In chapter two of his book
'Simply Christian' Tom Wright begins the chapter (titled ‘the hidden spring’) with a clever allegory that illustrates how enlightenment/modernist thinking has (until recently) sanitised our religious experience by divorcing it from day to day experience. The waters of religion were confined to a ‘small sub-department of ordinary life’. He seems to imply that there existed a professional relationship between religion and philosophy. Both were able to control their sub-departments, without fear of interference from each other.
However, the underground waters of ‘spirituality’ have made their way to the surface again; with both positive and negative effects. Negatively, ‘September 11, 2001 serves as a reminder of what happens when you try organise a world on the assumption that religion and spirituality are merely private matters, and that what really matters is economics and politics instead.’ This resurgence in spirituality was to be expected; for many of the world's peoples (especially so in a South African context) spirituality is an integral part of everyday life and cannot be compartmentalised.
Wright asserts that ‘the hidden spring’ of spirituality functions as ‘an echo of a voice’. By calling to those woven into the now faded tapestry of modern secularism it suggests to us that there is ‘more to our reality than this'. Moreover, spirituality has lost its’ stigma and is no longer a minority interest. One need only visit a bookshop to find that the ‘spirituality’, ‘self help’, ‘mind body spirit’ sections occupy a significant amount of floor space. What then ‘are we to make of ‘spirituality’ as we listen for the echoes of a voice that may be addressing us?’
At this point Wright gives the Christian explanation of the renewed interest in ‘spirituality’. Briefly, if it is true that ‘there is a God whom we can know most clearly in Jesus’ then a resurgence of spirituality should be expected. In Jesus we see a God who loves people and has created them to know and respond to that love. Given that people (and their world) have been seriously damaged by evil, simple self help, better social conditions, etc are not sufficient. Rather, complete rescue is required.
In this renewed interest, ‘we should expect that in the quest for spirituality people will embrace options that are less than what would actually be best for them'. Back to our water analogy: ‘people who have been starved of water for a long time will drink anything, even if it is polluted’.
The New Testament defines ‘true spirituality’ as the care of those unable to care for themselves (Jas 1:27). What I found most edifying in our discussion time was that this is the direction we took (albeit unintentionally).
It would seem that these first two echoes are inexorably linked.
Once again we revisited the fundamental tension between beauty and pain
. These two realities are all too true to the human experience. Living in this world as a follower of Jesus means we try to live in the tension of the life's beauty and pain. Poverty of spirit is the result of embracing too much of life's pain. Personal peace and affluence result from the extreme of embracing too much of it's beauty. The one numbs you to the reality of God's glory and the other to the reality of human suffering...
Another required tension exists between the need for both structure and freedom. We talked at length about how as followers of Jesus we struggle to find the tension between ‘piped’ water and ‘spring’ (our metaphors for structure and freedom). Our exploration of the interplay between Christian institution, which tends to pipe water and informal Christian community which tends to bubble like a spring; in the final wrap indicates the need for both/and. In the same way that natural springs tend to become muddy and polluted without some structure to hold the water, relationships too become contaminated and can even be damaged without appropriate relational structure. Applying this thought to the role of institution and individual we seem to have agreed that, in our quest for ‘true spirituality’, institution is perhaps better able to address ‘systematic injustice’, and the individual what we called ‘symptomatic injustice’.
Back to ‘the hidden spring’, the quest for spirituality may be the echo of voice, however, not shouting so loudly as to compel us to listen, nor whispering so quietly as to be drowned by the clamour of the world in which we live. No, rather when combined with a passion for justice, ‘some might conclude that it would at least be worth listening for further echoes of the same voice’.
