I have been trying to write this essay for a long time now: a piece that germinated with A Journey Home , wandered through Kinship , and now finds itself contemplating Contemporary Spirituality , a coordinate on the advaya map where I never would have imagined I’d end up.
As a child I believed in God, but only in the way that it was a given. I attended a primary school loosely associated with the Church of England, visiting the local village church for special services and attending the Christmas Day service a handful of times. I knew the lines of the Lord’s Prayer, the words to a few hymns and, once or twice, I tried praying by my bedside before going to sleep. Only now as an adult, can I begin to recognise the low-level nags I experienced, of an unarticulated guilt or shame that accompanied my thoughts, as those of a religious quality.
In my last year, the year before I moved to high school, that belief quickly unravelled, like a taut thread, invisible in its firmness, suddenly giving way from a build-up of tension revealing its middle like a low-hanging belly.
God was no longer real because no one else in my class seemed to believe in the idea – as if to believe in God was something like still believing in Father Christmas. From then on, my belief wavered, between a loss of something (structural yet not central), and possibility – first offered by agnosticism and then by a beckoning atheism which permeated my high school education. Looking back now, this new way of viewing the world was the trickle-down of New Atheism in its heyday and its “four horsemen” – Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. Presenting as hardcore rationalism: a thorough and penetrating approach delivered confidently and belligerently by those bearing a perfect likeness (white and male) to the principles of western intellectualism as if made in their image, ironically, New Atheism was later called out for its likeness to religious fundamentalism.
My belief as I know it now has settled with nothing more than a suspended disbelief.
After all, it feels much safer to drift in cloudy waters than to cling to rocky edges; the decision not to believe in something feels so much easier than the commitment to do so. The post-truth politics, the ideological wars that shatter any decipherable vision of a collective future, and the pervading sensation of info-whelm, its visceral deadening, leave me lethargic – defeated, uncertain and distrustful, not only of the institutions I grew up to have faith in, those which once protected me as a white and middle-class member of society, but also of my own abilities to discern between the truth and its imitations. The fragmented lines that our lives now follow – technologies (social media) and processes (globalisation) once believed to be mechanisms of infinite connection – have made it near impossible for me to comprehend a ‘way’ of living or being that is anything other than the one I persist with now. A life that is hyperaware of the crises that surround us and survives only through the, sometimes hollow, commands of habit and dailiness, leaving only small moments left for intention, wonder and promise.
What would it mean to pick up something so large and all-encompassing as that meant by ‘spirituality’ without really knowing where it could lead?
Thinking beyond my boundaries to what now seems to be an almost universal human experience thanks to globalisation: to fragmentation, this structure of living seems conceptually and practically at odds with the introduction of a system(s) with an appearance of such wholeness as spirituality.
I can only say now that the coordinates mapped out by Contemporary Spirituality, among advaya’s other courses, have softened these sentiments or, perhaps, more truthfully, my expectations. I haven't been converted or had any trace of an experience as direct as this, but, as I write now, the abundance of thoughts and feelings, their entanglement previously experienced as a heavy smog, now vibrate in-place, not neatly in equivalence, but in messy, fruitful relation, as if passers-by happy to join a complex conversation.
I don’t wish to undermine or disrespect the conversion experience. I can only imagine how deeply meaningful an experience as life-changing as conversion can be. But for those less certain, something more tentative is needed: something that by its wholeness speaks of an opening rather than of closure, an idea encapsulated by Alan Watts’ distinction between belief and faith:
The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go.
To begin to have faith then, to start now in the contemporary moment, requires one to create the space within for this opening, with no expectation of jumping-ship, of swapping out systematic uncertainty for one of steadfast assurance. Because to be home in an increasingly unstable world is to live with the unknown as a constant companion, to make peace with it: ’to find a place that doesn’t always know exactly what’s going on and that doesn’t need to’, as Eve Annecke captured so simply in A Journey Home.
The answer to uncertainty isn’t to relocate, look elsewhere, to throw everything out and start anew; instead, it’s a prompt to create new space from old soil, disturbing the surface and exploring beneath.
To have faith feels like a radical acceptance of ourselves as we are, vulnerable, and the world as it is, changeable, an idea that swirls in Andreas Weber’s theory of kinship explicated through the metaphor of the island. For Weber, to live, "to be yourself in this enclosed space" – an independent being with a physical body that acts in the world and an idea of the (your) self as it has accumulated over our lifetime – is to be "in constant recalibration on this vast ocean of total change, total chaos, wave after wave, washing over you, pulling you, suggesting you to become somebody new.”
Conceiving ourselves in this way, as a group of islands, exposes fixed identification (’the world works in x way') as unstable and liable to fracture. To permanently place the outside world in fixed relation demands a kind of stillness beyond the nature of our world. Faith promises a way of making contact with the moving wheel of the world, of riding the wave, to use Weber’s metaphor of the ocean, without being dragged along the ground by it. It’s not about clinging or grasping in an effort to slow things down to our level, but about gliding with it and seeing where it takes us, like Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome: a ‘stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle’; by remaining in constant relation with the world, the changes and the eruptions aren’t felt as irreversible breakages but, rather, extensions of our experience, thread-like offshoots bolstering the middle of the road.
The time is almost here. We’re both holding our breath as the light starts to climb the walls of the cave. At last the sun drops low enough to reach the opening in the bank. Suddenly the sun pierces the darkness like a shaft of light through a slit in an Incan temple on the dawn of the summer solstice. Timing is everything. Just for a moment, in the pause before the earth rotates us again into night, the cave is flooded with light. – Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss
