At the 2023 Conference for Exploring The Dynamics of Attachment in Adult Life, I was invited to explore the place of spirituality in the dynamics of attachment. In preparation for this Una McCluskey suggested to me that we have a motivational part to ourselves which is about exploring the meaning of the universe, the meaning of our own lives and the lives of others, and our relation to what is around and beyond that we cannot see.
That resonated strongly with my own experience. From my mid to late adolescence the meaning of life that I was being offered by the culture in which I grew up did not satisfy that part of me.
Growing up in a middle class family that valued educational achievement and success, the Gold Standard was to get into the Sixth Form, and do sufficiently well at A Level to be awarded a place at University, and if possible at Oxford or Cambridge Universities. That did not work for me.
Poetry helped me, especially that of Wordsworth, and his poem ‘The World is Too Much With Us’:
THE world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
‘Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!' These words especially rang true to me.
As did these: 'Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey':
I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.
Tragically we are now all too aware of the damage we are inflicting upon Nature by seeing it as an object to be used solely for our own purposes, rather than, as it is in reality, the very source and ground of our existence. We live in utter dependence upon Nature. Moment by moment, breath by breath, we depend upon the air around us, the water in the seas and rivers, the light and warmth of the sun, and the food from the earth to sustain us. We need to acknowledge our relationship with Nature, stop treating her as an object that exists solely for our benefit, and recover the ancient attitude of seeing her as sacred and having a life of her own, as Mother Nature. We live in relationship with Nature.
Important though that sense of a connection with Nature was for me, it was not enough on its own.
So here I want to tell you a story. In my late teens my family moved from London to a little hamlet in Borrowdale in the Cumbrian Lake District. My father and mother gave up their promising careers to run a small hotel in Grange-in-Borrowdale. However, they left me behind with our next door neighbours so that I could complete my A Level course in in London. I was miserable, and I failed the A Levels, but retook them in Keswick the following year.
My year living in Grange, helping out in the hotel, and attending Keswick School is one of the happiest years in my life. The other students welcomed me and shared their lives with me, walking and rock climbing and generally enjoying life. But there was still the same academic pressure. I did pass my A Levels, but didn’t do well enough to get university entrance. The head teacher got me a place at North Western Polytechnic in London to do a London University degree there. So, it was back to London, where once again I was miserable. Living in a bed sit in Tottenham I can remember one night sitting in bed and crying ‘God Help Me!’, even though I did not believe in God. It was just a cry for help in extremis.
Nothing happened that I was aware of. I returned home for the Christmas vacation. I went to a party at the home of a school friend, and got chatting to a student from Leeds University who was visiting. I told him about my disillusionment with our culture of ‘getting and spending’ and our need to be in touch with nature and to make the study of philosophy central to our life. He agreed with my disillusionment, but he thought that we needed to be in relationship with God. Not being a believer in God I questioned this. It was not that I was a committed atheist, but just that God did not figure in my experience of life. We parted without resolving the question.
A following night I was invited to another party at the home of a school friend. No deep philosophical conversations ensued, but a girl who had been in the same 6th form but who was not a member of my circle of friends was also there. We got into conversation, and started dating. She happened to be at the same university as the guy I had been talking to at the other party, and knew him as they were both Christians. She wasn’t as evangelical about her Christianity as the other guy, but had been born and brought up as a member of the Methodist church in Keswick. But she was willing to talk. She was in an all female hall of residence where I wasn’t allowed to stay (in was 1968), and so I stayed with the other guy in his hall. And so the conversation with him continued. To cut a long story short, what I remember of that conversation was his telling me that he believed that Jesus was not just a historical figure who lived and died 2,000 years ago, but that he was still alive and present and that we could be in relationship with him; and that above all, he could help us to love one another. Somehow the word ‘love’ got through to me. That night, again sitting in my bed, I repeated the prayer for help, saying in my mind, ‘Jesus, help me’.
Again, nothing happened, as far as I was aware of, except that the next morning when I went down to breakfast with the other students in hall, I experienced a deep sense of interconnectedness with them, and with the world around me. It was an experience of simply knowing at an experiential level that I mattered and belonged, just as I was. I did not have to have achieved anything in order to matter and belong. I simply did, just as I was. It was an experience of feeling at home in the universe.
Dorothy Heard, Brian Lake and Una McCluskey, in their book Attachment Therapy with Adolescents and Adults, discuss the meaning of intersubjectivity. They describe it as: ‘an immediate sense of interpersonal communion within and between persons’ and see it as ‘the bedrock for the development of the self throughout the life cycle’ (p.34). Those words accurately describe my experience.
Another word that is used to denote this experience is the Greek word koinonia. This word is used in group work to describe that sense of communion that can emerge in a group as the members dialogue and connect with one another. St Paul also uses it in his letters to describe the experience of the early Christians. He writes about their being caught up into an already existing bond of love and connection - an already existing web of relatedness. I find it amazing that this is also how contemporary physicists describe reality - that we exist in a field or web of interconnectedness, and that everything is connected in this web.
I have recently read a really interesting and important book called The Master & His Emissary: The Divided Brain and The Making of the Western World by Dr Iain McGilchrist. This book has been very helpful to me personally in that what he says confirms my experience of their being something missing in our culture. In a Question and Answer session about his book Iain McGilchrist said that we have a crisis of meaning in our world, and that there are three things that give life meaning: first, our relationship with the natural world, secondly our relationship with a stable society, and thirdly, our relationship with the divine realm. What is important about this book to me is that Iain gives us both a scientific and philosophical basis for the importance of these three relationships. In his latest book, 'The Matter with Things' he concludes with a chapter called 'A Sense of the Sacred', in which he goes into much greater depth about the importance of this spiritual dimension to our lives.
As I began to think about what I wanted to do with my life I found myself drawn to helping people experience their connection with that divine dimension to life which our reductionist scientific materialist culture has neglected. This led to training and working as a parish priest within The Church of England in parishes in both Cumbria and Sheffield, and also as a mental health chaplain with the NHS in Sheffield. Within that role as priest, I felt drawn to helping people whose suffering had been caused by difficulties in loving connections in their early lives. I trained and worked as a volunteer psychotherapist with a voluntary organisation that offered long-term therapy to those on low incomes. On the basis of this work I went on to train as a professional psychotherapist at The University of Sheffield's School of Medicine, and then with Dr Una McCluskey, who has developed a new of therapy, Exploratory Psychotherapy, which incorporates a model of human nature and well-being developed by the Dorothy Heard and Brian Lake.
More recently, having retired from working both as a priest and a psychotherapist, I find myself increasingly concerned about a crisis of meaning in our culture. Our scientific materialist, and global capitalist market economy is threatening the very existence of life on earth. We need a radical change of heart and mind if we are to survive. Ian McGilchrist, Helena Norberg-Hodge and many others are pioneering new ways of both understanding and living life. I am encouraged by them.