Creating spiritual health in 2022

I fell away from writing this blog early in the pandemic, mainly because it felt like a time when there was so much to say, it couldn’t possibly be a time to say it. No doubt part of this was the wish to be in some way *right*, and it was a time when that felt impossible. What I’ve understood better since then, is that ‘being right’ is a fool’s game, and it’s much more helpful to not know in public.

So I’m going to try doing that a bit — to write not in the hope of sharing new and solid wisdom, and staying silent when I have none to offer, but to show what I see and what I’m wondering, in the hope that the act of writing helps to coalesce my thoughts a little, and that the act of sharing enables others either to benefit, or to help me see more clearly.

Here in the early days of 2022, at the end of the magical bonus week before everyone’s quite woken up, looking ahead through the year feels as murky as the last two have. But now I am trying to remember that it’s like driving through fog — seeing a few feet in front of you is enough (and trying to put the headlights on full beam can mean you see less, not more), but it’s important to have the sense that you’re pointed broadly in the right direction.

Through much of the last couple of years, the sources of that sense of direction have been hard to come by. I’ve only been in person to my church half a dozen times, and with mask-wearing and no singing, not so much opportunity to chat, and many beloved church-mates not able to be there in person, it’s felt like less than I’ve needed. I’ve been wildly grateful for the Zoom version at many points in the pandemic, but it’s rare that more screen time is what I need on a Sunday morning. Aside from my congregation, many other usual sources of grounding and inspiration have been closed off, or harder to access — nature, travel, friendship, solitude, the stimulation of new experience. Many new ones have arisen too, particularly new online communities and practices — from a global co-coaching group of women leaders, to online spaces of silence, to meditation classes, to groups studying the Bible and Buddhist texts, to one-on-one guidance, to courses and discussion groups. Different things have risen and faded, as the shape and intensity of the outside context changed. In spring 2020, a group I had been meeting with monthly for a couple of years had a phase of meeting at the start and end of each week; by the summer we’d stopped meeting altogether.

I feel very hungry for in-person gatherings for spiritual nourishment, and these have understandably been few and far between — and it’s unclear when they’ll next be wise to do. And my hunger for the nourishment of nature has brought me to move out of the city I’ve lived in for nearly 20 years, so that I can have more trees and less traffic.

I’m conscious of the impact on many leaders — including ministers — who have not had the usual opportunities to stay spiritually healthy. There has been a forced adaptation, an evolutionary pressure, and no collective wisdom (that I’ve come across) on how to find the way to spiritual health when most of the usual sources have been instantly removed. I’m not sure we know yet the impact of relying on leaders who have had the ground knocked out from under their feet as much as everyone else has. I’ve felt envious of those with a solid prayer or meditation practice — and I suspect those are the people who will be most reliably grounded when the fog of crisis lifts.

My thoughts turn very often to the impact on our society of having our spiritual health suffer these two years in order to prioritise our physical health. I’m not saying that there have been wrong choices in lockdown rules and all the rest — protecting our physical health and our ability to provide reliable health care for everyone has seemed essential — but it feels important to acknowledge the consequences, not just of our lives being constrained and disconnected by protective measures, but by us all living through such loss, grief, uncertainty, division, confusion, and loneliness. So many people have been prompted to look at their lives anew, as their normality has been shaken up and turned upside down, but the spaces to chew over their revelations with others have been rare.

Of course, I am a zealot for church, and so I see the need and responsibility of spiritual communities of all sorts, including the Unitarian movement, to listen in to what people need right now, and offer out a hand, to make ourselves visible and welcoming to those emerging from the daze of pandemic. If the need for offering people the path to spiritual health is greater than ever, then it’s clear that this isn’t a time of going back to normal. At the same time, this is hard; the times I have been back to my church in person, I’ve felt real heartbreak for what I miss about it from the beforetimes. I *want* to go back to normal, even though I know there are good reasons for the changes. And for most congregations, normal already wasn’t working, if ‘working’ means to be visible and welcoming to a broad population.

We know that most Unitarian chapels have more empty seats than occupied ones. Helpful for social distancing, but not so much for the collective spiritual health of our communities. Many Unitarians will tell you — sometimes proudly, sometimes ruefully — that ‘we don’t evangelise’. It is in our core essence that we don’t hold to doctrine, or insist on a certain set of beliefs or practices, and so of course we won’t do *that* type of evangelism. But it seems to me that we can be evangelical about what we do stand for. We can show people the value that we find in community, in service, in spiritual exploration, in sharing what our conscience tells us, in asking life’s big questions together with people who might have a very different perspective, and in valuing the learning that difference brings.

Looking into 2022, knowing that the risk to our physical health is far from over, especially to those who are already vulnerable, it feels to me that our spiritual health can’t be neglected any longer. What might it look like for a collective, nationwide prioritisation of our spiritual health?

I don’t mean that this should just be for the fairly small proportion of the British population who already see themselves as religious — my view is that spiritual needs are universal, whether people would use the term ‘spiritual’ or not. As a neuroscience graduate, I’ve grappled with the idea of ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ a fair amount. I know there isn’t an anatomical or physiological soul we can point at or measure. But I do have a sense of when my spirit is healthy and when it isn’t. I can put on my neuroscience hat and describe it in terms of brain chemistry — serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin. These are accurate and useful ways to describe what’s going on inside me, but they’re also not the only ways, and they’re far from complete. Music, poetry, art, singing, prayer, nature, joyful gatherings — it seems infantile or robotic to describe my experience of these only through the language of science, and similarly the bleaker experiences. Medications that shift our brain chemistry are useful and often lifesaving, but in my view it would be foolish to say we’ve really solved any problems just because we can prescribe antidepressants to people who are suffering.

So when I talk about spiritual health, I’m not talking in the language that I would have used in my previous career in health care. I don’t think it helps to try to reduce our spiritual needs into the language of science and medicine, or even to see a lack of spiritual health as a problem that needs to be fixed by a neat solution. The transactional lens may not serve us.

I’m looking more through a cultural lens. How do the systems and patterns and practices that we live among serve our spirit? How might we make them serve it better?

This could sound human-centric, or self-centred, but the way I understand it, being spiritually healthy inevitably means that we are more likely to take care of other people and the more-than-human world better too — so developing a culture that helps communities to be spiritually healthy is to create a generative system, enabling humans to serve the wider circles of life from a place of spiritual health. So much in our culture is the other way around — we are encouraged to take things for our own individual pleasure that harm people and the environment, usually indirectly enough not to cause us distaste while we’re doing so.

My hope as I look into the fog of 2022 is that by prioritising our collective spiritual health, we can do our bit to tip the scales of our culture in the other direction.