Devotion without religion?
Kate here, exploring different types of collective devotion
Dear Lynne,
I loved your last letter and the edge you bumped into about collective devotion. Your three bucket framework also makes sense to me.
We spend so much time being jostled around by consensus reality in bucket one (insert requisite apology about how much time this letter has taken to write here!). We have access to bucket two - subjective reality, dreamland - through personal practices (but I do think these are often bucket one in disguise).1
But bucket three - the bucket in which we are all connected, the spirit or essence (or God!) level - we, certainly in this country, don’t spend a lot of time in this bucket. Like you say, in much of the world this bucket “is given space through collective devotion”. This bucket is often the space of religion, in its widest sense.
I grew up in the church - the United Reformed Church, to be precise. Our church was one full of very kind people, and it was deliberately very plain, a very “low” church. Very little ritual, very little mystery. Honestly, quite dull. Politically I now understand a bit more about religious history in this country and am in principle very sympathetic to this low-liturgy approach, which really focusses on an individual’s own experiences (bucket 2!). I’m grateful for the fact that I was 16 I went to the minister’s confirmation classes, gave it all a lot of thought, and then essentially said “I don’t believe in this stuff, and I don’t want to lie to you about it”, and he respected that decision, with no pressure or preaching.
I do remember yearning a little for slightly more charisma, something that would pick me up and carry me away. It was with this urge that I went when I was 15 or so with some friends to Spring Harvest, a big evangelical festival (in Butlins!), and was faced with more charisma than you can shake a stick at, and hated it, the feeling of group pressure, the sense of manipulation. I will totally allow that as a shy and awkward 15 year old without the cultural background to really tap into the collective this resistance may well have been more about me than about the experience.2
I have reached my mid 40s with an aversion to organised religion and a distaste for the hypocrisies of the established Church. But there is part of me that has been yearning for that sense of something bigger. During the Processwork training that I wrote about last time I did have some moments where I felt like my perspective shifted and I could feel the essence, feel the connections between us all. There are sometimes magical moments in facilitation, or in conversation with friends, where I feel I shift out of consensus reality and into a deeper place. The older I get the more I crave those moments.
I did have what I would describe as a beautiful moment of collective devotion a month or so ago. I went with a couple of friends to the Cross the Tracks festival in south London. It was all delightful - I know there has been controversy about using Brockwell Park for festivals but it was such a joy. The highlight for me was Ezra Collective bringing their joy about playing a home stage and getting everyone singing and dancing. I felt very proud to be a Londoner, and very moved by the vibe they managed to create in the crowd - preaching a sermon of joy to people who very much wanted to receive it.
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Festivals are maybe a bit like secular pilgrimages, ways of topping up your faith in humanity, of being just a body in an ocean of other bodies and souls for a while. Of just dancing. A suspension of consensus reality. But you can’t do that every weekend!
At the other end of the scale, something I do do every other weekend is help organise a gardening and litterpicking group in my local park. This is in lots of ways the opposite of going to a festival - sometimes there are only three of us, and you’d be amazed at the random crap people dump in parks3. Sometimes it’s fun - we’ve organised three annual community picnics now, and planted some beautiful flowers and trees. Sometimes there are 20 of us, and it’s a pleasingly anarchic morning.
It is the closest I come to regular devotion, I think. My daughter often comes with me and I definitely feel that whatever complicated feelings I have about not taking her to church are slightly allayed by the fact that she, too, comes out in the rain and cares for something that is not hers, alongside our neighbours. That we are all doing something small but consistent, together. That we show up.
I don’t really know what any of this means for organisations! But I think it’s a rich seam to keep investigating. Where are the spaces for collective devotion that you see?
with love!
Kate
certainly the amount of time I spend sucked into substack notes on my phone reading bland articles about spending less time on my phone feels like bucket one masquerading as bucket two…
this was definitely all exacerbated by the fact I had a bit of a stomach bug, and almost fainted during a prayer session - which all the leaders got very excited about as they thought the Holy Spirit had popped down for a visit
my favourite is still the unwashed set of used dinner plates