SPIRITUALITY AND WONDER
15th March 2002
The next issue, Number 70, will appear on 15th APRIL 2002.
(The following thoughts have arisen from two sources - a conference on hospital chaplaincy that I attended in a humanist capacity and an article I submitted recently to the magazine Humanism Scotland).
The conference proceedings were sprinkled liberally with such words as 'spiritual' and 'spirituality'. Care was taken, by several reverend speakers, to distinguish between 'spiritual', 'religious' and 'moral'. It was apparent to me that the word 'spiritual' and its cognates lack definition and I note that, even in personal conversation, two Ministers of the Kirk failed to do better than explicitly to recall 'Alice' and the notion of making words mean what you want them to mean. On the face of it, this want of definition suggests that the whole basis of the word 'spiritual' is like a quicksand on a foggy night.
To be fair, this flabbiness of definition did not prevent several participants saying very illuminating and heartening things about their actual experience as hospital chaplains. As an experienced patient, I have much regard for many of the chaplains I have met.
The problem is how to identify what people have in mind when the word 'spiritual' is used. I do not believe that either the Third Person of the Trinity, or chatting with the dead, are uppermost in the popular mind in this connection.
I am however impressed by the distinction between two different sorts of human needs. There are those needs such as for food, clothing, shelter, health care, companionship and sexual contact (in its most limited sense). These are needs that can be satisfied by the expenditure of money, or money's worth. There are other needs that are not matters of money, or barter, such as our needs for self-respect, hope, contentment, affection, creativity, reciprocal altruism and mutual respect between people. A telling contrast between these two distinct sorts of need can be captured by saying that you can buy works of art but you cannot buy artistic appreciation.
There are many more items on each of these lists of needs but the distinction is sufficiently clear - cash-based or not cash-based. The received distinction between 'material' and 'spiritual' seems to me to carry some needless assumptions and to miss the practical point embedded in our experience of life.
The need for a sense of wonder is one of the non-cash-based needs that is most neglected - indeed most perverted - in the modern world.
There has always been a yen for wonders of various sorts ....... miracle stories, magic and whatnot. It is easy to account for compulsive fantasising by people who could know no better - people who had little or no understanding of the way the world is even though they evidently had enough understanding of how to survive and prosper in it. Had they not been rather successful in these practical ways then we would not be here to adopt superior attitudes to their whacky theories. Had they not made any attempt to theorise then we would have no culturally inherited notions to improve upon and replace by sounder ones.
A sense of wonder and the urge to think and act upon it were, presumably, always necessary engines of human endeavour. We need such a sense as much as we ever did but we now have to consider questions that the ancients, one suspects, did not ask. Are we losing our sense of wonder or, perhaps worse, are we twisting it into fruitless shapes?
There seem to me to be two huge areas in which the proper sense of wonder ought to be active - the wonders of the natural world (including, as it does, the world of human life) and the wonders of our various enduring responses to the world.
The first category of wonders is exciting enough but it is our human response - in scientific comprehension, philosophical inquiry and artistic creativity of various sorts - that is, or ought to be, super-exciting. The "ought to be" is becoming more and more important - perhaps because less and less heeded.
In passing, I recall a wartime neighbour with whom I was sharing fire-watching duties during the air raids of 1940-43 on London. This man was a notable philistine - the patriotic song about 'Hearts of Oak' might well, in his case, have been altered to 'Heads of Oak' ! But even he, one beautiful dangerous night in 1942, felt moved to look up to the sky and say, of the stars ..... "That lot make a war between Britain and Germany look rather small". He had probably never been anywhere where 'light pollution' had not extinguished the wonderment that the night sky can evoke. Wishful thinking drives me to hope that, one day, he might have become an astronomer or a poet. The remote possibility that he might have developed in either or both of those directions illustrates the exciting response that people can make to a raw sense of wonder.
But, to return to the "ought to be" of an earlier paragraph, our sense of wonder is being diverted , from the world and what we make of it all, into modish catch penny fantasies which seem to have many people by the intellectual short hairs.
We are accustomed to the idea of rude peasants seeing the Holy Virgin all over the place but when we see the smart set going soft on stories about supernatural goings on in a wardrobe then we must feel rather sad. I don't really care about fairies at the bottom of the garden but I do draw the line at a lion in the cupboard among my clothes and my skeletons. Many great stories illuminate the study of social anthropology; the runaway success of 'Harry Potter' is simply an indictment that shames us all.
But let us be positive; things could be worse. There could be a brisk market in Fragments of the True Wardrobe; there could be a Harry's Pottery selling mugs of genuine Middle Earthenware.
Not that I wish there to be humanist versions of the Taliban, of the Puritans, of the inane Political Correctness now well rooted in American universities and elsewhere. I am in favour of the liberty to write pretentious claptrap but I retain a sad sense of wonder that so many people are moved to read it with such approval. Contrived wonders diminish us. There are real wonders around us, in us and from us; let us marvel at them.
E.S.
HOME PAGE