A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY

My 80th birthday in April has turned out to be a more significant milestone than I had expected. In March a series of synchronistic events led me to find and re-read my Priest’s Exam papers of July 1971. In Southwark Diocese you had to sit this in the summer after you’d been ordained Deacon, and before you were ordained Priest in the autumn. You had three hours to answer three questions out of six, each of which required you to reflect in different ways on your experience of being a deacon. I hadn’t looked at my answers for many years, and I was astonished on re-reading them now. It sounded as if I hadn’t changed very much: I was using language & ways of thinking that I still use today. Spirituality for me was clearly based primarily on my own personal experience and not on dogma & theory. .

Where did my spirituality come from, what were its origins? Looking back now I can name a number of influences. One is my parents, a Church going mother and a Quaker father. Another is the local church I went to with Mum, a middle of the road Anglican Church which always felt loving and accepting, without pushing anything doctrinal at you, and which nourished an intuitive faith in me. Epping Forest, was another, half an hours walk from where we lived and where I used to walk & ponder the big questions of life: why are we here? whats the point of life? where do we come from before birth & go to after death? Nobody else I knew showed any interest in these matters, but the curate at the church befriended me, listened to me, took me seriously, and encouraged me to keep questioning. A process that I recognise now as spiritual direction. He was another influence, and it was he who one day asked me if I’d ever thought about being ordained? I hadn’t, but a couple of years later, at the end of the Christmas Midnight communion service, I had an intuitive awakening that that was what God was calling me to. Moreover I know exactly what I thought, in my naivety, that would involve: it would give me paid time to walk in the forest & continue my questioning, and that I’d find myself having conversations with people like those that I’d experienced with our curate. Hmm.

The next big influence was when having been accepted by Voluntary Service Overseas for the year after school and before university, I went on a VSO training course. We were taught how to deliver babies, teach English to those who didn’t speak it and other things I desperately hoped that I’d never have to do! But there was one piece of wisdom that I’ve never forgotten, I guess because I intuitively recognised it: “Wherever you are sent try not to take any agenda with you, rather try to respond to the agenda of the people and place where you find yourselves.”  That has stayed with me. I remember, prior to ordination in 1970, if asked what I’d be doing once I found myself in a parish, I would have replied that there would be some practical things I’d need to learn, but beyond that I had no idea what I’d be doing, and that I assumed that what ever it was, God would make it clear to me when I got there.

Re-reading my Priests Exam answers I read myself saying that I’d learnt that if I listened to people & tried to take them seriously, then I invariably ended up liking them; and that when I allowed other people whom I met to set the agenda for our conversations rather than me seeking to control it, then we usually ended up talking some deep stuff: most people already seemed to know what they spiritually needed to know, but it lay buried & untrusted within them and needed encouragement and a safe place to begin to articulate it & then to trust it.

Mulling on all of the above over the past few months I’ve found myself wondering where that need of mine to ask those questions in my teens, came from and why I trusted myself with them, and not knowing the answer. Then one day, in conversation with a dear friend, I realised that it must have been God Who was prodding me with them and thus setting me out on my spiritual journey: the God Who is within me and within everybody. I therefore knew God, was known by God, before I knew the God that I knew, before I could begin to articulate Who or What it was that I knew. Realising that, I then recalled my intuition [although I’d never have used that word then] as a boy of maybe six or seven that Mum and Dad weren’t my real parents, they had simply adopted me, and the King and Queen were my true parents, which was my childish way of expressing that I knew that I had my origins somewhere else. ‘With God’ I’d now say. And I can remember in my early teens that I knew that God existed and was responsible for my existence. I am not sure where that knowing came from………..my intuition probably.

I’ve written all of the above primarily as a way of articulating for myself something of what has become clear to me in the past six months. I’m sharing it, rather self-indulgently, not because I think that there’s something special about me, because there isn’t, but rather for the opposite reason, namely because I assume that my experience is not that unusual, indeed I’m assuming that some of you will echo parts of it from your own experience, and will be aware that in other ways your personal spiritual journey had origins that are different. But we rarely talk about these matters do we, we rarely share them? I reckon thats a loss for us all. Maybe its time to share something of yours?