‘All these faith sources show that the spiritual realm is about the “interiority” of reality, about the life within.’ Photo: Médiathèque Lafarge, Alain Le Breton.
‘This is an opportune moment, a turning point, when things have to change.’
An opportune moment: A Friend talks to Unitarians
I am a Unitarian. But I was delighted when the Quaker writer and environmental activist Alastair McIntosh agreed to give a keynote presentation to a national gathering of Unitarians in April. It was entitled ‘The Revolution Will Be Spiritual’ and delivered via a Zoom link from his home in Glasgow. Around 150 of us heard Alastair argue that a spiritual revolution is needed if we are to confront – and ultimately transform – the forces destroying our world.
The immediate question is how to achieve this revolution. Alastair drew inspiration from a range of spiritual resources, including: Christian and Hindu scriptures; Jewish, Buddhist and Islamic wisdom; the poetry of WB Yeats and TS Eliot; as well as radical histories of the English civil war. We live in a highly-disordered world, he said, with the Covid-19 pandemic merely the latest symptom. But the coronavirus crisis has unfolded within the wider crisis of our time – that of climate change.
And yet, Alastair asserted, we can regard ourselves as privileged to be living at this time. Why? Because in theological terms it is a ‘Kairos’, an opportune moment, a turning point, when things have to change. A time when we are called to deeper meaning, to deeper service – and there are many ways in which we can serve.
Throughout his talk, Alastair made clear that both personal and structural changes are needed if we are to overcome the problems facing our world. For example, tackling the global climate crisis requires stabilising the world’s population. This will be achieved when people are free, particularly through the emancipation of women. ‘When women can control their own bodies and economic livelihoods, then population will look after itself,’ he said.
The second factor fuelling climate change is consumption, which goes far beyond legitimate human needs. Over-consumption, our consumerism, has become an addiction. It never satisfies, so we demand more and more. These demands are driven by an inner emptiness, he suggested, which can lead to madness.
Can we heal our inner emptiness, our inner madness? Well, said Alastair, perhaps we should learn from the spiritual riches of the past. He took as an example a story from Mark’s gospel about the Gadarene demoniac – the wild man from Gadara who lived among the tombs, crying out day and night, breaking the chains of those who tried to bind him. Jesus comes face-to-face with this man possessed by demons, and asks: ‘What is your name?’ The Gadarene demoniac replies: ‘My name is Legion, for we are many’. And when Jesus casts the demons out, they enter a herd of pigs, who rush off into the sea and are drowned. And then the demoniac is healed.
This could seem a crazy story, said Alastair, but in a startling retelling he suggested it is profoundly about the revolution. The man’s adopted name, ‘Legion’, is the word for a Roman legion, of 5,000 soldiers. Scholars believe Mark’s gospel was written during or just after the Jewish revolt of 66AD, which the Romans crushed, destroying the Second Temple in Jerusalem. And what happened in Gadara in Galilee during the revolt? The Jewish historian Josephus tells us Roman soldiers marched into Gadara and killed all its young people, showing no mercy. Then the soldiers set fire to the city and the villas around it.
‘Is it any wonder the demoniac from Gadara was possessed by the spirit of colonisation?,’ asked Alastair. And what about those 2,000 pigs? What were they doing there when Jewish people don’t eat pork? Surely to feed the Roman legion stationed in the area?
‘The Hebrew people, like the Scottish bards, know how to use story. They know stories can tell a deeper truth. And so what Mark seems to have been doing was taking a story from Jesus’ life, but setting it in a context that gave meaning to people in 66 AD.’ In this story, the pigs symbolised the Romans, who charged off to be drowned in that internal sea, the Sea of Galilee. ‘The Romans got around by boat, so this was like telling them: go back to where you came from!’ And the story ends with the demoniac being freed from the spirit of colonisation.
In an illuminating discussion after the talk, Alastair said we should not push the meaning of stories too far, to imply that colonisers should always be ‘driven out and into the sea’. The great wisdom teachers, including Jesus, taught rather that the oppressed need to free the oppressor as well.
In an analysis of the WB Yeats poem ‘The Second Coming’, and its references to Christ, Alastair said Yeats was pointing to the central call of Christian theology: namely, that we must wake up to our deeper selves and, in so doing, bring ourselves alongside the essence of the divine, of God.
Turning to the Vedic scriptures, the Upanishads, our speaker read of a light that shines beyond all things on Earth and in space, beyond the heavens even, and yet this is the light that shines in our hearts: ‘Smaller than a grain of rice or a mustard seed’. All these faith sources, our speaker said, show us that the spiritual realm is about the ‘interiority’ of reality, about the life within… so when the world is falling apart, we can pray the Hindu prayer, ‘God come to my heart’, and we can rest in the greater holding of the divine, of God.
But what has this got to do with the revolution? Alastair made clear that personal spiritual changes alone will not transform the world. The structures of political and economic dominance must be challenged as well.
He cited two radical twentieth-century historians: Christopher Hill, particularly The World Turned Upside Down; and EP Thompson and The Making of the English Working Class. English history showed the working-class was indeed ‘made’ – by colonisation: firstly by the Normans, then by landlordism, then by driving people from the land into the cities as ‘fodder’ for the industrial revolution. While these two historians are often called Marxists, both were steeped in the Bible and its wisdom.
Christopher Hill documented the radical movements that arose during the English revolution (like the Levellers and Diggers). Alastair commented that this material is not wanted on English school history syllabuses. Speaking as a Scot, he said he believed people in England needed to wake up to their own history (he has previously spoken of how modern land reform successes in Scotland were preceded by dedicated scholarship and the popularising of the case).
He quoted the US theologian Walter Wink’s book Unmasking the Powers, which argues that transforming the domination systems of the world requires us to reveal how they operate and then to engage with them, as we seek to build a fairer and ecologically-sustainable world.
To carry out this work, Alastair said, we need to centre ourselves in the spiritual – in that which gives life, in that which is ‘love made manifest’. And we need to beseech this spirit to come into us. ‘Then we will start to build the qualities within, that can transform the world. And the revolution of justice, of love, of peace and joy will be with us.’
