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David Tacey The Spirituality Revolution: The emergence of contemporary spirituality:' 2004 by Banner-Routledge East Sussex BN3 2FA

This revolution involves a democratisation of the spirit. It is about individuals taking authority into their own hands, and refusing to be told what to think or believe. It is about personal autonomy and experimentation, with the use of direct experience of the world as a kind of laboratory of the spirit. There is a new desire to observe, create theories, and test these against the facts of our experience. We seem to e applying the scientific method to our spiritual lives. Not all this investigation is happy or profitable* and this is all the more reason why Public institutions must eventually take up a dialogue with popular spirituality. The spirituality revolution is also about finding the sacred everywhere, and not just where religious traditions have asked us to find it. Things previously considered worldly or even unholy are being invested with new spiritual significance, such as the body nature, the feminine, sexuality, and the physical! environment. p.4

This is not an escapist or otherworldly movement, but a direct political and philosophical challenge to traditional notions of sacredness and the holy. It therefore belongs to the long line of democratic revolutions, and is the spiritual counterpart to former and continuing revolutions In politics, society, law, race, education, and gender. It is a forward movement of civilisation, even though it is an advance that is paradoxically achieved by revisiting and reconnecting with the ancient past. p.5

In the same way that the New Age seeks to ape our spiritual future, so fundamentalism seeks to mimic our past. p.5

Spirituality seeks a sensitive , contemplative, transformative relationship with the sacred, and is able to sustain levels of uncertainty in its quest because respect for mystery Is paramount. Fundamentalism seeks certainty, fixed answers and absolutism, as a fearful response to the complexity of the world and to our vulnerability as creatures in a mysterious universe. Spirituality arises from love of and intimacy with the sacred, and fundamentalism arises from fear of and possession by the sacred. The choice between spirituality and fundamentalism is a choice between conscious intimacy and unconscious possession. p.11

Our institutions are troubled, since they are not in control of these floodwaters, and they worry that people will be carried away by them. They worry also about their own survival, since so much appears to be happening outside their boundaries and without their 'permission', Because they do not control this revolution, the faith Institutions can deem it heretical and dangerous and the knowledge institutions mad and regressive. p.17

It appears to the church to be wild feral, derailed. As one clergyman said to me, 'How can the churches get excited about the new spirituality if it is not Putting bums on church seats?' p.20

Our contemporary situation is full of ironies and paradoxes. Chief among these is that our secular society has given birth no a sense of the sacred, and yet our sacred traditions are failing to recognise the spiritual potential. p.20

Many of our emerging spiritual impulses and ideas are archaic, malformed, nascent or ugly. These longings have been buried for centuries, and many have acquired a 'Gothic' appearance. Some have reverted to archaisms of the Past and are premodern, uneducated and silly. p.24

The New Age movement is to some extent a parody of the Coming Age, and in this movement sue see the most nascent, literal and crude interpretations of the living spirit. However, we must not condemn the New Age movement, but strive to educate it beyond its crudity. We must not condemn the river because of the rubble and mess it is forced to carry. p.25

These ancient realities do nor emerge from the secular unconscious as pure spiritual contents, true they come tinged with our narcissism and power-drives, with impure motives and consumerist desires. p.25

Our responsibility is to find a new social language for this spirituality, as well as to define community outlets, goals, objectives and possibilities for this energy. The responsibility lies with the educated, the informed and the tolerant to show leadership in this held, and to grasp the meaning and opportunity of spirituality in our time. New languages, understandings and practices need to he Sought, so that 'spirituality' does not become another word for narcissism, fanaticism, or self-aggrandisement. When there is a rise in spiritual water, there must he a corresponding rise in public morality , social meaning and responsibility, otherwise we might remain the victims of a flooding rather than the emissaries of life-giving renewal. p.29

