Pioneers of Modern Spirituality

I found this both inspiring and frustrating. Inspiring to read of people understanding some of the cultural trends of their time and seeking to respond in a way that enables Christians to pray and work in a way that has integrity. My frustration is that the figures chosen clearly inhabited a milieu socially and culturally that is so alien. I don't mean that it is 70 or more years ago but that it is clearly that they come from 'moneyed' backgrounds; the kinds of financial struggles and working lives that characterise my family background are not in view. Though to be fair, at least a couple of the pioneers are somewhat attentive to this. That said, a theme coming through was that of being on the edge of the institutional church and another was of believing ordinary people are worthy of God and capable of relating to God mystically/contemplatively. There is also a theme of expecting discipleship (to use a term largely not used by them /the writers) to be exercised in the everyday and in attention to the poor and marginalised. These are helpful themes to take forward into a post modern age. I'm asking myself whether these pioneers have anything to say to those of us entering the anthropocene -that is the age of climate boiling and environmental collapse. I think that there are some things to take away from them that orient us helpfully. The willingness to attend to and even embrace the marginal, to be suspicious of the vested interests represented by the institutional churches, to recognise that discipleship needs to be whole life in scope. It is also important that they point to an activism rooted in cultivating a love of God and security in God's love. I found Dearmer's appreciation of the aesthetic also personally affirming though I would want to ask questions about how constrained this was, in his case, by an Anglo-Catholicism that might do well to critique its own assumptions about liturgy in the light of social and cultural change. Dearmer's proto-fairtrade approach is commendable -it would be good to add sustainability to his 'fairtrade' liturgical considerations. It would also be good, I think, to reconsider liturgical events in the light of the demands of sustainability and also of the need to recognise and value the natural world and ecosystems that sustain us. Can we not begin to conduct our collective worship in ways that encourage us to embrace creation and live in harmony with it? Will we not need to help people to navigate guilt, complicity, responsibility and frustration? And just as consciousness of sin informed so much of medieval and -in a different way- reformation spirituality, will we not need to respond at the level of catechesis, spiritual accompaniment and liturgy to this recognition of the socially reproduced dimension of wrong that the word 'complicity' serves as a placemarker for? Corporate sin and the way we are suborned or recruited into it -sometimes/often even before we can consent or not to it, will need to be something we can support people in navigating.

I found this in the concluding chapter to be helpful to consider further. "...we Christians are not so good at teaching people how to practise faith, by which I mean, prayer and contemplation, and the work in the world - love of neighbour, and commitment to community and justice - that flows from that foundation of prayer and adopting a rule of life" So, what kind of catechesis does this imply in the Anthropocene?