resources
SPIRITUALITY AS COPERNICAN REVOLUTION
What is spirituality? There are myriad ways in which this question has been answered, through the ages, in different languages, throughout the world. Modern secular scholarship, as epitomised by studies such as Mitroff and Denton’s Spiritual Audit of Corporate America, encapsulate the concept as ‘meaning-making.’ I want however to follow the mystical tradition of metaphor to describe what I think spirituality is, which takes this rather further. To me, spirituality is about Copernican Revolution. Shortly before his death in 1543, the Polish astronomer Nicolai Copernicus published his life’s work, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, in which he presented his revolutionary heliocentric view of the world. For me, spirituality can best be described by this seismic shift in consciousness. Whenever it was, there was a time when I stopped trying to command the sun and saw that it commanded me. Drenched with its light and pulled by its gravity, I became aware of its strange thrall, and that any attempt to stare too closely at it would rob my feeble eyes of their ability to see it, even if only obliquely. It was the sun that welcomed me in the mornings, and accompanied me to bed. It was the same sun that, having kissed me goodnight, went off to wake a fellow wayfarer across the world. It was this sun that I could depend on to come up every morning without fail, even if on some days it seemed obscured by cloud. And if, on awaking alone in the dead of night, it ever felt as though the sun had forsaken me, looking out of the window I was greeted by her representative the moon, standing sentinel while she was elsewhere, lit by her reflected glory. With the aid of this metaphor, spirituality for me can be broken down into seven components. The first of these, homing, in keeping with the modern understanding of spirituality as meaning-making is concerned with teleology – what is the point of it all? The sun is physically distinct from us – we are free of it yet enslaved by it, transfixed by the forces of gravity that hold us in orbit and utterly dependent on the sun’s life-giving warmth and light. We can ignore the sun and take it for granted, we can pretend we are independent but, beyond the consciousness of Copernicus’ contemporaries, the reality is that of bondage. There is a view of the underlying history that we were in a sense created by the sun (or, technically, created by the sun’s creator) – both our planet and the building blocks of organic life. The dilemma of the creator (and the parent) is that the act of creating something, of taking a part of you and making it other, inevitably makes it separate and independent: in love, there is a desire to be bound, yet the act of love that creates, unbinds. So my teleology is about finding my way home to my creator. As a loving creator who has chosen to give me choice, this has to be a voluntary journey on my part, and it has to be mindful, deliberate and self-conscious. The sun helps us with its gravity – in time we are told we will be pulled ever closer to the sun towards an eventual union – but the timescales involved do not obviate the need for individual people, whose lives are a cosmic eye-blink in comparison, to keep making this choice, to keep yearning for reunion, and to keep working with the gravity of the spirit to make it happen. The second component is obedience. Not only does the pull of the sun’s gravity and the rhythm of the spheres govern us, but also the earth’s own gravity, emanating from deep within the heart of our planet. At some level this makes obedience a technical illusion, in the same way that some have argued for fate, but our free-will and intellectual arrogance make all kinds of disobedience a very real possibility. Like Russian dolls we are subject to nested gravities: the solar system, the earth, our own nature and substance, and we mis-align these at our peril. Like the geese, who, when slipping out of formation, feel the drag of resistance, to obey is actually easier, yet our fragile egos rail against it. But if our goal is to be reunited with our creator, alignment through obedience is the quickest route home. Finding the space and grace to accept this message is my greatest spiritual challenge. The third component is connectedness. The sun locks our solar system together in dynamic tension, and we are all duly connected through our common origins, dependencies and endings. As John Donne said, no man is an island. So I must choose to involve myself with mankind. In reaching out it is hard not to do so in the hope or expectation of reciprocation or reward, yet a prerequisite of being reached out to is to be ready to receive, and giving is the best training for this. The connectedness is cosmic as well as anthropological, so I must also take seriously the eco-system of my temporary home, as it nourishes me and shares my journey. Killing it will kill the ability of my descendants and their fellow wayfarers to make this same journey. These insights are as old as time and are shared by many secular thinkers from a humanist perspective, yet the additional resonance here is that, given the components of teleology and obedience, this is not an optional extra, a nice gesture that makes sense: it is law or condition of existence. My exhalations are needed by the plants and their exhalations are needed by me. Our journey home is a communal one and we can only make the progress of the slowest, so I must use any gifts I have, whether material or spiritual, to strengthen my companions that we all might progress. My path home has been trodden back by my forebears so that I might have a clear way through, and their pioneering exploration, mapping and sign-posting is an endowment I too need to husband for those who follow after me. The sun holds is all in its thrall and we are bound together by its very existence. The fourth component is therefore humility. The sun sees the whole solar system yet we can only glimpse it in part. We have been given this great gift of life and the even greater gift of free will, yet we cannot hope in our small lifetimes to understand enough to make always the right choices on or about our journey. So we are reliant on the wisdom handed down to us and the wisdom we can garner from our companions on the way, and even from those who choose not to journey along with us. So our mindset must be humbly agnostic yet faithful, and continuously open to learning. The fifth component is the corollary of the fourth, that of thankfulness. We should be thankful-hearted because without the sun we would not be here. We are the happy result of a peculiar coincidence of billions of conditions. We could be anything other than what we are, and what we are is a function not only of our debt to our creator, but of his agents – our parents, our family and friends; our education, our culture and heritage; our experiences, our opportunities and choices. Noticing and acknowledging this debt keeps us learning and keeps us humble. Neither should this be a retrospective thankfulness for the journey made, but also for the journey being made – the need for us to strive for improvement so that we can be our best selves, and everything that helps us towards this state. The penultimate component is the theme of truth-seeking. Given that on this earth we are in what John Hicks (after Keats) has called the vale of soul making, we should be on a trajectory towards union with our creator not only in substance but also in wisdom and in action, increasingly modelling this as we mature and grow. In the same way that at work we are used to being expected to demonstrate ability at the senior grade before we are promoted into it, each day we must find opportunities to be our best selves even before our time has come, both in terms of increasing our knowledge and discernment and by behaving as we ideally would. Part of our mission must also be to pick up our tools and join the relay in helping mankind to carve Truth out of the rough stone, contributing to corporate knowledge, wisdom and spiritual behaviour in the world. This gravitation towards the light needs to be balanced with a careful position about the dark. Light is not, without dark: night follows day and day is only not-night. The dark is also a gift because it is only with it that we can appreciate the light. Our best insights and wisdom often come to us in dreams and in darkness, and through dark happenings or mistaken darkness along our way. Pain and lack and woe are the chisels that are often best for revealing the statue beneath and their use strengthens us for the journey.
