David Hays maintains that survey figures show that interest in spirituality, often expressed as the awareness of ‘something there’, is rising right across the developed world. He demonstrates this from hundreds of interviews of ‘ordinary’ people which back up the view that spirituality is hard-wired into our biological make-up, that it is evolving, and that from it, a remarkable new phenomenon is emerging.
316pp, Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd., 2006. To purchase this book online, go to www.darton-longman-todd.co.uk
Content
Preface
Part 1: Context
1. The Mountains of the Mind
2. ‘Unfuzzying the Fuzzy’: Working Towards a Biology of the Spirit
Part 2: Conversation
3. The Individuality of the Spirit
4. Shared Aspects of the Spiritual Quest
5. Theorising about the Spirit
6. Primordial Spirituality
Part 3: Conflict
7. Psychologists Start Arguing about Spirituality
8. Modern Scientists Widen the Argument Why Spirituality
9. Is Difficult for Westerners
Part 4: Facing the Crisis
10. The Problems of the Institution
11. Treating the Sickness of the Spirit
An Unscientific Postscript
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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Review |
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Chapter one The mountains of the mind
Man that is born of woman has but a short time to live, and is full of misery. 1662 Prayer Book
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Gerard Manley Hopkins (l)ESTRAGON (giving up): Nothing to be done. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (2)
The spirit of an era
Certain people come to represent the spirit of their time. Maybe the Beatles or Elvis did that for the pop world of the 1960s and 1970s. On a cold evening in London in the 1950s the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett had already gone a step further. He put in a nutshell the emotional culmination of four centuries of European culture. The setting of this tour de force was the Arts Theatre Club in Great Newport Street on 3 August 1955. After troubles with the Lord Chamberlain over censorship, Beckett’s new play was about to open privately with Peter Hall directing. The weather had been drab all day, so it was not a bad time to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a theatre. Anyone present on that basis and hoping for a comfortable evening was to be disappointed. As the curtain rose, this is what confronted them.
On a bare stage stand two shabbily dressed men. Bowler-hatted clowns, they might be mistaken for Laurel and Hardy.(3) They are Vladimir and Estragon, the central characters in Waiting for Godot.
Although there is a path running through their Wasteland they do not venture along it, but stay rooted to the spot. It seems they are immobilised by hope, the hope that someone called Godot will arrive and… what? Give a meaning or an explanation of their situation? Tell them what to do? Get them out of their hopelessness? Who knows? At any rate here-and-now they are in a state of absolute dependency on a mysterious figure who mayor may not exist. (4) Those members of the audience who have the stamina to remain in their seats until the final curtain find out that nothing changes and Godot still hasn’t come. They are left with the strong suspicion that he will never come.
On that opening night, and for many succeeding nights, most of the audience were unimpressed. Many walked out, while others stayed to jeer – they couldn’t make head or tail of it. I remember being puzzled myself the first time I saw the play. Yet Beckett repeatedly asserted that the theme of Waiting for Godot is simple and straightforward. His claim to transparency is somewhat disingenuous, for his words confront us with human depths where few would care to remain for long. The psychological world occupied by the central characters is one that has regressed back to a childlike directness of feeling, as hinted at by the use of their pet names, Didi and Gogo. Their straightforwardness has a primordial quality, as if signalling the announcement of an embodied, biologically rooted knowingness existing before all theology, all philosophy, all scientific investigation, or any kind of extended thought whatsoever. The common response of those first audiences was denial, in the psychiatric sense of that word. People either avoided Beckett’s version of the truth by refusing to understand at the conscious level, or they ran away.
In spite of the temptation to shut out Beckett’s message as unrecognisable, his language is indeed perfectly familiar. Inevitably, but paradoxically, the naked passions of the characters in Waiting for Godot are clothed in the forms of European culture, particularly its Christian beliefs (5) – inevitably, because Beckett was a European; paradoxically, because how can language ever do more than hint at the primordial?
Beckett was unusually well acquainted with Christian culture. His mother, who was a devout member of the Church of Ireland, brought him up in a suburb of Dublin. (6) Their relationship was troubled and intense, and for the rest of his life he continued to immerse himself in the classical literature of Christianity, particularly the works of Dante. An interviewer once asked him if a Christian interpretation of Godot was justified, to which he replied, ‘Yes, Christianity is a myth with which I am perfectly familiar. So naturally I use it.’ (7) Beckett’s allusions to Christianity are not always reverent, but they are always serious and self-referential. His preoccupations are identical to those of the devout Christian believer meaning, hope and despair, suffering and the shortness of life. (8) During one knock-about exchange Estragon makes a reference to Jesus Christ. Vladimir exclaims ‘Christ! What has Christ to do with it? You’re not going to compare yourself to Christ!’ Estragon replies: ‘All my life I’ve compared myself to him.’
Many critics have dwelt upon this pervasive use of Christian imagery in Beckett’s writing, some of them claiming that his message is religious. It has even been suggested that he was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature on the mistaken assumption that his writing was a defence of religion. But Beckett was absolutely without any form of religious belief. The concluding words of his novel The Unnameable, express his views succinctly: ‘Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.’ (9)
One way of interpreting Godot is to see it as a snare to catch out unwary people and summarily demolish their illusion that they do know where they are. (10) Although Beckett’s stock of ideas came from the European tradition, he insisted that there is no solid reason to suppose that this or any inherited point of view corresponds with reality. His personal axioms included the belief that we are forever alone, that language ultimately fails to communicate, that broad generalisations (metanarratives) about the nature of reality are unwarranted; that they are even a kind of violence done to the unique world of the individual. Hence all that a writer or artist who feels driven to express themselves can do is to speak as concretely and simply as possible about their own experience of life.
THE MARGINALISING OF RELIGION
Although Beckett expressed his pain in a novel way, what he said is not new. Loss of coherent meaning lies at the core of an austere tradition traceable back to at least the sixteenth century in Europe.
