A Space of possibility

Talk given on Earth Day 26th April 2026

Nowadays it is quite common to hear people say that they feel spiritual but not religious and I know what they mean (I think); 

I think they mean that they realise that there is more to life than appears on the surface. 

I think they mean that although we accept that the world is material, material-ism doesn’t tell the whole story; 

I think they mean that there’s more to reality than the sum total of building blocks of microbes and cells;

 I think they mean that that there’s more to life than work and rest, profit and loss, the mundane and everyday;

 I think they mean that that they experience a spiritual dimension in life through their feelings and so they know that words like soul and sacred can’t just be poetic or fanciful, they feel these words have some anchor points in the real world because they’ ve felt moved and lifted by experiences beyond the ordinary and they ve been sustained through difficulties by a strength that seems to come from sources beyond our ordinary ways of knowing;

and perhaps they feel all of these things in a combination contribute to an affirmation that yes they are spiritual

But I think by saying they are not religious they mean that they want to demonstrate that they reject the traditional structures of religion which have done so much harm and damage in the world; 

That they reject sexist and oppressive readings of scripture that have held back progress and contributed to wars, and they reject toxic structures that have institutionalised abuse.

~~~

Some years ago I heard a speaker from the Vedanta tradition say: ‘Spirituality is the intentional removal of that which is false.’

Which is why I link the spirituality to our theme this month of ‘Awakening’. A spirituality which compels us to wake up from a dream or fiction, to wake up to what is real, means setting aside easy fantasies and illusions, even if they are the illusions we are living by. We sometimes are compelled to ask difficult questions especially of our ways of continuing to get by without confronting the truth. 

Some religion (and a lot of bad religion) can undoubtedly become a way to accommodate living with our untruths, and then become little more than the scaffolding that emerge to defend these religious structures and their comforting narratives. 

But its not just bad religion that operates this way…

Like dreamers who are consoled by comforting dreams our whole culture has failed to wake up to the realities of economic inequality, and we have begun trying (and failing of course) to adapt to injustice, we failed to wake up to the dangers of nuclear war and instead constructed an entire maladaptive system to cocoon ourselves from the reality of it, a system  which now threatens to overwhelm us, and of course & perhaps even more pressingly, only time will tell, we’ve failed to wake up to climate collapse. 

We are the sleepwalkers.  

But our modern religion isn’t the church or mosque, gurudwara or synagogue. 

However you may criticise organised religions and even bad religions most of them try to offer relief to victims of inequality; you can see queues for soup kitchens outside most of the pentecostal carpet-showroom churches, most denominations in Britain protest the arms-trade and many focus on climate irresponsibility. 

A critical overview of militarism will show that territorial and political power far outweighs religious motivation for state hostilities; and an objective consideration of sex-based inequality will demonstrate that these have been culturally encoded within secular societies without any recourse to scriptural reasoning or religious hierarchies – and sexual exploitation is exploding online without any religious warrant at all.

Religion today has been superseded in most peoples lives by consumerism and electronic forms of online sedation, and even dare I say it by a cheap individualistic spirituality that offers new age comforters to age old problems. 

In the Gospel of Mark Jesus is recorded as telling people the ‘time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God is at hand…’ somehow Christian religion distorted that message to be about the fulfilment of a retrospectively invented scriptural prophesy and a wish-fulfilment second coming disregarding its a call to wake up to what is happening now: Jesus also heals saying Take up your bed and walk which you might think is a bit obvious, a bit on the nose, and which clearly follows a genuine tradition of prophetic truth telling about the here and now (which is undeniably religious in character). 

These are all ideas which many would like to ignore, preferring a comforting slumber to a cold awakening. In another Gospel Jesus is cross-examined by a Roman consul, Jesus says: “…I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’ Pilate asked him ‘What is truth?” After he had said this, he went out…” 

It seems the consul didn’t care to continue this line of conversation, like most of us…

I ‘ll close by quoting a part of one of my favourite poems and I recommend checking out the whole thing in ist brilliant entirety but for now here are a few lines of Transendental Etudes by Adrienne Rich :

But there come times—perhaps this is one of them 

when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die;

we when have to pull back from the incantations,

rhythms we’ve moved to thoughtlessly,

and disenthrall ourselves, bestow

ourselves to silence, or a severer listening, cleansed

of oratory, formulas, choruses, laments, static

crowning the wires. We cut the wires,

find ourselves in free-fall, as if

our true home were the undimensional

solitudes, the rift

in the Great Nebula.

No one who survives to speak

new language, has avoided this:

the cutting-away of an old force that held her

rooted to an old ground…