SPIRIT MAKES US HUMAN



SPIRIT MAKES US HUMAN

David Tacey, Ethics and Spiritutality Conference

Canberra, 18 April 2002

I was originally employed at La Trobe University to teach literature in the English department.

After a few years, I gave up teaching literature and taught psychology and psychoanalysis.

After a few years at that, I became bored and restless again. I had noticed that countless numbers of my students were talking about ‘spirituality’, and they often complained that it was not on the curriculum, and not available for study.

Now by the word ‘spirituality’ they apparently did not mean ‘religion’. The widespread perception was that ‘religion’ was outside of their lives and external to the self. Religion appeared to have no existential purchase on their lives, and I found this was generally as true for students who had come out of religious schools and religious families, as it was for students from secular, humanist, or even atheist backgrounds.

Religion was found to be outside, external, institutional, establishment, passé, out of date, out of touch – often summed up in one brutal/devastating word: irrelevant. If religion was ‘bad’, spirituality was ‘good’. It was relevant to the self, purposeful, meaningful, useful, challenging, adventurous.

The new spirituality did not appear to be having any impact on the revaluation of religion, but I was intrigued about why this religious term had been selected to refer to such non religious or even anti religious interests. So I thought to myself that I would set up some new, stand-alone courses on spirituality, and see what I could learn from the students about their ‘spirituality’.

Other staff thought I was crazy. Some felt that this showed I was not a real academic at all, that I was wandering outside any specific academic discipline; that I was ‘undisciplined’. Actually, I had begun to see myself as a ‘resident alien’, because I was completely at odds with the intellectual interests of my colleagues: their various styles of cultural materialism, whether expressed as secular humanism, radical relativism, social constructivism, or whatever else, did not interest me at all. I wasn’t even in awe of it, because I knew how these intellectual models and theories worked. All I can say is that for me they held no soul, no spirit, no thirst for universal truth – and hence I was not attracted.

For me, it was like being a Platonist in a completely Aristotelian university. I was searching for Platonic forms, archetypal ideas, whereas the university had no interest in universal truth and was only interested in the language-games of social invention.

So I expressed my rebellion by setting up new courses on Spirituality. Some staff said: all you will attract will be New Age froth and bubble: students pretending to be witches and wizards, to talk to fairies and angels, to converse with spirits at séances. All you will attract will be students caught up in various illusions and delusions, in occultism and escapism, in superficial and vulgar clichés about Buddhism and karma, about meditation and reincarnation.

These warnings and blasts from my colleagues made me fairly scared – almost terrified at what I had done or unleashed. So that when the first classes began I almost wished that I was back in the relative safety of a known academic box, a discipline.

However, my original rationale was unknown to my colleagues, and nothing was going to shake me from it. I don’t see myself as courageous, but simply as incredibly stubborn. When I have a dream or vision, I will stick to it, no matter what. Others are astonished at the tenacity of my approach, but it is in my nature: it is all I have to live by.

My original rationale was this: we live in an increasingly secular world, and it is a world in which religion is coming to grief. More and more people don’t know what religion is about, what it means, why it exists. Despite this, I believed that we are essentially ‘religious’ beings: homo religiosus. The world is secular, and increasingly so, and yet surely, buried underneath a whole lot of history, culture, and intellectual assumptions, we must surely, deep down, still be religious. We are ‘naturally’ religious, only we don’t know it, we resist it, fight against it, deny and refute it. I have always been impressed by the saying written in Latin above Jung’s doorway in Zurich: ‘Called or Not Called, God is Always Present’.

According to this view, to which I have long subscribed, God is present in our lives whether we realise it or not. We might have lost our belief in God, but God still believes in us: so much so that the Holy Spirit is our indwelling presence, the very ground and essence of our being.

My hunch was that our secular society was gradually, slowly recognising that secular reality, or mere worldliness, was not enough. ‘Man does not live by bread alone? We had created a world full of materialism, technology, consumerism, and all manner of things, but we were still not satisfied. Hence the plaintive cry for ‘spirituality’ in the community, especially among out youth. I think youth register changes in the spirit of the time or zeitgeist (Hegel) because they are more vulnerable and exposed; less defended by adult comforts and supports. They can see through the lie of our materialism, and recognise the sickening emptiness at the heart of society.

