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Mid-life crisis
Stuck in Friday evening gridlock between White City and Park Royal I edged close enough to the car in front to read the small print beneath the personal registration number. The owner of the sleek, pale gold Maserati sports car had a neat line in self-deprecating humour: Wot mid-life crisis! it said.
Mid-life is one of the many personal thresholds that can tip us into deep spiritual crisis, with or without distracting treats. Cecilia Goodman in her lecture Deeper into God lists others: bereavement, redundancy, separation and divorce, serious illness, retirement, any unexpected and unwelcome change. These can all leave us reeling, peering at finger-posts which, in Cecilia's graphic image, have suddenly become illegible, and grappling for handholds as we begin to fall. But, as she suggests, if we have the courage to stay with the painful, often lonely, disorientation, it can lead us into new healing and transforming depths.
On a broader canvas, crisis vocabulary drives the news agenda at every level. The 24 hour immediacy of ever more ingenious technology, the endless speculation and comment, the accumulation of horrific images and unanswerable questions, leave many of us feeling confused and helpless. As one of our most thoughtful journalists, Madeleine Bunting, wrote in a Guardian column, Those who might have a sense of responsibility feel utterly powerless.
One participant at our 2008 Gathering echoed just this dilemma when she asked how can we know, in the face of so many pressing needs and so much blatant injustice, where we should direct our energies? How, in the midst of unrelenting crisis, can we respond responsibly? It's a question which haunts me, and I'm sure many if not all of you. I don't have the answer, but maybe there is the beginning of one here, in two writers whose thoughts I find helpful.
Ronald Blythe in his book Divine Landscapes writes: Solitude is not a luxury, a form of spiritual escapism. It is a necessity if our action and commitment to justice is to be pure and authentic. Radical action follows radical contemplation. Solitude is necessary to preserve us from superficial activism, from exhaustion, from fanaticism.
And in his now classic book on the spirituality of Meister Eckhart, The Way of Paradox, Cyprian Smith wrote that Eckhart believed: If we want to be good and useful members of society it is very important that we enter the depths of ourselves, discover God in the Soul's Ground, and learn to act from that centre. Meister Eckhart gives us the fundamental formula for tackling our urgent communal, social and political problems: It is simply this: if you want to change the world, change yourself.
Not an answer, as I say, but a legible signpost.
Eley McAinsh, Director
