IT COULD BE OBSERVED, and with some justification too, that the quest for spiritual enlightenment seems to take one away from the world and its cogent concerns into a rarefied existence in which the purity of ultimate reality is enjoyed without the jarring presence of mundane life. Of course, this accusation has been leveled in the past, and not always without some truth, against enclosed religious orders and even against the religious life in general. I am, in this account of the quest for God, writing quite definitely as a layman to laymen, for I believe that the constant interplay between spiritual aspiration and active participation in the world's commerce is the authentic way towards a knowledge of God. Those whose vocation is towards the contemplative life in an enclosed community are in no way belittled by this assertion. Their path is a special one, and its validity is to be judged by the product that emerges from it and the power of prayer it produces for the world's good.
No one living in the contemporary scene can be oblivious of the mounting problems of humanity. In one respect these have always been with us on account of the ambivalence of human nature, but, of course, the immense technological developments that have ensued from the recent scientific revolution have not only changed the face of the earth but have also challenged many comfortable assumptions about the independence and uniqueness of the human being. It is worth meditating on some of the problems that confront us all as members of the human race.
There is first of all the ominous growth of population, throughout the world, itself largely the outcome of the eradication of much infectious disease, such as tuberculosis, malaria, and yellow fever, which killed large numbers of young in previous eras. The gradual victory over malnutrition in developed countries has added to the population problem. To offset this, many people are taking advantage of methods of birth control, and indiscriminate abortion is now practiced in many parts of the world. While these methods certainly reduce the density of the population, they also leave in their wake a degrading view of human life. Is man merely a hypersexed animal whose chief function it is to enjoy himself without responsibility to the higher demands of life?
The overcrowding germane to the population explosion is augmented by the means of rapid inter-continental travel, some of it comparatively cheap and now available to nearly everyone. Not only is the world a much smaller place than it appeared to our forefathers, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to escape from the uproar all round us into a haven of quiet and peace. A rapidly developing population is seldom properly educated in the niceties of living. Whereas in previous ages a small aristocracy lived in luxury while an enormous working class subsisted at near starvation level, there has recently been a progressive levelling out of privilege and opportunity among the various classes of the population, at least in Western society.
This transmutation of personal privilege to common legal right, while thoroughly commendable in terms of social justice, has brought in its trail a whole generation of well-educated young people who have no immediate work of real value or inspiration to look forward to. Thus there is a general feeling of aimlessness, fruitlessness, and disillusionment amongst a generation who are immensely privileged when compared with their forebears. To escape from the nonentity of faceless safety in a welfare state, many turn to drugs, many to ecstatic religious cults which produce a pseudo-mystical experience that dulls the reasoning mind, and some even to crime.
A growing population loses contact with the soil from which it originally came. The earth is ravaged, the atmosphere is polluted, animals are destroyed and exploited for human greed, and a waste-land emerges to harmonise with the waste-land of the disregarded human soul.To face this vision of darkness some take to nihilistic despair, while others look for an authoritarian political system in which the God-given freedom of the person is subordinated to the claims of the monolithic state.
Here are at least a few of the intellectually insoluble problems of our own time. What use is the witness of the individual, be he ever so saintly and spiritually aware, amid this human wilderness? Will automation, which in many ways seems to eclipse human mentality, give people enough leisure to destroy themselves by vice, or will they emerge with a heightened awareness of the reality that underlies all outer appearances? It all depends on the witness and faith of the aspirant.
The first thing to realise is that these immense problems are outside the solution of any one person or group. Their origin lies in the unredeemed nature of most men who seek personal gain rather than the common good. It is very easy to adopt a sanctimonious view of the sins of society when one is comfortable and at ease, but one's attitude is very different when one's own possessions and way of life are challenged. Then one springs to the defensive intent on establishing the status quo. But the spiritually alive person is aware of something else, namely that there is a power behind the cosmic flow which is all-powerful and all-caring. This is God, and in Him alone can there be redemption.
Now God will never take the initiative on earth without human co-operation. Thus the type of religious thinking that relies on God to act and save the world as a distant potentate behind the scenes is foolish. God acts through His agents, who are spiritually aware human beings. It is this awareness of the divine purpose underlying all cosmic action, no matter how terrible some of it appears, that characterises the consciousness of an aspiring man. And the awareness manifests itself in the person's soul as the warmth of hope and the light of faith. If everything in the world, or for that matter in the tiny domain that we call our own life, depended on us alone, we would collapse mentally and physically almost at once through the terrible strain imposed on us by circumstances. But if we are in the loving power of God, we share the burden with Him. He does not take it away from us in some miraculous fashion, but He fills us with the power of the Holy Spirit so that we can act calmly, wisely, and effectively to solve the difficulty or bear the burden. "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me".
