The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-dayUnderhill, Evelyn
Religion
The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day
Underhill, Evelyn
Spiritual life
life.
Our aim should be to induce, in a wholesome way, that sense of the
spiritual in daily experience which the old writers called the
consciousness of the of God. The monastic training in spirituality,
slowly evolved under pressure of experience, nearly always did this. It
has bequeathed to us a funded wisdom of which we make little use; and
this, reinterpreted in the light of psychological knowledge, might I
believe cast a great deal of light on the fundamental problems of
spiritual education. We could if we chose take many hints from it, as
regards the disciplining of the attention, the correct use of
suggestion, the teaching of meditation, the sublimation and direction to
an assigned end of the natural impulse to reverie; above all, the
education of the moral life. For character-building as understood by
these old specialists was the most practical of arts.
Further, in all this teaching, those inward activities and responses to
which we can give generally the name of prayer, and those outward
activities and deeds of service to which we can give the name of work,
ought to be trained together and never dissociated. They are the
complementary and balanced expressions of one spirit of life: and must
be given together, under appropriately simple forms. Concrete
application of the child's energies, aptitudes and ideals must from the
first run side by side with the teaching of principle. Young people
therefore should constantly be encouraged to face as practical and
interesting facts, not as formulae, those reactions to eternal and
this-world reality which used to be called our duty to God and our
neighbour; and do concrete things proper to a real citizen of a really
theocratic world. They must be made to realize that nothing is truly
ours until we have expressed it in our deeds. Moreover, these deeds
should not be easy. They should involve effort and self-sacrifice; and
also some drudgery, which is worse. The spiritual life is only valued by
those on whom it makes genuine demands. Almost any kind of service will
do, which calls for attention, time and hard work. Though voluntary, it
must not be casual: but, once undertaken, should be regarded as an
honourable obligation. The Boy Scouts and Girl Guides have shown us how
wide a choice of possible "good deeds" is offered by every community:
and such a banding together of young people for corporate acts of
service is strongly to be commended. It encourages unselfish
comradeship, satisfies that "gang-instinct" which is a well-known
character of adolescence, and should leave no opening for
self-consciousness, rivalry, and vanity in well-doing or in abnegation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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