SEARCHING FOR THE SPIRITUAL
The vicar I was talking to seemed despondent about the world – climate crisis, war, political short-termism, a media unwilling to take it all seriously, the litany of problems so familiar it’s easy to forget to be outraged any more – but she clung with some intensity to one hope. She was certain that young people hungered for a spiritual dimension in their lives. They might be uncertain exactly what it could be, but they wanted something more than society was offering. Perhaps some sort of spiritual awakening might be the angle from which at last to challenge the catastrophes.
I nodded along, myself impressed by most of the young folk I know and supinely happy to find hope wherever it might be, but afterwards I wondered ‘What did she actually mean? What makes something spiritual? Is it just a euphemism for a now unfashionable sense of God, religion rebranded for Gen. Z?’
And so, I went round town asking people what they understood by the word ‘spiritual’. Some were crisp and clear: one girl found spirituality in the role of Jesus in her life, another with equal confidence declared it was ‘just religion and hippies’. Most were less certain, trying to trace the thread of their thoughts and dismayed with its elusiveness.
The most common definition was, more or less, ‘a sense of connection to something beyond the perceptible or definable’ (even to ‘a spirit’). Often this was through, or sometimes to, nature, but occasionally the connection was to other people or indeed oneself. Younger people were usually quick to stress that it didn’t mean organised religion, older ones less exclusive. There was some scorn for ‘beanbag (or ‘fridge magnet’) spirituality’, suggesting that shallowness might be as much of a hazard as the studious doctrines of the churches, but even this partiality emphasised how much more profound than everyday bustle, those who acknowledged it at all felt spirituality to be. It seemed odd that something agreed to be important should be discussed so little and so vaguely, as though its language had been lost.
If we accept that the cause of our catastrophe is the way our society is behaving, then the existence within us of a very different sensibility, albeit inchoate, ill-defined and seemingly half-forgotten, is some kind of basis for the vicar’s fervent hope. The demagogues and tech billionaires will hardly feel alarmed just yet, but it might be the inklings of the beginning of something.
How do we seek spirituality, communally or as individuals? Religious tradition has inspired the greatest wisdom in human culture, a continuity of thoughtfulness it would be arrogant to dismiss. Does its age give it authority or an air of obsolescence? The young are plainly sceptical of ‘the establishment’ and the vicar admitted the past failings of her church, but Christianity is not alone in having a patchy history. Islam has its terrorists and endless sectarian wars, Hinduism is politicised, there are even Buddhist monks committing genocide in Myanmar. (I was tempted to put ‘Buddhist’ in scare quotes, as though to admit that these tragic acts were an aberration from the true spirit of Buddhism, but of course the same could be said for all the religions. Jesus did not authorise the Crusades or the paedophile rector.) All large organisations, religious or secular, are full of ordinary people prey to the usual human failings, including the most vile. But institutions offer communal support and can get things done. How else could a personal spiritual impulse have any wider effect?
Most people I questioned mentioned nature. In our frustration with shallow, consumerist existence, it’s tempting to attribute spiritual virtue to the uncorrupted natural world, but is that how nature works? Or is this just wistful self-loathing? I saw an osprey for the first time recently – it was huge and lunkily magnificent. The other birds on the moor were as startled as I was and gave it plenty of room. But how was that osprey more spiritually charged than the flea I’ve just been chasing round my duvet? Because it was bigger, rarer, somehow ‘a good thing’ rather than a ‘bad’ one? Is spirituality no more than a burst of happy hormones? Entirely internal? That it made me gasp with surprise says more about my expectations than the wider universe. If spirituality becomes individualistic, a whatever-lights-your-candle subjectivity, we can identify any preference or prejudice as ‘my spirituality,’ which is exactly the self-indulgence that has caused all our problems and which the vicar prays we can wake from. Beneath the filigree detailing of our uniqueness, the world undercoats us all with the same broad brush. If it rains, we get wet; if a ten-ton weight falls cartoonishly on our heads we, notwithstanding our talents, our meticulous diet, our exquisitely individuated sensibility, get squashed flat as paper. Subjectivity has its limits.