It follows that the aspirant, though fully aware of the world's burdens and devoid of sentimental under-estimations of the difficulties involved, is nevertheless infused with the joy that radiates directly from the soul. He can act in an emergency, when the whole world appears to be collapsing around him, with quiet confidence. He can see the glory of eternity interpenetrating the misery around him, and thereby inspire those whom he is assisting with a precious vision of the meaning of life-a vision based not on words or formalised belief but on his own personality. When you are really inspired by God, you lose your concern for self and also the feeling of revolt against the fact of suffering that jars so much in the mind of an intellectually based person, and you identify yourself with the work on hand, no matter how vast it is.
How does the life of the spirit help in the battle against social injustice and racial discrimination? First of all, it is necessary that those moving towards divine reality should not only be aware of current social problems but also be knowledgeable about their roots and their true dimensions. Advocates both of the status quo and of a revolutionary change in society are notoriously one-sided. The traditionalist, who is identified with a rigid convention in religion that is all too often miscalled orthodoxy, is incapable of discerning the movement of the Holy Spirit, and strives for the virtues of stability and piety of a past age. The revolutionary, identified nowadays with extreme religious radicalism, is so propelled by emotional fervour that, in his enthusiasm for reform, he loses contact with the facts of human nature. The traditionalist has a basically gloomy view of humanity, and looks for government by a superior class or group in society, whereas the radical often falls into the plausible error of egalitarianism, which believes that all men are alike in their qualities and equal in potentiality.
The bitter experience of life refutes this kindly, but essentially immature, view of human nature. While we believe that all men are equal in God's love, it is nevertheless certain that only a few are in any way capable of reciprocating that love in selfless service to their fellows. Tradition is a well-trodden path of experience through the ages. It is ignored at our peril, but the path does not end at any one epoch.It proceeds onwards, and is indeed fashioned further by those of all successive generations. Its destination is the meeting of man and God. Thus it has no temporal or earthly ending.
When a spiritually aspiring person is confronted with obvious social injustice, such as racial or religious discrimination, there should be no doubt where his sympathies lie, nor should he fail to be counted among the righteous. But his attitude, and therefore the direction of his activity, should be of a more enlightened type than that of the emotional rabble-rouser. Those whose sympathies are with the downtrodden are often fighting an inner battle with the society that nurtured them. If you have had an unfortunate upbringing it is all too easy to identify the pillars of society with your own parents or teachers, and in turn to identify yourself with the underprivileged and weak. Thus what appears on the surface to be a spiritual fight for justice and decency can in fact be a personal vendetta against the establishment. The hallmarks of this type of social action are its fanaticism, its lack of real concern for people as such, and its devotion to doctrinaire panaceas.
It must be said, with regret, that much of the social agitation that is prominent nowadays has this humourless, loveless, grim fanaticism about it. What its protagonists really care about is their political ideology. The people on whose behalf they are agitating are mere ciphers. They are described as "the masses", and this is indeed what they are to this type of individual - masses of human animals to be directed without real consultation into such situations as are judged best for them by these very arrogant, yet emotionally immature theorists.
The seeker after God never loses contact with the person in his concern for society. Thus while it is very easy, and thoroughly satisfying too, to wax hot over social injustices in distant parts of the world, it is a much greater test of our integrity to behave charitably in a local situation. We can all throw up our hands in horror at the monstrous discrimination based on a fellow human being's colour or religion that occurs in foreign parts. But how many of us are loving to the stranger within our own gates? It is unfortunately true that most antagonists of social injustice are impelled more by hatred of the existing order and those that maintain it than by a compassion towards those who suffer under it.
This attitude is of great importance in terms of the ultimate solution of the problem. The man who hates what he calls evil will foment a revolution that destroys everything, good and bad alike, and brings in its turn a new tyranny. And yet the tyranny is as old as history itself, for it is simply the old Adam in man masquerading under a new name-and our current world is full of ideologies, some of the political right and others of the left, that tyrannise gullible men looking pathetically for political salvation, when the only real salvation is of God.