Even though youth spirituality was raw and untutored, often anti-religious and anti-establishment, influenced by American New Age fashions, occultism, spiritualism. television-inspired wicca and witchcraft, and superficial Orientalism: despite all this, one could wade through the dross and the muck and find something truly interesting: the cry of the spirit for liberation and truth, beneath mounds of rubble, nonsense, and illusion. Indeed: how could it be otherwise?

In a society so radically secularised the spiritual impulse could not be pure, pristine, or clear-minded. The spirit in our society is drugged, deeply disoriented, uncertain of itself and suffering from amnesia after its knock-out blow from modernity. It does not recognise who or what it is, and it does not recognise, or remember, religious language. For many youth today, religious-talk or God-talk is completely alien and alienating. This surely is the human and existential repercussions of the so-called ‘death of God’. As Jung suggested, revising Nietzsche: it is not so much that God has died, but we have died to God. The God-world is dead to us, does not move the mind, does not grip the imagination. We have spiritual impulses, but no spiritual language.

My colleague in the UK, David Hay at Nottingham, is currently working on a new book called ‘Something There’. He has interviewed countless numbers of people in Britain who tend to say: ‘I am not very religious but I am interested in spirituality’ and in the next breath: ‘There is something there; I can feel something there, but I wouldn’t exactly call it God’. People feel that God is too strong a word, too high and mighty, too exalted and otherworldly a term for what they think they feel. This is an absolute crisis in our society: a schizophrenia, a dissociation, between religious feeling (which people are still having, and are calling ‘spirituality’) and religious form (which the majority are rejecting, and calling ‘religion’).

In my spirituality course, I try to educate the emotions and the feelings, rather than simply supply new information to the mind. The true meaning of education, from the Latin educare, means to ‘draw out’, or to ‘lead out from’. I get my students talking about their feelings, because my own theory is that the deepest feeling of all is religious. And again this is religion in the truest, original sense: religio or religare: to bind back to, to reconnect with, to link back. At the core of our lives is a desire to bind back to our Creator, to reconnect with our God, our maker, the divine ground of our being. When you ask students what they mean by spirituality, they invariably say: connectedness. They say they want to connect with themselves or their ‘inner’ selves, with other people, with nature and environment, with the cosmos at large.

I often quietly smile to myself: this is the religious urge, this is what ‘religion’ (religio/religare) actually means, but at the same time as they say they want connectedness they are denying they are religious.

There is often, it seems to me, a two-fold level of error here. People tend not to recognise their religiousness, but nor do the institutions of religion recognise the religiousness of many people. The institutions of faith don’t realise how deeply ingrained the religious impulse is in people’s lives: our institutions have lost their regard for what William James called primordial religious experience. The religious urge is at the core of our identity and determines and controls a great deal of human behaviour. But if people respond to their primal urges in ways that are not recognisably institutional – that is, if their religious impulses are not ‘churchy’, the formal religions tend not to notice them, and even to disregard them. At this point the churches and universities are in agreement; spontaneous, individual expressions of the indwelling spirit are not given credence, value, or recognition. The secular society and the faith institutions do not value enough the still small voice of the spirit.

What I discover in my students at the moment is an epidemic of sadness. Unusually high numbers of them are depressed, fatigued, worried, exhausted, anxious. If you ask them why, they usually speak about a family bereavement, a death in the family, a brother, sister or cousin on a fatal accident, a drug overdose, a terminal disease, or an unexpected suicide.

But having discussions with them and reading their essays over the years I have detected a deeper, not personal but transpersonal or social level of sadness. They are sad because ‘God’ has ‘died’ in today’s society. They are sad because there are no shared values or meanings apart from secular or material values. It is little wonder that scientists are predicting that waves of depression will engulf affluent societies in the next 100 or more years. Naturally we are in a slump, because there is no social or shared higher meaning. The human spirit requires elevation, or what I call verticality: and it achieves verticality, notice, public regard in shared stories and symbols of transcendence. When there are no shared stories or symbols of transcendence, the human spirit goes into the ‘slough of despond’ as it is called in Pilgrim’s Progress. They are not just suffering from personal disorders, but from a collective disorder, a disease of the spirit.

