A tipping point? Spirituality in a time of meta crisis

When I first began to think about this Editorial, I was side-tracked by a message from a neighbour who teaches in a primary school (children aged 5–11). As part of their work on number she encourages her pupils to look for patterns in dates. That morning they had been very excited to find that it was a ‘Palindrome Day’. It was the 22nd of February and, because dates are written in the UK in day-month-year order, the sequence was 22 02 2022 – a sequence which is exactly the same when read both backwards and forwards. Technically a ‘single repetitive integer with zero’, this kind of palindrome date first appeared on 11 January 1011; there will not be another in our lifetimes. Written in the angular font which is often used on digital devices, 22022022 also forms an ambigram since it looks the same upside down. When I later drew my own young granddaughter’s attention to the phenomenon, she pointed out the coincidence that it was a Tuesday, the 2nd day of the week. She delightedly dubbed it ‘Super Twosday’! The unusual nature of the date was even acknowledged on the BBC’s Ten O’Clock News – at 22 minutes 22 seconds past 22.00 hours!

I mention all this because, ironically, just two days later, on 24 February, Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops to invade Ukraine, a sovereign state in Eastern Europe with a population of over 43 million. It is the second-largest country by area in Europe after Russia, which it borders to the east and north-east. Since then all such trivia as the shape of a date has been wiped from our news screens and replaced by horrific scenes of devastation – of towns razed to the ground by relentless aerial bombardment; of millions of women, children and elderly people fleeing the country in whatever way they can, often with only small hastily-packed bags, leaving their husbands, fathers, sons and brothers behind to fight for the survival of their country; and of people forced to remain in basements, held under siege in cities deprived of water, food and power – in every sense of that word.

I entitled my Editorial in issue 10.2 of this journal ‘The best of times, the worst of times?’ (Hunt 2020). It was written at the height of the coronavirus pandemic which, although vaccines are now available and help to mitigate its worst effects, continues to afflict millions of people around the world. I questioned whether the pandemic might have brought us to a long-predicted tipping point in human affairs – a time of ‘breakdown or breakthrough’ (Myers 1990, 180). The predicted breakdown is of the belief that we live in a ‘clockwork universe’. This image has held sway over Western philosophical, political and scientific developments since the seventeenth century (Dolnick 2012). It has created a mindset in which reality is ‘out there’ in a material world of separate ‘things’; human wants and needs are paramount; and values associated with competition, control and domination are more important than any other ways of thinking/being (Goerner 1999). The breakthrough that many writers have envisaged is to an understanding that we inhabit a ‘holographic universe’ (Talbot 1991, 2). Such an understanding not only takes account of ongoing work in quantum physics, ecology, and systems and complexity theory, but it affirms a belief that underpins many spiritual and indigenous traditions – a belief in the ‘oneness’ of all things. It has profound implications for life on this planet.

With this in mind, I was struck by a recent post on the online professional networking site, LinkedIn (Watters 2022), which pointed out that the ‘trinity of crises’ with which we are currently faced – war in Europe, the pandemic, and climate emergency – constitutes a ‘meta crisis’. Watters noted that ‘Crises are moments of danger and opportunity’, the danger being that ‘the intensity and immediate consequences of each crisis triggers our survival responses: blaming, attacking, defending, denying, shutting down’. The opportunity, he suggests, may lie in ‘a moment of awakening … a moment of choice. We humans are not just bundles of hopeless reactivity, bound by our past and condemned to a dismal future’ because we can actively decide to answer the question ‘Who do we choose to be?’ As Watters argues: ‘This is a species level question, but it is also a question that each of us must consider and answer as individuals’.

One’s answer as an individual, however, and the implications of that answer for the future is likely to be deeply embedded in what Husserl ([1936] 1970) called our ‘lifeworld’. This is a way of being/knowing that is simultaneously shaped by, and gives shape to, how we see and speak of what we know, and how we enact that knowledge. In Husserl’s ([1936] 1970, 142) terms, the lifeworld ‘is always already there’ as the ‘universal field of all actual and possible praxis’. Drawing on what are essentially holographic principles, he argued that human consciousness is not only embedded in each person but that it has a communal or shared element, now and through time. The historical epoch in which each person lives influences the lifeworlds of its time and how the knowledge of that time is articulated and applied but, often without recognition of the fact, we frequently articulate and apply the knowledge of earlier times to a present where it may no longer be appropriate or desirable. McGilchrist ([2009] 2019, 8) makes a similar point, noting: ‘When we look at our embodied selves, we look back into the past. But that past is no more dead than we are. The past is something we perform every living day, here and now. … Jung … surmised that much of our mental life, like our bodies, has ancient origins’.

