Global Spirituality: a Personal Transformation Hamburg 2007

‘A Civilization with a Heart’ is the beautiful name that Wayne Teasdale, an American pioneer of inter-spirituality, has given to the emerging global future.[1] Many of the prophetic spiritual teachers of the twentieth century have suggested that ‘We stand at the dawn of a new epoch in the evolution of human consciousness.’[2] As early as the 1970s Fr Bede Griffiths, who explored the meeting of Christian and Hindu spirituality, said, ‘I feel that we are on the eve of a new breakthrough in consciousness, of a new wave of civilisation.’[3] The Dalai Lama has called for a spiritual revolution.[4] These and many other visionaries agree that we need to recognise our deeper unity and the harmony of our fundamental values.’ [5]This is what I mean by ‘Global Spirituality.’ Just as the Global economy has not removed our different currencies, whether dollar, yen, mark or sterling, so a Global Spirituality is not a superficial mixing of religions, but a recognition of an underlying oneness.

A Global Spirituality implies a new understanding of religion. Let me suggest at least five ways in which this is true.

1 The emphasis on spiritual experience rather than religion;

2 Inter-faith and multi-cultural;

3 Our oneness with Nature;

4 Recognition of the feminine;

5 Compassion and active commitment to social change.

First, the emphasis on spiritual experience.

Keith Ward, former Regius Professor at Oxford, has identified four main phases in humanity’s religious history, although he makes clear that all four phases are still with us. He calls the fourth phase, which we are now entering, ‘the global.’ His first phase is the ‘local’ – in which local myths and rituals develop and are passed on through oral tradition. The second, following the Axial age, Ward calls the ‘canonical’ - in which the emerging world religions all posit, in different ways, one reality of supreme value who demands a moral way of life. Ward’s third phase, following from the Enlightenment, is the ‘critical,’ in which religious texts are subject to historical criticism and moral teaching is revised in the light of new knowledge. In the fourth phase, which we are now entering, Keith Ward says and I agree with him, religion is seen ‘as a process of spiritual exploration which… (gives) human life an ultimate meaning, as people… live in conscious relation to a supreme spiritual value.’ [6]

Old fashioned religion, if I may use that term, requires its followers to conform to a pre-existing belief system and moral code. You believe what the Church tells you or what the Bible says. You do what canon law or shari’a tells you to do. Increasingly the emphasis today is on spiritual exploration – you have to interiorise beliefs and make them your own. You act as your conscience guides you. The image of the journey has become common in contemporary religious writing. This, of course, is what the mystics of every age have taught us.[7]

The German mystic Angelus Silesius said

‘If Christ be born a hundred times anew,

Despair, o man, unless he is born in you.’

The Prayer of Humble Access in the Church of England Prayer Book ends with the yearning words – ‘that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.’

Mystics have always pointed us to a direct relationship with God.

Every religion has its mystics – but they used to be regarded as specialists. What is new today – perhaps in a consumer society - is that more people want to by-pass doctrine and ritual and seek direct experience of the Divine.

The second characteristic of the new age is that it will be interfaith and multi-cultural.

Those who are spiritually seeking should welcome inspiration from whatever source. Those who are committed to a path can also find spiritual enrichment from other traditions and I include not only other faiths, but also new spiritual movements. I see faith communities as it were as guardians or trustees of inherited spiritual treasures, which they should make available to all who could benefit from them - in the way that Raimundo Panikkar has made the Hindu scriptures available ‘for modern man’ in his great book The Vedic Experience.[8] I myself try now to read the Qur’an or the Guru Granth Sahib (the Sikh scriptures) with the same expectancy as I read the Bible, although I feel at home with the Bible which has been a lifelong companion [Kenneth Cragg, a Christian scholar of Islam, says of the Qur’an that ‘What has authority for some of the human race must have relevance for all. As “a mercy to the worlds”, Muhammad and the Qur’an cannot well be confined within Islam, nor their significance withheld from those who do not assent to its beliefs.’[9] There are Hindus who have a deep devotion to Jesus and there are also Christian theologians who speak of the universal significance of Jesus Christ without expecting that all people will become Christian. We are entering an age of global theology and global spirituality.]

