God's been mugged

I quite like Giles Fraser's writing, it's usually pithy and well aimed. It's good to see him looking at the recent televisial forays into spirituality and contrasting the monastery with other offerings. However, I do wonder whether he's not a little too overgeneralising here. "The idea that spirituality represents some innate human aspiration to the ultimate is a piece of modern candyfloss that neatly accords with the desire to participate in religion without any of the demands it makes upon you. It's religion transformed into esoteric self-help for those 'with something missing' - could it be a Porsche, could it be a new man, could it be God?"
It is true that there are signs that, for a lot of people, there is something of this mixed up in it all sometimes apparently in large doses. However, I think that I would want to save some space for the possibility that quite a lot of seemingly 'shallow' spiritual seekers along the lines Fraser lampoons here are in fact quite in earnest, it's just that [a] they don't have access through their life experience thus far to a richer repertoire of signs symbols and pathways to develop the stirrings of spirit or Spirit within and [b] what they often see of the church and Christians simply does not mesh with the little that they can somehow sense within.

Our mission, should we wish to undertake it, is to get alongside these people and to co-discern the deeper search, hunger or thirst within which may be being overlaid with grasping at things which won't work, can't work.

In my MA on life coaching and spiritual direction, one of the impressive things that came out of the life coaching end of it was the experience of coaches that people really were looking for something that satisfies the soul and not just the pocket or the wardrobe.. IF there is a God-shaped hole' in human life we should expect to see people flailing around and misconstruing it. The point is not to mock it and write it off but to challenge it to go deeper ...
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