From time to time the distress of it is caught in the writings of those who deal in naked feeling – that is, the poets. There is a parallel emotion running through from John Donne’s early seventeenth century lament,
And freely men confess that this world’s spent,
When in the planets and the firmament
They seek so many new: they see that this
Is crumbled out again t’his atomies.
‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;
All just supply, and all relation: (11)
to Matthew Arnold’s verse written in 1867:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night. (12)
W. B. Yeats continues with similar vehemence in 1921,
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world… (13)
In all three poems the loss of coherence is expressed as a spiritual or religious loss and it is a commonplace that this is associated with ideas that came to fruition during the European Enlightenment (14) Just how certain aspects of the Enlightenment made religious belief difficult for Europeans is an issue I will explore in detail later (see chapter 9). At this point it is sufficient to be reminded that the legacy of religious scepticism is inherited to some degree by everyone in the continent of Europe, not to speak of those other parts of the world that have been strongly influenced by European ideas. In every Westerner who is at all socially aware there resides either the conviction, or the knowledge of other people’s conviction, that religion is a dubious affair. Even those who have withdrawn into a religious ghetto to protect their beliefs are conscious of the critics who have triggered their wish for radical disengagement from the dominant culture.
Beckett is a supremely powerful spokesman on behalf of that underlying scepticism. In the 1950s, at what now seems like a pivotal moment, with the skill of a psychoanalyst he brought to consciousness the sense of incoherence that had been growing for centuries, but in the main was ignored or repressed in people’s everyday lives. He even got it headlined in the popular media. It is as if, with the honesty and naivety of a small boy, he blurted out an unpalatable intuition; there is no ultimate meaning. Large numbers of our contemporaries, when they have the strength to explore that suppressed world, share the opinion that the meanings that traditionally clothed our existence are simply not there.
The loss of religious meaning is publicly displayed in the statistics of decline in the churches. Britain is fortunate in having a relatively good set of figures summarising the changing involvement of people in religious institutions over the past 150 years. Though interpretation of the data is difficult and controversial, the waning of these institutions is unmistakable. It has been examined in detail by students of secularisation theory (which predicts that as society becomes more rationally ordered, the influence of religion will decline) .(15) The picture that emerges is one of increasing numbers of people drifting away from what they see as no longer credible, hence irrelevant to their lives. During the second half of the twentieth century the collapse appears to have accelerated. (16)
The story is well known so I shall confine myself to offering only a few reminders of the argument. Steve Bruce, the leading British proponent of secularisation theory, reflecting on several different analyses of the 1851 Census of Religious Worship, concludes that probably between 40 per cent and 60 per cent of the adult population of Britain were regular church attenders in that year. (I7) By 1998, according to figures gathered by Peter Brierley, (18) the proportion had dropped to 7.5 per cent. Between 1900 and 2000 the aggregated figures for church membership fell from an optimum of 27 per cent of the national population to 10 per cent. (19) The story is much the same for religious professionals. In 1900 there were over 45,000 clergy in the United Kingdom. By the year 2000, at a time when the national population had almost doubled, the number of clergy had fallen to just over 36,000. Professor Bruce points out that to maintain equivalence with 1900, there should be something like 80,000 clergy today. (20) Even more startling, Brierley calculates that attendance of children at Sunday School dropped from a maximum of half the population in 1920 to a miniscule 4 per cent in 2000. (21) In England in 1900, according to Brierley, 67 per cent of all weddings took place in an Anglican church, whilst by 2000 the figure had fallen to 20 per cent. (22) Finally and most devastatingly, during the last decade of the twentieth century people were detaching themselves from the mainstream churches at a spectacular rate. The statistics recorded in Religious Trends 1999/2000 (23) show that regular church attendance in Britain fell from 4.74 million in 1989 to 3.71 million in 1998, a drop of more than 20 per cent in ten years. Extrapolating those figures forward, one would have to conclude that there will be virtually no Christian institutional presence in Britain by the year 2050. In other words, if we take religious adherence as our measure of a belief in ultimate meaning, then there is overwhelming evidence that Beckett’s message has hit home.
RELIGIOUS AND SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE
Although this book is about spirituality, I will inevitably have a great deal to say about religion. The two subjects are very closely related, to the extent that for many people they are synonymous. What then, in the light of the statistics just quoted, are we to make of the dramatic changes in report of religious or spiritual experience in Britain during the latter part of the twentieth century? In 1987, along with Gordon Heald (who at the time was director of Gallup Poll in Britain), I published the results of a survey of reports of such experience in the UK. (24) The figures showed that 48 per cent of the national sample felt they were personally aware of this kind of experience in their lives. In the year 2000, in association with the BBC’s Soul of Britain review of the spiritual state of the nation, I had the opportunity to have another look at the question. Again I used the skills of Gordon Heald, who by this time was running his own polling organisation, the Opinion Research Business (ORB). I wondered what had happened over the years since 1987, approximately the same period of time during which church attendance had dropped by 20 per cent. I was curious to see whether there was a parallel fall in positive response to questions about religious and spiritual experience. As far as possible I decided to repeat the 1987 enquiries in the new survey, though omitting two of the original questions. (25)
I was astonished when I received the results, to the extent of telephoning the ORB office to make sure there had not been a mistake. Over those 13 years there had been an almost 60 per cent increase in the positive response rate. The figures suggest that around three-quarters of the national population are now likely to admit to having had one of these experiences. The great majority of these people are of course not regular churchgoers. And ever since the millennium, if the mushrooming of references on spirituality on the Internet is anything to go by (according to Google at the time of writing, it had risen to over 36,000,000) there is no sign of the interest dying down. (Currently,as of July 2006, the figure is 104,000,000.)
