Pentecost & the Idiot

And they were all filled with the holy Spirit and began to speak in different tongues, as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim
Acts 2:4

There is an ancient Chinese saying that when the sage points at the moon the idiot looks at his finger. This refers to the idea that religious actions, practices and rituals which are designed to point beyond themselves to a transcendent reality are often transformed into ends in themselves, and dead ends at that. The 'spiritual but not religious' crowd, enemies of organised religion and theological liberals emphasise this idea and suggest that the individual presenting themselves before the ultimate spiritual reality is the only show in town. In this view the function of the Church is, at best, merely an organising one, to carry out good social work and to gather believers in one place so that they can form suitable affinity groups.

The saying, however, has an important secondary meaning which is often overlooked. We can see the moon without the help of the sage but we cannot see it through his eyes without his help and guidance. That is, both the sage and his finger are necessary parts of the process which transform our understanding of the moon into something which we did not possess before. From a Christian point of view it is sometimes argued that since we receive the Holy Spirit, who is God Himself, then what need do we have for formalised actions, practices and rituals since we can be guided directly? What happened in the days immediately after this gift was first received? St Luke tells us-
They devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles and to the communal life, to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers.
Acts 2:42
So, although each believer had been touched by the Holy Spirit in order to grow in understanding, love and effective response they had recourse to the teachings brought to them by the companions of Jesus and to the spiritual strengthening offered by the sacrament of the Eucharist and by the liturgy. In that sense the Spirit is like the moon and the sage, we can each perceive its presence within us but to grow in response to its presence requires us to make an effort beginning with having the humility to recognise our own weakness and ignorance. The Apostolic Church is our sage and wise guide, the sacraments are the finger of God. Believers need them both if they are to both see and understand the true light which comes to us from the Father and the Son.

Blessed John Henry Newman, of course, expressed this idea with more elegance than I can hope to muster-
Our Prayers and Services, and Holy days, are only forms, dead forms, which can do us no good. Yes, they are dead forms to those who are dead, but they are living forms to those who are living. If you come here in a dead way, not in faith, not coming for a blessing, without your hearts being in the service, you will get no benefit from it. But if you come in a living way, in faith, and hope, and reverence, and with holy expectant hearts, then all that takes place will be a living service and full of heaven.
(Parochial Sermons Vol 7:13)

@stevhep


The painting is Pentecost by  Jan Joest van Kalkar

St Ælfric's by Night-A Christian Ghost Story

She was a very modern vicar. Traditions and superstitions that got in the way of kindness and tolerance were discarded by her for kindness and tolerance were her religion. Being thoroughly modern she made no provision for technological failure. So when, one November evening, the electricity failed she was at a loss about what to do. Eventually she remembered that there were candles in the church and she dug out the torch left by her predecessor and set out from the presbytery.

The wind was blowing dead autumn leaves across the churchyard. Like shrouds they piled up against the West side of the gravestones. The owls and the rodents had resumed their nightly battle of wits with violent death as the stake. The vicar found herself muttering involuntary prayers as she hurried through and half-laughed at her reversion to the pre-modern little girl she had once been.

St Ælfric in the Marsh was an ancient building, it was already old when Henry VIII decided to change the religion of his people. It had seen many modern vicars in its time and many different modernities. It had spent more centuries without electricity than with it so power cuts did not unduly affect St Ælfric.The vicar stepped into the porch and automatically flicked the light switches in the vague hope that the church was on a different circuit to the presbytery. It wasn’t, the darkness was profound.

She pointed her torch in the direction of the Lady chapel, where people with a faith as ancient as that of the church they worshipped in still placed votive candles, and she started trudging towards it. After a while it occurred to her that she had been walking for a long time given that St Ælfric’s was such a small building. She flashed the torch round about her. Everything seemed normal and she guessed she must be about halfway between the porch and the chapel. More time passed and her brisk tread became hesitant. Once more she paused to inspect her surroundings. She seemed to be in precisely the same position as she had been before.      

