[personal spirituality] hard to pinpoint

There’s an aspect to us to which most give scant regard – the spiritual. Lord Mancroft’s quote [1979] was amusing and yet contained a grain of truth when he wrote:

Cricket – a game which the English, not being a spiritual people, have invented in order to give themselves some conception of eternity.

We often come close to the spiritual. Ian, of Imagined Community, wrote:

[The] closest I have ever come to knowing G-d to exist was during a Russian Orthodox funeral mass sung in the Peter and Paul Cathedral on Hare Island in St Petersburg, burial place of many of the Tsars. You know I'm agnostic; if I did believe, I think the Russian Orthodox church would still be far too mediaeval for my taste.

But as I sat in that cathedral, and I listened to the unaccompanied male voice choir, and the harmonies flowed through me, and the impossibly low notes reverberated around me; as I heard the beauty which man could attain, and contemplated the devotion which inspired both composer and performers; well, I might not have known it for sure to be G-d, but I did know it to be sublime.

Every time your wife lies in your arms and you’re at one with the world, it seems that’s also close to it. As when we stand on the point of the cliff and gaze on the raging sea. As when we sail – the lonely sea and the sky.

Most aspects of the metaphysical I don’t purport to understand. I also don’t understand electricity but I know it turns lights on. There are clear ways to conduct oneself contained in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere. There are triumvirates of aspiration – hope, faith and charity.

I know one thing. When I cease to place myself at the centre and admit to my true place in the world, to relinquish my sovereignty, as it were, to submit, then things start to happen. They always have and they are doing so today.

Firstly, comfort comes and I can’t describe this – it’s like restfulness inside. Then things really do fall in place, in line, the physical elements of the daily grind and the ugly conjunction of unfortunate circumstances ceases to grate, like a jackhammer in a road and become more the strains of fine music.

Understanding comes too. It’s now easy to see I was wrong, that the falling out I may have recently had stemmed from my own wilfulness. And so on. It’s like an expansion of the intellect. And the health snaps into place too. Eat better, sleep better, the scales fall away.

Don’t forget strength. Moral strength gives strength of the will. A snivelling, gibbering weakling, such as I could easily have been, isn’t any more. Not so much ‘protected from harm’ – that was never promised – but certainly knowing how to meet adversity and that gives courage.

Douglas Adams had a nice way of describing people in this hyper-elevated state:

“The serene lot of bastards.”

That’s the point where it all starts to unravel and go wrong. People who’ve discovered this elixir now want to go out and spread it, to evangelize, to force all others to experience it. That’s why I’m diametrically opposed to compulsion, to evangelism, to religion. Yes, religion – the bane of civilization. I can’t imagine anyone I’d least like to be with than a religious nut. When they want to talk G-d, I go to the pub.

That’s why Marx was right about the opiate of the masses. That’s why the Muslims are right about submitting to the will of G-d and I don’t mean the evils of Sharia Law. That’s why the Buddhists have something there. They’re all skirting around different aspects of the one central truth. Plus blandishments like ‘we’re all children of the universe’. Well, we are. That’s why the Australian aborigines had it right before western values and alcohol destroyed their spirituality.

This is not to say, in any way, that all religions are right. Religion is the bane of civilization and has caused more destruction than any other factor. It’s because the human factor enters into it, it becomes a system of oppression and the ones at the top are the worst.

There really is a spiritual aspect though; there are ways to act and they’re all written down. And when a society is at one with its code of conduct and when that code is non-destructive and is based on simple common sense values, then good things come of it.

But they can’t accrue unless we have our personal spirituality sorted out first.