Here are some of the strongest and most fundamental criticisms that the present age has of the dogmatic structures of religions.
Religion is patriarchal and masculinist; it appears to be made by men to further their own power. It oppresses women and undermines their authority; represses the feminine element in men, and excludes the feminine dimension of the divine.
Religion is based on a pre-modern cosrnology and an archaic vision of reality that can no longer he believed. Its God is externalist and interventionist, inhabiting a distant metaphysical space and performing actions that are no more credible to us today than the thunderbolt temper-tantrums of Zeus or Jupiter upon Mt Olympus.
Religion is based on a conception of spirit that is supernatural, Spirit is conceived as an outside agency that works miracles and wonders with a 'kingdom' in another reality. It seems wholly Implausible and unattractive to modern understanding .
Religion is otherworldly and transcendentalist. It does not have enough to say about the experience of the sacred in creation. It does not teach us how to live harmoniously with nature but to have power and 'dominion' over the earth. In our time of ecological crisis, what can a human-centred religion contribute to the survival of the planet?
Religion seeks perfection as its goal, but the contemporary era has found perfection to be unrealistic, dangerous)y one-sided and even anti-life. Instead, our time seeks 'wholeness' as its goal, an altogether more complex and paradoxical conception, but one which seems to be in accord with our most basic and spiritual impulses.
Religion is dualistic and instructs the spirit to triumph over the body and its vital desires, but new spirituality seeks to bring spirit and body, sacredness and sexuality, together in a redemptive experience of the totality and mystery of life'
Religion is hierarchical and elitist. It rules from above, and excludes the voice of the people and democratic understanding Religion belongs to a former era in which spiritual authority was invested in authority figures, priests, bishops, clergy, and people freely gave authority to such figures. Now we want to own such authority for ourselves, and for two reasons: the inner authority of conscience and spirit is compelling, and people no longer trust old authority figures.
Religion is dogmatic and external to our lives. It imposes laws and rules upon us, without enquiring into the nature of the self that it is transforming. It does not offer a psychology or pathway by which the individual can be transformed, but simply demands that the person conform to devotional practices.
Religion imposes the 'big story' of theology upon our experience, without exploring the 'little stories' of our individual biographies, which might give theology a foothold in our lives. Religion is ' rejected not because a person does not believe, but because he or she is not believed. If religion expanded its horizons to include the spirituality of individuals, it might be renewed by such expansion, and individuals would not feel excluded, pushed out or irrelevant.
Religion is fused with the social establishment and too identified with business, government and commercial enterprise to be able 'to offer a critique of this world. It does not allow for the true radicality of the spirit, which is always 'at odds' with worldliness. Religion does not provide enough challenge to society, but simply reinforces and supports its basic values and, as such, it cannot represent the life of the spirit, pp.36-37

Such commercial industries thrive on the appearance of individualistic, do- It-yourself, free-floating spirituality, and see the demise of collective faith as a business opportunity. Many people fee! that they have liberated themselves from the control of the churches, but some have placed themselves in the hands of the commercial interests that patrol the new spiritual waters like sharks in the sea. Our free-floating and formless spiritual hunger can be ruthlessly exploited and manipulated by those who see the crisis as an opportunity to make money and win prestige. p.40

If the old sacredness was distant, aloof and a standard of moral perfection against which we judged ourselves to be unworthy, the new sacredness is embodied in our physicality and vital lives, an incarnational presence that asks us nor to be perfect but to strive for wholeness and integration. p.79

The old Pattern of repressing the self no longer appeals to modern taste. What does appeal is dropping the ego and following the true self, in which truth may reside. This may seem like a minor adjustment, but it actually makes a world of difference. The old pattern !eaves the believer without psychological resources and the psyche or soul. When the self is ignored in the name of religion, we are left without internal development or foundation, making us all the more dependent on outside authority for guidance and support; which is why a controlling church once favoured this dispensation. But people understandably no longer want to hand over their authority to external forces that may be unreliable or misguided. They do not want to make 'leaps of faith' into the blind unknown, because they want to see what they are doing. p.83

Those with negative experiences or memories are most likely to find their spiritual meaning, if they search for it at all, in exotic, alien or non-Western traditions. Buddhism may he flourishinq in the West precisely because there are no footfalls or echoes that are able to lead people back to where they began, and to know their inherited faith for the first time. p.111

Religion has placed itself in an invidious position by representing God as an antagonist to the bodily vitalities, and in styling the creator Is a stern judge who disproves of our instincts. p.115

am not sure if thIs philosopher sees the irony of claiming that Christianity, a religion based on the mystery of resurrection, will never 'rise again'. But if it does rise, it will clearly not be in the old form, but in a new form, closer perhaps to historical Buddhism. p.132

I armsure, for instance, that the new expressions of the sacred will be more holistic and less perfectionist and persecutory; this is what one can discern from the hints and clues in the new sciences, arts and philosophy. p.158

In the mystical model I am outlining, the priest is the figure who transforms our lives and sufferings by reconnecting-'binding hack' (religio) our iives and sufferings to a deeper, more profound presence. In the mystical vision, God is close at hand but hard to discern, and the priestly function is to bring God closer, or to bring us closer to God. The New Age says that God's proximity to us renders irrelevant the roe- of the priest or minister as 'middleman' but this is not so. The presence has to he seen clearly, discerned and acted upon. p.169

God may he behind the so-called demise of religion. God may be saying to us, 'I will take away the traditional vessels from you, and see what creativity might arise. I will break the religious clichés and images, and see whether something new can he fashioned from the direct experience of spiritual life' . God is serious about spiritual mission, and serious enough to take action if religion appears to be falling short of the mark. God might be saving 'I don't want blind belief, or worshippers who are content with a mere rumour of my existence. I want people to experience me in their hearts and lives; I want transformation, conversion and encounter' . The spirit of God wants to lead us on, and yet our attachment to old forms may be preventing this spirit from being realised. p.192

The phrase 'the ecology of the spirit' is brilliantly descriptive and sums up the situation well. Former!y, we were not aware of this ecology, as spiritual things were taken for qranted when they were in good order. When life is not broken, we do not need to understand how it works. But when life is radically fragmented, we have to learn how to repair it, and suddenly this strange new ecology emerges before us as something we have to attend to. p.220