STA, the world-view I write about, may offer a middle course between febrile subjectivity and the stale repetitions of dogma. It describes our basic standing in the world as individuality-with-interdependence. Each of us is unique with some degree of will and autonomy, and yet we are affected by everything around us, the rest of creation we cannot survive without. STA tries to set aside our cultural preconceptions and look at our surroundings afresh. It takes as its bases that the world is real (not some wild hallucination) and that evolution is true, meaning that all creatures are related. From this simple beginning it logically reaches these seven starting points:
1. Nature is real and the basis of our lives.
2. We are wholly involved in it and not separate in any way.
3. We generally ignore this, focussing on our own inventions (e.g., shopping, politics, football, TV etc) but …
4. ... a rewarding sense of belonging is available to us if we accept it.
5. Nature unceasingly creates new, unique individuals.
6. Nature is perfect, by definition; its only purpose being to do what it does (though this, of course, may not suit our personal interests).
7. As each thing is unique, all things must be equal; individuality-with-interdependence is the basis of relationships in nature.
I’m often asked if STA is spiritual. I reply that it is what it is, that its ideas are so simple that they don’t need any further categorisation – a ‘spiritual’ or a ‘not spiritual’ label wouldn’t add anything. STA is certainly not aiming at ‘a sense of connection to something beyond the perceptible or definable’. On the contrary, it focuses on the things we can see very clearly around us and understands them through the common sense we use at work or in making a shopping-list. It is an integral part of everyday life, because there is only a single reality, which we experience here and now.
‘And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time’, writes T.S. Eliot with deep relief at the end of Four Quartets. In a different cultural register, Dorothy found exactly the same when she woke up back in Kansas after her escapades in Oz. The poem is religious, the film is secular. Both recognise that here is home; it’s just a matter of seeing it aright. But STA never wandered off in the first place. It stayed at home, scrutinising its environment – this, here, now – with a rapt clarity undistracted by speculation about other realms or the diversions of things we’ve made up ourselves – concepts, media, money etc.
Because the reality is so plain, even blatant – the solid ground, the wet rain, the taste of an apple, the ouch of a stubbed toe – it does not demand the tremulous effort of faith. Faith is the trust in something for which we have no proof. It is therefore a gamble (as well as a struggle) and, if one’s world-view depends upon it, potentially a big one. The religious traditions (full of wise and learned people) say the rewards are worth it. I’m in no position to agree or disagree because it’s an assertion of faith. Some add that this jeopardy gives their faith an extra power. Coleridge wrote that the existence of God ‘could not be intellectually more evident without becoming morally less effective; by counteracting its own end by sacrificing the life of faith to the cold mechanism of a worthless because compulsory assent.’ That makes sense, but faith remains a gamble. STA, by contrast, seems palpably true; I have spent seven years trying and failing to disprove it, but my ‘compulsory assent’ to its certainty does not feel ‘worthless’. I know the richness that is already available to us without any wrestling with doubt, that is all around us like the dust motes in the air if we will only stop and consider it all, a matrix of wonder in which we are bound to every other part, a direct connection unmediated by institutions, doctrines, concepts, even books. STA is not a struggle for enlightenment in which some will succeed but some fail, while others (the whole non-human creation included) remain unaware that enlightenment was ever on offer; STA is there for everyone, because there’s not an organism on the planet that cannot recognise at some level that its role is to live here as part of a wider creation. Buried beneath all our cultural clutter this innate knowledge still exists somewhere in our minds too.
Perhaps the playwright Dennis Potter saw something of this. In 1994 he gave what he knew was his final interview. There was much he could have complained about: he was in great pain from the tumours that were killing him, his wife too was dying, the public world was frustrating and depressing (he called his cancer ‘Rupert’ after Murdoch). But he said this:
we forget or tend to forget that life can only be defined in the present tense ... The only thing you know for sure is the present tense, and that nowness becomes so vivid that, almost in a perverse sort of way, I'm almost serene. You know, I can celebrate life.