“I must be walking in circles somehow” she thought “It’s very strange.”

Touching the wall of the church with her right hand to keep herself straight she continued her unusually prolonged expedition prudently turning the torch off to save the dying battery. After a while she had to move the hand to help support the weight on her left shoulder. For a while she struggled on before she thought to ask herself what that weight might be and how it had got there. It seemed to her that she had been carrying it for a long time but she had no memory of how or when it came to be there. Kneeling painfully down she placed the thing on the floor and flashed her torch at it.

Slowly she moved the feeble light up and down, down and up and then down again. However often she looked at it it retained the same appearance. It was large and crudely made out of wood. It was a cross. The vicar gulped several times.

“Who needs candles anway?” she asked defiantly out loud and turned to make her way back to the reassuringly normal graveyard. Then she stopped. As clearly as if they had been spoken she became aware of the words-

“You can leave, but then you will never know the answer.”

She stood for a moment in the faint light from the stained glass windows. Several layers of modernity were shed. A choice was being made. Was she a woman of faith above all or was she a creature of technology and artificiality. Weeping slightly she turned again, picked up her cross and struggled on through the darkness. After what seemed long ages she sunk under the weight and sobbed without restraint. Then, a gentle healing presence surrounded her and slowly she stood up once more. Her burden had become lighter somehow. But the darkness was still dark and the way still seemed long.

Suddenly she let out an un-vicarlike expression. She had stubbed her toe on something. Carefully exploring the dark area in front with her foot she discovered that she was standing in front of a step.

“I must have veered off the way to the Lady chapel and come to the sanctuary instead.” she thought.

Firmly shouldering her cross she began to climb. More time passed. And then she found the light.

@stevhep

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The Journey & Other Poems

The Journey

You're in front of me
And I don't see you. Beside
Me and I don't know.
Fill my emptiness with you.
Touch my darkness with your light

With longing I search
For you. In hope I travel.
Towards or Away?
How can I know or be sure?
I long for your hidden smile.

Will I find you, see
You, know you? Elusive love,
Yet faithful lover.
Journey's end and beginning 
Pilgrim heartsease and hearts wound.

Of this I am sure,
The anchor to which I cling,
That which sustains me,
If I fail, when I fail, you 
Will find me. And we will kiss.

Not Hearing

I am without you.
You, my love, are within me.
Not hearing, I speak.

Within Me

On the mountains I
Look for you, and in the seas.
You are within me.

Zen Sky

Mind and sky empty
Cloudless. Infinite. At peace.
Dogs bark far away.

Harvest Season

Now I realise
My best days are behind me.
Season of harvest

Fragile Icon

Fragile icon. Soon
Your beauty will fade away
But not from my mind.

English Summer

Drumming on flat roofs
Summer shower, brief but fierce.
Abandon picnic!

Pacing the Cloister

Pacing the cloister
A thousand years of silence
Dust motes in the sun

Concealing Spiders

Untended garden
Riotously tangled life
Concealing spiders.

Evening of Life

Evening of life
A walk amid deep shadows.
Not without laughter.

Beyond the Window

Long days, short nights. Sun
Flecked paths. Warm rain. Bright flowers.
Beyond the window.

Our Lady of Light

Mary, filled with light
Mother of God’s pure Wisdom.
Advocate of love

Mary Amid the Darkness

Mary amid the
Darkness, sharing our sorrows.
Mother of our Hope.

Echoes of Silent Prayer

Echoes of silent
Prayer heard in deep stillness.
Shafts of light break through.

