SOFiA - Exploring Values, Meaning and Spirituality: Newsletter issue 166, Jun 2023
At the Christchurch Sea of Faith conference in 2019 a potential new name for our organisation, Rethinking Religion, was finally rejected by a majority of attending members at the AGM. However, I continued to think this remained a pretty good name for a religious discussion group, at least a pretty good name for a group I wanted to belong to at the time. So, I revived the Sea of Faith group in Christchurch that had recently folded, with Rethinking Religion as its name, and religious discussion as its purpose.
Rethinking Religion meetings became scheduled for the 4th Monday evening of the month preceded by a pot-luck dinner. The first occurred in January 2020, with me as the presenter. I talked about my own spiritual journey to date – a journey out of fundamentalist, evangelical, Anglican Christianity. I provided Lloyd Geering’s book chapter “Religion in the 21st Century” as accompanying reading for the meeting, which includes Lloyd’s take on the basis of religion, drawing on the Latin word religio, to bind together.
What followed that year of 2020 and into 2021, as the Covid epidemic progressed, was a series of really interesting presentations by most of the regular attendees of the group, focussed on each member’s spiritual progression to date. Presentations were each received with respect, and a feeling of togetherness resulted. I realized my journey had not been as unique as I once had thought, and I felt an emerging sense of spiritual comradeship with fellow travellers.
However, as time passed, discussion revealed there were some significant differences in the group in terms of such things as: the nature of spirituality; what is important to live well by and survive future anticipated calamity; philosophical issues such as the nature of consciousness; and socio-political issues such as whether medical authorities can be trusted about the usefulness of the covid vaccination. Discussions gradually began to feel somewhat tense, and the warmth of “spiritual friends” that had been present for the first 18-months began to wane.
Two books in particular helped me understand what was going on. The first was, “The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion”, by US social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Righteous Mind helped me see that people holding different values and life insights to my own are not stupid, bad or ignorant. They simply have a different formulation of this immense complexity (“Life, the Universe, and Everything”), the ultimate truth of which eludes us all, and perhaps will always do so. But we have evolved an exquisite self-consciousness with a need to hold on to something that gives us orientation and provides a degree of security in the face of the yawning mystery we find ourselves immersed in. I began to understand better how this need for something to hold on to is deep within each of us and we can all become defensive and irritable if our particular formulation is questioned.
The second book was, “Hold Me Tight: Your guide to the most successful approach to building loving relationships”, by Dr Sue Johnson. In fact, this second book was one of a series of books I’ve been reading over the past three years while undergoing some new psychotherapy training in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) based in part on the theoretical work of John Bowlby on human attachment. During one of the workshops I participated in, an EFT therapy session videotape was played of a woman in her late-30s I think who was somewhat bitter and demoralized about life and in conflict with her parents. When she casually brought God (her Catholic God) into the discussion I was immediately very eager to see how the therapist was going to deal with it, if at all. I wondered if the therapist might acknowledge her comment and then say something like, “Well that’s the area of your spirituality, now let’s get back to the therapy” or similar. But what he did surprised and excited me. Rather than dismiss or side-line her God, he incorporated Him (as a major attachment figure) into the therapy as a positive resource and set up a therapeutic encounter between the two as part of a strategy of building up her confidence to face her parents.
I saw then more clearly than I’d seen it before, how we all have a deep need for some sort of attachment figure (or idea) in our lives. It was this epiphany that gave me a further shot of empathy for my fellow Rethinking Religion comrades whose life-views I didn’t share. It also, incidentally, helped me subsequently feel sympathetic understanding towards the thousands of grieving people standing in lines for hours to pay respects to the dead Queen Elizabeth II.
In withdrawing from the Rethinking Religion group, and thus bringing it to an end (no one came forward to continue it) I felt grateful to those who had shared and argued, as it was in this context that I’d been able to take another step forward in my spiritual journey, with two particular ideas reinforced: 1. There is a strong nexus between spirituality/religion and psychology; and 2. Spiritual groups need a shared attachment figure (or idea) as orientation; what Lloyd Geering wrote about in reference to something Big that binds a group together.
Doug Sellman
May 2023