A mystifying text and frustrating word
I had an odd message on my old blog site yesterday. It simply read “用心經營的blog~您的部落格文章真棒!!” and seemed to relate to a blog about a month ago. As I gazed perplexed at it, inspiration suddenly triumphed over commonsense and I pasted the text into Google Translate and pressed the buttons for Chinese to English. In seconds I got the following: ‘Working hard to blog ~ your blog article terrific!!’ I would give you the name of the sender but I suspect it is indeed from mainland China or (following last week’s blog) Tibet. I must admit I love the idea that illegally translated copies of Lamb among the Stars are being furtively circulated across China. Who knows? Anyway if you are reading this in China: may God bless both you and your nation!
Anyway back to the West. Our minister preached the other Sunday on spirituality and began to tease out some of the problems with this very enigmatic word. This stimulated me to think about this and I have concluded that what most modern people mean by spirituality bears very little resemblance to what older Christian authors understood by it. (Mind you, I’m not sure older writers used the word very much; I’m sure there’s a PhD thesis somewhere on the ‘Death of Religion and the Rise of Spirituality’.) So I thought I’d pen some comments on this but I do have to say that my thoughts are very tentative.
My basic proposition is along the following lines. Modern writers when they use the word spirituality seem to be referring to the pursuit – or experience – of some mystical or extraordinary psychological experience. Older Christian writers, if they used the word spirituality or any such concept, would not have disagreed but would always have seen it as an experience in the context of religious creed and religious action. Although I suspect it’s not often been formalised, traditional Christianity has had three interlocking elements: right beliefs (orthodoxy), right practices (orthopraxy) and the mystical experience of God. (Ironically, the last element has often actually been considered the most minor one and, in some churches and individuals, almost ignored altogether.) In my view, within traditional Christianity, mystical experiences have always been constrained by right beliefs and right practices. There is a certain logic here: our internal experiences are notoriously susceptible to being affected by music, mood or what you’ve just eaten or drunk. They’re also impossible for others (or anybody?) to test for genuineness. Creeds and conduct are, in contrast, much less ambiguous. The result was that in traditional Christianity all experiences had to be tested by their effects on what you believed what you did. A spirituality that led you to deny Christ or rob a bank wasn’t genuine. And a spirituality or spiritual experience that led you to understand the creed better or to love your neighbour more completely was more likely to be authentic. In summary, the untestable experiences of spirituality were thus constrained by the external creeds and codes of religion.
Today though I think things are very different. What we have today is, all too frequently, a spirituality that stands on its own and seeks no external authentication. The modern spirituality is a free-flying, liberated mood divorced from any concern with right beliefs and right actions. It is no wonder that so many people today claim to be spiritual without being religious.
The problem with modern spirituality is that of all internal experiences: namely, how do we know we have something of genuine value? At the risk of sounding rather unspiritual I would say that if you gave me a first-class restaurant with a fine view over beautiful countryside, I might easily have something close to a spiritual experience. Send me a Nikon D90 with the 18-200 VR (MK2) lens and the experience I will have on opening the box will, I assure you, be pretty much on the spiritual plane. Indeed I don’t have to be hypothetical: I have enjoyed near rapture on an ageing Boeing 707 at seeing Mogadishu vanish into the haze behind me. And seeing your newborn children is also awesome.
Put like that you see the problem. A spirituality without religion is actually quite problematic. What can we say to someone for whom drink or drugs provides some sort of spiritual boost? What about those for whom shopping gives a spiritual high? And if we liberate spirituality from both creed and morality, why can’t violence or arson be spiritual?
Well, I need to think about this further. But you can understand why I’m a little cautious when I meet someone who says ‘I’m very spiritual but I don’t like religion’.
Have a good week.