34 – What on Earth is Spirituality?

Author: David Boulton. Published September 1998 in issue 34 of Sofia.

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Articles
Regulars and Occasionals

Editorial

We don’t want to sound too evangel- _ : ical, but... you just might find it the most — - see move vous ‘ve ever ae Petre | EDITORIAL Sea of Faith The quarterly magazine of the Sea of Faith Network Hobsons Farm, Dent, Cumbria LA10 SRF Editor: David Boulton When Spirituality met the Full Monty ll, did the earth move for We Did you find out what on earth is spirituality? If you are one of the 250 or so who attended the Network’s annual conference at Sheffield in July, you may have an answer. If not, you can catch up now: most of this issue is taken up with the three major addresses on the conference theme, What on earth is spirituality?

Network vice-chair Patti Whaley opened proceedings by posing the tough questions which lay behind the conference title. “Spirituality”, she suggested, is a word many of us are no longer comfortable with, either because we think it is something we have lost or because it represents the kind of “woolly beyondness” that Sea of Faith should be moving away from.

Patti’s pertinent questions got our brains into gear. We print her introduction on page 5.

Refreshingly for a professional churchman, Catholic priest Diarmuid O’Murchu sought to distance religion and spirituality. Religions, he suggested, were invented by human beings when spirituality began to fade.

Religions were perhaps “the most destructive and outrageous form of idolatry ever known”, fuelling “pain, bitterness, oppression and destruction”. Spirituality was, in contrast, a benign phenomenon, universal, crossing barriers of time and culture, and “an innate human predisposition to mystery and to meaning in life”. It is something we moderns have lost and need to find again. Diarmuid’s view is modern rather than postmodern, and unashamedly realist — though postmodernity and nonrealism are not part of his vocabulary, as his critique of something he called “unrealism” (not included in the slightly shortened version of his talk printed on page 6) demonstrated. Questioners wondered whether he had not strayed too close to Rousseau’s now dated notion of the noble savage, but there was warm support for a concept of spirituality transcending religion and all its baggage.

Robert Ashby’s approach (page 10) could hardly have been more different, though his too was expressly non-religious. For the director of the British Humanist Association, declaring himself to be without a religious bone in his body (where would a religious bone be? the humerus?), “what on earth is spirituality?” is a political question. It is political and pragmatic because Parliament requires our schools to aim at the “spiritual development” of our children, and our hospitals and prisons to promote the spiritual welfare of their inmates. If Humanists want to contribute to spiritual development and welfare in schools, hospitals and prisons — and the BHA does — then they must perforce subscribe to some notion of “spirituality”. Humanists have worked hard to carve out a place for the wholly human spirit, and have won recognition, even among the churches, that “spiritual is not synonymous with religious”.

Robert’s examples of personal experiences which he felt he could call “spiritual” (if he really had to) were what some might call “peak Sea of Faith Autumn (September) 1998 No. 34 When Spirituality met the Full Monty Editorial 3 20 Questions on Spirituality A conference introduction by Patti Whaley 5 Back to Spirituality!

Rediscovering our spiritual roots by Diarmuid O’Murchu 6 The Fellowship of the Human Spirit A Humanist view by Robert Ashby 10 Everyday Spirituality A future for spirituality? by Don Cupitt 14 My Story, My Song A new book from SoF by various writers 20 Reason and Faith:

The Cherry Cake Option by Philip Knight 22 An Unreasonable Distinction The debate continues... by Anne Padley 24 Postbag You’re telling us! 25 Postscripts by Seafarer 2f “The old spirituality...is dying, even if it won't lie down. The new postmodern spirituality owes nothing to those ancient Platonic dualisms. It is a here-and-now spirituality, a spirituality we make rather than discover or rediscover.” > experiences”: listening to Shostakovitch’s 8th quartet, or Billie Holiday, or looking at Rodin’s drawings or Leonardo’s cartoons. Each experience he listed was wholly human, intensely personal. For Robert, the spiritual experience was “a particular focus on this life”. It had nothing to do with the supernatural, with gods, mysticism or a sixth sense. We do not have a separate spiritual life. We have a life.

For Don Cupitt (page 14) there is an old spirituality and a new. The old spirituality is something invented by the churches and religious institutions as a counterweight to everything they are against. They are against this “material” world here below and for another “spiritual” world up above.