But what do people mean when they say they have had a spiritual or religious experience? I am able to give a substantial answer because of the work of the Oxford zoologist, Alister Hardy, of whom I shall have more to say in later chapters. In 1969 Hardy founded the Religious Experience Research Unit (RERU) (26) with the purpose of making a scientific study of the nature, function and frequency of reports of religious experience in the human species. He saw his initial task as rather like that of the Victorian naturalists, gathering examples of different specimens and classifying them, in preparation for the creation of a theory of religious experience. In response to advertisements he placed in the media, Hardy accumulated an archive of several thousand personal descriptions sent in to the Unit by members of the general public. These narratives were replies to variants of the following question:
Have you ever been aware of or influenced by a presence or a power, whether you call it God or not, that is different from your everyday self?
Hardy was soon to find that the classification of the responses was more difficult than he expected, primarily because there is a fundamental difference between sorting physical organisms like animals and plants, and applying the same method to written accounts of experience. In the latter case a multitude of personal, psychological, social and political influences affect the way people put their experience into words, making classification a more puzzling and uncertain undertaking.
In spite of the complications, several attempts have been made to organise the material in Hardy’s archive. (27) The simplest, and therefore the crudest method, is the one Gordon Heald and I used to prepare the questionnaire for our 1987 survey. We wanted to ask about different subcategories of experience. To be useable in a largescale national poll the questions have to be clear-cut, straightforward and as far as possible, unambiguous. We decided that it was not practicable to offer a list of more than a few alternatives, so we carefully reviewed the archive held in the RERU office and identified the eight commonest types of experience recorded. These were inserted in our poll. For the sake of clarity I will present the same classification here, along with a warning that this simplification is of course an over-simplification.
In my illustrations I have intentionally chosen vivid descriptions because they are helpful to convey the strong feeling that typically lies behind them. But there is a snag about using extracts like this because most people’s accounts are simple and down-to-earth. Hardy wanted to stress this ordinariness, in contrast to the two previous best-known studies of religious experience prior to his work, which both emphasised extraordinary states of consciousness. William James, first professor of Psychology at Harvard University, is the acknowledged founding father of the modern psychological study of religious experience. He achieved this position through his Gifford Lectures, delivered in Edinburgh University in 1901-2 and published as The Varieties of Religious Experience. (28) The lectures intentionally laid stress on extreme examples of experience because of James’ belief that psychological phenomena are most easily recognisable in their acute form. Similarly, in 1917, the German philosopher and theologian Rudolf Otto wrote a highly influential book on the experience of transcendence, Das Heilige. (29) It is a dramatic work in which he focuses upon the awe-inspiring forms that such experience can take, drawing many of his examples from the Bible.
Table 1: Frequency of Report of Religious or Spiritual Experience in Britain for the Years 1987 and 2000
1987 2000
A patterning of events 29% 55%
Awareness of the presence of God 27% 38%
Awareness of prayer being answered 25% 37%
Awareness of a sacred presence in nature 16% 29%
Awareness of the presence of the dead 18% 25%
Awareness of an evil presence 12% 25%
Cumulative Total (48%)* 76%
* This includes totals for respondents to two additional questions asked in 1987 about ‘a presence not called God’ (22%) and ‘awareness that all things are One’ (5%), i.e. the total of 76% for the year 2000 is quite likely to be relatively speaking an underestimate.
Bearing my proviso in mind, here are the classified extracts from Hardy’s archive.
AWARENESS OF A PATTERNING OF EVENTS/ SYNCHRONICITY
The commonest kind of experience reported in Britain is the recognition of a transcendent providence: a patterning of events in a person’s life that convinces them that in some strange way those events were meant to happen. In the millennium year survey I mentioned above, 55 per cent of the national sample recognised this in their own lives. This is a 90 per cent rise compared to the response when the question was asked in 1987 (see Table 1). Sometimes these events have the startling characteristics of what the psychologist C. G. Jung called ‘synchronicity’, that is, a ‘meaningful coincidence’ or a cluster of events that do not appear to have any causal connection with each other, yet have a meaningful relationship. (30)
My first example will illustrate what I mean. A young woman is giving an account of her religious search:
… while walking home one dark night I reflected how my search was going and, rather sadly, felt that, like Thomas, I must have proof and without that I would have to say that I did not believe in God. Deep in thought, I looked up at the night sky, which was filled with hundreds of stars. Wildly, I threw the silent call upwards, ‘Prove it!’ Hardly had the words been formed than a bright star sped across the sky. Before it died away, another star had begun to traverse the darkness. And there, just for a moment, an enormous cross blazed in the heavens like a personal signature. I was filled with awe and a certain terror at the power that I saw unleashed…
Here we see at once the importance of the cultural context in which an experience (any kind of experience) occurs for the construction of meaning, since this woman is aware of the symbolic significance of the cross in Christianity. Nevertheless, whilst a sceptic would dismiss the coincidence as meaningless, she is convinced that her experience is not merely coincidental, since she adds,
My husband died last year at the age of 39 years with cancer. While I nursed him a friend said to me, ‘I don’t know how you can believe in God.’ The question surprised me, for once you know there is a God the question of belief ceases to exist.
The next example has a rather less obviously culturally constructed content, but the symbolic importance of coincidence is experienced as even more melodramatic. The incident occurred at a time when the informant’s life was in pieces and she had decided to kill herself:
… at that moment I let out a loud challenge into that dark and lonesome night, into that desolation of land and soul and I shouted: … IF THERE IS SUCH A THING AS A GOD THEN SHOW YOURSELF TO ME – NOW… and at that very instant there was a loud crack, like a rifle shot [coming from the bedroom] … I stumbled through the open door to my bedroom. I fell into the bed shaking and then something forced my eyes upward to the wall above my bedside table and where I had a very small photograph of my father hanging. .. The picture had gone – I just looked at the empty space… but in looking closer I saw the photograph, face down on the little table and the narrow silver frame was split apart, the glass broken and from behind the cardboard on the back there had slipped out. .. the last letter [my father] had written me … When I picked up that letter and read over and over the words of this beloved caring father of mine, I knew that was HIS help to me, and God answered me directly in the hour of this soul being in anguish.