The emphasis on mystical experience also makes us take a new look at the truth claims of every faith. The Mystery of God transcends our human understanding. ‘Neti, Neti, Not this, Not that’ says the Hindu and the Christian St Gregory of Nazianzus wrote,

By what name shall I call upon you,

Who are beyond all name!

You, the Beyond-all, what name shall I give you?

…

All names are given to you and yet none can comprehend you.

How shall I name you then, O you, the Beyond-all name?’[10]

Pluralism is, as the Indian theologian Stanley Samartha said, ‘the homage which the finite mind pays to the inexhaustibility of the infinite.’[11] Doctrines are not true in an absolute sense. This also fits with the modern recognition of the relativity of all human language. All statements about reality are conditioned by their author’s historical setting, intention, culture, class and sex. Reality speaks to each person with the language he or she gives to it. We need to see that religious truth is conveyed through symbol, music and art as much as through words.

The third characteristic of our new religious consciousness is a new sense of our oneness, especially with Nature.

The mystic experience, in its varied forms, is essentially a unitary experience – a sense of oneness with all life, with other people, with the Divine Mystery.

For many people, pictures of Planet Earth taken from space have become a symbol of this new sense of oneness. Religions vie with each other to be the greenest or most eco-friendly. But it is more than reverence for the earth which is involved. When Father Thomas Berry, one of the most respected environmental theologians, speaks of the ‘Spirituality of the Earth’, he speaks of the Earth as subject, not object. His primary concern is not how we treat the planet, but the recognition that ‘in our totality we are born of the Earth. We are earthlings. The Earth is our origin, our nourishment, our support, our guide.’[12]

Furthermore, we have to recognise that that ‘the universe is now experienced as an irreversible time-developmental process… Not so much a cosmos as a cosmogenesis.’[13] We are part of the evolving universe. [14] This implies that human beings are co-creators with God. For weal or woe, the future is in human hands.[15] Jane Goodall, world famous for her work with chimpanzees, has said, ‘Together we must re-establish our connections with the natural world and with the Spiritual Power that is around us. And then we can move, triumphantly, joyously, into the final stage of human evolution – spiritual evolution.’[16]

It is not surprising that women, who have the privilege of giving birth, have a particularly vivid sense of participating in the process of creation and clearly recognise our bonds with Mother Earth. The emerging spiritual consciousness will, fourthly, give due weight to the spiritual insights of women.

Slowly we are recognising just how patriarchal the great faiths have been. It is also said that the ascetic tradition to be found in many religions is a male spirituality, which ‘rejects our bodies, our sexuality, our generativity and the earth itself.’[17]

In a chapel in Toronto, the figure of woman with arms outstretched, as if crucified, hangs below the cross. On seeing this, a woman, whose name we do not know, wrote a poem which has helped me to see why talk of ‘God becoming man,’ may make some women feel they do not count.

O God, through the image of a woman

Crucified on the cross

I understand at last.

For over half my life

I have been ashamed of the scars I bear.

These scars tell an ugly story,

A common story,

About a girl who is the victim of sexual abuse.

In the warmth, peace

And sunlight of your presence

I was able to uncurl

The tightly clenched fists.

For the first time

I felt your suffering presence with me

In that event.

I have known you as a vulnerable baby,

As a brother, and as a father.

Now I know you as a woman.

You were there with me

As a violated girl

Caught in the helpless suffering.

The chains of fear

No longer bind my heart and body.

a slow fire of compassion and forgiveness

is kindled.

My tears fall now,

For man as well as woman.

You were not ashamed of your wounds,

You showed them to Thomas

As marks of your ordeal and death,

I will no longer bear them gracefully,

They will tell a resurrection story. [18]

Finally, the sense of oneness with all life should also inspire not only compassion for all who suffer but active commitment to change.

Holy people, traditionally, have withdrawn from the world in their search for the Divine. In recent years, a new pattern of spirituality, which draws inspiration from all the great faiths, has emerged in which the pursuit of holiness takes place in the midst of a non-violent struggle for peace and justice and in the service of the poor. Mahatma Gandhi said once that ‘If I could find God in a Himalayan cave, I would proceed there at once, but I can only find him in the service of the poor.’[19] Mother Teresa likewise prayed that our eyes would be opened to see God in the poor and hungry. Ma Gohsananda, a Buddhist leader, came back from a monastic life in exile to help his people of Cambodia in their agony. The Dalai Lama insists ‘My call for a spiritual revolution is … (not) a reference to a way of life that is somehow other-worldly, still less to something magical or mysterious. Rather it is a call for a radical re-orientation away from our habitual preoccupation with self towards concern for the wider community of beings with whom we are connected, and for conduct which recognizes other’s interest alongside our own.’[20]

Spiritual Transformnation.