This does not mean that bad governments and corrupt societies are to be tolerated. Of course they must go, and be replaced by those of greater probity and compassion.The sacred history of the Jews, as is clear in the candid pages of the Old Testament, is one of the power of the Holy Spirit speaking through the prophets and denouncing dishonesty and hypocrisy. Old dynasties are swept away as a new ideal of justice emerges. And the final advent is the incarnate Christ Himself. The movement of the spirit is therefore not a mere sweeping aside of one form of injustice so that it can be replaced by another equally odious injustice flourishing under a new, more pretentious name. It is one in which the vision of the people is raised from the limitation of the small, the petty, and the mean to a broader view of man's destiny in Christ. When a spiritual man espouses the cause of the world's wronged and rejected, he does not lose sight of their oppressors. A compassion passes from him that unites oppressor and oppressed, guilty and innocent, into a new creation. He judges less and loves more.
The call in the world's present period of civil and international strife is not so much for the knife of justice as for the embracing arm of reconciliation. It is clear that no particular ethnic group bears all the blame for persecution, nor is any the completely innocent victim of suffering. Likewise, no religious group has been entirely guiltless of provocation through arrogant exclusiveness. We all have much to repent for in our past and present attitudes. The spiritual man realises this in his combat against injustice. He has passed beyond the naive and destructive self-righteousness that informs less aware people. "For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God"-this statement of St.Paul is the basis of the spiritual approach to social action. It tries to unite all people, rich and poor, black and white, Jew and gentile, into a larger body of mankind, the material (as well as the mystical) body of Christ in which all are one, while at the same time working out their own salvation with fear and trembling.
The quest of God does not demand a retreat from the world or its problems. Far from it; there must be an ever more passionate commitment of the person to the service of his brothers who, as St.Francis of Assisi saw, include not only human beings but also the whole sentient universe. We cannot ignore the animal creation, nor can we create havoc with our environment by the selfish destruction of vegetation to suit our immediate needs. The threat of pollution is another warning to man of the limited world he inhabits. Even space travel does not seem, at least in terms of the foreseeable future, to offer man much further territory to colonise. We are forced back more and more on the limited range of our planet, and if we pollute it sufficiently, we shall all die. But life will go on even if the human species kills itself, though this would be a tragedy in terms of the process of evolution.
In fact, the spiritually aware person is not a harbinger of gloom, for he sees the power of God in all things. Behind the despair of so much worldly life lies the radiant glow of hope that comes to us from the divine outpouring. Fortunately man is not alone. Even when he does the most outrageous things, there is the power of God, that works as the Holy Spirit in him and in others, that redeems an apparently lost situation, and brings man back to reason once more. The spark of God works in the souls of men, who usually against their better judgement, do the right thing in the end. The right decision and the appropriate response come not from us but through us as the outpouring of God's grace in us.
The things of this world are to be enjoyed while we, being in the flesh, are partakers of the world. The key to successful living is balance. Moderation, the golden mean, the middle way of the Buddhist, is the way to liberation. Gluttony enslaves the body to its coarser appetites, while asceticism leads to a separation of the soul from the body, which is a sacred organism also. We cannot, during our transient sojourn on the earth, live with out preying on the life around us, nor should we be sad about this. All growing things progress by sacrificing themselves for the good of others. Jesus Himself gave mankind His body and His blood in a very real sense that it might be healed through a knowledge of the love of God.
But this use of the world's resources for our own existence must be made with reverence. As little suffering as possible ought to be inflicted, remembering that in the acute sensitivity of the human conscience the suffering of the world is mirrored. The world is a very beautiful place and also a terrifying one. Nothing is more terrifying than a brutalised human being. Nothing is more beautiful than a noble one. "The glory of God is a living man", wrote St.Irenaeus. And his life revives the life of all the world around him.
As we grow in the spiritual life so we come to realise that our greatest service to humanity lies in working in our local environment. Only by concerted prayer can we have a wider influence on the world's progress, while the witness of our lives produces results on those immediately around us. Each kindly action changes the perspectives of those in contact with us, and so starts a chain reaction that culminates in a change of heart of many people. The work is slow and the immediate rewards meagre, but it is thus that the Holy Spirit guides people towards a greater understanding of the world in which they live.
But what of the psychic field to which I have referred, in passing, several times? Are we not living in times when many are turning to the area of the psychic for help? It is very important that those seeking the spiritual path should know how the psychic faculty relates to it.