Travelling through Greece - Holy Monastery of St John the Forerunner

We are at the Holy Monastery of St John the Forerunner. Built on the site of sixteenth century ruins of an old church dedicated to St John the Baptist, the new church, a copy, is just 15 years old. The nuns have not been allowed to use old materials because of laws requiring churches to provide sanctuary and protection from earthquakes; thus the building has involved thick poured concrete with iron reinforcement and 2m foundations! We have been welcomed into the monastery grounds by Sister Theoktisti, very delightful, very English and she is proudly showing us their new church, not yet consecrated because it is not quite finished. The painting in the altar area is still to be completed.
Coming in from the brilliant sunshine our eyes take quite a while to acclimatise within the darkened church, as we stumble in the darkness to take up positions within, some sitting or perching on the narrow choir stalls (deliberately not, we are told, built for comfort, but more like the misericords in our cathedral and church choirs - for discretely perching in long services in days gone by!) There is a wonderful painting of the six days of creation above the six icons leading to the sanctuary. 

We are told that the monastery stands at 1100 metres and therefore gets very cold in the winter and is often snowed. It is not hard to imagine how beautiful it must then look, some compensation, I feel, for the inconveniences the snow must bring.   

Dazzled by the sun as we go outside once more, we make our way to a large covered area beyond the church where we are treated to welcome refreshments and have a chance to hear more about the monastery from Sister Theoktisti. People are returning to the country from the towns, she tells us, to find quality of life again and visitors come to worship at the church from as far as Larisa. There are 20 sisters in residence, and a further eight live just outside Athens. Some have even gone to Estonia to form a community there.
These nuns are closest to the Benedictines in life style, devoting their time to work, prayer and community life. They are pretty much self sufficient, only calling on local traders where necessary to supplement their own many and varied skills. For example they may need an electrician from time to time. They have livestock - pigs, goats chickens etc - and while not eating meat themselves they sell meat for funds - there is a waiting list for their beef because it is so good, being totally organic - and they have a very kind quiet slaughter producing the very best of meat in tenderness and flavour. They have also built up a successful market for their feta cheese. They don't have pets because that may cause contention as to "ownership" - whose "baby" is it?

The nuns grow all their own fruit and vegetables and do Christian art - such as icons, mosaics, carving, stitching etc according to individual skills, (the latest novice is learning homeopathy), much of this work being sold in their shop alongside jams, chutneys and honey etc.. Twenty women living together from 12 different cultures and with 22 languages between them bring their own challenges but it is clear that this also brings an incalculable richness into the community. The philosophy is not to worry about the way things happen. No one way is the only way - but to realise God's greatness and generosity in the diversity of culture. Different branches of Christianity, she reminds us, are almost an accident of birth - the ultimate choice being in our own hearts - we are all able to choose our own route to God if we leave our inherited path. And they never let the sun go down on their anger (See Paul's advice to the Ephesians 4: 26) After saying the final office of Compline every night they have a communal truth session - all asking for forgiveness of misdoings and offering total forgiveness in return. Not a bad plan for family life also I would say.

They are financially poor, but have a richness of life which money just cannot buy.

 

And so we make our farewells, climb the road back up to the coach which is waiting to take us down the Kesovos mountain and on our way to the main highway and our hotel for the night at Kalambaka below the dramatic Meteora Monasteries.

Passing through the village of Dimitra we see storks on their nests on the tops of posts and chimneys, even one atop a church, looking incongruously over crowded where parents were sharing the untidy pile of twigs with their two youngsters. The storks, while revered and regarded as lucky can be a nuisance and some people put dummy storks on their chimneys to keep the real ones away! Here we also see cotton everywhere - on the verges, in the fields, as we pass close to the birthplace of Asklepios and hear the myth of Chiron - and Asklepian healing - explored in my first book Healing this Wounded Earth, indeed the main inspiration for it.

Monastery of the Holy Trinity Meteora mountains

Eventually the Meteora mountains can be seen straight ahead in the distance - It is a place beyond words - but not mentioned by any ancient Greek authors, curiously perhaps. Much more about this amazing place in the next post...