@stevhep

Shakespeare & the Apostles

Agincourt, Imagination and the Bible

 Then he took the twelve apostles aside, and warned them, Now we are going up to Jerusalem, and all that has been written by the prophets about the Son of Man is to be accomplished.  He will be given up to the Gentiles, and mocked, and beaten, and spat upon; they will scourge him, and then they will kill him; but on the third day he will rise again. They could make nothing of all this; his meaning was hidden from them, so that they could not understand what he said.
Luke 18:31-34

King of France
With pennons painted in the blood of Harfleur: 
Rush on his host, as doth the melted snow 
Upon the valleys, whose low vassal seat 
The Alps doth spit and void his rheum upon: 
Go down upon him, you have power enough, 
And in a captive chariot into Rouen 
Bring him our prisoner.
Constable of France.
 This becomes the great. 
Sorry am I his numbers are so few, 
His soldiers sick and famish'd in their march, 
For I am sure, when he shall see our army, 
He'll drop his heart into the sink of fear 
And for achievement offer us his ransom
Henry V, Act III, Scene 5


The Apostles do not come well out of the Gospels. They seem to have a near perfect ability to misunderstand or not comprehend Jesus. It is tempting to dismiss them as unusually dense or at least woefully ignorant. It does not help much if we remember that we know the end of the story and they didn't, that we have the benefit of the reflections on Jesus and His mission in the Epistles and two thousand years of Christian thought and they had to make do with very much less. The reason this is not helpful is because it is a purely intellectual exercise on our part. Most readers of the Gospels, Christian or not, are emotionally invested in Jesus, often to a great degree, and it hurts us when we see Him desperately trying and usually failing to make those closest to Him understand who He is and what He is doing. That emotional wound, that empathy which we feel, cannot really be touched simply by engaging in the mental exercise of adding up the things which the Apostles could have known and could have understood and comparing it with what our Lord was asking them to know and understand. Emotional wounds need to be treated with emotional medicines.

(enter Shakespeare)
One way of reading Scripture is to immerse oneself in it imaginatively. If we try to see the events unfolding before us not through the eyes and with the feelings of a 21st century person but as near as we can manage it with the feelings of the historical participants then our perspective will change. For most of us it will not be possible really to enter into the thought processes of the Apostles, the holy women or the Pharisees because their thinking was dominated by a framework of assumptions and experiences that only professional historians could really reproduce. Their feelings, however, would be akin to ones that we ourselves are familiar with because the lapse of two thousand years has effected no change in the human emotional range whatever it may have done to the world of ideas. In this context Act III, scene 5 of Henry V becomes a useful tool. Why? It is set on the eve of the battle of Agincourt, the flower of French knighthood and nobility is preparing itself for a foreseen victory. In that they are wise, they possess the greatest warriors in Christendom, they are fighting on their own soil and they heavily outnumber the English. It is not vainglorious or foolish of them to expect to be victorious, quite the reverse they have no reason to expect anything else. Yet, as it happens, on that October day in 1415 they experienced a crushing and humiliating defeat. Shakespeare, I think, captures well their attitude and does not portray it as he might have done as being hubristic. This makes the contrast with what follows all the sharper.
(exit Shakespeare pursued by angry Frenchmen)

If we read the Agincourt section of Henry V then none of its participants appear to be behaving in an excessively foolish manner, they do not irritate us by their denseness. If we read the Gospels in a similar way then we can see that the Apostles, particularly on the eve of the Passion found themselves emotionally in a place analogous to that of the French nobility. They expected a triumph and had good reason for such an expectation. In Jesus they recognised the promised Messiah, the Anointed One of God. Their understanding of these titles was that as a descendant of King David and Solomon our Lord would restore the kingdom of Israel to its ancient glories driving out the occupying Romans and humbling their insolent neighbours. A restored Israel would be rich and powerful and all the world would acknowledge the might of Israel's God. That Jesus had the power to be just such a Messiah they could not doubt, had He not displayed His power over sickness and death and had not His words shown a wisdom greater even than Solomon's? That Jesus did not intend to use His power in such a fashion they could not grasp. That is to say they may have intellectually grasped that His words pointed in a different direction but, rather like our attitude towards them, they could not emotionally grasp the significance of His mission because in their heart they desired something different. It would require the horror of the Passion and the joy of the Resurrection to flood into their inmost being before they could be open to understand as keenly with their hearts as with their minds what it was that Jesus stood for.

