A spirituality for the descent

Looking back on this blog, I'm aware that nearly everything I've written since July has been on an environmental theme, and mostly pretty gloomy in tone. Yet the heading of this blog still promises "a trialogue between ... mainstream Christianity, Gnosticism and scientific rationalism", and I don't feel like altering that, because I think environmental matters are central to any such trialogue taking place at this point in our history. But maybe it's time to redress the balance a bit.

Here's the question. What kind of spirituality, if any, is adequate in the face of a future that at worst (in the case of runaway climate change) holds extinction of our species, and at best what the Archdruid refers to as the "long descent", a slow but nevertheless very thorough step-by-step process of the "catabolic collapse" of civilisation?

And for me personally, if there is no longer an easy hope that things will get better, or even stay as they are, in the future, there is also a corresponding loss of the past. It is often said that for Christians, the central fact of history is the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ. It is the proof that God is real, that God cares, that there is (in spite of the above) hope for the future. I feel in my depths that Christianity is true, yet having put a lot of effort over the last few years into evaluating the historical evidence, I can no longer believe that anyone at all like the Jesus of the gospels ever lived on this earth. If the Christian myth holds any truth at all -- and I am convinced it does -- then it must be located somewhere outside literal history. This is the way the second half of the New Testament speaks, and I continue to value those writings, but I find the reality they point me to is almost entirely an inner one. A God who intervenes in history, either in the Incarnation or to pull us out of the pit into which we've now collectively dug ourselves, seems barely believable; and I cannot help feeling that as an aching loss. Thus there is another question: what kind of spirituality can address this loss of the past, as well as that of the future?

I have recently come across the writings of the French Catholic mystic Simone Weil (a tip for those keen to avoid embarrassment at mystic parties: it's pronounced "Vey", not "Vile"). I had been aware of her for many years as someone I ought to read one day, and had even felt a kind of affinity for her owing to the fact that we share a birthday, but it had never gone further than that until I was introduced to her work at a meeting of a church house group I've become part of recently (I may even start going to the church itself at some point).

I don't have a full answer to my question "what kind of spirituality ...?", but I am pretty clear about one part of it. It needs to arise from the life of someone who has in some way lived in the future, in the sense of having personally undergone some of the unpleasant things that almost certainly lie in wait for us on the downslope of "Hubbert's Peak" of oil production. And Weil certainly qualifies. She suffered plenty: some of it involuntary (persistent, agonising headaches), much of it voluntary. And she lived out her principles in a way very few of us do: she fought for the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War -- or more strictly, she cooked for them, owing to her pacifist convictions; was effectively exiled from her home country by the German invasion; and not long afterwards, died from voluntary starvation undertaken out of identification with her countrypeople suffering under the Nazi jackboot. So she probably comes as close to being a "person of the future" as anyone past or present can.

Her major work, "Gravity and Grace", was compiled after her death by the man to whom she entrusted her notes. The book is accordingly a sequence of short chapters, each consisting in turn of a sequence of often dense paragraph-length comments of unnerving directness. Here are a few, from the chapter "Detachment".

Affliction in itself is not enough for the attainment of total detachment ... To strip ourselves of the imaginary royalty of the world. Absolute solitude. Then we possess the truth of the world.

This reminded me of Morrissey's words: "I decree today that life is simply taking and not giving / England is mine and it owes me a living...". It's as absurd as he makes it sound, and we all do it, I suspect.

Two ways of renouncing material possessions:

To give them up with a view to some spiritual advantage.

To conceive of them and feel them as conducive to spiritual well-being (for example: hunger, fatigue and humiliation cloud the mind and hinder meditation) and yet to renounce them.

Only the second kind of renunciation means nakedness of spirit.

Furthermore, material goods would scarcely be dangerous if they were seen in isolation and not bound up with spiritual advantage.

We must give up everything that is not grace and not even desire grace.

For me, an example of the first kind of renunciation is simplifying my life to leave time and energy for prayer: minimising time spent in front of the television, alcohol consumption, and so on. Not really a problem. The second kind would be to give up the very things that support my meditation: enough sleep, enough to eat, peace and quiet, a regular routine. That would be a hundred times as hard.

We must leave on one side the beliefs which fill up voids and sweeten what is bitter. The belief in immortality ... The belief in the providential ordering of events -- in short, the "consolations" which are ordinarily sought in religion.

To love God through and across the destruction of Troy and of Carthage -- and with no consolation. Love is not consolation, it is light.

This is the kind of writing I can well imagine sustaining me as our present-day Troys and Carthages begin to shudder from the impacts of catabolic collapse.