The Challenge of Finding Spiritual Connection in a Disconnected World.
As I recently reflected on my experience of returning from missionary life in Madagascar, one feeling in particular stands out: disconnection. I don’t mean not having anyone to talk to or spend time with per se – there were always people to hang out with as a student; I mean not having the spiritual connection that I had while working in a purposeful, highly focused missionary environment.
When I returned home, the mantle of missionary slid from my shoulders and I was back to normal life again, resuming my personal journey outside the parameters of a demanding but highly rewarding spiritually-oriented challenge. Some form of disconnection might have been inevitable.
Questions to Answer
I had been raised to believe that the next step after a mission was marriage, but my earliest relationships post-mission were more like escapes from the big questions in front of me than they were serious steps towards settling down with a wife. I had questions to answer outside of the missionary context. How, for example, would I resolve my spiritual disconnection in the real world? After all, several people I’d spoken with who had returned from missions decades before were adamant that their missions were the most spiritual times of their lives. Nothing since could hold a candle to their golden missionary years. Did the spiritual trajectory really have to be downhill from here?
The Superfluousness of God
If I received little by way of answers to my relative spiritual disconnection at church, then I received even less at university. Much of what I heard from lecturers in social science classes was antithetical to what I’d learned, and had been teaching, in Madagascar; it wasn’t the individual who had the biggest say over their lives but the system.
Even collectivist philosophies like Communitarianism (espoused by Amitai Etzioni), which focus on how community members can meet each others’ needs, were dismissed as naïve, idealistic and altogether undesirable by left-leaning academics. For them, the responsibility for improving people’s outcomes and lives as a whole lay primarily with the state. For reasons that are fairly self-evident, ideas of spirituality and connection with divinity in the individual’s plight for personal growth and improved outcomes were a million miles away from my academic milieu. Materialism was the only game in town.
When I would later read Dostoevsky’s astute take on atheistic socialism in The Brothers Karamazov years later, I was reminded of this materialistic mindset:
“For socialism is not merely the labour question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism today, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to Heaven from Earth but to set up Heaven on earth.”
God, in the world I had returned to, seemed to be surplus to requirements and I had to make sense of that in relation to my own life.
“All of this could be yours, Tom!”
Besides the aversion to the divine within life at university, I also encountered the usual distractions and temptations faced by young people. I remember one chap who had decided to leave the church before passionately imploring me to do the same. As we stood on a hill overlooking the city of Leeds, he pointed to it and theatrically declared, “All of this could be yours, Tom!” All I had to do to claim it, apparently, was give up my faith and go the so-called way of the world.
It was quite a hilarious encounter in some respects, made more so by this fellow’s passion in selling me his vision of my life unfettered by the constricts of faith. I couldn’t help but notice a more serious parallel in the incident, however, as his temptation reminded me of one of the devil’s temptations of Christ in the New Testament. Of course, he wasn’t the devil and I wasn’t Christ, but the core message was the same: forsake the spiritual to have more of the physical. I didn’t succumb to his temptation, but the way of the world was tempting enough in its own right.
Empathy with the Wanderer
In spite of my experiences as a missionary, I had to confront my own disconnection from divinity and self as a young man. I’ve also since seen the nature and effects of this disconnection in the lives of many other young people.
How might people choose to deal with this disconnection? For some, it might be the excitement (or anaesthetic) of hedonistic living, manifested through relentless pleasure-seeking, which often obscures the inevitable descent to nihilism. For others, the yearning for spiritual connection might lead to dabbling with black magic and the occult. Many find a home in extreme political ideologies, both on the left and the right. Each of these things can lead to very negative outcomes for the wanderer.
Of course, many do find positive ways to connect with divinity and their inner-selves, but this is by no means a sure thing in societies that have God-shaped holes.
“You can take away a man's gods, but only to give him others in return.” – Carl Jung
Learning and Relearning through Reflection
It has been enlightening for me to remember and reflect on my values journey since I launched the Real Clear Values podcast. I’ve learned and in some cases relearned lessons picked up along the way. One thing that has particularly struck me through my recollections is just how difficult it can be to live in harmony with values that support continuous spiritual connection in a world full of distractions, temptations and challenges. And that reaffirms why I do the work I do in empowering others to create lives of purpose, meaning and fulfilment in pursuing their version of sustainable success, which, for me, is the only game in town.
If you’d like to know more about my mentoring service in relation to your own values journey then drop me a line: tom@3stewardships.com.