If we enter into their emotional lives then not only can we understand them better but we can also feel more deeply for ourselves the impact of the Easter events. Then, like the Apostles, it will be only natural that these events become for us the foundation of all that we are and do in the world. It should not be understood, however, that I am suggesting that we should read the Gospels only in an imaginative way. The scriptures can and should be read in a variety of different ways- as narratives, as literal truth, as metaphorical truth and so on- since only then can they yield to us all the treasures which they contain. Moreover, they should always be read with the mind of the Church, two thousand years of Catholic reflection and meditation have preceded us and we should draw upon this resource looking towards it for guidance and support particularly where we encounter passages and sayings which are difficult to understand or to integrate with scripture as a whole.

Nonetheless the imaginative reading of scripture has enormous potential to help us release our inmost energies. This does not only apply to the Gospels, the Exodus story of Israel escaping from bondage has often exercised great influence over those suffering oppression precisely because they can enter imaginatively into the sufferings of the Hebrews and see in their salvation a source of hope for their own plight. Personally too I recall that in the days after my mother died I read the Book of Job and what I saw there spoke to me and moved me and changed me in ways which had not been possible before because I could now see his loss and pain through the eyes of my own bereavement. The Bible has been called the Book of Life and it is that in this sense: your life can be found within its pages and that life by it and by prayer and the Holy Spirit can be transformed from darkness into light.

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Is Spirituality Superior to Religion 2?

Everyone has the same spiritual access to God — or the Great Spirit, or the Goddess — regardless of education or background. It is a personal spiritual access from within the individual directly to the Supreme Being - 
Stephen E. Schlarb

Philip ran to him, and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah, and said, “Do you understand what you are reading?”  And he said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he asked Philip to come up and sit with him.

Acts of the Apostles 8:30-31



In Part One I looked at the shared understanding that both 'spiritual but not religious' and 'religious as well as spiritual' people have that there is an underlying transcendent reality to the cosmos we inhabit. In this Part I propose to look at the assumptions-
a) Religion is man-made and artificial but spirituality is an authentic personal response to the Divine, and
b) Religion is hopelessly bound up in rules and regulations but spirituality is free.
I am writing from the perspective of Christianity but, in fact, I think my arguments would have some traction with all the major religions.

An individual human is limited and finite; the reality which they seek to apprehend or intuit is infinite and eternal. This means that each person can only grasp a small portion of it on the basis of personal experience alone. If they are content with that small portion not only are they terminally incurious but they have just created their very own personal man or woman-made religion. When we set the limits to what is knowable or experienceable on the basis of ourselves alone then we are not really responding to the infinite we are imprisoning it within our own limitations. At the very least it seems reasonable to suggest that spiritual seekers should seek to benefit from the collective wisdom traditions of other spiritual seekers. These can point us towards ways of accessing the Divine that we would not necessarily have thought of ourselves. They can suggest dimensions to the transcendent which we never would have imagined left to our own devices. Authentic spirituality then ceases to be merely an individual experience and becomes part of a community spread over both space and time.

Religion can be considered from this perspective to be the communities that collect, preserve and transmit wisdom traditions. Without the existence of such more or less stable more or less durable organisations or belief systems much wisdom would be lost from one generation to the next. Religion, however, can claim to be more than that. Christianity, for example, posits a Divine Revelation. God by intervening in various ways in human history reveals more of Himself and more about Himself than we could possibly apprehend without such a revelation. Unaided wisdom can lift us to the upper reaches of our own abilities, Revealed truth can lift us into eternity both in this life and in the one to come. In the figure of Jesus, Son of God and Son of Mary, Christians see the fullest possible self-revelation of God. Religion based upon such a revelation is not a man-made one but a received one. We respond to what we have received and seek to form a relationship with the Divine One based upon it. Dogma and doctrine are not attempts to impose order on disorderly humans but are the formulae we use to summarise the truths we have received. Accepting these dogmatic definitions and using them as the basis from which we seek to understand and respond to the Divinity is not an inauthentic man-made response to a transcendent reality it is the fruit of the shared wisdom and understanding of generations of believers who have known God through Christ.

