If you are interested in reading any work on contemporary religion it is usual to read how our churches, of any faith, religion, or culture, are being depleted of bodies by the pullings of the secular world. We hear about the nones, who seemed at first to me to be some lab experiment gone awry that produced hermaphroditic crosses between zombies and borgs, all with the usual inappropriate body piercings whose major purpose was to party all weekend and snarl about global warming and the difficulty of getting on welfare roles, all the while giving old people another population to target for reconversion. A recent editorial in The Christian Century listed at least a half dozen “ecclesial experiments” that are trying to draw the baby boomers, the young adults, the GenXers , or the millennials back into the churches, temples and mosques. Some suggest dropping the standard liturgies that incarcerate all religious institutions and market Jesus, or some other prophet, as a rock star. Others suggest firing the rock stars and adopting small contemplative kitchen klatches for worship. Just leave your flip-flops and body piercings at home.
The variety of groups that are described as leaving the church suggests that there may be a variety of ways to attract them back, or better, a variety of newly styled, flexible institutions that may serve a portion of this vertiginous population. Such flexibility may be well advised; there is no one solution. And here-in is both the strength and weakness of the latest book to address this problem, a good read by the psychotherapist, professor, and writer, Thomas Moore. The subtitle, “A Religion of One’s Own: Creating a Personal Spirituality in a Secular World” suggests that the answer is not how those of us who have been left behind to tend the forts can draw the deserting rats back, but that it is up to those who would like more spiritual meaning in their lives to find their own, personal, practices that can renew their faith, the meaning of their lives. The subtitle subtly suggests the strength and weakness of Moore’s book — the strength of appealing to a variety of individuals with elements of their lives, and the weakness of the individual facing alone the new world.
Moore is a Jungian psychotherapist who has written several books on spirituality from the mytho-poetic theoretical position of Jungian depth psychology. In this, his most recent book, he voices his concern about the decline of participation in institutionalized religion. He does mention in passing the tendency of modern people of faith to de-accent belief in the orthodox structures and their supporting theories, which have been replaced by modern scientific cosmology and systems of belief, making the old myths largely meaningless and impractical. Unlike many theologians and observers of the church, he does not dwell on the causes. He instead notes the psychologically negative effect of this abandonment of the old structures of thought, repeating several times how he has met many people who experience great depression, anxiety, and addictive behaviors because they have little feeling that their lives have a purpose that justifies their work or their marriages. They lack the concern necessary to sustain their daily activities. He suggests that individuals suffering from this ennui may find a deeper spiritual connection with life through trying out a multiplicity of practices that will bring to them a deep calmness and acceptance of their experience and result in an enjoyment of the beauty and connection that these practices may bring. He lists and describes many spiritual practices that we all are familiar with, such as meditation, liturgical singing and playing of music, dream analysis, study of spiritual works, and reading poetry. The great virtue of his idea is that we do not have to limit ourselves to the traditional catalogue of spiritual practices, finding in our day to day experience activities that we can ritualize, deriving from their regular repetition the spiritual juice needed to give us a sense of beauty, connectedness, joy, and meaning. He suggests, for instance, using the making and sharing of our morning coffee, the feeding of pets, the brief rest periods that we might capture at work, or the turning down of our bed sheets at the close of our day. He has many suggestions about how we may find the divine in the mundane.
Moore freely, almost blithely, admits that he cannot tell where each individual will find in their daily lives these practices. He sees every individual as having her or his own experience, their own upbringing in their culture. He suggests that everyone will have to find their own truth, and by truth he means a sense of beauty and joyful significance. Thus spirit is closely associated with cultural awareness and aesthetic appreciation. The two mental habits that prevent this awakening from happening are a moralism — I’m right and you’re wrong — and a literalism — the restriction of meaning and imagination to set forms and interpretations. We must use our imaginations and uncover new meanings and associations, avoiding harming ourselves and others, yet bringing into our days new practices and experiences. As we repeat our spiritual practices, a process he closely associates with contemplation, we will discover new meanings and relationships. “[T]he focus of contemplation can be ordinary life, the natural world, deep feelings, and important relationships. … [R]eligion and spirituality can take many different forms. … [W]hat looks like the opposite of religion may be its best manifestation.”
