From the English Victorian novelist George Eliot :

We walk about “well-wadded with stupidity. … If we had but keen vision and feeling … it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence”.

A very happy New Year to all our readers.

Watching the way the old time religions try to resolve their antagonisms with each other is always interesting. They usually begin by invoking a common deity and a shared interest in a united front against the forces of atheism (read “evil”) in the world.

This approach is never sustainable, however, since much of the world’s terrorism is fuelled by adherents of those same religions. It’s an internal problem, not an external one.

It’s true that many terrorists are not “religious” at all but psychopaths looking for a cause that will allow them to express their blind anger and vent their blood lust. But, if a faith harbours such animosity that it acts as a magnet for such people, it has only itself to blame.

The worst cases of this religious hatred are to be found in the three Abrahamic religions : Judaism, Roman Christianity and Islam. Why should that be?

They are all “book” religions, depending on “revelatory” texts to underscore their beliefs. These beliefs, of course, are a moveable feast which feed off contradictions in the texts to support just about anything they want. Protestant Christians are said to have over 20,000 denominations. Atheists, not unreasonably, claim that this invalidates them altogether.

The Abrahamic faiths also come from that hotbed of incendiary politics, the Middle East, where religious faith has been ruthlessly politicized for two or more millennia.

In the West now, a sharp reaction to the Abrahamic frenzy has been discernible for some time. People are turning away in droves from the old, barnacle-encrusted religions towards a more “modern” spirituality. That is to say, to practices which emphasize direct experience of spiritual reality, without the intervention of a “church”, although it may involve a “guru”, or teacher.

If this is the way the world — or a significant part of it — is going, why not use that trend to mitigate the failures of the old system, without seeming to attack it.

If every church or faith, reiterated its support for a universal spirituality that transcended the cultural forms that dominate individual religions, their members would not find themselves in the awkward position of having to defend a set of old rules and rituals against another set of old rules and rituals, thus in a bound removing the sparking points of religious conflict.

In other words, recognize a global mysticism above religion and its institutions.

It could be done, but it would take a lot of will and sacrifice on the part of religious leaders who are already inculcated with the need to hold their own “turf”.

Halloween, which falls today, October 31, is all things to all men. Celebrated as a time when the veil between the spiritual and the earthly realms can be lifted.

It is enacted in many parts of the Western world, often as a jokey event, most commonly in the United States, Canada, the UK, and Ireland.

The term Halloween, and its older spelling Hallowe’en, is shortened from All-Hallows-Eve, as it is the evening before “All Hallows’ Day” (also known as “All Saints’ Day”).

In some places, Halloween is more often associated with the occult. Many European cultural traditions hold that Halloween is one of the liminal times of the year when the spiritual world can make contact with the physical and when magic is most potent.

It coincides with the Celtic festival of Samhain when the veil between the spiritual and the earthly realms could be lifted. Once it was a floating festival with the actual date depending on astronomical variations. It’s said to be a good time for facing up to whatever you are afraid of.

At this time of post-millennial ferment, it is perhaps legitimate to ask whether contemplatives retain any relevance in our increasingly secular society. Simone Weil thought that a different kind of contemplation is needed today: “…a fresh spring, an invention…almost equivalent to a new revelation of the universe and human destiny.” She insisted on “the miraculous newness “ required of today’s contemplative.

However remote these quiet mystics may seem to us, the modern world needs contemplatives precisely because they refresh and renew the tired old dogmas into which all religions and worldviews lapse over time. Forms of words in ancient liturgies take on a nostalgic potency like some old song, which can obscure the need for mystical, contemplative experience.

Young people in particular are turning away from traditional worship because it seems to offer them no escape from the tyranny of a wholly man-made world. By contrast, the contemplative is the nearest we have to a human bridge between that part of us which creates the fragile infrastructure of our lives, and the higher self which, according to the mystics, lives close to the divine.

Throughout history, the greatest of the contemplatives have been at odds with the Church and other authorities. St John of the Cross was imprisoned because of his support for St Teresa of Avila and her reformed Carmelite order. St Teresa herself, was in constant hot water for her simple-hearted espousal of the poverty of St Francis. The order she created was known as the Bare-footed Carmelites and was deemed by authority to be a step too far, whether shod or not. Both were subsequently canonized, posthumously, of course, and John was made a Doctor of the Church. During their lifetimes, they would undoubtedly have been acutely embarrassed by such august recognition.

In the frantic, modern world we need contemplatives more than ever, even if most of us are not aware of their existence.