Pic'n'Mix Spirituality

Our culture seems to recognise that we have a hole in our lives that needs to be filled. In the last few years there has been an amazing increase in the interest in spiritual things. People are filling that hole in all kinds of ways. There is a phenomenal rise in the interest in spirituality and how that affects us and how people are using different spiritual practices to fill that God shaped hole.

Choice seems to be the buzzword of the last few years, particularly in politics with politicians all talking to us about increasing our choices. Choice in education, choice in the way we live our lives and choice in the NHS. It doesn't stop there though. It's not just the NHS that offers us an abundance of choice and its not just politicians that are offering us choice but big businesses too. Here’s an article from the Times:

Colour has gone crazy. Where once there was red now there is carmine. Blue has become aqua. And yellow is simply sunset. When it comes to painting your home there is now almost too much choice. "With so many colours available, everyone should be able to find the perfect one for them," says Lisa Herbert, Pantone's vice president of textile, home and fashion. Easier said than done. When faced with a spectrum of more than 1,900 colours, palette panic sets in. It is tempting to give up and go for good old white. But there are hundreds of shades of white -from whitest white to white with a just hint of white.

We can see it also in something as simple as coffee. Now you can have full caf, decaf and half caf too. If you go to a coffee shop you can have latte, mocca, cappuccino, choc coff, expresso, half cup, full cup, tall cup, short cup everything you would ever need.

We have more TV stations than ever, choice is amazing. There are so many channels that the viewing systems come with special menus to make scanning and choosing what you are going to watch easier.

Why this great amount of choice?

Well the idea, so we are told, is so that we can tailor things to fit just perfectly exactly who we are.

Here’s another quote from that article in the Times:

The promise that you are what you have has created a wonderful opportunity for manufacturers to proliferate widely the number and range of products they create - despite most being more or less like every other in a particular product range. Take the range of coffee combinations now available from Starbucks. By choosing size, coffee type, coffee to milk ratio and form of sweetening this mass purveyor of coffee-based drinks promises to tailor the exact beverage that's right for you.

I can pick and mix from the menu in a coffee shop to create the perfect beverage for me. I can pick and mix from the range of NHS services to create the perfect health care programme for me. I can pick and mix from the wide range of TV channels to create the perfect nights viewing just for me.

You know there’s another amazing area of choice in our current culture. That’s the choice available to us in the area of spirituality.

In recent years we have seen a proliferation in the choices of spirituality available to us. Feng Shui, Tai Chi, alternative medicine, aromatherapy, reiki, homeopathy, hypnotherapy, shiatsu, transcendental meditation, yin and yang, all the so called new age spirituality - horoscopes, astrology, Ouija boards, tarot cards.

All this as well as the so called religions and the amazing range of faiths and choices available. The 2001 census notes the major faiths in our country as being Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish and Sikh and interestingly 76.8% of the population indicate an adherence to one of these religions.

But within these of course are different denominations and practices Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Christian scientists, Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Sunni Muslims, Shi’a Muslims, Orthodox Jews, Messianic Jews on and on and on.

Huge variety and choice in the area of spirituality.

The menu for spirituality, like the menu for coffee is seemingly endless and a bit like you can pick and choose exactly what you want from the coffee menu to create the perfect beverage for you it seems these days to be entirely acceptable to pick and mix from the spirituality menu to create the perfect religion just for you.

But is all this choice necessarily a good thing?