Below my window in Ross ... the blossom is out in full now, there in the west early. It's a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it's white, and looking at it, instead of saying "Oh that's nice blossom" ... last week looking at it through the window when I'm writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know. There's no way of telling you; you have to experience it, but the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance ... not that I'm interested in reassuring people - bugger that. The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.
STA is a world-view, not a doctrine. Beyond its initial plea – ‘stand still and consider the wondrous things’ – it prescribes nothing. What you see and think when you stand and consider is up to you; we have different bodies, experiences and circumstances, so I can’t speak for you. But its plain solidity and the seven starting points (if you accept them) can contextualise everything. Think back to the osprey.
With a STA perspective, the osprey is a delight and a surprise – they’re seldom seen in these inland hills – but it fits into the pattern. However, with the conventional Western view (in which humans are separate from a nature which exists to serve our purposes – politics, money, progress, comfort etc) the osprey is outside the paradigm. It has no role except to provide momentary entertainment. Its magnificence may provoke an awe that feels spiritual and perhaps might even inspire a scrutiny of that limited world-view; but if it doesn’t, it’s just an experience, awesome but meaningless. Without a world-view which accommodates them, the hunger for spiritual experiences – meaningless thrill after meaningless thrill – becomes an acquisitive desire not very different from consumerism, a bucket-list mentality of personal aggrandisement. We do not need a revelation, but an understanding which makes sense of the revelations when they come. It’s the day after day after day that counts, not the OMGs. When we appreciate the world from a STA angle, the OMGs come thick and fast anyway.
The vicar suggested that many young people were too troubled by the perils nature faces to seek spirituality there. For them, ‘nature’ means extinction, struggle, pollution, wildfires, seabirds tangled in fishing lines, polar bears on melting ice and the promise of worse to come. Not much comfort there, let alone the gleeful affirmation of life I declare so earnestly. No one can seriously deny the catastrophe; but it is a macro way of looking at things. No other creature thinks like this; they do not see ‘nature’, they see individuals, kin groups, threats and prey. Nature itself has no physical existence; it is an abstraction, manifested only in specifics – this bush, this bee, this rhinoceros, here. This is the true theatre of operations, the bee’s-eye level STA adopts.
I don’t pretend we will ‘save the planet’ by staring at daffodils, but if we begin by paying attention and acknowledging the family connection between ourselves and these plants and animals that make up ‘the environment’ we will not only find wonder and affirmation but give ourselves a grounding in living reality when we address the macro concerns of politics and economics, where such granular reality is often overlooked. The micro is common to all creatures; the macro is pseudo-divine. We will treat the planet better when we’re clear in which camp we belong. Such humility may be our best hope – not feebleness and acquiescence, but a clear-eyed, thoroughgoing, systemic, militant humility as the informing principle of everything we do.
Talking to young people engaged in climate activism, Rowan Williams felt obliged to tell them that it would be tough and might not work, that politicians might ignore them. ‘So, why are you doing it? Because it is valuable in itself, because this is you doing what you were created to do. Hang on to that!’ It was, he said, a question of being true to themselves – again the micro perspective, holding on to the reality of the individual within the generalised talk of concepts, stats and political pragmatism.
STA is a foundational world-view. Just as its micro-perspective can inform the macro, and its basic plodding can generate OMGs galore, so it may be possible that the bedrock reality of STA could be a basis for a spiritual understanding. As I’ve explained, I’m doubtful that there is or that we need any kind of beyondness – the physical world around me seems enough – but I’m conscious that STA is not me. I wrote earlier that ‘there is only a single reality which we experience here and now’. But how deep does this here and now go? People with sharper acuity or a rangier imagination will see further than I do. Perhaps focussing on the physical need not be a denial of the spiritual. Christianity, for example, is an incarnational faith – God becomes human flesh – with a strong tradition of understanding the hidden things through the solid perceptible world. ‘We proceed from the known to the unknown,’ said Aquinas. Sir Thomas Browne echoed many when he described nature as ‘God’s second scripture.’ Most telling of all is the tale of Doubting Thomas, which I’ll quickly recap. Jesus has been crucified and is unmistakably dead. Three days later he has come back to life and appears to his jubilant disciples (except Thomas who is absent). When Thomas returns, they tell him of the miracle, but he won’t have a word of it. ‘I’ll believe it when I can see and touch his wounds,’ he says with the grumpy sarcasm of someone who doesn’t like pranks. Cue Jesus who appears wounds and all. ‘My Lord and my God,’ murmurs Thomas, astonished, ashamed and exhilarated. We can reach God, says the Bible, by looking at what is in front of us, reaching out, touching it and trusting what we see. The world is not a worthless prelude to some remote but transcendent reality; it is not a hoax or an illusion; everything is laid out for us. ‘All that is needful hath been granted’ as the old hymn put it.
