Message from the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (PaCET) for Sunday Meeting 10th November 2024

Dear Friends,

Most of my life I’ve been interested two areas often thought to be in conflict, namely science and religion (which I mean to include spirituality). Both make claims about the nature of our world, so I sometimes feel the tension between the viewpoints keenly. Einstein appears to have thought that they actually complement each other; he is quoted as saying Religion without science is blind. Science without religion is lame. What I assume he meant was that to form a religious view of the world without taking into account what science has found out about it is like closing your eyes to its true nature, while, on the other hand science, being a collective search for truth, only works if the research is done with values which are the usually the subject of religion. It requires an unbiased approach, the humility to accept being proved wrong, and a ruthless honesty in the face of what nature reveals, and in reporting findings.

A consequence for me is that the world-view which underpins my life needs to include the wide variety of life experiences of others besides my own. Consequently I am drawn to reading many autobiographies and to studies of what prompted people’s acceptance or rejection of faith. One quickly sees that some people find their faith only after a determined search prompted perhaps by the promise of Jesus and other mystics:- seek and you will find. This may be neither easy nor quick. Fox desperately wandered the country for around seven years questioning religious people of different persuasions before he heard a voice which released him with an answer. Gopi Krishna had been performing his yoga practice for 17 years before he was surprised by his transformative kundalini experience. For some their spiritual enlightenment comes as a blinding flash when they recognise a massive contradiction in their life. For others it may come as part of or a result of a massive trauma. To my mind there is a lot to be learned from the accounts of near death experiences as modern medicine revives increasing numbers of people who would normally be pronounced clinically dead. A significant fraction of these report experiences which to them are vividly real, which transform their understanding of life – upending their previous values – but which they are afraid to speak of for risk of being thought deranged. By and large these experiences lead people to be more spiritual, loving and compassionate, but less drawn to formal religious groups.

Most people who come to some kind of faith arrive by less dramatic routes, so I hope it might be helpful to quote a just couple (taken from Alister Hardy’s study The Spiritual Nature of Man).

• As far back as I can remember I have never had a sense of separation from the spiritual force I now choose to call God … From the age of about 6 to 12 in places of quiet and desolation this feeling of ‘oneness’ often passed to a state of ‘listening’. I mean by ‘listening’ that I was suddenly alerted to something that was going to happen. What followed was a feeling of tremendous exaltation in which time stood still.
• When I was on holiday, aged about 17, I glanced down and watched an ant striving to drag a bit of twig through a patch of sun on a wall in the graveyard of a Greek church, while chanting came from within the white building. The feeling aroused in me was quite unanticipated, welling up from some great depth, and essentially timeless. The concentration of simplicity and innocence was intensely of some vital present. I’ve had similar experiences on buses, suddenly watching people and being aware of how right everything essentially is.

Such musings seem rather ephemeral in the present time of great political turmoil, here in the UK, the USA and the world generally. I set out to comment on that, but found I could not, being drawn instead to the context in which I view it. My individual experience, I would say, has more in common with this latter example than with the more dramatic experiences. Certainly you cannot have anyone’s spiritual experience for them, so I would not try to tell anyone what to do, except to follow your individual path while noting the value of learning of how it is for others.

Bob Harwood

on behalf of the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (David Hitchin, Chris Lawson, Tim Pitt-Payne, Caroline Pybus, Theresa Samms and Nancy Wall)