Thought for the Week: Religion and spirituality
Mike Price considers the diversity of experience within Friends
In the introduction to Advices & queries there is the following: ‘There will be a diversity of experience of belief and language. Friends maintain that expressions of faith must be related to personal experience. Some find traditional Christian language full of meaning; some do not.’
I would put myself in the second category, as do many others among Quakers, but we also cherish those who hold to more traditional beliefs. I have, over the last twenty years or so, moved further and further away from Christian language and have dismissed almost all of what I believed in earlier years.
At the first Quaker conference I attended, Michael Michlaner, late of Norwich Meeting, came to join us for worship on Sunday morning. He read Philip Rack’s paragraph in Quaker faith & practice, 20.06. The ideas expressed there have stayed with me over the years, that some people have found a rock to stand on, while some of us haven’t and are not even looking for one. I prefer, with Philip Rack, to live on the waves edge where I am tossed head over heels in the surf. I believe it is, for the present, the right place to be.
I have come to a position where I am no longer happy with the word ‘religious’ when it applies to me. Daniel Dennett, in his book Breaking the Spell, defines religion with these words: ‘a social system whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.’ I can no longer believe in a supernatural being and now believe that all religion is a manmade phenomenon that has evolved over time. It follows if I no longer have a belief in a ‘god out there’ that I am not seeking any approval from him/her for any of my actions.
Attending Meeting enables me to sit in silence, in the company of other Friends, while my thoughts range over many topics week by week. I believe those thoughts are mine and mine alone and are led by me. If a Friend ministers it may set my mind onto new avenues of thought and leave me refreshed and enriched by those thoughts.
What is spirituality? Is spiritual experience confined to those who would consider themselves religious? I don’t believe so. My response to beauty, to music, to beautiful art or a good book is, for me, a spiritual experience. Perhaps we should approach the world’s complexities, good and bad, ‘with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen you will only just scratch the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to a proper size – not all that is important in the great scheme of things’ (Daniel Dennett). I find this explanation of spirituality both exhilarating and exciting. Explore the world I am in. This is it. I shall not come this way again.
Having never studied, or even read about, evolutionary science I started to read Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene and others), Steve Jones and other writers to try to begin to understand. I have only scratched the tiniest layer of paint off the surface of this vast subject but I can see what Daniel Dennett means. The wonder and amazing beauty of this world, its age and the wondrous way it has evolved and developed have been, to me, a spiritual experience. Also the exploration of music, from Mozart to Shostakovich and Beethoven to jazz, proves there is always more to experience and to explore. Spiritual experience is not necessarily religious for it is a widening of our view of the world in which we live for a brief moment in a great span of time.
You need to login to read subscriber-only content and/or comment on articles.