These two examples are described in spectacular terms and experienced as such. Much more commonly, people speak of coming to recognise an unfolding pattern in their lives that has not been dictated by their personal choice, as for example in the selection of a career. Almost without exception this configuration is interpreted as something ‘given’, though not necessarily with an overtly religious connotation. The next example, however, is from a committed religious believer, and here we can see a move towards St Ignatius Loyola’s dictum of ‘seeing God in all things’:
The experiences of the last six months have… confirmed my deep conviction that God is directly and indirectly guiding my life. .. as well as being absolutely convinced of Divine guidance in the larger issues of my life, I feel the guidance strongly even in some of the smaller events. .. the pattern of my life seems to me to be a mosaic, in which everything, including seeming disasters, eventually turns to good. . .
AWARENESS OF THE PRESENCE OF GOD
Many people feel they have been aware of the presence of God. We know from our research that this can often be when they are very happy. At the other end of the scale, people talk of being aware of God when they are deeply distressed. In the latter case typically nothing changes in their physical circumstances, but the experience of God’s presence places them in a larger context of meaning which helps them to bear their suffering. In the year 2000 poll, 38 per cent of the sample said they had personal awareness of such a divine presence – a 41 per cent rise on 13 years previously. Here is an example of someone experiencing feelings of joy in the presence of God, yet anxious about her sanity:
I was looking after the Friends Meeting House high on a spur of the forest, and sleeping on a camp bed in the sitting-room of the dwelling next door. One night I awoke slowly at about one o’clock to a feeling of absolute safety and happiness; everything in the world around me seemed to be singing ‘All is very well’. After an almost unbelieving (sic) few minutes I got up and went to the window and saw the valley filled with the love of God, flowing and spreading from the roadside and the few houses of the village. It was as though a great source of light and love and goodness was there along the valley, absolutely true and unchangeable. I went outside and looked down over the hedge, and the light and assurance were most truly there; I looked and looked, and, to be honest, I was not thankful, as I should have been, but trying to absorb the awareness of safety and joy so deeply that I would never forget it.
The writer goes on to say that the following day, in someone else’s house, she picked up a magazine that lay ‘open at an article on just such religious experiences as [I] had had the previous night’. Synchronicity again. She interpreted it as a reassurance that she was ‘quite sane’. As we shall see, anxiety about insanity is a common accompaniment of these experiences.
Some of the most interesting examples in Hardy’s archive are memories from childhood. (31) The freedom for experience of this type in children is often attributed to naivety and a misunderstanding of causality. In a later chapter I will question this dismissal and offer an alternative account based on recent empirical research. Here is an example of someone recollecting a spontaneous experience of being in God’s presence when she was a young girl:
My father used to take all the family for a walk on Sunday evenings. On one such walk, we wandered across a narrow path through a field of high, ripe corn. I lagged behind, and found myself alone. Suddenly, heaven blazed upon me. I was enveloped in golden light, I was conscious of a presence, so kind, so loving, so bright, so consoling, so commanding, existing apart from me but so close. I heard no sound. But words fell into my mind quite clearly – ‘Everything is all right. Everybody will be all right.’
The writer connects her comment with the best-known saying of the fourteenth-century English mystic, Julian of Norwich, ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’
Surprise is very characteristic, as in the next quotation, which is of interest because the writer includes a reflection on the use of metaphor to mediate his experience:
The experience itself is very difficult to describe. It took me completely by surprise. I was about to start shaving at the time, of all things. I felt that my soul was literally physically shifted for quite a number of seconds, perhaps 15 to 20 – from the dark into the light. I saw my life, suddenly, as forming a pattern and felt that I had, suddenly, become acquainted with myself again after a long absence – that I was, whether I liked it or not, treading a kind of spiritual path, and this fact demanded me to quit academics and enter social work… I must stress here that prior to this experience I used never to use the words such as ‘sour or ‘salvation’ or any such ‘religiously coloured’ words. But in order to make even the slightest sense of what happened to me I find it imperative to use them. Looking back it does seem as if I saw a kind of light, but I think that this might have been a metaphor I coined immediately after the experience.
The next illustration is an example of the many accounts of the presence of God that are associated with times of severe distress:
I had an experience seven years ago that changed my whole life. I had lost my husband six months before and my courage at the same time. I felt life would be useless if fear were allowed to govern me. One evening with no preparation, as sudden and dynamic as the Revelation to Saul of Tarsus, I knew I was in the presence of God, and that he would never leave me nor forsake me and that he loved me with a love beyond imagination – no matter what I did.
AWARENESS OF A PRESENCE NOT NAMED
Rather more than a fifth of our 1987 sample referred to this kind of experience. We were not able to include a question on it in our millennium poll. (32) That is unfortunate, because it is an increasingly Important category in an age of religious decline. Luckily there are numerous examples in Hardy’s archive. People are often lost for words, and when they do find words they are not sure that they Convey the experience. Evidently the term ‘God’ is not always appropriate for the writers, partly because they feel uneasy with religious language. The inarticulacy associated with any experience of a transcendent presence, and the uncertainty when words are found, is beautifully brought out in the next account. It is also of a childhood memory, from a man in his fifties:
As a child (not younger than 6, not older than 8) I had an experience which nowadays I consider as kindred, if not identical with those experiences related by Wordsworth in The Prelude, Bk I, lines 379-400. (33) The circumstances were: dusk, summertime, and lone of a crowd of grown-ups and children assembled round the shore of an artificial lake, waiting for full darkness before a firework display was to begin. A breeze stirred the leaves of a group of poplars to my right; stirred, they gave a fluttering sound. There, then, I knew or felt or experienced what? Incommunicable now, but then much more so. The sensations were of awe and wonder, and a sense of astounding beauty… that child of 6 or 7 or 8 knew nothing of Wordsworth or about mysticism or about religion.
