A Closer Look at New Age Spirituality

This book by Rob Frost was one of those I read with a classic almost-ex-evangelical mixture of cynical apprehension of heresy and roiling curiosity. I've borrowed it from the communal research & training library at work, and if the subtitle is anything to go by, it will live up to this mixture of expectations - as holism and psychotherapy I have no doubt Christianity is fully compatible with the ultimate findings of, but - ley lines? astrology?

   It's interesting from the offset to note that this book's author was in the same position as me when he began researching it. He wanted to debunk all the 'New Age nonsense', as is so much the trend in contemporary christian circles, but as he dug he found more and more commonality, potential insight into things like our relationship with nature and our own minds and bodies (which Christendom-form christianity often wasn't very good at talking about in healthily educational ways), and challenges of basic phenomenology that New Age mysticism is, in many ways, better-equipped to deal with than 'correct-theology' obsessed forms of modern church thinking, and therefore better able to connect with any persons or ideas outside of these modes and communities.

   There's a lot in this book and I won't pretend to bother summarizing it. I'm still on the whole retaining a broad sense of caution in approaching new ideas, but I've never been a shirker from them, and this has been no different - in many ways from reading this book I feel much more affirmed in the core sturdy reality of Christianity to respond to things we may perceive to be alien, but - do we really need to then perceive them as hostile? Or - is this going too far? - incompatible? At root, New Age thinking believes in the possibility of a set of practices and attitudes which can unite humanity and bring about a superior form of human civilisation. This potted summary, were it to contain a mention of Jesus, would also pretty perfectly describe Christianity's God-intended secular impacts. So whatever you may think about it all (assuming here that most of the readers of my blogposts about Christian books are Christian, sorry if you're not, God loves you btw), I'd recommend this book to any persons of faith who suspect grains of truth may exist anywhere else, to be discovered and brought into the larger whole which the gospel forms the core to. Because I certainly believe they do.

I Can Fly

This book by Fifi Kuo is just beautiful. I've bought it as a Christmas present for my very new niece Lily and, because it's very short, managed to read it before wrapping it. Replete with washy pastel illustrations that shiver with life & cold, the story follows a baby emperor penguin as they discover (much to their chagrin) that unlike most other birds they can see - they can't fly. But then... they learn to swim. A life-affirming, broad-strokes tilt at that elusive monster - the perfect children's book. If only Julia Donaldson and Lynley Dodd were out of the game, this one would be in with a shout.

Journal of the Unknown Prophet

This book, despite its title, is by someone known to be called Wendy Alec - and it claims to be a series of revelations pertaining to various End-Times matters during a visitation of Jesus Christ to her over a ten-day period in November 1999.

   If that sounds to you like mumbo-jumbo, let me assure you that my initial reaction was also of the same grotesque cynicism that characterises, quite hegemonically, our twenty-first century's general sociocultural attitudes toward "the prophetic" - which is deeply & systematically misunderstood; people know it has some general mystical or supernatural component but since the typical individuals' apprehensions of covenant relations with God are so corroded the true nature of prophetic ministry is completely unheeded and people seem to just presume it's a weird magical means of predicting future events. Or summat. 

