IT IS one of the more striking turns of the 20th and early 21st century that, as well as the churches, even Christianity itself is becoming dissociated from the fundamental idea of spirituality in the public mind. The reasons for this disconnection are, perhaps, to be found as a subset of the causes for the general decline in church attendance and membership from the 1960s onwards.
The sudden development of alternative means of association, culture, and recreation led to a withering of the means that churches might use — broad public knowledge of scripture, devotional literature, music — to transmit and propagate the idea of spirituality. All of this marked the loss of a shared cultural language which affirmed the idea of spirituality, and made it a normal part of life to share it.
On top of this, the general trends of attacking received ideas of knowledge and old institutions, along with the privileging of the experience and desires of the individual over collective and inherited experience, undermined the authority of the churches in the field. The post-1960s tendency was not to accept doctrines from traditional establishments, or inherited canons, but either to defer to one’s own feelings and intuitions, or else to look further afield.
The failures of the churches after that time — whether from financial or abuse scandals, or else a general running down of local networks and infrastructure (such as the Anglican parishes), or also of the theological, liturgical, and cultural training of the clergy — has exacerbated the problem. The result is as the research has shown. There is a loss of the superstructure which made it possible for people to understand the offer of Christianity and spirituality.
As a consequence, the public ever more look to themselves alone, or else to imported traditions, as with the Beatles following the Maharishi, to assuage their spiritual longings. As the search for spirituality becomes more individualised and estranged from an inherited and shared language anchored in wider cultural traditions, it becomes harder and more uncomfortable for people to articulate the nature of their spiritual longings or their spiritual progress, and, in a climate which privileges the immediate satisfaction of every matter of sensual desire and the veneer of the rational, every expression of a wider or less temporal longing brings with it a sensation close to shame.
FOR all of this breakdown of the past half-century and more — the overwhelming of the structures of the Church and its surrounding culture with the unaccustomed acid of new technology, the contempt of the old, the new insistence on the primacy of the individual over the inheritance of shared knowledge and experience — the spiritual insight of the Church and the Christian faith remains. It is a fervent and articulate expression of that longing for the “something” which the spiritual but not religious deeply desire, but can barely put into words, and are fearful even to speak of.
“Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks, so longeth my soul after thee, O God,” Psalm 42 says. “My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the living God: when shall I come to appear before the presence of God?”
In the pursuit of that “something”, the presence of God, it falls to those on the Christian spiritual path to “think a lot about lots of things”. “Try me, O God, and seek the ground of my heart,” the Psalmist demands. “Prove me, and examine my thoughts.”
PixabayPixabay
In that pursuit of whom, through whom, and to whom “are all things”, as St Paul writes (Romans 11.36), there is an imperative towards the deep contemplation of all things, in which are hinted the presence of that God which defies all categories we can grasp or impose:
“Such knowledge is too wonderful and excellent for me: I cannot attain unto it. . . Whither shall I go then from thy Spirit: or whither shall I go then from thy presence? If I climb up into heaven, thou art there: if I go down to hell, thou art there also. If I take the wings of the morning: and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there also shall thy hand lead me: and thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, Peradventure the darkness shall cover me: then shall my night be turned to day. Yea, the darkness is no darkness with thee, but the night is as clear as the day: the darkness and light to thee are both alike” (Psalm 139).
That confusing, confounding intimacy with that “something” — the distant God the knowledge of whom “is too wonderful and excellent for me” but who is so close that He “hast searched me out and known me”, who “knowest my down-sitting and mine up-rising, [and] understandest my thoughts long before” — finds its epitome in the figure of Christ crucified, who transcends the barriers between the human and the divine, the transitory and the eternal. “Who”, as St Paul wrote in the Letter to the Philippians: “. . . being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name. . .” (Philippians 2.6-9).
In the mystery of the incarnation of Christ, “the Word” who, for love of man “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1.14), there is offered a path to a spiritual unity, a reintegration with that “something” from which the human spirit, confined by its temporal and evanescent frame, feels its profoundest longings. The incarnate Christ crosses every spiritual frontier. As he says in St John’s Gospel, “. . . because I live, ye shall live also. At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you” (14.19-20).
In the act of communion, all are knitted together in Christ: “He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him” ( John 6.56). The exaltation of man in mutual fellowship, unity, and love, is the culmination of this path: “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. . . If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us” (1 John 4.7, 12).
These desires, for that “something”, for unity and spiritual integration, are still as much a part of human longing today as they were when the Psalmist, the Gospel authors, and St Paul were writing. Such fundamental longings have not been assuaged by an abundance of technology, wealth, or affluence, or the connectivity of social media, as passingly pleasing as they are.
THE message of integration, of the wholeness offered in the way of the Christian spiritual path, is presented to us not just in the raw and unmediated texts of scripture, but it is to be found given “A local habitation and a name” in the generations and centuries of English culture and artistic creativity inspired by this message, which, even though we are ever more estranged from it, lies close to hand and ready to inspire in its turn.
For that longing for the “something”, for God, for which many still furtively and inarticulately strive, is declared and affirmed in the cries of the great poets, of George Herbert and John Donne calling “Whither, O whither art thou fled, My Lord, My Love”, or “Batter my heart, three-personed God”; in the outpourings of the medieval mystics, Dame Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe; in the fragments of doom paintings and soaring spaces of the parish churches and cathedrals, or the canvases of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; in the longing of the music of Thomas Tallis, of William Byrd, of Orlando Gibbons, of Henry Purcell heard at evensong.
And even the intimation of the height of that journey, the sense of wholeness and integration in the vision of the divine — that, too, is offered in a homely guise, whether in the puzzling and fiery simplicity of The Cloud of Unknowing, the poems of William Blake seeing heaven in a wild flower, Gerard Manley Hopkins finding the Passion of Christ charged in the “achieve” of “The Windhover”: “air, pride, plume here Buckle! And the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!”
Or Thomas Traherne, apprehending with the vision of a child the presence of heaven all around: “The corn was Orient and Immortal wheat. . . I thought it had stood from Everlasting to Everlasting. The Dust and Stones of the Street were as Precious as GOLD . . . The Green Trees when I saw them first . . . Transported and Ravished me; their Sweetness and unusual Beauty made my Heart to leap, and almost mad with Exstasie . . .”
“Are not all His treasures yours, and yours His?” Traherne asks. The treasure of England is a spiritual tradition, proclaimed in a matrix of culture, which, if offered with confidence and approached with an open-minded patience, has the power to assuage and nourish those longings of the spirit so clearly present but which the demands of this age desire us to disregard.
We need not think that England is brutish, or deficient in that which might feed and satisfy the spirit. Like Traherne, we may look beyond the garden gate, and see the dust and stones in our local streets as precious as gold, and the very trees here to make our hearts leap, almost mad with ecstasy.
This is an edited extract from God is an Englishman: Christianity and the creation of England by Bijan Omrani, is published by Swift Press at £25 (Church Times Bookshop £22.50); 978-1-80075-306-8 (Books, 25 April).
