Movement 103

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Carrie Styles takes a pop at pop spirituatity. One Mrruure Mvslc by Simon Parke (SPCK) ALT.SPIRIT@MEIRO.M3 by Mike Riddell (Lion) tr IITTE BOOKS ON just about anything you fancy seem to be massively de n{eur at the moment, possiblyjust because theY are cheap and make'ideal Presents' but almost certainly not because they are of any use whatsoever. From the delights of 'Wrong Shui'to 'The Little Book of Lurve'(yak!) I have yetto find one that really tickles my fancy (so to speak). Depressingly the One Minute Mystlc did little to redress the balance. Quirky? Too right! lt's one of the weirdest books l've read in a while (more of that later) and possibly one of the least useful. lt starts off very seriously with quotes by old favourites like MotherJulian and St Augustine but then goes off on one with half finished snippets like... "God speaks through the strangest of things for those who have eyes to see. Nuts. Definitely!' Huh? Whats that got to do with being a mystic? No, well, bits of it are bearable and not so very quirlty but I am still bothered by the title. The combination of 'Learn yourself how to be a mystic' with the typical cry of our times "l've got less than a minute to devote to this" just don't go together in my head. lf You wantto be a mystic, great! Butgive .r{c wrhthli#dh *u,e(4romcm diF-!. !ru/@tb nft yFbqdr'qhEn ,*+iirorL@d e illck I Pocket sized faith yourself a good shot at it, 59 seconds just proves that you are totally not suited to the task. Mmmmm, anYwaY, moving 0n... lf you thought that was weird ! Mike Riddell's a/t spirit@metro.rn3 is really weirdl Not only is it a nightmare to read because it is divided into two halves (a novel and a runningspiritual notebook combined on the same page - see picture) but it also seems to have been written in the same style as the first book - that is, a tad incoherently. Fortunately though the book did ultimately redeem itself. I discovered a fascinating storY underneath the folds of confusion, of two people trying to find a way forward on the cusp of the third millennium and of ultimately succeeding. They make an unlikely couple, she a hooker-with-an-abusivepast and he a dead-endbanker-bod and have a ridiculously romantic meeting at a rock concert when she finds him admiring her feet! And yet lfound myself smiling attheir innocence and optimism, which theY manage to hold on to despite all the odds. They are both consumed with the belief that there has to be more to life than this, that there must be a God who cares about them somewhere, they just wish He would show his face atsome point. lhad a lotof timefor them on this one and willed them on to a point where they felt held and loved. lt is pretty Generation X-y in thatsense: two people with a real sense of the futility of modern living and searching for something more, I I l7 t ?i:r}:r: 'r;ji: Itl lt k6*hp#Ec ldf hdryttdhsdg &ulklsttobi6d d iFsl&rbhdEr @rdCt *ra6.dd EbilFrit-rlbpU MdqrnFffidcFd tu.tudy&rhft I i... r-*I- Luth.r Klnt? # I lr. Lri !()\s i hDrhf mrtt or PirU ! upp.r lip, ihich shc q,,( lh iiF: rir) Firh rh. a.ni.rt.. ll{treibir!dtdr\. Uinbololt ihrhbilof auul but this time with a spiritual backbone to it. There are faintly Sample page from Ridell's book. Top '.18, I (-'n {. d,.rt. Ol.dtrv ir'! n,t a rlxl ittl li' tau, enh (,r,,tr d,'idg ili l;ldc rhhs r lbc n!)ncnr. lLu h!rl !, nrr ,r,1,. ,' i! ni,,{h !ild! (iil. half isfull of disconnected joftings; boftom part isthe novel itself. e reminiscent bits from parables and other well known turns of phrase, but cringe-worthy as that sounds they just serve to improve the overall flavour and I liked it. lfs as if ,,tt,,:, movement 26 d.y these stories, parables, whatever are part of our general consciousness and people say them without realising where they come form, except that in the case of Marilyn and Vincent are beginning to make the connection. They are coming to realise that maybe there is something there after all and that this something might actually care about them. I don't know if it is depressing or not that they 0nly make this discovery afterthey find each other and therefore find love. Marilyn suffered childhood abuse and is now a hard-nosed prostitute and doesn't know what it feels like to be loved by another person (specifically a man?) until she meets Vincent, himself 'a loser', and together they make the discovery about God. As I said, maybe cringe-worthy but somehow it works. The bits round the edge ofthe novel were a bit harder to take. The11 were good in small doses but some left me behind completely and I them. The glossy back cover suggests you just dip in and that sounded like good advice to me. The book seems to be an overall package ofthat kind of 'spirituality in a nutshell'that is on every bookshelf at the moment, but with a deeper sense of purpose than I fell1ne Minute Mystic had. This was definitely one to keep by your bedside rather than try to read on the long train home. rrlt. sprrLt@rEtttr''? MlKt RtDDSLL / + -, lllTiliil'ii ll ! [t!flflll,,:l There are an awful lot of these 'PoP spirituality' books about, you've probably got a stack of them given to you by well-meaning relatives because they think you're the 'religious type' (heaven help us!). 0bviously some are better than others but even so I am a bit concerned about tliis current binge. Whafs it all for? Are people really looking to change their lives (or even just their lifestyles) or are they just f0llowing the latest fad? Because thals exactly what it is, in the same waY that they find themselves buying balsamic vinegar in Safeway. There are those who'do' religious/spiritual/weird stuff and those who just don't, so whY trY and persuade everyone that ifs a good idea? lf you are already working your guts out in the 'real world' you don't have time to think about'highe/ things and there is no point trying to fit it into your reading time on the bus to work. Real deep-down spirituality is surely about something more profound than that, something you need to work on and devote time to, notjust add to your list of other activities. 0f course there are also those who simply just don'twantto get involved, and fair enough really, who can blame them? But if you do want to discover Your spiritual-abili$ then for heaven's sake take yourtime!
