Spiritual Intelligence
Dear Friends
I have just spent a day between Luton and Belfast airports joining the back of one queue after another. No wonder John who wrote Revelations foresaw the patience of saints!
Many Britons of my generation had their career options influenced by the research of Sir Cyril Burt. His dubious IQ tests on eleven year olds suggested that cognitive ability was genetically determined and set in early formative years, no growth possible! Society and its schools were separated for brain and brawn.
More recently, half a dozen other capabilities have been identified including
kinesthetic intelligence, abundant in footballers for instance. (No, not the capacity to kick, spit and head butt.) Call it KQ for fun. During the 1990’s Daniel Goleman initiated the EQ craze. Management gurus are extolling the virtues of emotional intelligence and the need to be ‘touchy feely’.
Now, students of the mind have discovered neural centres in the brain from which our innate spiritual intelligence is centred. ‘The God Spot’. So we now have SQ! Trust my luck, I’m at the back of the queue again. Listen up for a miracle with the lobes and fissures.
To be serious, Donah Zohar in her book Spiritual Capital published in 2005
contends that the amount of spiritual knowledge and expertise available in a culture is based on meaningfulness, values and fundamental purposes that are important to wealth creation. She expands Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs with sixteen ranked motivators and associates each of these with transformational principles. In effect she says, without quoting Jesus in Matthew 6, that we should seek first the kingdom and righteousness and our survival needs will be met as a consequence. She goes on to identify plateaus of motivation from which each of us operate and suggests that those who are demotivated can only be uplifted by those on higher levels of enlightenment. In practice most of us are unlikely to do better than being ‘Knights’ or ‘Servant Leaders’.
The model has virtue in its humanistic definition but is likely to result in a wave of
‘enlightened management gurus’ - the prospect of false Christ’s offering to develop our SQ. History tells us that there is nothing within the soul of man that is self redemptive. Grace is the gift of God alone. May God continue to bless your service as instruments of God’s peace.
Thank Q for using your IQ, KQ, EQ, SQ and whatever else is in the Q in the service of God and others.
Yours sincerely
Victor
“Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.”
Matthew 6:33 (NLT)