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SPIDIR newsletter 60

Autumn 2003 Issue 60 (Contents)

SPIRITUALITY IN A SECULAR AGE

Abstract by the editor of a paper by David Hay presented at the SPIDIR AGM in June 2003

(based on the full text of the talk which is available from the Editor)

At this year's AGM David Hay, formerly of Nottingham University, began his talk with a description of an exercise he used to use with his students to help them to explore the question of identity. In pairs, they take it in turns, repeatedly asking their partner quietly and gently, 'Who are you?'

After a while the students fall silent. There might be a period of boredom, and possibly a move into deeper territory. The 'Who are you?' exercise is deeply moving to the participants, quite often leading them to weep at the profundity and mysteriousness of their condition.

As the 'Who are you?' exercise progresses, many people (even non-religious ones) find that their mood becomes more and more contemplative, almost prayerlike. Perhaps when we find ourselves in this territory it is impossible not to pray. There is the sense here that we are, whether we like it or not, religious animals.

But is spirituality to be equated with formal religious adherence? Some theologians and students of the social construction of reality come very close to saying 'Yes'. For example, the Yale theologian George Lindbeck asserts that we enter the spiritual life by learning the language of a religious culture. This is very much in line with the postmodern view that reality is constructed for us by language. …But what postmodernists often forget is the fact that we are embodied beings, living in a reality that discloses itself to our awareness. Our spirituality is a matter of the disclosure of reality, or to use the language of faith, God's disclosure to us through divine grace.

But what is the nature of contemporary spirituality? In the year 2000 the BBC ran a series of TV programmes called Soul of Britain, intended to be a review of the spiritual state of the nation two thousand years on from the birth of Christ. With his colleague Kate Hunt, David Hay arranged with the BBC to insert a set of questions in the survey asking people about their spiritual lives. The results showed that over three quarters of the sample claimed that they were personally aware of a spiritual dimension to their experience.

Over a period of thirteen years since a previous survey, the number of people admitting to spiritual experience in this country has probably increased by around 60%. Most people assume that spirituality is to do with religion; indeed some people say the words are identical in meaning. We are therefore in a curious social situation. A rapidly increasing number of people are prepared to recognise spiritual experience as part of their lives but the institutions traditionally associated with the spiritual life are in a process of severe decline. Hay maintains that although the secularisation of British culture is proceeding very quickly, so far for most people it is only skin deep.

For most people, spirituality was to do with meaning making: the recognition of a patterning of events in a person's life that convinces them that in some way those events, whether happy or sad are part of an unfolding transcendent meaning that is not of their making. Many people feel they have been aware of the presence of God, especially at times of distress; though others often talk of being aware of God when they are very happy, or in love.

Another commonly reported experience is an awareness of a sacred presence in nature. A surprisingly large number of people also feel they have been in touch with someone who has died. Almost always this encounter is experienced as healing and consoling and it usually takes place fairly soon after the death. More ominously, a quarter of all the people interviewed feel they have been aware of an evil presence.

The figures are startling as people are very shy about admitting to spiritual experience. Why might this be happening? Hay believes that there has not in reality been a sudden increase in the prevalence of such experience. It is more likely that in some way social change has made it less of a taboo subject.

In another survey carried out in 2000, Kate Hunt and David Hay discovered that most people's spirituality is in what the sociologist of religion Daniel Batson calls the 'Quest mode' People sometimes said explicitly that they were on a journey on a route that was not clear, or as one person put it 'It is like a foggy day'. From a religious perspective the doctrinal content in most conversations was minimal. Quite a lot of people didn't like to use the word 'God' at all. The phrase most commonly heard was "I definitely believe in Something; there's Something there." But people were timid and inhibited, afraid that that they would be targeted by evangelists or be laughed at.

RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY

Though the sense of 'Something there' can be suppressed or even repressed, it seems that it is very difficult to destroy. This indestructibility links in with Alister Hardy's notion that spiritual awareness is biologically built into us. Hardy's view was that it had evolved biologically through the process of natural selection because it has survival value. It is not a plaything of language that can be deconstructed out of existence. It is there in everybody, including both religious people and those who think religion is nonsense. These ideas, conjectural perhaps, represent an increasing trend in scientific circles to interpret spiritual awareness as something positive, rather than illusory or pathological.

During the late 1990s, Dr Rebecca Nye and David Hay started investigating the spirituality of children. They identified three areas of ordinary everyday experience that were likely to be strongly associated with spirituality. These areas were as follows:

(a) Awareness of the here-and-now Remaining in the here-and-now is central to traditional religious exercises like meditation or prayer. In monotheistic religions like Christianity, contemplative prayer is defined as a raising of the heart and mind to God, in the here-and-now. Spiritual activity is not necessarily religious in intention. It is perfectly possible for someone with secular beliefs to practise awareness meditation.

(b) Awareness of mystery Spirituality is traditionally closely associated with the profoundest and most mysterious aspects of human existence and religions characteristically claim to respond to those issues. At their centre lie questions like 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' "Who is this body that I call "me" and that has a name, a profession, a nationality, a culture, a gender, a social status, that at times can seem utterly arbitrary?' Young children are in touch with this because they have not yet been given explanations.

(c) Awareness of value What in the end matters most of all to us? Religion claims to be concerned with what is more important than anything else but quite often this remains at a shallow, theoretical level. All spiritual questions have a quality of intense immediacy. At least from some spiritual perspectives, there are dimensions of immediate experience that are equally or more important than theoretical beliefs.

The overarching concept that linked all the children's spiritual talk was what was referred to as 'relational consciousness'. Rebecca Nye described this as having two aspects: an unusual level of consciousness or perceptiveness, relative to other passages of conversation spoken by that child; and that the child related to things, other people, himself/herself and God.

'Relational consciousness' goes against the notion of spirituality as a solitary affair, something very private. In addition, 'relational consciousness' not only seems to be closely related to, if not identical with spiritual awareness, it also underlies the ethical impulse. In research with adults, people were asked to say in what way their spiritual experience affected their lives. By far the commonest of all answers was that they wanted to behave better.

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS

This contrasts with the extreme individualism of western society. Its best known British protagonist of is the seventeenth century philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan (1651). His view that 'minds never meet, that ideas are never really shared and that each of us is always and finally isolated from every other individual' assumes that all human behaviour is entirely motivated by self-interest. Well, that is undeniably one side of the human story, but it is diametrically opposed to the spiritual dimension of what it is to be human, where, as recent research is showing, tender relationship is paramount. The evidence implies increasingly strongly that relational consciousness is an inbuilt human competence that does not have to be taught. It is a predisposition that paradoxically becomes damaged as the result of socialisation into an individualistic culture.

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