For us to share in the emerging Global Spirituality, we need an inner transformation, a sense of oneness, a recognition of the sacredness of the other. The Mayan spiritual leader, Abraham Garcia, who was tortured in the civil war in Guatemala, has said, ‘Peace isn’t the simple silencing of the bullets. It must be an inner change toward other people, respect for the way they think and live.’[21] Significantly, the Declaration of a Global Ethic is an invitation to personal commitment.

As we wait in the presence of the Holy, we gain a vision, a picture of the world‘as God’s love would make it.’ Martin Luther King, in those famous words, declared, ‘I have a dream’ and if we have then we will feel impelled to try to realise it and to campaign for justice and for the ‘kingdom of God.’

But this is tough going and it is easy to give up. As we become aware of the underlying harmony of the universe we become aware also that in the end truth, goodness and justice are stronger than falsehood, hatred and oppression. As Gandhi said, ‘I can see that in the midst of death life persists, in the midst of untruth truth persists, in the midst of darkness light persist.’ ‘Lead us from despair to hope.’

As we our still, we may not only catch a glimpse of God’s purposes for the world but also feel a oneness with the divine and all living beings. As Francis Younghusband, who founded the World Congress of Faiths, said of his mystical experience during the Welsh Revival in the early years of the twentieth century, ‘I felt as if I were in love with every man and woman in the world.’ That experience inspires compassion and forgiveness.

The Tibetan Buddhist practice of tonglen (Tibetan for ‘giving and taking’) is a good way to develop compassion. First, you focus on a suffering individual or group. Breathe in deeply and feel yourself drawing in all their emotional pain, right into your heart, making their grief your own. Then, as you breathe out, send love, warmth, kindness and compassion to people who are suffering in the hope that their fear and pain will be replaced by courage and some acceptance.

The sense of oneness means that we recognise God’s presence in the other, especially the deprived and marginalised. Jalal al-Din Rumi tells of the time when God rebuked Moses, saying, ‘I am God, I fell sick; but you did not come.’ Moses asked God to explain. God said again, ‘Why didn’t you kindly ask after me when I was sick.’ Moses answered, ‘O Lord, you are never ill. I don’t understand: explain the meaning of these words.’ God said, ‘Yes, a favourite and chosen slave of mine fell sick. I am he. Consider well: his infirmity, his sickness is my sickness.’ This is reminiscent of Jesus’ parable of the Sheep and the Goats. The righteous are surprised when the king says to them ‘I was hungry and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me a drink; I was a stranger and your received me in your homes, naked and you clothed me; I was sick and you took care of me, in prison and you visited me.’ Then the king explains, ‘I tell you, whenever you did this for one of the least important of these brothers of mine, you did it for me.’[22]

But as Howard Thurman has said, ‘It is much easier within the context of mystical piety to identify with the sufferer, the hungry, the poor, the neglected, than with those whose power, privilege and insensitivity are largely responsible for the social ills.’ [23] Gandhi also asked, ‘How is one to treat alike insulting, insolent, and corrupt officials, co-workers of yesterday raising meaningless opposition and people who have always been good to one?’[24]

Religious people also have an important role in shaping public opinion. The poet W H Auden said, ‘All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie.’[25] We need to plead the cause of the poor, as Jubilee 2000, did so effectively in calling for debt relief.

The sense of oneness makes forgiveness possible. Once you can begin to think of the other not as ‘the enemy’ or as a ‘terrorist’, but as a person, your feelings change. An Israeli soldier has said how his whole outlook was changed when he had to search the body of an Arab who had been shot. In his inside pocket there were pictures of the dead man’s wife and children who were much the same age as the soldier’s own son and daughter. I am convinced, as Desmond Tutu has called one of his books, There is no Future without Forgiveness and that in this sphere the faiths should have something very significant to offer. [26] Although it is right to seek justice for the victims of violence and oppression, there will be no lasting peace without mutual forgiveness. Mufti Camdzic, whose beautiful mosque in Banja Luka was destroyed during the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia, has said ‘We can’t forget; but we try to forgive and reconcile, to build again.’