But too much Winter and we can get S.A.D., so unless we are peculiarly gifted, the lure of the exhilaration of the via negativa must be balanced by a quest for equilibrium and being, as well as the balance of the equal opposite, which is the final component, optimism, or joy. We can count on the sun coming up every morning and that it will sustain us until the end of our lives. We can also count on the sun to keep us close and to keep us connected, and we can count on the final fulfilment when the earth and the sun become one. Joy includes hope. So these are my seven spiritual virtues: homing, obedience, connectedness, humility, thankfulness, truth-seeking and joy. For me, spirituality needs an underpinning theology, and in my context these spiritual virtues emanate from and are reinforced by my Christian faith, which has at its centre that great sun, the son of the triune God. Homing is linked to the formal Christian spiritual path of theiosis or deification. This is often misunderstood, but resonates with the ideas of nirvana (Hinduism and Buddhism) and haqiqa (Sufi Muslims), and is about losing the ego and being absorbed into God. More generally in the Christian tradition it links with ideas about the end of time, the coming of the Kingdom and the second coming of Christ (echoed also in Islam). The Lord’s Prayer petitions: thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Obedience is key to all formal religious traditions, and in Christianity was transformed by Christ from adherence to a detailed set of laws based on the 10 Commandments to a simple principle: Love the Lord your God with all you heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength … and love your neighbour as yourself (Mark12:30-31). The concept is also embedded in the language of vocation: the taking of holy orders. Connectednness speaks to the Gospel message of seeing Jesus in the face of your fellow man: I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me (Matt 25:35-40). It also draws on the charge given to Adam in Genesis to be steward of the earth, echoed in Jesus’ many parables about stewardship. Humility is the virtue traditionally exemplified in the Blessed Virgin Mary, who said yes to the angel and agreed to be the vessel of redemption. It is also reprised throughout the Bible and transmitted through hagiography, and is fundamentally about that great phrase from Job: the fear of the Lord, that is Wisdom (Job 28:28). It is also presented in the cautionary tales of the prophets and in stories such as the Good Samaritan that tell us how much we have to learn from dissenters and outsiders. Thankfulness is formalised within the Christian tradition through prayers, liturgical worship and through traditions of charity, whether by tithing or through service. Truth-seeking is embodied in the nature of the texts handed down, in the liturgy based upon them, and in the language employed – rabbi, teacher, disciple. It is also behind the true nature of mission, which is not about compelling belief (belief has to be voluntary to be genuine), but about trying to increase collective wisdom through the sharing of wisdom traditions and stories. Tidings of great joy brought news of Jesus’ birth, and joy is in the many carols, hymns and anthems that are the sound-track of the Christian year. As with our sun, Christianity is but one solar system in our galaxy of belief, but behind them all is that great unmoved mover, the creator of all. So, where in all of this is love? Should that not be one of the components? But for me, spirituality is love, and these seven are the out-workings of it. If spirituality is electricity, then love is both current and currency – spirituality is the noun, but love is the verb. Being spiritual is being loving. Thus, spirit is not mere meaning: it is love. Eve Poole is now a tutor at Ashridge Business School, following earlier careers working for the Church Commissioners and Deloitte Consulting. She is currently researching for a part-time PhD in the theology of capitalism and can be contacted via eve.poole@ashridge.org.uk
But too much Winter and we can get S.A.D., so unless we are peculiarly gifted, the lure of the exhilaration of the via negativa must be balanced by a quest for equilibrium and being, as well as the balance of the equal opposite, which is the final component, optimism, or joy. We can count on the sun coming up every morning and that it will sustain us until the end of our lives. We can also count on the sun to keep us close and to keep us connected, and we can count on the final fulfilment when the earth and the sun become one. Joy includes hope.