The Buddhist and the healing power of nature

Of all the great faiths and philosophies, the Buddhist seems to understand most clearly not only our need to live more simply and altruistically within the natural world but also the healing power of nature.
The Vietnamese monk Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh writes:

"Buddhists believe that the reality of the interconnectedness of human beings, society and Nature will reveal itself more…as we gradually cease to be possessed by anxiety, fear, and the dispersion of the mind. Among the three - human beings, society, and Nature - it is us who begin to effect change. But in order to effect change we must recover ourselves, one must be whole. Since this requires the kind of environment favorable to one’s healing, one must seek the kind of lifestyle that is free from the destruction of one’s humanness. Efforts to change the environment and to change oneself are both necessary. But we know how difficult it is to change the environment if individuals themselves are not in a state of equilibrium."

(This is from the Buddhist faith statement prepared for the Alliance of Religions and Conservation by Kevin Fossey, Buddhist educator and representative of Engaged Buddhism in Europe; Somdech Preah Maha Ghosananda, Patriarch of Cambodian Buddhism; His Excellency Sri Kushok Bakula, 20th Reincarnation of the Buddha’s Disciple Bakula, head of Ladakhi Buddhism, and initial rebuilder of Mongolian Buddhism; and Venerable Nhem Kim Teng, Patriarch of Vietnamese Buddhism: From Faith in Conservation: 2003, pp.77, 78. Also online at ARC site.)

Can spirituality transform our world?

Ursula King poses this question in a paper of that title published in the very first issue of the brand new and rather good Journal for the Study of Spirituality.
In a nutshell she concludes that spiritualities do indeed offer a vision of hope and human flourishing, but that in practical terms we need spiritual education at all levels and to all ages, alongside a global spiritual awakening, to realize an effective spiritual transformation. We need, she says, a spiritual revolution, something dear to my own heart as readers of my blogs and book will know!

At an individual level I would say we need a spiritual re- awakening. Surely we used to be spiritual beings before many of us became unduly influenced by the advance of materialism and scientific reductionism and the accompanying cynicism about religion and spirituality. In this materialistic and consumerist world many of us have lost the ability to connect with the spirit within us, to transcend the material elements of our lives. If only we can rediscover the spiritual essence of our beings. We then need to connect that spiritual element across all boundaries of space and time, to realize that we are not mere individuals, but we are all part of a deeply interconnected, social mind, with huge potential significance for our future.
But that begs a question. What is spirituality?
It is almost impossible to define, but significantly in that same Journal John Swinton, Professor of Practical Theology and Pastoral Care in the School of Divinity at the University of Aberdeen, draws our attention to the idea of spirituality being best thought of as something that is missing in our lives. It is true that very often people will reflect that they feel something is missing in what they do, but they have difficulty articulating what that something is. So they change jobs, go away for a while, buy more consumer goods, and never find that elusive quality they seek. They continue to feel dissatisfied but don’t really know why.
If spirituality has something to do with our search for meaning, purpose, love, some kind of a God, then we are saying that something profoundly important is too often not being adequately addressed. Our challenge, Swinton writes, is to “learn what it means to treat people as human beings.”
That is clearly of fundamental importance, as Swinton points out, when we are thinking about healthcare and the treatment of patients or about the way we run our businesses and commerce, where people can become nothing more than “economic units.” I’ve written about this elsewhere in my book Healing this Wounded Earth…
But I take this a step further. To learn how to treat other people as human beings, then, strange as it may sound, I think we actually have to learn to be human beings ourselves! By that I mean that we need to raise our own spiritual awareness, be compassionate to ourselves, love ourselves, first, be “happy” in our own bodies. How can we bring love and compassion and spirituality and a total sense of worth into any workplace or life if we do not have those qualities in ourselves?

And furthermore I believe we are challenged to bring that undefined spiritual quality into everything we do – not only in our workplace, but in our communities, in our creativity, in our faiths, in our relationships, so that our work and whole way of life reflects that love and compassion and spirit and can become a healing influence for others. Because there is no doubt that the alternatives can be harmful. The Jesuit priest, Thomas Merton, tells us that our hatred of ourselves is more dangerous than our hatred of others, because we project our own evil onto others and we do not see it in ourselves. “If you love peace,” he wrote, in his book New Seeds of Contemplation, “then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed – but hate these things in yourself, [Merton’s italics] not in another.” It is easy to see how our self -hatred could for example be reflected in those nasty computer and video games that are now so freely available and are almost certainly a harmful influence to our children and indeed many adults. But someone, indeed a whole production team, brought such items to the market place, made them freely available to one and all.