Of course the question naturally arises why accept one revelation rather than another? Why Jesus and not Krishna or why St Paul and not the prophet of Islam? In a world where people travelled little and knew of few religions it would be natural for them to accept lock stock and barrel the religion of one's country or region because they knew no other. For us in multi-cultural societies with easy access to all the wisdom and faith traditions of the world would it not be best to heed all wisdoms and act only on those which spoke most clearly to us? Well, yes and no. The idea that a personal spirituality is something that we acquire like we do an outfit, shoes from here, hat from there, handbag from somewhere else is rather repugnant to both good taste and good sense. Each religious tradition is a coherent whole. It has a consistent inner logic, one part fits with another. It is difficult if not impossible to appreciate that coherence and to benefit from the fruits of it from outside of the tradition. I was a Catholic for ten years or so before it all began to really make sense to me. If you try to match together disparate elements from different traditions it is not the best of all possible worlds that you will get because you will be reducing wisdom to your size not allowing your size to be expanded by wisdom. So much for the 'no', the 'yes' is simply this- to accept a religious revelation as authentic and to live your life by it is leap of faith and that faith can only be founded upon your personal experience of it.  I would urge people in the strongest possible terms to look towards Jesus and by prayer and hope and careful study of the Gospels to invite Him into your heart and life. That would give you the most authentic and most enduring of all spiritual lives. Other religions would no doubt offer similar invitations. The proof of religion is experimental which is a posh way of saying 'suck it and see.'

We come now to the idea that religions are bound by strict commands which usually begin with "thou shalt not" whereas spirituality is free from such restrictions and, therefore, less oppressive. It is certainly true that religions have rules and it is also true that within each tradition there are those for whom the rules are the religion. The textbook case of this. perhaps unfairly, are the Pharisees as depicted in the Gospels. In the history of Catholicism too there have been periods where outward observance has been seen as more important than the inner spiritual life. Providentially in such times God has raised up prophetic figures like St Catherine of Siena or St Francis of Assisi to guide it back into the path of authentic spirituality (something I looked at in my Girl Power blog.) Rules do serve a purpose other than social control however. The spiritual journey is about transformation. We are changed by it. Every gain involves a loss, we must shed, sometimes painfully shed, parts of ourselves which we are quite comfortable with. Our rough edges need to be smoothed our smoothness needs to be roughed. Most of all our ego needs to be irretrievably shattered a process beyond our own power to achieve. Rules against which we chafe, decisions which we can only accept in the first instance with faith hoping that reason will follow it in due course, these are the tools by which our square peg can be shaped to slot into the round hole. We should not fly from restrictions because they are difficult to adhere to and hard to understand, these are the very reasons that we should accept them when we know that generations before us have passed through the precise same crucible and so arrived at the point where they can say from experience 'the kingdom of God is within.'

It is false anyway to think that we are free if we are not bound by external forces. Our internal forces hold us fast in their grip. We are oppressed by our desires, our appetites our fears and inhibitions, our demons. Jesus put it like this Most assuredly, I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin. (John 8:34) It is all too often the case that when we wish to do something good or avoid doing something bad a force inside us overrides our good intentions and we find ourselves acting in ways that we ourselves think hateful. The choice before us is not freedom or slavery but involuntary slavery to our lower selves or voluntary obedience to the Divine One. And when each act is a free will offering to the Highest of the High, the Sweetest of the Sweet the Lord who has granted us our freedom to reject or accept Him then it is an escape from oppression not a retreat into it. When we can share in Mary's joyful exclamation Behold the maidservant of the Lord! Let it be to me according to your word. (Luke 1:38) then we will have entered into a loving relationship between ourselves and the Persons of the Blessed Trinity who form the one underlying truth to all that is. Then spirituality and religion lose their distinction because we have become absorbed into the life of God Himself.