My former colleague Edward Robinson (34) had the opportunity to talk further with this man about what his experience meant to him. He told Robinson,
It’s very difficult to say that it revealed – what? The existence of infinity? The fact of divinity? I wouldn’t have had the language at my command to formulate such things, so that if I speak about it now it is with the language and ideas of a mature person. But from my present age, looking back some half a century, I would say now that I did then experience – what? a truth, a fact, the existence of the divine. What happened was telling me something. But what was it telling? The fact of divinity, that it was good? Not so much in the moral sense, but that it was beautiful, yes, sacred. (35)
Did this man mean ‘God’? I don’t know, and it is not clear that the person himself feels able to give an unequivocal answer to that question either. A similar uncertainty appears in the next extract, because the informant has consciously withdrawn from the religious institution in which he was nurtured:
Since about the age of 6 I have had an awareness of a higher power. At all times I am aware of this power, which is as real to me as any in the physical world. In this sense I live in two spheres of influence. When I am tranquil, as in bed late at night, I place my problems before this higher power and I am shown the way to solve them… Originally a Catholic, since 12 I have belonged to no organised religion whatsoever. I belong to no group.
Sometimes there is no equivocation, as in the next brief extract, which sounds self-contradictory, perhaps further underlining the difficulty with the use of religious terminology in a secular age:
I … know that since I concluded some years ago that my mind could not accept a personal God… I seem to have become more aware of this all pervading power which to me is strength, comfort, joy, goodness. . .
AWARENESS OF PRAYER BEING ANSWERED
In great unhappiness or fear, many people, including those who are uncertain about God’s existence, turn to prayer for help. A total of 37 per cent of those questioned in the millennium survey felt they had received such help – a 40 per cent increase on 1987. My first example is a description of a modern vision. It is of great interest because of the common perception that such experience is symptomatic of mental disturbance, though this was not the opinion of the informant. His understanding of the shaping role of culture in his experience is clear, for he remarks ‘I realise that the form of the vision and the words I heard were the result of my education and cultural background’, but this does not lead him to dismiss it. At the time of the incident he had been a psychiatric patient for three years during which he underwent numerous electric shock treatments for schizophrenia. He interprets his experience not as a symptom of his illness, but rather as the trigger for his recovery from psychosis. He writes:
At one time I reached utter despair and wept and prayed God for mercy instinctively and without faith in reply. That night I stood with other patients in the grounds waiting to be let into our ward. It was a very cold night with many stars. Suddenly someone stood beside me in a dusty brown robe and a voice said, ‘Mad or sane, you are one of my sheep.’ I never spoke to anyone of this, but ever since, 20 years, it has been the pivot of my life.
My next example is an illustration of prayer as something involuntary, emerging from severe distress and followed by religious awareness. The informant was watching through the night with his dying father:
I was stretched out hardly a foot away from my father as his life slipped from his body, and came to the shocking conclusion that I was of very little help to him. He lay there not making much sound, just enough to make me aware that he was in distress. Every so often he pulled at the covers, trying to get out of bed. I was miserably conscious of each movement as he struggled towards the edge of the mattress and was in danger of crashing onto the floor. Again and again I got up, walked round to the other side of the bed and tried to settle him back as gently as I could. I thought to myself, this is the worst night of my life. I found I was praying. Not words. Just a despairing reaching towards God to help me through the night. Then, slowly, an extraordinary change began to take place. I became more and more strongly aware of God’s presence filling the room, indescribably powerful and (does this make any sense to you?) drawing my father and me, all things, together in a vast, rich harmony. Then it seemed as if something like a hard crust was dissolving or falling away inside me. I knew what was happening. The wounded relationship was being tenderly uncovered and healed. I was filled with joy. The rest of what I experienced is beyond words…
In the following example, a prayer for enlightenment is answered, and once again the cultural context is striking. I do not know if the writer was aware of the lines in George Herbert’s hymn,
A servant with this clause makes drudgery divine. Who sweeps a room as for thy laws makes that and the action fine.
I prayed with unashamed sincerity that if God existed, could He show me some sort of light in the jungle. One day, I was sweeping the stairs, down in the house in which I was working, when suddenly I was overcome, overwhelmed, saturated… with a sense of most sublime and living love. It not only affected me, but seemed to bring everything around me to life. The brush in my hand, my dustpan, the stairs, seemed to come alive with love. I seemed no longer me, with my petty troubles and trials, but part of this infinite power of love, so utterly and overwhelmingly wonderful that one knew at once what the saints had grasped. It could only have been a minute or two, yet for that brief particle of time it seemed eternity. ..
A SACRED PRESENCE IN NATURE
Another commonly reported experience is an awareness of a sacred esence in nature, akin to Wordsworth’s description of a presence at ‘rolls through all things’ in his lines written above Tintern Abbey. A total of 29 per cent of the millennium sample felt that they had had is kind of experience – an 81 per cent rise since 1987. In the next example, what begins as an awareness of a presence in nature and the hearing of God’s words to Moses out of the burning bush, ends as the experience of mystical union with God:
I was staying in Ireland in a cottage by the sea, with a beach, sand dunes and mountains. Walking through the dunes to call the family home from their fishing in the river, I came to the hollow I had walked through many times. This time I was halted by a voice saying clearly ‘Take off your shoes, the ground on which you stand is holy ground.’ I had no shoes on, but I was compelled on to my knees and then into a crouch so that I was as close as I could be to the ground. Then a tremendous silence came around me; I almost felt it touched me, I was enclosed in it. Yet I could hear the insects, bees, beetles, ants, etc. in the small flowers in the short grass, and I was one with them, creatures and flowers. I could hear the sheep and the breakers beyond on the beach, and I was one with them and the sea. Rivers, and for some reason the Victoria Falls (which I have never seen), came into my mind, and I was one with all waterfalls, all trees, all living things everywhere. A farmer’s wife in the valley had just had a baby and I was one with them, and the old Woman on the mountain who was dying and her relatives who were with her before they left for America, and I was one with them. Not only ‘one with’, somehow I was them. Then I thought, ‘God is here, with me and in me, the Creator’, and for that moment I was one with and in God.