Dreams, and Jungian dream analysis, are a major way Moore suggests that we deepen our contemplation of the mundane. For those of us who lived through the spiritual experimentation of the 1970’ his description of sources of spiritual awareness reads like an itinerary of our adventures in spiritual promiscuity many of us indulged ourselves with. He includes the Tarot and the I Ching (with coins). He does leave out dancing with snakes. Even though his book calls for a return to the quests of four decades past, I cannot fault him for that. These techniques are tried and true, and can readily bring one to feelings of excitement and growth that are missing from our lives if we have fallen into the ruts of the ordinary social clubs and entertainment forums many of our churches have become. His fault is not in finding new, refreshing practices, but in going nowhere with them.
There is little sense of the social gospel in Moore’s work. His good is limited almost solely to the individual. The spiritual quest, because it is always an individual who must be the participant in the quest, is that individual’s personal spirituality. The reasons for the quest, for Moore, are that many individuals are no longer nourished spiritually by the old religious forms, and therefore suffer an individual meaninglessness. The problem is manifested in the individual’s lack of fulfillment. Therefore, the individual must enrich his or her spirituality in order to find the individual meaning, and they do this by finding a peace and enjoyment in their individual practices. This limitation of the means and goals of spiritual fulfillment to the individual limits the good that results to rather self-indulgent behavior. In select cases maybe individual salvation is needed, but it is questionable; what do we do about the social illness that causs and extends much further than the individual meaninglessness that Moore addresses. Most founders of the world’s religions were moved by the pain caused by unjust social forms. The story is that Buddha, upon finding that he could free himself from the cycles of suffering, refused the last step and turned back into the mundane world. Even God cries.
Moore seems to be talking to the upper-middle class, largely white, educated and verbal population that make up his therapy practice. He calls for reading the classics of literature, looking at the great works of art, listening to good music, taking time to see beautiful nature. How many people have the means to do these things, much less the luxury to take time to make them into regular religious practices. And what good would they do in the face of much of the deadly oppression visited on so many of us. Mary sang her song of hope for her baby. Did Moore hear? Where are the practices that call for distributing justice throughout the world? Can we become spiritually realized so long as there are many who are prevented from doing so by the principalities of the world, some of whom represent the very institutions from which many of the nones flee? Moore mentions global warming only in passing. He seems unaware of the evils caused by patriarchal forms in our cultures. He does mention pollution, but his list of practices does not include anything that might cause a company that profits from their polluting consumerism any bother. He does mention serving in soup kitchens as a practice, but has no suggestions about practices that might end the unequal distribution of food, general welfare, and social power that might end poverty. His failure is not a failure of lack of practices, but a more basic failure of moral sensitivity. Maybe he needs to follow his own advice and read and contemplate Emerson:
Nothing is fair or good alone.
I thought the sparrow’s note from heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough;
I brought him home, in his nest at even;
He sings the song, but it cheers him not now,
For I did not bring home the river and sky;– He sang to my ear,–they sang to my eye.
– From Ralph Waldo Emerson, Each and All.
Moore has some good ideas, but his best, the need for finding our spiritual revival in discovering in the mundane practices that lead to this revival, is negated by his failure to see this revival as needing more than the renewal of his privileged class. I hesitate to say that this is a good book for those who have lost faith in our religious institutions help to find practices that will give many meaningful lives. I was hoping to find solutions to our current problems. Instead, I found myself caught up once again in the shallow analysis of social wrongs as individual wrongs that turned the 1960’s into the coopted, self-indulgent 1970’s and ‘80’s. It needn’t be so. Hopefully, it is not so. Each week sees more and more of the nones, and their religious allies, protesting the destruction of the world and the injustice brought by the principalities that profit from that injustice. How many are adopting the practice of getting arrested through non-violent action? You can’t get much more mundane that hearing that steel door clank shut behind you. Let those who have ears hear.