They are against the material body and for the spiritual soul. “Christian spirituality...attempted to deny this world, and with it the body, the entire secular realm, the passions, sex and time”. That’s the old spirituality. It is dying, even if it won't lie down. The new postmodern spirituality owes nothing to those ancient Platonic dualisms. It is a here-and-now spirituality, a spirituality we make rather than discover or rediscover, “fully thisworldly and time-bound” and “concerned not with the things of another world but with the continual givenness of our this-worldly existence, and what we are making of it”. What on earth is spirituality? The question contains the answer, italicised.

Those who missed the conference can at least catch up on the three main addresses. Unhappily we cannot similarly reproduce the true spirit of nearly thirty hugely diverse workshops, ranging from “The Jesus Seminar” to “Spirituality and Sexuality”, from “Monastic Chant” and “Buddhist Meditation” to “Understanding the Quaker Meeting”, from “Agnostics at Prayer” to “Dennis Potter and Jeanette Winterson”, from “Philosophical “4 Pragmatism” to Mahler’s Resurrection symphony and the haunting jazz saxophone of Jan Garbarek, which became the theme music of the conference, linking workship, worship and epilogue.

Nor can we adequately convey the sense of common fellowship which pervaded this conference. We disagreed with each other, as ever, but always within the boundaries of a Network at ease with itself and its aims, “to explore and promote religious faith as a human creation”. “Fellowship is heaven,” says the radical hedge-priest John Ball in William Morris’s Dream of John Ball, “and lack of fellowship is hell; fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death.” At Sheffield — home of that magnificent triumph of the human spirit, The Full Monty — we enjoyed the fellowship of each other and the communion of saints and sinners.

There was a great spirit. That’s what on earth is spirituality.

Something has gone wrong with SoF.

The “headless chicken” evangelicalism of Duncan Park is something I simply do not recognise, and David Boulton’s response was almost equally dogmatic and prescriptive in its rampant non-realism. If fundamentalism is a frame of mind, then the SoF is rapidly becoming a platform for the opposition-bashing methodology that characterises conservatives such as Reform and Forward in Faith in the contemporary Church of England.

This setting up of simplistic either-or caricatures of spiritual movements is pointless. There are Christians who do not believe in the rift between faith and reason, and some of them are even evangelicals. It is about time that the assumptions of SoF that such people do not exist were challenged.

Perhaps some members feel safer if we didn’t exist and that our presence is just offensive to them.

This technique uses the method of demonising the opposition in order to advance one’s own will-to-power and domination by having the “Truth” — hardly in the spirit of SoF. Those of us who are clergy (and I suppose many who aren’t) have all been on the receiving end of this. Still, if all we have is language then we might as well beat each other over the head with words.

At least its better than physical abuse...

— Tim Gouldstone, Truro

Tim Gouldstone, The Rectory, Tresillan, Truro TR2 4AA Spare Rib I was interested to read the quotations from RE teachers in the Summer 1998 magazine. The problem of RE teaching is not only the material itself, but the varied home background of the children — not only different faiths (they may be withdrawn) but the various Christian traditions.

Here is a quotation from an interview with a Biology teacher, which I did in 1988 as part of a small survey of mature students on Ministerial Training Schemes in four Dioceses; “Whenever I wheel the skeleton out of the cupboard to do anatomy” she said, “someone will ask ‘Is it a man or a woman?...because men have one less rib than women — one was made into Eve’. She went on “The fact is that many teenagers still believe that and know nothing else. I spend a lot of time trying to explain that you don’t have to take Adam and Eve literally to be a Christian. Also I have a lot of pupils who belong to a fundamentalist church and are horrified that I should doubt it. Somehow I have to hold it all together.” I wonder if things have changed since then?

— Molly Rosenthal, Denbigh

Molly Rosenthal, Tandderwen, Prior, Denbigh LL16 4RS Kill Cupitt I read with interest your two reviews of Cupitt’s latest book. I am afraid I have a totally different view of The Religion of Being. I am sure that others like me were saddened when they read this book. I believe that it is the worst the guru of Sea of Faith has produced.

Cupitt seeks to give us a new word/concept for God (which may be long overdue) and to resolve that nagging critique of postmodernism about the existence/non-existence of reality.

His solution is to talk about Being which he insists is very different from God. And he proceeds to describe Being as “that” which exists independently of beings. As a “refugee Buddhist” I find talk of Being just as troublesome as talk of God, and I certainly don’t find Cupitt’s claims to be Buddhistic very appropriate. After all, Buddhism has spent most of its existence avoiding any definition/conceptualisation of a “ground of being” (I know that the philosophers will argue with my conflating the two terms).

