What's Wrong with Spirituality?

Khouria Frederica Mathewes-Green has posted a very perceptive essay on modern understandings of "spirituality." Here's a snippet:

"I don’t like the category 'spirituality.' It sounds so external. It sounds so optional. It isn’t a concept I find in the first millennium, or anywhere in Eastern Christianity. As far as I can tell, what people today mean by 'spirituality' is what St. Paul meant by 'life in Christ.'

This is a transformation that every Christian is supposed to be experiencing, because we are all 'partakers of the divine nature' (2 Peter 1:4). As we partake of the life of Christ and discipline ourselves, seeking to assimilate that life, it affects both our souls and bodies. His light spreads within us like fire spreading through a lump of coal, and so we become Christ-bearers to the world. This is such an essential, foundational element of life in Christ that to extract it and label it seems to deaden it..."

Read it all on her website here.