Psychologists are increasingly wondering about this. Again I quote from a newspaper article. In April 2004 just before Easter of that year it was written:

Perhaps Tony Blair should follow Henry Ford's dictum on choice when he offered purchasers of his Model T car any colour so long as it was black. In other words: give the public no choice. This is the advice that the social psychologist Barry Schwartz gives in his new book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. He argues that too much choice makes us miserable because we fear making the wrong decision. People are happier when they have little choice. This may trouble both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, Michael Howard, since The Economist (April 10) says that they "agree choice is the way to improve Britain's cash-thirsty and underperforming public services". A survey commissioned by the magazine found that voters do consider greater choice in health and education services as important. Dan Corry, director of the New Local Government Network, writing in Local Government Chronicle (April 8), says that Schwartz's book has been "terrifying the No 10 choice aficionados and bringing joy to the old Labour 'we told you so' faction". But Mr Corry argues that most of us find ways of coping with choice and says: "it is not as if we are suffering from a surfeit of choice (in the public sector). I hope Mr Schwartz enjoys his identical Easter eggs. I am looking forward to my varied selection."

Another psychologist Michael Wilmott co-founder of the future foundation says this

“Growing complexity in our daily lives is leading to frustration," he explains. "We face more choices than ever and evidence suggests we are finding this increasingly hard to manage."

Let us explore the characteristics of spirituality in our day and look at whether or not pick and mixing our spirituality is a good thing.

There’s an alternative spirituality for you, the spirituality of colour!

Whether or not we like it, we living in a time of huge cultural change. For two to three hundred years our world view has been conditioned by something called modernism. We have been living in an age where reason and science have been the keys to our culture - this age began with the enlightenment of the 18th and 19th centuries.

In the last 30-40 years in fact really since end of the 2nd world war our world view has been slowly changing. No one really knows where it is heading. It is called post modernism because no one knows what it will end up being like they just know we’re moving on from modernism.

This shift has come as we realise that science really can’t solve all our problems, in fact it may have made some of them worse.

There are lots of characteristics of this cultural shift , this change in outlook

Perceived desire for greater choice is one.

Suspicion of authority (which is one reason why so few people turn out to vote these days).

Greater desire to help those in need.

The rediscovery of spirituality.

As people begin to feel that science and reason are not providing the answers to their big questions they are turning to the spiritual.

There is an increased interest in the spiritual dimension of their lives. Don’t take my word for it - the recent British spiritual awareness survey highlights the increase in this interest.

We see this shift reflected in the TV programmes that we watch – the monastry and the convent being just two and in the programmes our children watch too - Buffy, Angel, Charmed etc. and in the magazines that are available to them.

We see it in the media with blockbusters including the Harry Potter books and films and the Da Vinci Code.

We see it in what celebrities are doing. Madonna and David Beckham have both been seen sporting a Kabbalah bracelet - thin red, seven times knotted thread. Kabbalah is a spiritual movement rooted in Jewish mysticism and it has led Madonna to change her name to Esther after the Jewish heroine.

We see it in the books and magazines available to our children to read. A New Age spell book containing dozens of mystical exercises laid out cookbook style in a book called ‘Teen Witch: Wicca for a New Generation,’ a 250-page handbook that’s very popular. Written for 10 to 17-year-olds by New Age author Silver RavenWolf, it boasts everything a kid needs to become a pinnacle-wearing, spell-casting, completely authentic witch, that includes instructions for such uniquely teen rituals as the ‘Unground Me Spell,’ the ‘Just Say No Spell’ and the ‘Bad Bus Driver Spell.’

The author says this about the book and others like it “Parents don’t need to be concerned. These can be read as a kind of introduction to Eastern Mysticism and homespun folklore from Tarot reading to Feng Shui, a practice that combines Chinese Astrology and interior design."

All of these are being positioned as spirituality options in our day, available not just to adults, but even to young people.

Let’s look at some of the characteristics of today’s spirituality.

1. Openness

This renewed interest in spirituality has meant that there is tremendous openness to the spiritual.

People are interested in hearing about people’s spiritual experiences - there is a real openness that didn’t exist even 20 years ago.

2. Political Correctness

Whilst there is the tremendous openness to spiritual things, respect for what people believe it has to come with the appropriate dose of political correctness. Tolerance is vital to contemporary spirituality.

