In Fantasy writing, the author relies on the reader to accept the unbelievable or impossible for the sake of enjoyment. This is known as "suspension of disbelief." The reader knows the story is not true, its characters and settings are not true, and yet the reader is able to set aside his or her beliefs to fantasize about the storyline. With a spiritual central theme, however, the reader's suspension of disbelief becomes mixed-in with his or her own spiritual or religious beliefs. For example, instead of blessings, characters receive endowments of special powers; miracles are presented as supernatural events; prayer is described as direct communication with an all-powerful being. Things between belief and disbelief become blurred! In this way, reading Spiritual Fantasy can be special and allow the reader to experience a story in a unique way. It can make reading Spiritual Fantasy thrilling!
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In today's world, spirituality can be viewed in a lot of different ways. Thus, it is also found in literature in a lot of different ways. If "Spiritual Fantasy" is searched on the Internet, a lot of different stories are deemed part of the subgenre. For example, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse is a fictional story about a young, Nepalese man's search for spiritual enlightenment. Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace is a Historical fiction story about a Jewish man who becomes a Roman slave and later finds redemption as a Christian. Both examples are overt stories of spiritual experience, whose supernatural phenomena is rooted more in its religious aspects rather than in fantastic description.
Then there are those Spiritual Fantasy stories that are more Fantasy in character and setting, but whose spiritual side is found in its storytelling. For example, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis may take place in a faraway Narnia land with magic and talking animals, but is an allegory of the author's Christian faith and morality. The same can be said about The Gunslinger by Stephen King and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. Each is a representation of the authors' spiritual or religious beliefs.
More modern views of spirituality are more secular, meaning they do not depend on formal religious practice. The emphasis in a more modern Spiritual Fantasy story, then, would depend less on transcendental aspects or relations with a higher being, and more on what Philip Sheldrake, author of A Brief History of Spirituality, describes as "the deepest values and meanings by which people live." This includes more humanistic ideas on moral character, such as love, compassion, forgiveness, coexistence, as well as others. In these cases, the humanistic idea itself becomes the spiritual link to a supernatural aspect of a story. For example, if the theme is "Love conquers all" or "Love is all you need," you can imagine a storyline where a character's undying love (or faith) for another character causes a supernatural (or miraculous) event to occur. Sounds amazingly religious, doesn't it?
To hold the Spiritual Fantasy subgenre to one strict interpretation or another, however, is to lose sight of the heart of its matter. Spirituality can mean so many different things for so many different people. That's what makes Spiritual Fantasy so great -- it allows for individual expression and exploration of one's own spirituality. Could anything so deep and meaningful not warrant its own subgenre in literature? I think not!That said, I want to welcome you to the Church, Temple and House of Spiritual Fantasy!
