A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY

I have a friend who came to his Christian faith, as a young man, in a fundamentalist brethren church many years ago. He had been going through a painful personal crisis and found this church to be a place of warmth, acceptance and love, which was what he desperately needed. He also came to know & revere Jesus as they were always talking about Him. His spiritual journey has taken him some way since then, but he still remembers with gratitude what he found amongst that group of Christian men and women. Looking back he recalls with a smile that he disagreed with pretty much everything that the male preacher at the front used to say but reckoned that putting up with it was a small price to pay for the fellowship he found amongst the membership.

I reckon that there is deep truth in his story: that the most effective Christian preaching is not to be found in words spoken from the pulpit, but in a loving community. Plenty of churches are just like that, although some are not. As St Francis is reputed to have said “preach the Gospel at all times, and if all else fails, use words.”  My guess is that the churches that are like that are mostly small in size, and that the bigger they become the more difficult it becomes to be so.

The Good News is that such small loving communities are not confined to churches. When one of my daughters died and I went with her sister to make arrangements for her funeral, I knew that she didn’t have anything to do with a church, but discovered that she’d been recently become a member of a social club where she she’d clearly felt welcomed and accepted. We met some of her friends there and held the wake after the funeral in the club where they made us feel very welcome. God felt as present amongst that group of men and women as She had been in the brethren church where my friend came to faith.

The presence of the gracious and loving God is potentially found in communities anywhere and everywhere. I have another friend who left the church of which she’d been a member for many years because it no longer felt to her to be a welcoming and loving community. Instead she joined a ‘wild swimming’ group and found there all the things that had felt absent from her church. It was a friendly and mutually supportive community, and a felt sense of awe and wonder was frequently experienced while swimming in the river.

I rarely attend worship in a church building these days and don’t feel the lack of it. I have my shed where I pray every day. I have a rich community of friends with whom I share spiritual conversations, most of them still alive, although many [poets, composers, artists and writers among them] are long dead. Mary Oliver a deeply spiritual poet wrote, that when she was young “I never met any of my friends, of course, in a usual way – they were strangers, & lived only in their writings. But if they were only shadow-companions, still they were constant, & powerful, & amazing. That is, they said amazing things, and for me it changed the world………My great ones have taught me to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always caringly.”  

I walk pretty much every day in the natural world, where I am aware that the birds, and the grasses, the trees, the flowers, the animals, the earth, the river, the wind and the light from the Sun, are all worshipping the God Who called them into being, in their various ways. In their midst I am aware of being part of world-wide community embracing all creation.

The Cosmic Christ is everywhere you look if you have ‘eyes to see and ears to hear’ Him, and I have found Him, and continue to find Him, in all manner of communities. Unlike my friend I have no need to put up with the judgemental, rule-giving language that church worship frequently uses with reference to God, for the God Whom I have found, or more accurately has found me, is an unconditionally loving God, the God Whom Jesus Himself knew.