With the end of the age of dependence on science and reason has come the end to absolute truth. It’s fine for people to believe just what they want to believe we respect that, but what isn’t fine is for one spirituality, one faith, one religion to make a claim to absolute truth.

Because a claim to absolute truth means that other faiths, religions, spiritualities must be wrong and to say that would be politically incorrect, would be intolerant.

3. Huge Variety and Choice

As we look out on the spiritual things that are offered to us the variety and choice is amazing and if you don’t find exactly the thing that you are looking for - well you can take a bit of this and a bit of that and make your own.

How do we cope with all of this?

How do we choose between all of this - how do we cope with this amazing variety?

How do we live in an age where, so it is said, there is no absolute spiritual truth?

What do we do with all of this?

First of all when we are looking at any form of spirituality, be it Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, New Age, Eastern whatever we need to ask some questions about it:

a) What does it say about life now?

What is this spirituality mix that I might be buying in to - what does it offer me for my life

Does it promise me health, vitality, eternal youth, material well being, or does it offer me something more foundational than that

Does it offer my deep rooted peace that whatever life throws at me there is a spiritual side to me, a faith if you like that will help me to cope with that?

b) What does it say about the future?

It’s all well and good looking at what this offers me now, but what is it going to offer my in the future - when I die even?

What does this spiritual mix say about my future?

c) What is the basis and background to it?

This is a key question - where does this all come from, who decided what it would be like?

Was it someone out for their own personal gain or is there something more significant to it than that?

Coupled with this is our last question

d) Is it logical, does it make sense?

Is there a basis to it that makes sense?

Is there some evidence that backs up the claims of a particular spiritual approach?

Does it have historical credibility?

So these are some of the questions you might think about asking.

As a Christian I think that this shift in our culture is in many respects a good thing. An openness to spirituality is good news as far as I am concerned. It connects with something that Christians have been saying for 2000 years - that there is a spiritual dimension to our lives - that there is something in this world beyond just us - that there is a force at work in our universe that transcends human beings.

In that aspect we can embrace this cultural shift. Where as a Christian I have more of a problem is with the idea that we can pick whatever spirituality works for us and that there is no absolute spiritual truth.

In many ways Christianity can embrace post modernism. Christianity says yes there is a spiritual side to our lives. It says yes to the desire to help those in need.

Where is stands opposed to it though is at this point, about there being no absolute spiritual truth.

The Christian believes that there is an absolute spiritual truth, that we can’t just pick and mix a bit of this spirituality and a bit of that.

The Christian believes that there is one God who sent his son Jesus so that we could know him and have a relationship with him.

It seems to me that much of today’s spirituality is about convenience.

Our culture says create your own spirituality - pick and choose the bits that fit with you. It’s the ultimate in consumerism.

Spirituality offers an escape from the real world in to a kind of virtual reality and by creating our own we can ensure that it is not too costly to us.

It is surely significant that Buddhism of all the major traditional religions seems to be attractive to many today. Buddhism offers an escapist spirituality - if you go to a Buddhist temple you will find a statue of the Buddha sitting cross legged, with his eyes closed and a smile on his face - happy because he has separated himself from this world through meditation.

But if you go to a Christian church you will find a very different symbol - a cross, symbolising the cross where Jesus died with nails through his hands and pain on his face.

In many ways Jesus is the opposite of Buddha, Jesus is God taking human form in this world rather than seeking to escape from it. Christianity is not escapism - it is real world spirituality.

Real spirituality is not just convenience - it means something, it costs something. Christianity isn’t a spirituality of convenience - it isn’t something you can dabble in or pick a bit of.

It embraces the whole of life and yes it costs you something, but then it cost Jesus everything.

It’s interesting that despite this renewed interest in spirituality, despite the continuing rise in our standards of living in this country, people are still unhappy. Many people it seems despite their searching still haven’t found what they are looking for. Maybe they are just looking in the wrong place?

Auth. Rev Chris Porter

Minister of Easthampstead Baptist Church in Bracknell, England