine force ( Peterson and Seligman, 2004). Spirituality is a significant and universal aspect of human experience. “If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.” – Thomas Merton Introduction Such multifaceted integration offers insight and wisdom to both areas of study and opens up new directions for psycho-spiritual research and practices to deepen and broaden our understanding of what it means to be human. Finally, we turn to research-based practices and examine how character strengths might facilitate and contribute to spiritual practices and, conversely, how spirituality might enhance character strength practices. We frame two pathways of integration: the grounding path, in which character strengths offer tangibility and thereby deepen and enhance spirituality, and the sanctification path, in which spirituality elevates character strengths.
We further discuss six levels by which spirituality can be integrated within the VIA Classification, including a meta-perspective in which wholeness represents a meta-strength or superordinate virtue. By wholeness, we are referring to a way of being in the world that involves a life-affirming view of oneself and the world, a capacity to see and approach life with breadth and depth and the ability to organize the life journey into a cohesive whole. We elaborate on how character strengths and spirituality come together in the context of the psycho-spiritual journey toward wholeness. At the same time, character strengths can enhance and deepen spiritual practices, rituals, and experiences. In this exploration, we argue that there is a robust synergy of these sciences and practices revealing that spirituality is vitally concerned with promoting character strengths. At the same time, the science of spirituality has steadily unfolded over the last few decades and has offered only occasional attention to select strengths of character (e.g., humility, love, and forgiveness) or the universal typology of the VIA classification of character strengths and virtues. The science of character strengths has surged in recent years with hundreds of studies, yet with minimal attention to spirituality or the literature thereof. Little attention has been given to the integral relationship between character strengths and spirituality (the search for or communing with the sacred to derive meaning and purpose). 3Department of Psychology, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, KY, United States.2Department of Counseling and Human Development, Achva Academic College, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
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