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SPIDIR newsletter 59

Contents of Issue 59 Spring-Summer 2003

• A Beam Of Light In Ramallah - David Hay
• Finding a spiritual director - Sue King

A BEAM OF LIGHT IN RAMALLAH

by David Hay

The other day in that powder keg of a town, Ramallah, an Israeli soldier set about a Palestinian youth with his rifle butt, using it as a club to beat him to the ground. As the boy lay there bleeding and trying to fend off the blows, his mother ran out from the watching crowd, outraged at the treatment of her son and shouting at the soldier at the top of her voice. Such are the commonplaces of the hate-filled West Bank.

The incident was witnessed by a Dutch rabbi who happened to be visiting Israel at the time. He told me of a small and moving additional detail. While she was haranguing the soldier, the woman held his hand. It was as if she was saying to him 'Although I am furious with you, you and I are fellow human beings who belong together - and that is why things like this should not happen.'

In the language of Martin Buber, she insisted on treating the soldier as a Thou and refused to push him into the category of an It. Buber's insight is a spiritual insight. Spirituality is not a private matter; it is about relationship - my relationship to you, our relationship to our material environment and, both overarching and pervading all of this, our relationship to the ever-present God. This means that the spiritual life is very directly connected with politics. Indeed, as the Palestinian woman was insisting by her gesture, spirituality always has a social dimension.

If someone were to ask me about the most important insight to emerge from thirty years of empirical research into spiritual experience, I would be inclined to talk about this rootedness in social and political life. Very often in our secularised culture the life of the spirit is assumed to be something clandestine, the part of a person's life that takes place in secret. We are regularly told that such things are an entirely private matter, even being reminded that there is support for this in sacred scripture. When we pray, we follow Jesus' example by finding a lonely place for our prayer, or we take up his advice to go to our private room and close the door. We sometimes forget that the purpose is not isolation, but to sharpen awareness of relationship, in this case, to God. Jesus is quite clear about the dangers of public prayer ñ self inflation, hypocrisy - that is, the creation of false relationships.

The idea of human beings as fundamentally isolated from each other and caught up in a world of their private desires has a long history in Europe. It stretches at least to the Seventeenth Century when Thomas Hobbes famously expressed his view that in the state of nature human life is 'solitary, nasty, brutish and short'. Hobbes' solution to the problem of the insatiable and often bloody competition between these isolated human beings was the setting up of Leviathan, a dictatorship that would terrorise people into behaving in a civilised manner.

A number of political commentators have remarked that Hobbes' vision of human nature, and his solution to it, continues to underpin the modern market economy within which we live. We are not exactly terrorised into obedience by Leviathan, but we are equally controlled by the modern equivalent, the surveillance society - cameras on every street corner of our cities, electronic tracking devices, vast data banks containing detailed information on every one of us, perhaps in the future containing identification by DNA patterning.

Most of us are relieved that such surveillance exists; it protects us from the activities of criminals and sometimes helps to track them down. But this close scrutiny of our lives is an ambivalent blessing. It brings with it the implicit assumption that the reason people behave properly is because they are being spied upon. Along with the erosion of a sense of social obligation there is a loss of social cohesion and what Robert Puttnam calls 'social capital' (the store of good will, communal institutions like sports clubs, churches, societies, and social interchange within neighbourhoods) that maintains the moral commonwealth. In his book Bowling Alone, Puttnam catalogues exhaustively how since the 1960s practically every dimension of communal activity in the United States has declined radically. And as numerous commentators have remarked, very similar social processes are operating in Britain.

What is increasingly being eaten away, though thankfully it is still surprisingly widespread, is the notion that we are responsible for each other, or even, as the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas suggested, that when I truly gaze upon your face, I find that my responsibility towards you is greater than to myself. These insights are profoundly spiritual and they remind us that the nurturing of the spiritual life is not merely a personal matter, an attractive option for people who like to go on retreats, a kind of religious hobby. The social and political health of society as a whole grows out of spiritual awareness, and a spiritual awareness that is overtly recognised and celebrated as the keystone of the community.

That is why those who have responsibility for the care of souls are crucially important members of the community. When we enter into the life of prayer, we discover existentially, in our own bodies, that God is indeed love and that we live in landscapes filled with divine creation. The psychological distance between ourselves and the rest of reality is lessened and we recover our sense of responsibility for it. But we always do so as members of a human culture. When that Palestinian woman held the soldier's hand, she did so in the context of a culture (which may have been Christian; many Palestinians are Christian) that nurtured her inbuilt sense that we are all children of the one God and that we must endeavour to love one another for that reason.

The crises in trust between Jew and Arab in Israel will not be resolved by solutions based on economic or historical claims to land and resources, but by transcending boundaries created by avarice and fear; boundaries which, as we immerse ourselves in the prayer life of our own Christian culture, we discover have no place in the loving heart of God.

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