Now returning to this word ‘spirituality’, it seems to me to have been hi-jacked by secular discourse and popular language, and deprived of much of its original religious meaning. Religion is now faced with an extraordinary task, and whether it is capable of this task I do not know. The task of religion is to go back to basics, to reach right back and down into our traditions, and to find truths, stories, elements that can speak to the incredible spiritual hunger of our time. The task of religion is to go back to its original meaning: to forget about preserving the institution per se and to recover a sense of itself as mystery, as wonder, as a response to spirit. If religion can do this, it will be reborn in the human heart, and people will view it, not as extraneous baggage or something outside the self, but as the deepest part of their own reflections. The duty of religion is not to preserve itself but to preserve the spirit: and its responsibility is to provide a language, forms, and symbols so that the human spirit might understand itself. The old language doesn’t work and we urgently need a new language: we need to give tongues to the spirit and expression to the soul. Religion has a lot of work to do, if it wants to shift from being an obstacle to people’s spirituality, to being a resource for spirituality. This means, religion has to be prophetic rather than institutional and self-concerned. Instead of worrying about declining numbers, it should worry about how to reach out to, and re-connect with, the spiritual impulses and urges in people’s lives. This will involve us in midrash the making new of the eternal word. And we can only make new with the agency and strength of the Holy Spirit: not by merely human effort, but by calling on the Holy Spirit to guide and direct our ministry. It is the absence of the prophetic element in Christianity which has brought about this terrible rift between word and life.

[The prophetic element: artists, writers, poets, musicians, painters, sculptors, architects: it is to be found in arts.]

If religion wants to regain its contact with the world, and recover its own sense of mission and service, its primary task, as I see it, is to offer discemment to those millions of people who have embarked on their own spiritual journey. This changes, of course, the concept of church: instead of ministering to the gathered community on Sundays, religion has to minister to the scattered community on all days.

For instance, religion might like to suggest there is such a thing as true or authentic spirituality, and help people come to a discerning recognition and awareness of authenticity. Instead of feeling that it has been brushed aside and rendered irrelevant by popular spirituality, religion might strive to put the sacredness back into spirituality. To some extent, spirituality has been de-socialised, but this is only because it has been newly invented by secular or de-sacrelised culture. Spirituality that is defined and experienced along purely secular lines is often not a cure of our modern alienation, but a contributor to it.

A de-sacralised spirituality has several typical features:

1. it is about me and not others

2. it springs from radical relativism, and not from an appreciation of the universal nature of truth: ‘what works for me is my spirituality; what works for you is yours; we should not expect our spiritualities to meet

3. it is also about me philosophically and psychologically: it does not emphasise a relationship with the Sacred Other as the ultimate, and

4. desacralised spirituality fails to recognise that the ultimate, the divine, makes claims on us. This experience is not just about my enjoyment or entertainment: through genuine spirituality we are made and held responsible to something ultimate.

These four features are discovered today in popular spirituality:

i) the isolation and loneliness of the individual path

ii) disregard for the universal nature of truth

iii) egocentricity

iv) little understanding of the claims on responsibilities.

Religious spirituality recognises that, deep down, spirituality is not ‘about us’ at all: it is about something ultimate that wants to know, befriend and transform us.

If spirituality is just our own personal, secular story, we become lost in the smallness of our lives: ironically, we fail to see the true greatness in ourselves, others, or life itself. The sense of our instrumentality is afforded by the religious perspective, and paradoxically this instrumentality alone provides us with a glimpse of greatness, grandeur, and verticality.

Religion can help popular spirituality a great deal, especially if it dialogues with it in a language that the popular can understand. What the popular understands is desire and the language of fulfilment. Religion can speak to the deep sense of failure and disappointment in secular spirituality: such spirituality promises a great deal, and the young get incredibly excited about it, but so often it fails to deliver, because it is not the genuine article.

Religious people must not condemn popular spirituality: if they do, the young will feel confirmed in their prejudice that religion is narrow, judgemental and irrelevant. Rather, the religious challenge is to dialogue with it, to relate to popular hunger, and to suggest how it can be satiated.