These ancient origins are evident in the unfolding of the clockwork universe worldview that has, arguably, given shape to the current meta crisis. And understandings of religion and spirituality are inevitably embedded within them. In a speech attempting to ‘justify’ his invasion of Ukraine, Putin claimed on behalf of Russia that ‘Ukraine is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space’. This claim apparently goes back to the year 988 when Vladimir, pagan King of the Rus, became a convert to Christianity to secure his marriage to the sister of the Christian Emperor Basil II and a powerful political alliance with Byzantium. Having done so, he returned to Kyiv in triumph and summoned the whole city to the banks of the Dnieper River for a mass baptism. In consequence, Kyiv, established more than 600 years before Moscow, is ‘the site of the imagined mother church for all the Rus’ (Costello 2022, online).

Leustean (2022, online) argues that Putin’s attempt to ‘repossess’ this sacred site on behalf of Russia and to impose his own religious ideology on Ukraine by brute force constitutes ‘the first religious war in the twenty-first century’¹ and is likely to have long-term implications for the global Orthodox Church. He suggests that ‘religious diplomacy’ may be a significant route towards ‘reaching diplomatic consensus’. It is to be hoped that peace can be achieved quickly by whatever means. However, Leustean’s perception of this war as the ‘first’ religious war of the twenty-first century is chilling in its anticipation that there will be more to follow. Is that inevitable?

Sadly, if the clockwork universe mindset prevails the answer is probably ‘yes’, especially where religious ideology is underpinned by socio-political/economic ambitions. Living in a world assumed to be composed of separate ‘things’ which can be manipulated to suit particular religious and political ideologies has resulted in the ‘othering’ of individuals and groups who have different beliefs and lifestyles. With no recognition of a common humanity, powerful elites have thus felt able to dominate or dispose of those deemed other, and are likely to continue to do so, whether or not they invoke the name of their preferred deity to justify their actions.

Are such patterns of the past so firmly embedded in the modern human psyche that we are doomed to repeat them? Or, faced with the current meta crisis in which news screens are filled with images of inhumane atrocities perpetrated on innocent people on a religious pretext, the numbers of coronavirus infections are rising, and environmental disasters continue to afflict many parts of the planet, have we finally reached a tipping point that could lead towards a different kind of future? Could this be a collective moment of awakening to a species-level question about the intricacies of our relationships and our essential ‘oneness’? It is a question which goes way beyond the bounds and beliefs of individuals, doctrines, churches, nation states, and history itself. It concerns our common humanity and spiritual nature.

The study of spirituality and how it is understood and enacted has perhaps never been more vital than it is today.

The purpose of JSS has always been to contribute to such understanding. The articles in this issue continue to introduce some of the myriad forms and ways in which spirituality may be explored. In this critical moment, it does not seem insignificant that, between them, the four main articles point to the role of spirituality in creating a sense of peace, concern for others, resilience against crisis, and healing through love.

In the first article, entitled ‘“Walking into the rock … ”: Labyrinth experience as thin place and [spi]ritual direction’, Phil Daughtry, Kirsten Macaitis and Tick Zweck present the findings of a small study of staff and students in a tertiary education setting in South Australia. They demonstrate how, through labyrinth walking, participants experienced ‘dissolution of individual identity into a greater sense of connectivity [with] elements of nature, such as rock, water, and sand’; ‘deep emotional connection’ and an ability to process pivotal moments of spiritual awareness; and ‘a movement into unusual peace, a sense of the living and fluid nature of time and space’.

The focus of Snežana Brumec’s article is also on experiences of spirituality in the physical process of walking. Based in Slovenia, she discusses ‘Life changes after the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, including a deeper sense of spirituality’. Pointing out that ‘while it is widely known that [such] pilgrimage … changes people, there is limited research exploring the transformative aftereffects of the experience’, she compares life changes in beliefs, philosophy and behaviour after the Camino pilgrimage to life changes after three different kinds of exceptional human experiences (EHEs) as described in methodologically similar studies. The most striking changes involved ‘an increase in appreciation for life; a heightened quest for meaning and sense of purpose; more concern for others; greater self-acceptance; as well as a deeper sense of spirituality’ and ‘a decrease in concern with worldly achievement’.