The next excerpt seemingly belongs to the same universe of discourse, but at the time it was without the overt religious content of the previous example:
I did not attribute any great significance to these experiences: they were an expression of my ecstatic love for what Wordsworth calls ‘natural objects’, not utterly different from the ecstasy of sexual love. I did not think of them in terms of union with God, for instance, until much later. I used to be puzzled by the way this experience would come unheralded, and in the most unlikely places – not, for instance, in rose plot, fringed pool, fern’d grot – but in a bus or by a dustbin; but I did not think a lot about it or try to give a meaning to it until I read Wordsworth, and, later still, various books on mysticism.
AWARENESS OF THE PRESENCE OF THE DEAD
A surprisingly large number of people, 25 per cent of the national sample in the year 2000, felt they had been in touch with someone who has died – this is a 38 per cent rise since 1987. This kind of experience is commonly reported in association with immediate grief following the death of a loved companion or relative, as in the following incident:
After the sudden death of my husband about nine years ago, I had several experiences, which proved to me that there is life after death. I am not a spiritualist nor a churchgoer, but I try to follow Jesus, and I am a great believer in meditation as a way to God. After his passing, I both saw and spoke to my husband and held his hand. This hand was strong and not at all ghostlike, nor was his appearance. I was alone at the time, so no medium there to act as a link. Probably this is not a detail to prove God’s existence, but to me, it indeed did.
Sometimes the dead person offers comfort because of some other grief or anxiety, as in the next example:
One day I got a phone message to say that my elder son, who was at [a private school] had been taken to hospital that morning with polio. As I lay across the kitchen table in complete anguish and despair, I distinctly felt my grandmother’s hand laid on my shoulder and I had a feeling of complete serenity. My grandmother had died when I was 11. She was a very religious woman and I adored her. I just could not worry after this happening, and my son managed to throw off the germ before the paralysis set in.
AWARENESS OF AN EVIL PRESENCE
A quarter of all the people interviewed in 2000 felt they had been aware of an evil presence – a rise of over 100 per cent since 1987. These experiences are qualitatively quite different from all the other categories we have looked at, in that they are associated with a sense of great dread and unhappiness, as described here by a man in his mid – twenties:
A year and a half ago I was asleep in the night and woke very suddenly and felt quite alert. I felt surrounded and threatened by the most terrifying and powerful presence of evil. It seemed almost physical and in a curious way it ‘crackled’, though not audibly. .. I felt it was a manifestation directed very personally at me by a power of darkness.
Quite often, even when people say they are not religious, they turn to traditional religious symbols in an attempt to allay their fear. During a lengthy car journey through Europe, a woman and her companions had arranged to stay the night in a large town:
We had all been travelling many hours and were hot, sticky and tired. On entering the room I felt a most terrible chill, a fear I had never known. I am afraid I cannot put into words what exactly I felt, only to say that some terrible presence was in this room also… On the bedside table beside me was a Bible: although I am of the Jewish faith and not religious, this, even so, made me feel at that time very close to God… I do not believe one has to be religious to speak with God. But the Bible made me feel strong, made me feel that whatever was in this room I could fight and that God would fight alongside me.
Sometimes an encounter with a very physical manifestation of evil can, so to speak, trigger off a vocation to combat it. Here a GP recalls an incident when she was a girl:
Something came to me when 1 was thirteen years old. I saw a picture of a pile of Jews’ bodies waiting to be bulldozed into a mass grave in Germany during the Second World War. Of course 1 was shocked, but the ‘whatever it is’ took the opportunity to pound my brain from the inside for twelve hours. I can remember thinking ‘I don’t know what you want. What am I to do?’ At the end of the twelve hours I thought – though 1 can’t remember why – that maybe I should choose a career as a doctor.
AWARENESS THAT ALL THINGS ARE ONE
The notion of coherence, unity, shading into the mystical ‘All is one’ appears in a relatively small number of reports, and in our 1987 survey only 5 per cent responded positively to this question. It was this consideration that led me to omit it from the millennium survey. These accounts are nevertheless extremely interesting, since a number of professional students of mysticism have suggested that the experience of unity is the most fundamental form of mystical experience. (36) My first example is very like one I quoted from in the category of ‘a presence in nature’ except that the person does not claim to be aware of the presence of God:
One afternoon I was lying down resting after a long walk on the Plain… The grass was hot and I was on an eye level with insects moving about. Everything was warm, busy and occupied with living. 1 was relaxed but extraneous to the scene. Then it happened: a sensation of bliss. No loss of consciousness, but increased consciousness… I could feel the earth under me right down to the centre of the earth, and I belonged to it and it belonged to me. I also felt that the insects were my brothers and sisters, and all that was alive was related to me, because we were all living matter that died to make way for the next generation… And I felt and experienced everything that existed, even sounds and colours and tastes, all at once, and it was all blissful… I had a conviction that a most important truth had been enunciated: that we are all related – animal, vegetable and mineral – so no one is alone. I have never forgotten this experience.