I am more worried about the flavour of this book than by its concepts however. Cupitt states that the religious person believes that “there is...something there that one must defer to...we are never alone” (p.137). The anti- (note the oppositional language) religious person is one “for whom human beings are radically alone” (p.139) In this description, Cupitt stoops low enough to suggest that such a view is ignorant and dangerous. I am afraid I had thought that Cupitt was one of those “antireligious” people who nevertheless insisted that we could create meaning in our lives by the use of religious stories. Obviously I was wrong.

Or Cupitt has retreated from his radicalism and gone back into the corner held by Christians for the last two millenia. A corner stuffy with “nonGod metaphors” that hide a nonhumanistic mysticism. A corner full of the cobwebs of theologians whose rationalisations make little sense to ordinary “democratic” people.

There is a story in Zen that ends with the phrase “If you meet the Buddha on the road Kill Him”.

Metaphorically at least, the Sea of Faith must do the same to Cupitt. His road now leads back into obscurantism, philosophical hair-splitting and pseudo-Christianity. If the movement goes this way its gatherings will be more like a new age club full of eccentrics, dissatisfied mystics and churchless church people. It will lose that cutting-edge of searching which has defined it so far.

— Mark Rivett, Cardiff

Mark Rivett, 3 Pitman St, Portcarra, Cardiff CF1 9DJ POSTBAG Beyond Words I feel that Norman Richardson (“Experience beyond words”, Summer 1998) has not quite understood the connection between language and experience. Language is more than verbal. Surely it is any system of conventional elements and signs which differentiates and distinguishes experience and reality to create meaning and enable people to cope with life. Such a system involves relationships with the environment and other people. One speaks of Maths as “universal” language, body language, the language of love...

Therefore any system which distinguishes and applies frameworks, patterns and relationships is linguistic.

Also I feel that he has too readily equated experience and perception. To my way of thinking, experience is never simple or single, but complex and continuous, involving contexts, intentions, moods, perceptions and purposes, all of which fit together to give a “picture” of reality. Traces of past experiences also intrude on the present.

Let’s apply all this to his example of driving a car. I would call this an activity rather than an experience as such, and would certainly not regard it as a “passive” experience.

In learning to drive there is much verbal exchange which I am sure stays with drivers, if only unconsciously. Driving is a co-ordinated activity linked with the (conventionally laid out) controls of the car and the (conventional) layout of the road — the fruit of much practising and training. This involves the operation of conventional systems and learned, conventional behaviour.

We speak of “reading the road” in driving. Roads have markings, signs, traffic lights, street sign, signals and conventions of behaviour — polite and impolite, safe and unsafe. Driving means applying acquired knowledge and understanding and learned behaviour to new situations. One could call this the “language of driving”.

Like driving, living entails the operation of a host of acquired systems, mainly unconsciously which work with our immediate experience to give meaning and direction.

Babies receive many sensations as they develop, some pleasant and some unpleasant, but they do not know these or distinguish them as joy or pain until they have become part of a social setting which has these categories. Then they learn to anticipate pleasure and pain as they experience the world. No human experience is neutral or raw. It is informed by a long history of human language and culture.

— Brian Simons, Gillingham, Kent

Brian Simons, 17 Eva Road, Gillingham, Kent ME7 5NE Mysticism and SoF There is a strong mystical element within Quakerism. In her pamphlet Signposts to the Future Josephine Teagle states that Sea of Faith decries mysticism.

Is there some incompatibility between the two approaches or is this a misunderstanding?

Norman Richardson, 17 Water Lane, Ashwell, Rutland LE15 7LS [SoF has no single “approach” to mysticism. Few members would “decry” it, but many would want to re-evaluate what mysticism might mean in our postmodern this-worldonly age — Ed.] Caesar sic in omnibus?

— Norman Richardson, Ashwell, Rutland

Can anyone help me over this notion of “coincidentia oppositorum” much spoken of by Tom Altizer in his address to the 1997 Conference?

Being in Latin, it looks impressive. It seems plausible, even seductive, and if one learns to think along these lines, perhaps Wittgenstein could be deemed to have effected a splendid “coincidentia oppositorum” between realism and idealism in his later philosophy of language? But then in the Independent I read: “David Mellor has one of the largest CD collections in the country, and could make a post modern synergy between classical music and football.” Is it ancient wisdom? rubbish? a game?

— Judith Woodford, Bozeat, Northamptonshire