Reporting on a study undertaken at the height of the coronavirus pandemic in the Philippines, Janet Arnado, Mikael Kabelen and Roxanne Doron discuss ‘The accomplishment of spirituality in the everyday pandemic life of religion-practicing Filipinos’. The authors draw on ‘social capital theories and ethnomethodology to characterise spirituality as an accomplishment in everyday life with investments and returns’. They demonstrate, in particular, the implications of their findings for ‘the resilience against crises of a spiritually inclined population’.

The fourth article, ‘Considering spirituality in contemporary Spiritualist art’, by Ann Bridge Davies, an artist based in the UK, explores a spiritual belief system which is not widely discussed and perhaps not well understood. Drawing on her own experience of receiving a ‘spirit art’ painting from an artist-medium, believed to be of spirits of the deceased, and of creating such art herself, the author considers where spirituality is ‘located’ in art – with the artist, in the art work, or with the viewer? She suggests that spirit art has an extra dimension in the ‘passage of information from a separate spiritual entity to the artist (as medium) to the viewer’. In the making of spirit art, she says, ‘it seems that impressions of the deceased flow through the artist’ and, once recognised by the recipient of the art, may generate a deep sense of spiritual love which can help to heal grief.

In addition to these articles, this issue contains an expanded Forum section to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the introduction of this section into the journal. Launched in issue 2.1, the purpose of the Forum is:

to invite the submission of ‘Think Pieces’, short articles that are specifically designed to raise new issues and questions relating to spirituality; engage with significant ongoing debates and/or controversial aspects of theory, practice or policy; respond to articles previously published in JSS; outline plans and ideas for new research; and/or address matters that are consistent with the aims of JSS, using forms of writing other than a full-length academic journal article.

Interestingly, the very first Forum item, by John Rowan (2012), alludes to what I have called a clockwork universe mindset. Entitling his article ‘Third Tier Thinking and Subtle Consciousness’, Rowan calls for better recognition of this alternative way of thinking, He points out that ‘first tier thinking’ is prevalent in the Western world and

tends towards “black and white” thinking, making us think that if we have an opinion, and someone else has a different opinion on the same matter, one of us (probably me) is right and the other wrong. If the other is sufficiently wrong, I may be entitled to put him/her right, by force if necessary. (92)

The essence of third tier thinking is, he says, ‘that we have to admit that we are spiritual beings’ (93).

To date, more than twenty Forum articles have been published, covering a wide range of topics. These include atheist spirituality; paranormal experiences and their effects on wellbeing; spiritual awareness and inter-faith relations; spiritual crisis; wisdom; the relationship between science and spirituality; the hermeneutics of trust and of doubt, and initiating children into hermeneutical discourse in religious education. Some articles have reported on policy and practice developments in, for example, residential care communities, compassionate healthcare, and new vocational qualifications in spirituality. Others have reflected on perceptions of spirituality among millennials; the problematic nature of studying spirituality; the relationship between spirituality and evolution; and the nature and implications of a ‘Universe of Being’.

In this issue, in an article entitled ‘Spirituality, religion and the functioning of the economy’, Laszlo Zsolnai describes the background to, and focus of, a major research programme being undertaken at Corvinus University of Budapest in Hungary. The aim of the programme is to explore and study the multiple roles that religion and spirituality play in the functioning of the economy. It focuses on contemporary issues of capitalism in relation to ethics and morality, ecology and sustainability, and social inequality and cultural diversity. The programme is intended to foster a spirit of open dialogue that seeks collaboration across disciplines, cultures and faith traditions.

Coincidentally, the importance of open dialogue features in different ways in all four Forum articles included here. In her article on ‘Public perception of religion and worldviews education’, Kathryn Wright reports on the findings of a large-scale survey undertaken in the UK by Culham St Gabriel’s Trust, a charitable organisation committed to the development of ‘a broad-based, critical and reflective education in religion and worldviews contributing to a well-informed, respectful and open society’. In contrast to the findings of earlier national surveys, this survey indicates that public perception of an education in religion and worldviews, and religious-, belief-, spiritual- and worldview-literacy more widely, is largely positive. A majority of respondents saw it as especially important that young people should be encouraged to discuss their beliefs openly with others, and helped to critically evaluate their own and others’ beliefs.

