Making Our Connections

Pink Dandelion

Description

We can travel more than we have ever had the ability to before. Indeed, travel is now part of everyday life for most of us, whether to or for work, or on holiday. This book looks at how we enhance the spiritual dimension of our lives as we constantly head off to somewhere else.

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 28 juillet 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334049449
• Langue: English

Extrait

Making our Connections
Making our Connections
The Spirituality of Travel
Pink Dandelion
© Pink Dandelion 2013
Published in 2013 by SCM Press
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to be identified as the Author of this Work
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Anglicized Edition, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
978 0 334 04408 6

Typeset by Manila Typesetting
Printed and bound by
ScandBook, Sweden
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface: Travel and Spirituality
Introduction
1 From Call to Commodity
2 Trains, Planes and Automobiles
3 Missing the Connection
4 Engagement in the Valley of Love and Delight
5 Travelling Home
References
For all Fellow Travellers
Acknowledgements
One of the joys of writing about something we all do, such as travel, is that everyone I spoke to about this book had something wise and wonderful to offer me. I have been very grateful for the insight, interest and support shown me in all these conversations. I also feel a debt to all those who have written about their experience of travel over the years: reading your work has felt like a companionable dialogue, an affirmation of my own aspirations and experiences, that has now lasted decades.
Colleagues at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham have been very helpful with offering me space and support to do the writing, and Ian Jackson and Bettina Gray in the library there have helped so much in getting me the texts I needed to consult.
I am grateful to Natalie Watson and her colleagues at SCM for supporting and publishing the work. I thank those who read earlier drafts, and above all my family, who gave me the gift of time and space to make the journey of drafting the text.

‘Ben’ Pink Dandelion
Clitheroe, February 2013
Preface Travel and Spirituality
In this book, I am interested in all forms of travel, whether the walk to the supermarket or the round-the-world omnibus expedition, whether a 19-hour day on a bicycle to cover 200 miles or a 19-hour flight from London to Perth. In this way, I define ‘travel’ in its broadest sense. It is about making a journey, moving from one place to another. I am not just interested in travel made for explicitly religious purposes such as pilgrimage, or travel which turns out to include moments of transforming enlightenment. I also do not make a distinction between travelling and tourism, between what might be seen as ‘movement towards’ or ‘onwards’ or ‘away from’ (the everyday). All are within my use of the term ‘travel’.
I have found spirituality a very difficult term to define, and that most people, academics included, use it without even trying to do so. Many say what it entails but not what it is. Often, spirituality is seen as oppositional or differentiated from religion. For example, Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead in their study of religious decline and the growth of spirituality in Kendal, draw a clear distinction between religion and spir­ituality (2005). They define religion in terms of a transcendent reference point, such as ‘God’, and spirituality through a subjective reference point, ‘self’ (2005, pp. 5–6). This dichotomy provides a useful tool for sociologists interested in secularization and sacralization, but does not work for how I wish to present this discussion of spirituality and travel.
More helpful is my friend Alex Wildwood’s maxim that when we are living authentically, we feel ‘a part’ of the whole, not ‘apart’ from it. Spirituality for me is about this experience of connection. It is about the awe and wonder we feel when we see the beauty of creation and the connection between every part of it. We see we are not alone in the world, that none of us are strangers in any ultimate sense. This in turn leads us to nurture that sense of the collective whole or community. Spirituality de-differentiates humanity in contrast to the hierarchies and separations of modernity. It is about loving our neighbour freely and unconditionally, whoever our neighbour is.
I write as a British Quaker, a member of the Religious Society of Friends. Quakerism was founded in the seventeenth century on the experience of direct encounter with the Divine. George Fox, early Quaker leader, believed this experience was available to everybody and that we are all of equal spiritual worth. Everyone is part of the priesthood, everyone is a minister. Thus, Quakers have no leaders and no ‘front’ to their ‘Meetings’. Early Friends adopted silence and stillness as the way to nurture that sense of encounter into which anyone might offer ‘vocal ministry’ as led to by the Spirit. British Friends continue this tradition today.
The experience of the Divine was a transforming one and those converted to the movement adopted a new and distinct lifestyle. They refused to accept worldly etiquette around hierarchy, using ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ to everyone rather than the deferential ‘you’. They refused to use titles or remove their hat, except in prayer. They refused to fight in ‘outward wars’, as killing contradicted the idea of the spiritual equality of all. They practised this sense of spiritual connection in a very material way. This didn’t mean everyone was free to do what they wanted but that killing would not affirm the covenant between the Divine and humanity. Indeed, Quakers were very critical of others, particularly those who claimed that people still needed to listen to sermons or share in the Eucharist, practices which Quakers now saw as anachronistic. However, Quakers were keen to emphasize that everyone was part of God’s people and that God was interested in the good of everybody, not just a partial elect. Thus, one of my presuppositions about the nature of authentic spirituality is that it upholds the integrity of all humanity and affirms the spiritual equality of all. It is a spirituality that seeks peace and justice. It is optimistic about human nature and human potential and it is not about correct belief but authentic experience. It is about having regard and care for everybody.
In secular terms, we can understand this kind of attitude as ‘cosmopolitanism’. Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah summarizes the concept:
[T]here are two strands that intertwine in the notion of cosmopolitanism. One is the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kin or even the more formal ties of shared citizenship. The other is that we take seriously the value not just of a human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance. People are different, the cosmopolitan knows, and there is much to learn from our differences . . . Whatever their obligations are to others (or theirs to us) they often have the right to go their own way. (Appiah 2007, p. xiii)
People are different and necessarily and usefully so, but our obligations to others in one way both transcend these differences and are also enriched by engagement with these differences. Cosmopolitans hold two ideals – universal concern and respect for legitimate difference – in tension. These concerns override what Virginia Woolf, niece of Quaker Caroline Stephen, called ‘unreal loyalties’ – those, for example, of nation, sex, school, neighbourhood (1938, p. 79). Similarly Leo Tolstoy, inspiration to Gandhi, inveighed against patri­otism in 1896 – ‘to destroy war, destroy patriotism’ (1994, p. 132). We are brought up to see the world in terms of particular concerns rather than universal ones. We are schooled in being proud of our family, our neighbourhood, our nation, but this is often at the expense of universal concern for what is important to those beyond our locality. Indeed, cosmopol­itanism is not a common or popular philosophy: notable anti-cosmopolitans such as Hitler and Stalin required a kind of loyalty to one portion of humanity – nation, a class – that ruled out loyalty to all of humanity. Appiah states: ‘the one thought cosmopolitans share is that no local loyalty can ever justify forgetting that each human being has responsibilities to every other’ (2007, p. xiv).
This is not easy: ‘there are times when these two ideals – universal concern and respect for legitimate difference – clash. There’s a sense in which cosmopolitanism is the name not of the solution but of the challenge’ (2007, p. xiii). Given this, however, Appiah continues: ‘Cosmopolitanism is an adventure and an ideal . . . a world in which communities are neatly hived off from one another seems no longer a serious option, if it ever was . . . segregation and seclusion has always been anomalous in our perpetually voyaging species’ (p. xviii).
Cosmopolitanism calls on us not to portion off any part of humanity, not to engender any form of ‘them and us’ as our nations have done repeatedly for s