The stream that trickles through this village and the Mariana Trench six thousand fathoms below the Pacific Ocean surface are equally part of one great waterway. There’s no division and no priority. The creatures of the deep and the dippers in Clyro Brook all participate in the one reality. In the same way, although I’m sure that wise folk can plumb greater depths than STA attempts, deeper doesn’t equal truer. A guru is not more right than a dandelion (or a dipper). STA stays with its own experience. All that is needful hath indeed been granted.
‘If a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel,’ wrote Keats. It isn’t hard to empathise with the bird outside the window – or the plum-tree. Its trunk pulses with sap as mine with blood and it puts out its blossom like a brainstorm of ideas (which may or may not be pollinated). Everything has its response in me and everything of mine has its image elsewhere because we are each unique evolutions from one common ancestor, still sharing genes and DNA with the rest of the family, all part of the great diaspora which began with some cell in some deep ocean trench and is spreading beyond the power of imagination into elephants, lobelias, parakeets, ourselves and who knows what to come. Our lives follow the same path from birth through constant changes to the death we will all achieve. Our needs on the journey are the same, our means of attaining them hilariously divergent and bizarre. Each of us is separate, with some rudimentary sense of self and will, but none of us is isolated. Even walking on the remotest hills, you are never alone; it’s just that your companions – bracken, buzzard, moss – are not great conversationalists. I may not comprehend their inner lives, but my best friend is often a mystery too. It goes against the grain of four centuries of Western thought to say so but knowing everything isn’t really the point. David Jones writes that an artist ‘must deny nothing, he must integrate everything... Let him love more and more things. “It is better to love than to know” is his golden rule.’
Many come to this understanding by instinct or emotion; for them the rational arguments may seem superfluous. But I am a child of the late Enlightenment, brought up hungry for empirical certainty. STA is deeply counter-cultural, so it is ironic that the proudly proclaimed methods of our culture – logical deduction from scientific evidence – should lead here to STA rather than to the society we inhabit.
Where does this leave us? With a recognition of our affinity, born out of knowledge so certain and rewarding that it swells into emotion, and demands no struggle of faith. A completeness of belonging so that everything is sustained by an infinite network (like the ancient myth of Indra’s Net) in a fully contextualised life. I wish I were a good enough writer to express the emotional fulfilment this brings, far deeper than the satisfaction of a ploddingly logical proof, but my job in writing these essays is just to point you towards this simple, stripped-back way of looking in the hope that its certainty (for I have no doubt of its basic truths – reality, individuality, connectedness) may be a reassurance and inspiration to some readers.
The seventeenth century priest and poet Thomas Traherne looks around him with a visionary intensity, which ignores supposed divisions between one world and another. He does not, like Blake, see angels. He sees the same solid stuff as the rest of us, but transfigured by his world-view. Some things are little on the outside, and rough and common, but I remember the time when the dust of the streets were as precious as Gold to my infant eyes, and now they are more precious to the eye of reason. Stop and consider the wondrous things.
The picture at the head of this essay may (or may not) be less spiritual than it looks. In fact, it’s a halogen light in my kitchen shining through the steam while I was cooking spaghetti.
The Familiar, published by The Cyrus Press. Text by Gareth Howell-Jones
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