It is necessary to go beyond the ego, so that the human person, the self, can be fulfilled. This is a further paradox that only religious tradition can impart. Religion can affirm, with Augustine, that ‘Our hearts are restless, until they find their rest in thee’. The secular world does not understand this paradox, which is why its spirituality is ultimately unrewarding. The secular says: The self is empty, it is hungry, therefore it must be filled with more consumer items, more entertainment, more things and more fun. But psychological and social research shows that hedonism, narcissism and chronic egocentricity leads not to a sense of fulfilment or satisfaction, but to self-loathing, failure, and was self-disgust. Why? Because there is an essential part of us, call it the soul or spirit, that is an essential part of us, call it the soul or spirit, that becomes trapped or imprisoned when egocentricity rules, and that part eventually turns us against the self, because it is stronger, more powerful, and greater than the ego.

I want to finish up by referring to this important phrase: Becoming Fully Human. We become fully human when something ‘other’ than the merely human is honoured, respected, acknowledged. It is as if that glimpse of a transcendent purpose lifts us out of the cocoon of the ego, and frees us to be the larger person that we actually are. You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free? However, it takes wisdom to recognise and release wisdom in the individual. Psychodynamically, this is the whole point of religion: it is a vast wealth of knowledge, paradox, and mystery which can be used to guide the individual out of the prison-house of egocentricity, toward a larger life.

I grew up in Alice Springs, in a place heavily influenced by Aboriginal culture. I was always impressed by how Aboriginal people handled this problem. Aboriginal culture assumes that the natural state, the given state, as displayed in the egocentricity of youth, has to be broken, so that the human dignity of the person can be released. In the Aboriginal ritual of initiation into the tribe, conducted at age 12 or 13, the childhood ego-state is ritually destroyed in a controlled, caring, and loving environment. This ritual, conducted by elders, and informed by age-old wisdom, is designed to show the young person that egocentricity is an illusion, and that the real forces of life are spiritual, cosmic, ancestral. The normal consciousness is broken, the person is virtually starved, deprived, sometimes wounded, and symbolically put to death. It is at this critical point in the initiation that spiritual forces break through, symbolised by dance, ceremony, music, story-telling and ritual re-enactment of ancestor spirits. In many tribal communities: the elder comes forward with a sacred stone, a churinga, with concentric rings, and hands it to the youth, saying: ‘Here, take this, this is your second self.’

The second self is what we would call the spirit or soul, in contrast to ego. The second self is ritually identified as an animal totem, and that animal is to be regarded as sacred, and not harmed. The animal could be a dingo, eagle, lizard, kangaroo, emu, and so on. The youth is to revere and respect the animal totem, because according to tribal law, this animal makes us fully human. This is explored wonderfully in Deborah Bird Rose’s study of Aboriginal religion, called Dingo Makes Us Human. The Dingo makes us human, because it shatters the illusion of the first self or ego, and exposes us to our true connection with the sacred. This connection makes us responsible to the whole of life, rather than concerned only for the personal part. The initiated person, according to Aboriginal law, is not ego-centred but community-centred, not full of personal wants and desires, but desires only for the good of the community and the common good.

Aboriginal culture also throws spiritual light on youth pathology and self-mutilating behaviour.

An Aboriginal elder, David Mowaljarlai, once said to me ‘It is no use teaching religion or the law to uninitiated people’. ‘They won’t make sense of it, will scoff at it and misinterpret it, until their first life is broken and another life begins.’

This immediately struck a chord with me: in our society, religion frequently falls on deaf ears, or pearls are thrown before swine. There has to be a deeper process released within the self, before the mysteries and paradoxes of religion make sense. We can’t go back, it seems, to tribal initiation, and the rituals of our formal religions do not seem to break the first self in the way that provides ongoing and continuous relationship with the spirit: in other words, rebirth or metanoia. But spirituality, if pursued seriously and with ongoing commitment, may be the self-initiation that breaks the circuit of the first self.

The problem is that spirituality can strengthen, rather than terminate, the selfish ego-state, unless it is conducted in the light of traditional wisdom. Spiritual hunger, unfulfilled desire, restlessness may be driving us, collectively, out of our ego-state, which is so destructive to ourselves, the community, the world, and the natural environment. My earnest hope is that spirituality can move beyond its vulgar, de-sacralised form, and shown to lead us to objective truth. When we discover that truth, we will be set free to become fully human.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download