Why Spirituality is Difficult for Westeners by David Hay

Author:David Hay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, spirituality, culture, Europe, science, evolution, biology
ISBN: 9781845408107
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2017
Published: 2017-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

In contrast to this necessary conservatism, literacy continues the process of individualisation initiated by the ability to speak, but with much greater impact. Literacy drastically reduces the need to remember everything, since information can be stored in written form, whilst reading gives us the ability to move in our imagination out of the concrete here-and-now in any direction a book can take us. Also, the fact that we gain information from words on a page encourages the idea that knowledge is something independent of us that we can examine in a detached way. Most strikingly, literacy throws open the door to a private world, not dependent on directly shared memory but on the limitations of one’s library.

The complexities of modern society are so great that we would be unable to manage them without the skills of literacy and this is compounded hugely and in contradictory and as yet unpredictable ways by the revolution in electronic communication. The two aspects of our experience that very often get overlooked in the process are (a) the rich, concrete immediacy of our relationship with the here-and-now and (b) our immediate sense of belonging to and being continuous with the surrounding community.

We have seen in the previous chapter that the locus of communication with sacred reality is pre-eminently in this same holistic awareness of immediacy. Thus, if people are to maintain contact with the spiritual dimension when they become literate they need to have some system for protecting immediate awareness. As ‘people of the Book’ the traditional faith communities of Jews, Christians and Muslims of course respect literacy highly. But at the same time as beginners are learning to read and write, the greatest care is taken to give instruction in how to stay in touch with their spiritual lives via the skills of contemplative prayer or meditation. In monotheistic religions this requires the regular practice of raising the heart and mind to God in the here-and-now, or what the Jesuit Jean-Pierre de Caussade [23] calls attending to the ‘sacrament of the present moment’. In those religions that decline to comment on the existence of God there are closely parallel practices. As we saw previously, in Theravada Buddhism vipassana or awareness meditation requires a similar focusing on the here-and-now, assisted by attention to the act of breathing whilst sitting, or observing the fine detail of the movements of the feet in walking meditation. [24]

For the committed member of a religious community these practices are not undertaken casually. They are timetabled into a structured routine, in many cases repeated several times each day. In every case, ranging from Vespers to vipassana, the ultimate purpose is to cultivate a state of steady alertness to here-and-now reality, or to put it in the Christian terms of St Paul, to pray without ceasing. One can see something of what this means, even in the secularised West, in areas where there are substantial numbers of first or second generation Muslim immigrants. Compared to most members of the indigenous population they

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