Finally, an aesthetically rich description which turns into a very pure experience of unity:
I was walking across a field, turning my head to admire the Western sky and looking at a line of pine trees appearing as black velvet against a pink backdrop, turning to duck egg blue/green overhead, as the sun set. Then it happened. It was as if a switch marked ‘ego’ was suddenly switched off. Consciousness expanded to include, be, the previously observed. ‘I’ was the sunset and there was no ‘I’ experiencing ‘it’. At the same time – eternity was ‘born’. There was no past, no future, just an eternal now… then I returned completely to normal consciousness finding myself walking across the field, in time, with a memory.
INSTITUTION AND EXPERIENCE PART COMPANY
The remarkable rise in reports of spiritual or religious experience in Britain during the last decades of the twentieth century is extraordinary and takes some explaining. My own guess is that in reality there has been no great change in the frequency with which people encounter a spiritual dimension in their lives. What is probably altering is people’s sense that they have social permission for such experience. Somehow or other (perhaps through the influence of postmodernism, which I shall discuss later), there is a growing feeling that it is acceptable to admit to spiritual awareness, though it is still something most people feel quite deeply embarrassed about. The freeing up may be associated with a breakdown of the traditional assumption that the formal religious institution and spirituality, whilst perhaps not synonymous, are inseparable.
No doubt most people still connect the two, but there is evidence of an accelerating sense of disjunction between institution and personal experience right across the Western world. It is risky to
make general assertions on the basis of statistical findings in one country. Nevertheless it seems that Britain is not unique in this respect. My colleague David Tacey at La Trobe University in Melbourne has detected an almost identical pattern of decreasing church attendance and rising report of spiritual experience in Australia. He comments strikingly that:
In Australia, Catholic students who abandon formal worship within eighteen months of graduating from school amount to a staggering 97 per cent of the student body. These are not figures that any institution would be proud of, and consequently they are not broadcast. (37)
At the same time his report on his own small-scale studies with his students makes the point about spirituality:
In March 1998, I surveyed 50 of my students who had enrolled in one of my literature and psychology courses. An impressive 47 students indicated that personal spirituality was a major concern in their lives, while only two students said that religion was important. In 2002, 1 surveyed 125 students in my undergraduate subject, and ‘115 expressed personal concern for ‘spirituality’, while only about ten said they were pleased to be designated as following one of the religions. (38)
There are hints of a somewhat similar phenomenon in the European countries examined at intervals by the European Study of Values (ESV). Some years ago the English sociologist of religion, Grace Davie, developed the concept of ‘believing without belonging’, (39) and this seems to have relevance to the data gathered by the ESV. The French sociologist Yves Lambert, commenting on these surveys, notes that for the nine countries considered as a whole, the rate of self-definition as ‘a religious person’ among young people with no formal religion went up from 14 per cent in 1981 to 22 per cent in 1999; belief in God from 20 per cent to 29 per cent and belief in life after death from 19 per cent to 28 per cent. He adds,
The development of this autonomous, diffused religiosity, detached from Christianity, which appeared in the survey of 1990, is the most unique phenomenon. This ‘off-piste’ religiosity is illustrated mainly through variables that are less typically Christian: ‘taking a moment of prayer, meditation, contemplation or something like that’; belief in ‘a life after death’ (which can include diverse conceptions such as belief in reincarnation); belief in God as ‘some sort of spirit or life force’; and being led to ‘explore different religious traditions’ rather than ‘stick to a particular faith.’ (40).
Even in the United States, which is often cited as a Western country that is bucking the trend towards secularisation, there is evidence accumulating that a split has appeared between religion
and spirituality. In a pioneering piece of research published in 1997, Brian Zinnbauer and his colleagues (41) showed that even though the Christian churches in the US are numerically relatively five or six times as strong as in the UK, there is a parallel increasing tendency to make a distinction between ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’.
I believe that this shift in the relationship between religion and spirituality has been implicitly there for a very long time in Western consciousness, like a ghostly presence nudging people out of alienation, the feeling of being far from home in a cold universe. I think I see the shift in Karl Marx. As a young man in the 1840s Marx interpreted the institutional spirituality of his time as itself alienating, a false resolution of the injustices created by class society. But he also spoke of ‘spirit’ in highly positive terms. To criticise a situation as ‘spiritless’, as he does when he refers to religion as ‘the spirit of a spiritless situation’ is an attack on religion, but surely not on whatever he means by ‘spirit’. There lies the problem. So far I have dodged the question of definition because, as is already evident, the answer is not straightforward.
Notes
Chapter 1: The Mountains of the Mind
1. Gerard Manley Hopkins, from the poem ‘No Worst’, reprinted in The Faber Book of Religious Verse, ed. Helen Gardner (London: Faber and Faber, 1972).
2. Beckett published the original in French as En attendant Godot (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1952/English translation, London: Faber and Faber, 1956). In spite of the hostility of many members of the audiences the play in fact prospered. Not much more than a month after it opened at the Arts Theatre Club, on 12 September 1955, it was moved to a larger theatre, the Criterion.
3. Hugh Kenner draws out the parallels with the knockabout comedy of Laurel and Hardy in A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973).
4. In 1934 Beckett began a lengthy psychoanalysis with Wilfrid Bion, later to become the founding father of the Tavistock method for the study of group dynamics (see Wilfred Bion, Experiences in Groups, London: Tavistock Press, 1961). One of the three major basic assumptions Bion was to identify in the unconscious life of groups is dependency, the assumption that if the group waits long enough someone will come and save it. It is tempting to imagine that a similar assumption, at the individual level, emerged from Beckett’s unconscious with impressive force during his analysis.
5. The intensity with which Christian ideas pervade all of Beckett’s work is brought out particularly well in Mary Bryden’s Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God (London: Macmillan, 1998).
6. The most extensive and detailed biography of Beckett is James Knowlson’s Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996); marginally shorter and more readable is Anthony Cronin’s Samuel Beckett: the Last Modernist (London: HarperCollins, 1996).
7. This remark was made to Colin Duckworth and reported in his edited book Samuel Beckett: En attendant Godot (London: Harrap, 1966).