Those who create such horror for the retail trade seem to be allowing their own wounds to crush them. They need their own healing. But they also have a responsibility for the potential negative effects of their work; for the harm it possibly inflicts on the minds of others. We know that people who are subjected to too much gratuitous violence put up a barrier of defense and they become desensitized, a process sometimes known as ‘psychic numbing’. (This is significant when we consider the behavior of our soldiers, for example, trained to kill, but who have to live a different life back in the “real” world.) It is not hard to see that the longer-term effects of such violence on the general behavior and indeed future of the human race could be far reaching. I wrote more about this over on my Ripples of Hope Blog very recently.


More spiritual education to enhance the world’s level of spiritual literacy would surely begin to address issues such as these. But how do we start? Some things we can all do. We can introduce our children to beautiful art in our national galleries, we can show them more of the awesome wonders of nature in our museums, we can celebrate with them the wealth of religious traditions around them, we can nurture the innate spiritual qualities within them. And we can nurture our own spiritual needs at the same time! But we do need the support of a spiritually driven education. Because we know that children are born naturally empathic and spiritual, thanks to the work of David Hay and Rebecca Nye, for example. It is our subsequent education system that crushes these qualities, beats them out of our children. And we have a generation or more of parents who went through the same spirit-crushing system!
How many of us are teachers, school governors, or otherwise involved with children in some way? We can all play an important role.

By tapping into the natural spirituality of our young and nurturing it throughout their education, I hope we can start to build a better world. I would hope that children so educated would be less inclined to squander valuable time on video “nasties,” or violent films, for example, and will be steered towards a more spiritual and healing life, a much more satisfying life, that will influence all those around them, in an ever widening aura of spiritual consciousness. Or is this a pipe dream? I don’t think so. I hope not!

This leads into plenty of other topics to write about! What do current consciousness studies tell us about the possibility of a global spiritual awareness? What are the differences between religion and spirituality, how do they interrelate? Do they overlap, or does one encompass the other? If spirituality is a necessary component of all religions why is this not a unifying force between them? What do we understand about the evolution of consciousness and spirituality? Given that we can steer our own evolution by our actions or inactions, and are conscious that we can do this, how can we steer the world towards a better future, whatever we mean by that?
I shall muse on these by the swimming pool today!

A Shared Responsibility, a Shared Sense of Belonging

I write today (24th August) on my Ripples of Hope blog about our flawed economy, inspired by an article at Digital Journal, Op-Ed: The West v Islam? This same article led me to the website of the international Quilliam Foundation “challenging extremism, promoting pluralism, inspiring change”)

The foundation is named after Shaikh William Henry Abdullah Quilliam (1856-1932) who founded one of the first British mosques, in Liverpool, in 1889.

We are told on Quilliam’s website that Quilliam
“was a native Englishman, a solicitor, from Liverpool, England. He, and many of his contemporaries, embraced Islam voluntarily and established Britain’s first mosque in Liverpool, now a national heritage site. This was the first native Muslim community, dedicated to serving fellow Brits on the English mainland. Shaikh Quilliam was one of the first people to grapple with the challenges posed by inter-cultural exchanges which preceded the age of mass globalisation. As such, we have much to learn from the example set by him and his small Muslim community in Liverpool.”

I also learnt that in that same year, 1889, the Shah Jahan Mosque was built at Woking by Dr Gottleib Wilhelm Leitner, a Jewish convert, and that The Holy Qur’an was first translated into English by the Christian convert Marmaduke Pickthall (1875–1936).

I suspect few people know – I didn’t – that Islam was first imported into Britain by white converts as long ago as the 19th Century.

For Americans reading this blog, and by way of comparison, Muslims first entered the United States from the Ottoman Empire, and from parts of South Asia from the 1880s to 1914. It is most likely that Albanian Muslims in Biddeford, Maine founded the first American mosque in 1915. A Muslim cemetery still exists there.

But I digress!
Quilliam claims to be “the world’s first counter-extremism think tank set up to address the unique challenges of citizenship, identity and belonging in a globalised world. Quilliam stands for religious freedom, equality, human rights and democracy.”

“Challenging extremism is the duty of all responsible members of society,” it writes. “Not least because cultural insularity and extremism are products of the failures of wider society to foster a shared sense of belonging and to advance liberal democratic values. With Islamist extremism in particular… a more self-critical approach must be adopted by Muslims. Westophobic ideological influences and social insularity needs to be challenged within Muslim communities by Muslims themselves whilst simultaneously, an active drive towards creating an inclusive civic identity must be pursued by all members of society.” (my emphases)

So what is this shared sense of belonging?