Having written biographies of Tolstoy, Saint Pau[ and Jesus, A.N.Wilson was never one to shun a challenge. Now he has decided to describe'God's funeral'. Malcolm Brown responds. Brickbats and bouquets Goo's FuruenRl eyA.N. Wl-sor'r (John Murray) tr HE HtsroRY oF ENGLTSH atheism in the nineteenth century may not exactly seem like a rivetting subject for a book. To inform us that manY philosophers and literati ofthe period gave up believing in the 39 articles, or in Christianity, or even in God, may sound, at best, a trifle unnecessary. lt may sound like reinventing the wheel, and a rather square wheel at that. Yet God's Funeral by A.N. Wilson (the title is taken from a Thomas Hardy poem) does have its moments. Some are thought-provoking, some are entertaining. Believers and unbelievers figure large, but the real heroes are those who grapple with the questions of religion and atheism, and continue to believe - but in their own way. Ihose like Thomas Carlyle, who believed 'that somewhere in the dead husk of these creeds there was something called Faith which could be cherished, even in an age of unbelief . Wilson is especially dismissive of those who insisted on a rigid adherence to the 39 articles, those founding principles of early Anglicanism, and on a literalist reading of the Bible. He cites with some delightthe persecuted Bishop Colenso of Natal in South Africa, who wentthrough the Mosaic books of the Old Testament and showed that: Forthe accountsto be literallytrue, itwould be necessary to believe that six men had 2,748 sons between them. By calculating the number of priests mentioned, and the number of pigeons consumed, Colenso showed that (once again, if the narrative were literallytrue) each ofthe priests ofthat juncture would have been accounting for 88 pigeons daily. The author is also critical of those who inflated the significance of such anomalies into a conclusion that religion was therefore nonsensical. Such a dogmatic atheism fell into the same literalist trap because of an inability to comprehend other possible interpretations of the texts, and because it focused on the detail at the expense of the broader themes. Some who are more dogmatic in their unbelief than Wilson have been critical of the book for that reason - perhaps the fundamentalist of atheism find it difficult to tolerate the heretics in their midst. But Wilson is balanced atthis point. The lively, entertainingstyle of the book makes up for its lack of originality, and reaches its peak in the chapter on Karl Marx. One evening, the German thinker went out with some compatriots on a London pub crawl, and stumbled into a session ofthe Order of 0ddfellows: The three Germanswere called upon to drink the health of the )ddfellows. Bauer replied with a taunt about Engtish snobbishnes s. Maa, not to be outdone, launched into a bittertirade againstthe lack of culture in Britain and the undoubted superiority of Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn to any British composer. By the ilme he had warmed to hls theme and began to explain why he hated EnEland and the Entlish, the company was becoming rough. Before full-scale fisticuffs erupted, Marx and his friends fled. As they blundered along, by now much the worse for drink, they tripped over a heap of stones.'Hurrah!' shouted Bauer,'l have an idea!' Picking up one of the stones he hurled it at the $ass panel of a street lamp. lt was two in the morning, and they had managed to smash four or five lamps before the arrival of a policeman resulted in an exciting chase down streets and alleys. I enjoyed readingthis book, and am sure that many readers of <strong>Movement</strong>would as well. But there was something irritating about it. The fault seems to be an excessively top-down approach. That the thought of philosophers and intellectuals was superior to that of the common people is not questioned. Ihe death of God was announced by Nietsche, God's funeral observed by Hardy, and the orations were given by a myriad of great men and a few great women. And surely this must have influenced the common people. But surely the great change of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is notthe decline of belief, or particular forms of belief, among such people. It is the fact that atheism has become normal among the common people of many countries, but by no means universal. Popular Christianig is alive and well. The Catholic church still systematises it, and the multitudes still practice it. They may not have degrees, they movement 97 may not sell books, but does this make their religious experience any less valid? Perhaps, to be fair, Wilson comes close to answering this question, in his chapter on William James, a philosopher for whom the reality of religious experience was a central theme to be defended. And if the intellectuals of Christianity are now on the side of the poor and oppressed, Wilson's final paragraph is all the more salutary: Just as Nie2sch ds generation were declaring the death of God and Thomas Hardy was witnesslnf His burial, relitious thinkers as valed as Srmone Weil, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Nicholas Berdayev and Teilhard de Chardin were waiting in the wings.... ln other parts of the world, the roles played in the spiritual war against racism by the Southern Baptist minister Martin Luther Kint and by the Church of England monk FatherTrevor Huddleston showed that there was immense potency, not just in the Christian ethical ideal, but in their biblical sense of God co mint to earth with His winnowintfork in His hand, ready to clear His threshing-floor. These world changing men and women decided to ignore the death of God in the nineteenth century. They spoke in the name of a God who was First and Last. They puttheir trust in One who said,'lwas dead, and see, I am alive for evermord.
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Movement 103

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