8. For an aware and insightful discussion of this concordance by a Christian writer, see Richard Harries’ essay ‘Astride of a grave – Samuel Beckett and Christian hope’ in his book of collected essays, Questioning Belief (London: SPCK, 1995).
9. Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable (English translation, London: John Calder, 1959).
10. See Thomas Cousineau, Waiting for Godot: Form in Movement (Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1990), p. 27.
11. John Donne, from ‘The first anniversarie: an anatomy of the world’ in The Epithalamions, Anniversaries and Episodes, ed. W. Milgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).
12. Matthew Arnold, from ‘Dover Beach’, reprinted in The Penguin Book of English Verse, ed. John Hayward (London: Penguin Books, 1956), pp. 344-5.
13. W. B. Yeats, from ‘The Second Coming’, reprinted in The Penguin Book of English Verse, p. 407.
14. The late Roy Porter’s splendid book, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World, published by Allen Lane (London: Penguin Press, 2000), is a highly readable and scholarly introduction to this complex and controversial concept.
15. The father figure of secularisation theory in Britain was the late Bryan Wilson, formerly Head of the Sociology Department in Oxford University (see his influential text, Religion in Secular Society, London: C. A. Watts, 1966). Two important contemporary successors with distinctive perspectives of their own are Callum Brown, Professor of History in the University of Dundee (see The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000, London and New York: Routledge, 2001) and Steve Bruce, Professor of Sociology at Aberdeen University (see, for example, God is Dead: Secularization in the West, Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).
16. Callum Brown identifies the turning point as the 1960s. Before that date, whilst church attendance might not be high, widely held popular assumptions were still recognisably Christian. It was during the 1960s, for example, that it first became impossible to carry on the tradition of singing the hymn ‘Abide with me’ at the English FA Cup Final. See Brown, The Death of Christian Britain.
17. Bruce, God is Dead, p. 63.
18. In Peter Brierley, The Tide is Running Out (London: Christian Research Association, 2000).
19. Peter Brierley, Religious Trends No.1: 1999/2000 (London: Christian Research Association, 1999).
20. Bruce, God is Dead, p. 69.
21. Brierley, Religious Trends.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. See David Hay and Gordon Heald, ‘Religion is good for you’, New Society, 17 April 1987.
25. They were omitted because we had no money to pay for them. It is an unfortunate economic reality of research in the boundary area between religion and science that such enquiries are usually too scientific for the religious funding bodies and too religious for the agencies supporting science. Consequently (with some notable exceptions) we have often had to make do with not much more than small change.
26. Now called the Religious Experience Research Centre and based in the University of Wales, Lampeter. The current directors are Dr Wendy Dossett, Professor Paul Badham and Professor Xinzhong Yao. The Centre’s website is at <http://www.alisterhardytrust.org.uk>
27. Hardy’s own preferred classification is presented in his book The Spiritual Nature of Man (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). Other attempts include Tim Beardsworth’s A Sense of Presence (Oxford: Religious Experience Research Unit, 1977); Meg Maxwell and Verena Tschudin’s Seeing the Invisible (London: Penguin/Arkana Press, 1990); Geoffrey Ahern’s Spiritual/Religious Experience in Modern Society (Oxford: Religious Experience Research Centre, 1990).
28. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longman, Green and Co., 1902). There have been many subsequent editions, some with the significant subtitle ‘A Study in Human Nature’, implying James’ belief that the phenomenon has a naturalistic component. The most authoritative edition was published in 1985 as one of the volumes in the Harvard University Press series, The Works of William James.
29. Rudolph Otto, Das Heilige, translated into English with the title The Idea of the Holy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923).
30. Synchronicity has an eminent place in the history of Christianity, for example in the famous story of the conversion of St Augustine near Milan in the year 386. He was standing in a garden in a distressed state when he overheard ‘the singsong voice of a child in a nearby house’ shouting’ Tolle lege, tolle lege’ (‘take it and read, take it and read’). Augustine took the cry to be a direct command from heaven and opening at random a book containing St Paul’s Epistles, read the words, ‘Not in revelling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather, arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ; spend no more thought on nature and nature’s appetites.’ [Described in Book VIII xii (29) of Augustine’s Confessions]. In the same paragraph, Augustine himself refers to a precedent for his experience; the conversion of St Anthony in a church in Alexandria when he heard the words from St Matthew’s Gospel, ‘Go, sell all you have, give to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me’ (Matt. 19:21).
31. Edward Robinson made a moving study of the religious experience of childhood, drawing upon such accounts in the RERV archive. See his book, The Original Vision (New York: Seabury Press, 1983).
32. See note 24.
33. The point where Wordsworth begins to speak more overtly of his experience of transcendence is from line 415 onwards, from The Prelude Book I: Childhood and school-time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977):
I left my Bark,
And, through the meadows homeward went, with grave
And serious thoughts; and after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Work’d with a dim and undetermin’d sense
Of unknown modes of being; in my thoughts
There was a darkness, call it solitude,
Or blank desertion, no familiar shapes
Of hourly objects, images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty Forms that do not live
Like living men mov’d slowly through the mind
By day and were the trouble of my dreams.
34. Director of the Religious Experience Research Unit from 1976 to 1985. 35. Quoted in The Original Vision, p. 35.
36. See for example W. T. Stace’s important book Mysticism and Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1960).
37. In David Tacey, The Spirituality Revolution: the Emergence of Contemporary Spirituality (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 14. 38. Ibid. 39. See Grave Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging, with an introduction by David Martin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
40. Personal communication from Yves Lambert. See his complete paper, ‘A turning point in religious evolution in Europe’, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 19:1 (2004), pp. 29-45.
41. See B. J. Zinnbauer et al., ‘Religion and spirituality: unfuzzying the fuzzy’,
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 76:4 (1997), pp. 549-64.