The Renaissance author and Anglican priest John Donne famously wrote in 1624:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.(1)

The Apostle Paul, writing in his first epistle to the Corinthians, on human worth, likened the worldwide body of Christians with the human body. All parts of the body are essential for the complete welfare of the whole. In the same way we all need each other and the loss of any part weakens us all: there should be no discord between us. He taught his followers that the members of the church should ‘have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together.’(2) The ‘body’ in this biblical context is translated from the Greek Soma, related to Sozo meaning ‘to heal, preserve, be made whole.’ We are not whole: we are wounded or spiritually impoverished if we are not a part of the greater body of faith in our community. We all need to feel that connectedness, that relationship. We need to find unity within the wide diversity of all our individual gifts. We all need each other and we all are special in the eyes of God.
Followers of the Baha’i faith see Earth as one country of which we are all citizens.(3) One of their guiding principles is that ‘the oneness of humanity is the fundamental spiritual and social truth shaping our age.’

Whatever our faith, or none, we can be guided by these truths.
This – as the Quilliam Foundation reminds us, is our responsibility.

This then had me musing a little more about our personal and corporate responsibilities.

Viktor Frankl once wrote that ‘Being human means being conscious and being responsible.’ He was writing about the very core of our being, our human conscience, and our personal integrity.
The state of being responsible is to be ‘liable to be called to account,’ or to render satisfaction, or to be answerable to someone for something. In his book To Heal a Fractured World The Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes at length on the ethics of our responsibilities. His theme is that ‘Life is God’s call to responsibility.’ While written from a Jewish perspective, his message is equally relevant to those of all other faiths or none. The Jewish ethics of responsibility can be summed up very simply. If someone is in any kind of need, help him. And this, he says, is the best answer he knows to the meaning of life, expressed in the Hebrew word simhah meaning the happiness we make by sharing. It is akin to the joy or ‘blessedness’ of the Christian who hungers and thirsts for justice and righteousness.

The twenty-first century philosopher and social commentator Aldous Huxley also recognized the essential role and responsibility of the individual in determining the events of the world. In a shift away from his early preoccupation with the mistakes of institution and state, he came to believe in later life that ‘the most overlooked cure for social problems is actually the improvement of the individual citizen, and that cultures are only expressions of the collective consciousness of their people.’(D. Sawyer, Aldous Huxley: A Biography, New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2002 p. 95, cited at http://www.itp.edu/about/aldous_huxley.php

Perhaps one of the greatest enemies of responsible behavior is to be found in the remoteness that often exists between cause and effect. It is so much easier not to have a conscience about our behavior where the consequences of our actions are not directly experienced. Someone speaking on the radio the other day about the horrors of child prostitution said we should all be screaming to have something done about it. But we carry on our daily lives as if nothing is wrong in the wider world.

We need to remind ourselves that inaction can be as irresponsible as inappropriate action. It can be important that we should take a stand. It is believed to have been said by Albert Einstein that‘The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.’

But one often has to be courageous to speak up about something that is important to us. It is not always easy to try to paddle against the tide. It is much easier to go with the flow. As Voltaire once remarked, ‘No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.’

Quilliam seeks to challenge what we think, and the way we think. It aims to generate creative, informed and inclusive discussions to counter the ideological underpinnings of terrorism, whilst simultaneously providing evidence-based recommendations to governments for related policy measures. I think it deserves our attention.

I suspect that much religious intolerance is born out of ignorance, with no real justification other than the fear that ignorance nurtures. Part of our responsibility demands that we recognize our prejudices and fears born out of ignorance and that as far as possible we keep ourselves informed of the important issues of the day, so that we are better equipped to play our part in discovering our shared sense of belonging and healing our wounded world.

Further resource:

http://www.masud.co.uk/ One of the Web's Leading and Original Resources for Traditional Islam since 1996

www.khudipakistan.com

Lots of relevant media articles at http://www.quilliamfoundation.org/media.html

1. John Donne seventeenth century English poet died 1631. Famous words of prose taken from the final lines of his 1624 Meditation 17, from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.
2. Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version, 1 Corinthians 12. 25,26.
3. From Baha’u’llah’s Revelation, as he enjoins his followers to develop a sense of world citizenship and a commitment to stewardship of the earth. From Faith in Conservation, 2003, p. 72.