It is in the nature of humans to be spiritual seekers, to recognise the God-shaped gap in their lives and look for ways to fill it. Many grasp at substitutes, the immediate sensual gratifications that the world offers so abundantly. Others seek more ethereal experiences but are resolved to be the master of my fate.. the captain of my soul (Invictus, William Ernest Henley.) Such a resolution, though, is a delusion. We are never the masters (or mistresses) of our fate, we cannot control illnesses, the death of loved ones, the collapse of the firm we work for, the bomb that explodes on our aeroplane. Neither can we captain a soul which we cannot even compel to stop eating chocolate when we want to lose weight. We are both less free and more free than we think we are. Less free because we carry a cross without realising it, more free because we can choose to carry it with the help of Christ when we do realise it. And with Him nothing is impossible.

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Is Spirituality Superior to Religion?

All the great Founders of religions have been possessed of clairvoyant sight. They are the spiritual Guides of mankind, and their precepts are precepts of the moral life based on astral and spiritual truths. This explains the similarities in all the religions
Rudolf Steiner- The Astral World

Jesus saith to him: I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No man cometh to the Father, but by me.
John 14:6

There are significant numbers of people who are happy to make the statement 'I'm spiritual but I'm not religious.' What they intend to convey by this is that spirituality is A Good Thing and religion is A Bad Thing or at least a deeply flawed one. This attitude rests, I think, on two pairs of assumptions. Firstly religion is an artificial man-made (with special emphasis on 'man') phenomenon whereas spirituality is an authentic, honest and individual response to and search for transcendent reality. Secondly religion is bound up with all sorts of rules and regulations which are at best irrelevant and at worst oppressive whereas spirituality is free from such restrictions and allows a spiritual seeker to follow where the spirit leads them without being chained by lists which begin with 'thou shalt not.' I would argue that each of these assumptions, at least so far as they compare and contrast with the Christian faith, is comprehensively wrong but that they all flow from an initial insight which is profoundly true. The insight in question is that there is an underlying spiritual source to all life and to the cosmos, this source can be encountered and responded to by each person and from that encounter strength can be gained and personal growth can ensue. I propose to say something about this truth and then proceed from there to demonstrate the weakness of the spiritual-but-not-religious response to it.

'There is nothing new under the sun' wrote the author of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes (1:9) and certainly those people who think they are being frightfully modern in adopting this kind of approach are mistaken. In the 20th Century, to go no further back, figures like Rudolf Steiner, Teilhard de Chardin, Paul Brunton and Abdu'l Baha advanced just such ideas. Most of the readers of this blog I would hazard have never heard of these once prominent figures; one of the weaknesses of the individual approach to spirituality is that it has no mechanism to transmit wisdom from one epoch to the next so that each generation not only has to reinvent the wheel but may find itself labouring to overcome the difficulties of having a square wheel since no one is around to point out the benefits of roundness. Be that as it may, what usually followed from the affirmation by such people that all truth was essentially one was the further assertion that they personally had synthesised all of that into a new form which was offered as being absolutely the best way to process this truth and integrate it into a persons life. That is, as soon as any attempt is made to summarise what the transcendent reality actually is and how we should approach it effectively a new religion is created. The only way to avoid this happening would be to refuse to use one's intellect when describing transcendence or seeking to understand it.

Perhaps the most successful attempt to evade this danger is to be found in The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley (mostly famous for his novel Brave New World and for dying on the same day as President John F. Kennedy.) In this work he posited that there was an underlying Ground of Being where the multiplicity of many things became One, everything came from the One and to the One would return. More significantly, perhaps, he sought to demonstrate that all of the worlds major religions and most of the minor ones, intuited this truth and traces of it could be found in writing from each of these traditions. In large part the book consists of a series of quotes from Christians (Catholic and Protestant), Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and others each essentially saying, or appearing to say, the same thing about a range of topics like suffering, faith and the self. The strength of this approach is that it does seem to demonstrate that the transcendent reality being described by, say, a medieval Christian is the same thing as that which a Mahayana Buddhist some thousands of miles away in distance, hundreds of years apart in time and with a completely different intellectual framework is describing. There are problems with this approach however. What Huxley is describing is the highest common denominator and the common in question is not the average believer in any tradition but only a highly mystically oriented subset of believers. In order to allow for the possibility of each person coming to encounter and know the truth about the Ground of Being Huxley had to accept a theory of reincarnation but introducing this as a necessary component of the Perennial Philosophy had the automatic effect of excluding most of those religions which he had been insisting were, in their higher manifestations, actually part of it.