   Indeed - for want of a better place to tell this story, I'm going to recount here something that happened to me over summer. I had the privilege of being part of my work's team sent to the New Wine festival, and on the penultimate night of my week or so there, I met a man in the bar area (whose name, to my fault, I can't remember) whose claim, during our introduction, was that he held and exercised a prophetic ministry. And despite having grown up in Christian environs - this was not a claim I'd ever heard anyone make. Ever. I was skeptical, and to be completely honest somewhat tipsy, and given the range of other things going on in my heart at the time in a very strange place spiritually - and so I met this claim with something akin to derision; but we talked at some length of what he meant by it, what this looked like for him on a day-to-day basis with his relations with and ministering to people inside and outside of Christian communities, and after the bar had closed and my colleagues gone to bed I found I was still talking to this man - felt in myself deeply convicted by God of my own ignorant arrogances of which I'm still trying to repent and decolonize: we prayed together around midnight as he tried to wrap things up to head back to his tent and he, during that prayer - said things about me that even I didn't know I knew to be true, asked God for things that I didn't realise I needed; ending on a simple request that through the providence of the Holy Spirit that I would be given "some connection" that would help me make sense of my walk with Christ at that stage. And nothing immediately happened, of course. But looking back - thinking through - this "connection" I think was something God had already been abundantly showering me in: to come to know, fully, humbly and joyously, the realities of Jesus's work made real through his accomplishment on the cross and re-enacted by his stumbling followers ever since - I've been blessed enough to grow up in a Christian household, and a very good church, and to now have a job I love literally studying the ongoing work of the Church in the UK to see how it can better see God at work and follow his will better - but have always felt in my heart somewhat spiritually bereft, homeless, driftwood-like: even having in the September of the autumn before the winter during which I started this blog I'd had, at a UCCF weekend retreat, feeling particularly keenly this alienation from the "felt" realities of my faith which seemed to flow so freely among my peers and worrying what was going wrong - I walked off alone into a field and threw my complaints tearfully toward Heaven; "why does this all seem so right to my mind yet feel so empty in my heart? why aren't you letting me feel whatever it is my brothers and sisters seem to be feeling when they thrust hands in the air during moments of ecstatic worship, or their voices break during prayers, or why do you even let me think these things and feel the nagging doubts that I am maybe surrounded by fakers, by superficial christian spirituality, or if it is real WHY are you letting me not feel it?" and during an earlier worship service on that same weekend we'd been prompted by someone at the front to think of our gifts, our callings, and I'd had no idea - the only thing I knew I was really good at was book-learning, and short of becoming a theologian there didn't seem to be any tangible means of using this to bless or serve the body of Christ nor aid in their missions: but following this prayer from this prophet, whose name remains unknown to me, at New Wine, it was gradually & overwhelmingly revealed to me how blind I'd been of God's own work in & through & for me - answering this prayer of lonely desperation, helping reform my mental, emotional and behavioural attitudes to bring myself fullerly, truerly, toward the Throne of Jesus with everything I could be & do: and thinking backwards reflectively over the nature of the workings of the spirit I began to see evidence of God's interventions everywhere in my life, ranging from the enormous upheavals like saving my life as a child through the NHS to the bizarre minutiae of things like the encounter that prompted me to read this book that would go on to radically shape the way I thought about God, humanity, creation, rationality and so much else at a time appropriate for these thoughts to impact my spiritual growth and intellectual development - and so much else, big, small, normal-everyday, weird: it became impossible for me to now not be able to look at life without some degree of a mystical lens to it, and if coming to the budding emergence of this element in my perspective doesn't qualify as an answer to the prayer of this man for some meaningful connection to manifest in my life I don't know what does.

   Anyway, other than all that - I've realised I've barely talked about this actual book. It's not an easy read, and this might be not an easy thing to believe but on reflection I think I believe it's genuine. Though now for having said that, I'd like to remind you that that means I believe this book to be a faithful account of Wendy's revelations from Jesus Christ himself - and given the magnitude of that it would be very difficult for me to talk about the contents of the book much without feeling obliged to go into loads of analytical depth cross-reffing it with Scripture and history and current contextual factors and whatnot and this post is, I'm feeling, already long enough, but if you've made it this far through without thinking I'm an absolutely insane person then perhaps this is the kind of book you'll grow somewhat or take something from.

Notes on a Nervous Planet

This book by Matt Haig is a punchily honest & disarmingly thoughtful series of reflections on how we can try to maintain our mental health in a world increasingly beholden by all of our modern era's weirdnesses, stresses, etc: drawing on everyday biographical snippets and pretty robust common sense this book skips around a lot but weaves together a bright cogent narrative of our Real Living Selves, navigating political chaos, new technologies, & all the myriad fuckeries these bring to bear on our poor battered brains. Personally I got a lot of encouraging ammunition from this book to apply to my own struggles with the stuff Haig* talks about here; I'd highly recommend this to anyone similarly looking for some kind of individual stability and reasonableness throughout the bluster that is becoming of this fucking decade.

* Btw it is indeed same author as this fantastic novel, which in itself was inspired by Haig's own disassociative experiences with extreme depression & anxiety, as further unpacked in this other more testimonial work.