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74 CONVERSATION

are different to those of biblical times.

I worry about my children going on school trips, and the bus crashing. I have those kinds of worries. Someone two thousand years ago might have those same worries related to something else. It s about bringing that so that that makes sense to me, in my life, reaching out to me today, not two thousand years ago.

For these reasons, Stephanie had chosen to find her own spiritual path. The echoes of Christian tradition still resonate surprisingly strongly, but she has created her own language and imagery to explain her spirituality.

SUMMING UP

I chose to discuss these four people because they show vividly con-trasting responses to the spiritual search. Their perspectives are by no means exhaustive, as will become elear elsewhere in this book. But their rangę is striking. Nicola is quite clearly emotionally the closest to the Christian institution. Her spirituality is still very much expressed in traditional symbolism, even if that symbolism is cur-' rently stacked away in the loft. I have the feeling that had she been an adult in the culture of fifty years ago she would have been a daily Mass-goer like her mother. The reason she doesn’t go to church now is morę to do with contemporary cultural expectation than with the naturę of her own belief or disbelief. Nicola is quite clearly a believer. But the pervasive secularity of contemporary life offers little physical or emotional space for the practice of her religion.

Matthew comes next in my rather arbitrary sequence. Unlike Nicola, Matthew is in a strained and uncomfortable dialogue with the church. He knows what he doesnt believe in«and he sees a lot of that in the spirituality purveyed by the church. He is annoyed with it, because it fails to live up to his expectations. For Matthew, life is complex, it is a struggle and so far he hasn’t found any help or any encouragement from the rather superficial versions of spirituality he has encountered in the church. In a way he is disappointed by the lack of religious seriousness in the church. He is asking for morę religion from the institution, not less. He also wants a church that is sufficiently open so that he, as an uncertain, struggling searcłier, can belong to it without perjuring himself.

Tom is outside the whole Christian ainbit. The institution is a very

|g!- distant presence, hardly even a backcloth. He uses the traditional j§p|| resources of ‘folk. religion’, sensed as an underlying primeval presence in the culture. Wliether his ideas are historically correct or not, he is spf.drawn to the notion of timeless truths that predate newcomers like »Christianity It is not about beliefs and doctrines for Tom; it is about ^.^experiencing phenomena that reveal the strangeness of the world. At jpfjjpithe same time he is aware of being at odds with secular conventions. |||||Whilst in the right company he is voluble about his beliefs, he is also llllaware that he needs to be circumspect, especially when his experience conflicts with what he sees as scientific respectability.

- Of the four people, Stephanies spirituality is by far the most llpurposeful. It is the oxygen, the life-blood of her existence. Although i; she has chosen to explore spirituality, it is not a commodity for her;

it is life. In that respect she is very different from Nicola, who does |t seem to see religion as a useful commodity or, as she put it, ‘money the bank’. Stephanie has an intense religiosity not unfamiliar within Christian communities. Yet although many of her beliefs ||||parallel those of Christianity she feels no need to belong to the Christian institution, indeed disparages it for what she sees as its false Ś®understanding of suffering. Something important is being said here |e about freedom, about the perceived constrictions of formal religion, §?f seen as an externally imposed set of doctrines and rules to be ąccepted lock, stock and barrel.