Barriers are especially overcome as we share each other’s sorrows. After the London bombings, my wife Mary and I were invited to services - first in a synagogue and later in a mosque - at which people of all faiths came together to express their sympathy for the bereaved and the injured and to renew their commitment to work together for a more peaceful and just society.

We need to stand by others when they are attacked. For example, Kosovo, in mid-March 2004, saw its most serious outbreak of violence since the end of the 1999 conflict. In Belgrade, in revenge a mob of nearly 2,000 people attacked a mosque, although Serbian and Jewish neighbours tried to dissuade them. The Serbian Orthodox Bishop also personally tried to stop the mob. The Mufti (Hamdija Jusufspahic) thanked him for this, saying ‘I don’t know who caused the destruction, but I know who tried to help us.’ He also signed a burnt copy of the Qur’an and presented it to the Bishop.[27]

All this springs from the sense of our oneness with all people. A particularly moving discovery of our shared humanity is described by Yevtushenko. In Moscow in 1941, he saw German war prisoners being marched through the streets. The watching crowd were mostly women. ‘Every one of them must have had a father or a husband, a brother or a son killed by the Germans’. They were gazing with hatred as the column of prisoners approached. ‘They saw the German soldiers, thin, unshaven, wearing dirty blood stained bandages, hobbling on crutches or leaning on the shoulders of their comrades; the soldiers walked with their heads down’. There was silence in the street, the sound only of shuffling boots and crutches hitting the ground. Then, wrote Yevtushenko, ‘I saw an elderly woman in broken-down boots push herself forward and touch a policeman’s shoulder, saying “Let me through...” She went up to the column, took from inside her coat something wrapped in a coloured handkerchief and unfolded it. It was a crust of black bread. She pushed it awkwardly into the pocket of an exhausted soldier. Then suddenly from every side women ran towards the soldiers, pushing into their hands bread, cigarettes, whatever they had... The soldiers were no longer enemies. They were people.’[28]

Finally, our sense of oneness, as I have already suggested, deepens our concern for the natural world – for the welfare of animals and the protection of the planet. Perhaps indeed it is only as we recognise our inter-connectedness with all life that we shall find a vision to motivate us to seek a new world order.

It is significant that like those who have explored outer space, mystics – people of deep prayer and meditation - who have explored inner space proclaim the same message of unity. The French Jesuit and palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin said, ‘I live at the heart of a single, unique Element, the Centre of the Universe, and present in each part of it; personal Love and cosmic Power.’[29]

The new era of Global Spirituality becomes a reality as we are personally transformed. I do not think it is inevitable, which is why if we have glimpsed its possibility, we have a responsibility to allow ourselves to be used for its realization. The challenge to each of us is to so shape our lives that we give a ‘Heart to the World,’ or, in the words of Mairead Maguire, the Irish Nobel Peace Prize Winner, ‘Dream the impossible, then so live that the dream is fulfilled.’[30]

Marcus Braybrooke.

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[1] Wayne Teasdale, The Mystic Heart, New World Library, 1999, p. 249.

[2] The quotations from Fred Blum are from his The New Era Center for the development of a new Human Consciousness and Social Order, which he wrote at Easter 1967. Copies are available from the Abbey at Sutton Courtenay.

[3] Bede Griffiths to Hugh Waterman (22.12.72), quoted by Shirley Du Boulay in Beyond the Darkness – A Biography of Bede Griffiths, Rider, 1998, p. 169.

[4] Dalai Lama, Ancient Wisdom, Modern World: Ethics for a New Millennium, Little, Brown and Co, 1999, p. 25.

[5] One could mention also Hans Küng and of course Rudolf Steiner, Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo and many others as prophets of a new era.

[6] Keith Ward, The Case for Religion, Oneworld, 2004, p.5. See also the concluding chapter,

pp. 220-237.

[7] I think the key difference between religion and spirituality is whether you try to attune to a given revelation and pattern of life or see your inner voice as your only guide. John Heron makes a clear distinction between the authoritarianism inherent in almost every religious tradition and what he describes as the new self-generating spiritual culture. Those who belong to this culture, he says, affirm their own original relation to the presence of creation and find spiritual authority within and do not project authority onto teachers or texts.[7]

Other writers distinguish between ‘life-as’ and the subjective life. By this they mean that religion – the ‘life-as’ approach – presents us with role-models to which we should aspire –for example, the faithful husband, the dutiful wife, the good parent. The subjective life, by contrast is person-centred. What matters is to discover your true self. [7]

[8] Raimundo Panikkar, The Vedic Experience, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1977.