What is interesting for our purposes is that while Huxley asserts that which is true, that there is only one underlying reality, and that which is probably true, that each significant religion apprehends that reality to a greater or lesser extent, what he does not do is suggest that individuals can attain a sustained perception of that reality as individual spiritual seekers apart from the religious traditions. Quite early on he notes it is a fact, confirmed and reconfirmed during two or three thousand years of religious history, that the ultimate Reality is not clearly and immediately apprehended, except by those who have made themselves loving, pure in heart and poor in spirit, essentially what he argues is that one cannot attain to the source of Self without minimising ones own personal self. The French philosopher Simone Weil put the idea in even starker terms talking about the de-creation of the self We possess nothing in the world—a mere chance can strip us of everything—except the power to say, “I.” That is what we have to give to God—in other words—to destroy. There is absolutely no other free act that is given us to accomplish—only the destruction of the “I. There is nothing within us that both belongs to us and is big enough to comprehend the Ground of Being, the Source, the Transcendent Reality, God, call it what you will. Only God can comprehend God and we can only participate in that comprehending if we eliminate those parts of ourself which we have created for ourselves precisely in order to keep God out and to give us the illusion that we are greater than we are.

It is probably true that those who are spiritual but not religious and those who are both religious and spiritual share a common belief in the existence of a real but veiled transcendent source of being. The fundamental fault line between them consists of radically different strategies about how to encounter, respond to and understand that reality. We cannot develop a strategy unless we know something about what it is we encounter and which part of ourselves it is that encounters it. Since all those involved are content to use the word spiritual to describe their activities it is agreed that the object encountered is itself Spirit that is it is not matter not is it a product of matter although matter may be a product of it. It gives life so it is itself Life. Personal and historical experience suggests that it is responsive to and creative of love which can be presumed to originate from it so it is itself Love. For us to fully encounter and understand as fully as possible Spirit, Life and Love we ourselves need to transform ourselves or be transformed into Spirit, Life and Love also. How is this possible? We need to consider our starting point. What are we like at the point at which we begin the encounter or the search? And our end point; what do we envisage ourselves being like at the point of most profound encounter or fulfillment? In order to get from where we are to where we want to be what to we have to do?

The choice we have to make at the start is between affirming what we already are and seeking more of the same or acknowledging our inadequacies and failures and seeking less of the same. Either we displace what is bad with what is good or we continually strengthen that which already is. The route which religion, prior to theological liberalism, has traditionally gone down is that outlined by Huxley and Weil, we need to de-create our ego-created selves in order to make space for God to fill us up so that we become a transmission station for love, life and spirit which can flow in and through us with as little impediment as possible. This approach can be dismissed by the spiritual-but-not-religious person as exaggerated self loathing or an  unhealthy obsession with sin. Any approach, however, which is not rooted in humility is rooted in pride. Self-affirmation is not a programme for growth, it is a statement of complacency and, moreover, it tends to shift the blame for frustrations and failures onto other people or adverse circumstances. Everything good is down to me, everything bad is down to someone or something outside of me. And so we have two radically different strategies. Which one is more likely to be right? Well, we are talking about relationship here, we are relating to the source of being and the source of being is relating to us, so we cannot develop a successful strategy without knowing something about the part of the relationship other than ourselves. In Part Two I will be looking at how we can know something about that part of the equation.        


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