Patricia Hannam’s article, ‘Reflections on the place of spirituality in policy making for religious education’, sheds light on the way in which an innovative religious education (RE) policy was developed for use in one particular English county. She notes that the policy document ‘refers to religious education in the public sphere. This means there must be a recognition of the role education plays in the public sphere, and also that religion itself is not something relegated merely to private concern’. Noting that ‘knowledge transmission’ and/or religious ‘literacy development’ have often been regarded as the educational justification for the subject, she argues that ‘experience, intellectual engagement and discernment’ should be recognised in the RE syllabus as being ‘matters of public concern in equal measure’. The article concludes with ‘a plea for religion itself to be conceptualised broadly, in terms not only of beliefs and practices, but also in terms of existence and in relation to experience of faith and trust – and acknowledging that we do not live alone in the world, but with others’. In Hannam’s view, ‘what could be at stake here is the life of each one of us and of the world’.

The final article, ‘The study of spirituality and consciousness through Bohm Dialogue’, is similarly concerned with ways in which knowledge has traditionally been shared, and reiterates my own earlier concern about the privileging of a particular way of knowing in the Western world. Describing the rationale and focus of a new Special Interest Group (SIG) in Spirituality and Consciousness Studies (SaCS) that has recently been established by the International Network for the Study of Spirituality (INSS), Joan Walton highlights potential connections between spirituality and consciousness, and what might be gained by enquiring into the nature of a relationship between them. She also provides an explanation of ‘Bohm Dialogue’, which is currently helping to shape the group’s work. As she notes, this is a form of inquiry which ‘supports a more open culture, in which thoughts and experiences can be shared with mutual respect. Groups of people learn to think together; the outcome is that ideas and ways of perceiving reality are generated that no one person would have had on their own’.

Such an approach would seem to offer much in the context of a meta crisis … 

In concluding this Editorial, I am pleased to be able to draw your attention to a number of ongoing developments in INSS. In addition to the establishment of the SaCS SIG, the inauguration has recently taken place of a SIG focussing on Spirituality and the Arts. In recent years there has been a growing interest in the intersection of the arts and spirituality and the intention of this SIG is to meet to discuss this intersection in a variety of forms and mediums, such as visual art, music, film, dance, digital, interactive, poetry, time-based and performative art forms. It will include personal, social and cultural perspectives, encompassing both religious and spiritual-but-not-religious contexts.

Later this year, INSS is also hoping to establish a SIG for members with interests in mental health and wellbeing.

An especially welcome development is that plans for the Seventh International Conference of the International Network for the Study of Spirituality are currently taking shape. After the pandemic caused the postponement of the 2020 conference – which was subsequently held very successfully online in June 2021 – the hope is that it will be possible to hold the next conference in a face-to-face format once again.

The conference will take place from 16-18 May 2023. The venue will be the newly-established South East Technological University (SETU), Waterford Campus, Waterford, Ireland. (The INSS website will contain regular updates about the conference and all other new developments: https://spiritualitystudiesnetwork.org/)

The conference date may not include the excitement of a Palindrome Day but we hope you will be as excited as the INSS Executive Team is at the prospect of participating in this event. We very much look forward to meeting you – and to engaging in an open and productive dialogue about the ongoing study of spirituality and how it may be enacted, not only in the context of crisis but in the shaping of a less uncertain future.

Notes

1 It is worth noting that this is a somewhat Eurocentric view. As Rowan Williams (2022, online), former Archbishop of Canterbury, points out, for example, Putin ‘sees himself as the protagonist in a battle for the survival of an integral Christian culture as surely as Islamic State casts itself as the defender of Islamic cultural purity’. Williams notes that there are, of course, ‘profound operational, historical and political differences, and it would be foolish to ignore these’; however, ‘a realistic picture’ of what is happening in Ukraine ‘has to reckon with the parallels.’ Such a picture also needs to acknowledge that ‘secular geopolitical calculations and bargains may not give us the tools for making sense of what is going on’ (2022).