[9] Kenneth Cragg, Readings in the Qur’an, Collins 1988, p. 9

[10] English translation from the Greek by Mary Rogers, in World Faiths,

no.99, summer 1976, p. 20.

[11] Stanley Samartha, One Christ, Many Religions, Orbis 1991, p.4.

[12] Thomas Berry, ‘The Spirituality of the Earth’, in Celebrating Earth

Holy Days, ed. Susan J Clark, Crossroad, New York, 1992, p. 69.

[13] Thomas Berry, ‘The Cosmology of Religions’, in A Source Book for Earth’s Community of Religions, ed. Joel Beversluis, CoNexus Press, 1995 edtn, p. 95

[14] Thomas Berry, ‘The Cosmology of Religions’, (note 27) p. 96. ‘The first great contribution this new perspective makes to religious consciousness’, writes Father Berry, ‘is the sense of participating in the creation process itself.’

into the hands of men and women.

[15] For other reasons, I have argued in Time to Meet, that God ‘puts the future of his creation into the hands of men and women. This means the outcome of human history is genuinely open.’ Time to Meet, SCM Press 1990, pp.126-7.’

[16] Jane Goodall, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, Warner Books, 1999, p.267. She has also said , although I cannot find the reference, ‘We are moving toward the ultimate destiny of our species – a state of compassion and love.’

[17] See John Heron refers to P.Wright, ‘Bringing Women’s Voices to

Transpersonal Psychology’, ReVision, 17 (3) 3-10., in Sacred Science, p.5

[18] 1,000 World Prayers, Compiled by Marcus Braybrooke, John Hunt Publishing 2003, pp. 197-8.

[19] Quoted from Harijan by Bede Griffiths in Christian Ashram, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1966,

p. 127

[20] Dalai Lama, Ancient Wisdom, Modern World: Ethics for a New Millennium, p. 25.

Wayne Teasdale embodied this new approach to spirituality. He chose to be a monk living in the world, so that he could share everyday problems of earning a living and of commuting as well as of campaigning for peace and human rights. ‘Why,’ he was asked, ‘did you not choose to be locked away in a remote hermitage?’ ‘Because’, he replied, ‘I want to identify with and be identified with all those who suffer alone in the world, who are abandoned, homeless, unwanted, unknown, and unloved.’[20] Wayne was also motivated by the words of Jesus that ‘Whatever you do for the least of my brethren you do for me.’[20]

His words are reminiscent of the Boddhisattva’s vow, which has inspired the Dalai Lama.

May I become at all times, both now and forever,

A protector for those without protection,

A guide for those who have lost their way,

A ship for those with oceans to cross,

A bridge for those with rivers to cross,

A sanctuary for those in danger,

A lamp for those in need of light,

A place of refuge for those in need of shelter,

And a servant to all those in need.

[21] Quoted in Marcus Braybrooke, 365 Meditations for a Peaceful Heart and a Peaceful World,

Godsfield Books, 2004, p. 296.

[22] Matthew, 25, 35-40.

[23] From Henry Thurman, ‘Mysticism and Social Action: Breathing in and Breathing Out.’

[24] Quoted in My Life With Martin Luther King, p. 193.

[25] W H Auden’s poem ‘September 1^st, 1939’ was published in 1940. It includes the line, ‘We must love one another or die.’

[26] Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiuveness, Rider, 1999. See also Solomon Schimmel, Wounds Not Healed by Time, Oxford, 2002.

[27] World Conference of Religions for Peace, South East Europe Program Update, February 2005 and

The Secretary General’s Update, 51.5.04.

[28] Yevgeny Yevtushenko, A Precocious Autobiography, Collins 1963, pp. 24-5, quoted by Brian

Frost in The Politics of Peace, Darton, Longman and Todd 1991, pp. 15-16.

[29] Teilhard de Chardin, quoted in ‘The Cosmology of Religions’, p. 97,

[30] Mairead Corrigan Maguire, The Vision of Peace, Orbis Books, 1999.