Back After a Meeting on Exploring Reformed Spiritualities

View from my bedroom Window

I am back from a Meeting called Exploring Reformed Spiritualities. This was held at Westminster College Cambridge and organised by the United Reformed Church Retreat Network. Yes in any other denomination they would have the badge the spirituality network but lets be honest Reformed folk don't do spirituality at least it fits into the same taboo box as "evangelism" and " Christian Education", so to actually have a meeting discussing it was pretty risky. To give you some idea from the whole of the URC exactly 21 people signed up and at least three of those could not make the whole meeting.

The other thing is I have called it a "Meeting", there is really no other word for it. It was not a conference, there were papers given, exactly two in three days. It was not a retreat, maybe an "Exploration" would be better but it was an exploration of the spiritualities we ourselves owned, the spiritualities of Reformed Christians, done by getting a group of willing volunteers into a room and trying to encourage them to talk about it. Lets say this was not easy. About possibly abour four or five of us would have started this exploration for themselves prior to the meeting, the rest were made up of two groups: those who were URC members and spiritual directors and those who were intrigued by the title.

I was struck recently by a comment in a book I was reading which talking about sixteenth century Reformed Worship, where they said Zwingli was probably the finest musician of the the Reformer. Now regardless of how poor the competition was, the thing that is noticeable about worship in Zurich under Zwingli is the complete absence of music. Something that Calvin in Genevan does not do. David Martin talks about an ambiguity towards the aesthetic, but this is stronger, this is almost a deliberate turning away from the aesthetic, a denial of the passions of the self, a fear of them running in ways that you can't control. The Reformed God is wild, and our relationship to him/her is only ever talkable about in the most distance of language/form. To approach more closely is to invite escastasy that is beyond what we are capable of containing. We are a plain folk who talk about plain things not because the fire is not there, but because that is what we can talk about, the rest is beyond. To start to explore spirituality is therefore risky and difficult.

The leader was led by Mark Argent(I suspect that website is dated) and his style of leading it was very much about consensus and mutuality in decision process. In some ways I was prepared for it I think better than some as I had followed the development of group theory from Bion, it uses the group itself as a method to explore group dynamics.This knowledge gave me enough space to trust the process and to engage with it, but it was not a comfortable process for many/any who were there. The sessions people seemed at most at ease in were the two led by David Cornick and Sarah Moore. The delving into ourselves and trying to give voice to the visceral is not something the Reformed normally do readily, I suspect for the reason given above.

I in a sense did not have problems with getting in touch with them, they were all too evident on the surface. I simply had in someways been under prepared emotionally. Over a decade ago I did TLS at Westminster, I was both in an emotionally difficult place and I also was coping with a huge stressor at the time. A critical support during this time was Rev David A L Jenkins who was at the time the director of TLS. I think he was the one person I talked with at depth about the situation that was not intimately connected with it. That says a huge amount about the sense I felt of his trustworthiness. There were so many layers of distrust that I was struggling to handle, that the fact I openned to anyone is somewhat surprising. What I had not expected was that I must have "left" quite a bit of emotion behind from the conversations we had. That emotion was reconnected by my return to Westminster College.

I do not know whether the fact I went too deeply into silence in the first session was related to this. I suspect it was highly likely I would have done anyway after being quite tired before I set out and then having quite an involved journey. I am aware that many people don't think you can go "too deeply into silence". By "too deeply" I mean that I had entered the silence to the extent I could not participate or sustain a normal conversation for the rest of the evening. It may have sounded like tiredness, but the pull of silence was so strong I found that in order to participate in even the simplest of exchanges I had to make a deliberate effort to focus my attention within the physical. Silence had become a drug that distanced me from the present reality, I think technically it was disassociative. I tackled this the only way I could do at the time (I had left some of the tools for this grounding at home) and started drawing during sessions. The drawings were all based on irregular but repetitive shapes. The repetition being as important as the actual presentation. As a rule they were not abstract except the last which was actually the only one I was trying to represent something. However I think this meant I started to respond creatively to the situation.


At another level I was ever the ethnographer, my brain was connecting observation with theory and other situations. Some I shared, others I need to process more deeply. I wonder how much the acceptance of the approach initially depended on people not wanting to disagree and be isolated especially with a group that did not know each other and with the feeling that as Mark was leading that we should be open to his suggestions. How much some of the irritated response was down to personality and the preference for formal structure. Why no-one picked up Mark's suggestion of Lectio Divina, which is not actually totally alien to the Reformed tradition, as I believe that the very slow reading of the Bible where a single verse or verses were dwelt on was quite a popular religious practice amongst Welsh Chapels. Why was the reading of whole chapters of John's gospel so much appreciated as part of worship? Was it solely a dissent Reformed spirituality or did it have a dominant form. However I am pretty sure that when I come to write my own autoethnography it will be recognisably a Reformed Piety.

Another oddity was how easily I went to the pub with people. This is unusual for me, the only other group I can think of that I have naturally done it with is Pilgrim Adventure (now Journeyings) and there everyone did, partly to stay warm in an evening so as to be able to get to sleep in a tent. This time only a minority did and yet I was part of that minority. No idea but it happened almost by accident.

I think as you can see I have a lot of stuff to think about and digest, both at a personal level and also for thesis.