Anne Coghill Derek Chorley is surely right when he asks (January 1995): ‘‘Can one person elicit a spiritual response from another simply by teaching religion or religions?’’.
Spirituality, he goes on to say, is related to a stage of growth in which people have reached a certain level of maturity, so that they have a deeper and more meaningful vision of themselves in relation to other people and the world.
OUS The question we must ask ourselves is: how can we awaken in our children an awareness, if not of spirituality, which tends to be associated with age and maturity, but at least of love and compassion? Certainly not by just telling them to love one another, as we are exhorted by the Christian religion.
Babies are born with a capacity to love and to hate. How can we stimulate the first and understand the second?
Young children cannot describe their feelings verbally but they can often draw them or act them out. As they get older, they can be introduced not just to the facts of sexual life but to the facts of emotional life as well so that they understand more clearly the complexity of emotional factors in personal relationships and will therefore have a greater chance of making the right choice of partner, thus laying the foundation of a happy marriage and the rearing of children free from the anguish of divided loyalties and the conflict engendered by love/hate relationships.
Efforts are already being made in some schools to understand the hatred shown for example when children bully vulnerable class-mates. Bullies are asked to play the role of victim and the victim is encouraged to play the role of bully. By this means they become aware of the role of ‘‘the other’’. Much of what we do that is unloving is because we have blocked out of our awareness what “the other’’ is experiencing. When we become aware of it, then we can try to understand it.
Here we come to some advice given us thousands of years ago by Socrates: ‘‘Know thyself!’’ It is interesting that, although Plato discussed at great length Socrates’ definition of Truth and Beauty, he did not mention the implications of this vital advice. Although much of what Christ said may have implied the importance of becoming self-aware, especially his advice to see the beam in one’s own eye rather than the moat in the eye of ‘‘the other’’, it is not mentioned explicitly. Maybe the later gospel writers found this a difficult suggestion. It is so much easier to instruct people to love one another than to delve into the difficulties that prevent our doing so.
In the seventeenth century, Spinoza in the Ethics speaks of the need to understand the emotions. His idea of the free man was one in whom the emotions spring from the ‘“‘whole man’’ and not (as the passions do) from just a part. Spinoza’s idea of humanity was not a fragmented or stunted individual; he was the integral human being, the whole man. One of his propositions was as follows: *‘He who clearly and distinctly understands himself and his emotions loves God, and so much more in proportion as he understands himself and his emotions’’. Spinoza was regarded as a dangerous heretic, so the Ethics was only published after his death.
We have had to wait for the modern students of the psyche - Freud and Jung et al - to realise more fully the complexity of our relationships one with another. Jung, in his theory of individuation, comes closest to describing aspects of the spiritual life. Individuation, he says, is a process of maturation and unfolding, unless inhibited or obstructed, the psychic parallel in fact of the physical process of growth and ageing. The process of individuation falls into two parts taking place in the first and second halves of life. The task in the first half is the initiation into the inner reality - a deeper self-knowledge, a ‘‘turning back”’ to the traits of one’s genetic inheritance that have hitherto remained unconscious.
Spirituality and the middle-aged In our present culture, with its emphasis on youth, the possibilities of developing greater maturity in later life are not explored. So perhaps one of the tasks Sea of Faith could set itself would be to draw attention to the processes of growth in spiritual awareness that can take place in the second half of life.
The failure of the Christian Church two thousand years after the death of Christ is nowhere better illustrated than in the savage conflicts taking place in the world today.
The worship of the Divine, the search for Paradise/ Heaven/Perfection, the religious spirit, has been misdirected into political channels with the result that in Germany we had the attempt to create a paradise on earth inhabited only by people of Aryan race. In Russia a tightly controlled, ostensibly perfect but in fact extremely brutal state was established in the interests of the people. The heaven of a Greater Serbia drives the Serbs to continue the war, while the Chechnyans are ready to die in the interests of creating the heaven of the independent state.
It is only by harnessing their spiritual energies in the service of these earthly ambitions that men have been able to shut out the awareness of ‘‘the other’’, the intense suffering inflicted on many thousands of men, women and children in the interests of gaining their ambition. At the same time they are unaware of the long-term results of what they are doing. Blinded by their religious faith in a Greater Serbia, they fail to see the build-up of desire for revenge among their victims, so that this becomes in its turn, by means of misdirected energy, a religious desire to avenge the terrible wounds inflicted on their compatriots.
And so humanity’s suffering is assured well into the future!