A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY

August 2016

Most religions have practices whereby worshippers invoke the aid of the dead, their ancestors, and sometimes sense their active presence in their lives. There is a recognition that individual worshippers stand in a tradition that they have inherited and that needs to be honoured and passed on to future generations. Gratitude is expressed to those who have preceded us in this world, and their continuing assistance is sought. As is the recognition that the dead have wisdom that we have forgotten, and that we need to access in making our decisions.  Prior to the Reformation, the saints were invoked by Christian worshippers in very much this way, but we’ve mostly forgotten that now, to our detriment I sense.  

We also need to be aware of generations yet unborn, because the decisions we make today will affect the greater interconnected community of humankind across time.     

It is a commonplace to say that we tend to see only what we’re looking for, and for the most part our eyes are closed to signs of the activities of those who have lived before us and are now dead. We might know about them in our heads as history, but we don’t know it in our souls as presence.  As I sit here writing, I’m sitting on a chair at a table, and likelihood is that those who made both chair and table are now dead. The men who built the house in which I live, most certainly are. The people who planted the trees I can see through the window are no longer here.  When I leave my house I walk along a road which has been used for hundreds of years, mostly by people on foot. The country in which I live, and everything in it, its tradition and culture, has been shaped over centuries by the men and women who have lived here. As George Eliot put it “that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”  

I read books by men and women who are dead, listen to music by composers long dead, wonder at art by artists who died years ago. I am hugely influenced by people no longer alive and my life now is unimaginable without them: I owe them a great debt.  Just as I owe a great debt to my parents who had a defining influence on my life, and still do, and beyond them to their parents who influenced them in turn, and so on back through the ages.  I owe a similar debt to countless ‘teachers’ who’ve consciously or unconsciously shaped my life, many of whom are no longer alive.  That I am who I am is a lot down to people who are now dead.

All this has a personal energy for me because I’ve had three experiences, each of them very much to my surprise and bewilderment, of being addressed by people whom I knew to be dead, which has left me convinced that they are still in some sense alive, and that we are deeply interconnected.  Two known to me personally and the other not. In each case it was less the content of the message that the experience conveyed, and more the unquestionable authenticity of the experience that was so powerful that it was impossible to doubt it.  They each had a ‘Damascus Road’ effect, in turning my world upside down, while being hugely life affirming.  Hence I take this stuff seriously.