So What Now?

Yesterday I wrote about the mundane way in which my interest in spirituality may have been generated. That was only a quick sketch of course and I will, at some later date, come back to various aspects of it, so that others might share their own experiences as well.

Today, I hope to describe how I’ve reached my present point, where I am now spending several hours a day not only reading up on and memorising everything I can find on Gnostic Christianity and Kabbalah, but also contemplating those readings, meditating, praying and carrying out various spiritual exercises. What am I hoping to achieve? And why is it happening now?

At a practical level, I have the time to do this because I am unemployed. I am not seeking work because firstly, my unemployment was the result of voluntary redundancy, and the subsequent redundancy payment is large enough, if I’m careful, to live on until I can claim my pension. Secondly, I am suffering quite badly now from fibromyalgia, and would not at the moment make a reliable employee.

 I have no mortgage, because 12 years ago I decided to downsize from a huge detached four-bedroomed house to a two-bedroomed cottage. I have no expensive hobbies, my life revolves around books, the internet, the TV, visits to and from friends and long outings to coffee houses with my husband to talk (we sometimes forget to do so at home.) My surroundings are becoming shabby, but not unliveable in nor yet  unaesthetic or displeasing.

That’s one way of looking at it. I have constructed another perspective; that in the light of what my studies have taught me, makes considerably more sense.

After a varied career, I became a lecturer in organisational management in a university, a job I loved. A few years back however, the job began to pall, and it was also at that time that my fibromyalgia attacks (involving pain, depression and chronic fatigue) began to become more frequent. I think these two changes were ascribable to a number of reasons. I continued to enjoy the teaching - most of my students were postgraduate and working fulltime, and taught me as much, if not more, than I taught them- and I enjoyed doing research. I had some lovely colleagues.

But I was disillusioned with where this country was going with higher education, and at odds with various aspects of the culture that my own institution had developed. Although now happily married, I kept finding myself dreaming of the life of a contemplative nun! (Perhaps one who was allowed home to her husband in the evenings an weekends.) The 20 minute walk to the station at the beginning of each day’s commute became increasingly difficult, and it was taking me longer to recover from each of the three hour lectures I gave. My own prime intellectual interest had shifted back from organisational psychology to mysticism, and I kept trying to introduce this into my own Doctoral level research on management in organisations, which really annoyed at least one of my supervisors, a committed Marxist materialist. (I’m using the word ‘materialist’ here to describe some-one who believes that nothing exists beyond the material world).

 I began to feel restless, but it never occurred to me to give up or change my job. I couldn’t think of anything else that I wanted to do, other than pursue my mystical studies, and it never occurred to me to give up work voluntarily – that would have seemed too irresponsible. But I remember saying to my son one morning that I needed more help with the housework, or I wasn’t going to make it through the last few years that I had before retirement.

And then the University abolished my post. Over fifty posts were abolished and replaced with 29 new ones, for which the displaced post-holders were invited to apply. I went to bed one Tuesday night wondering how best to present myself to get one of those new jobs, and woke up the following morning knowing it was time to walk. I cannot tell you how overjoyed I was at this decision, even before I had calculated what redundancy money I would get. The prayers I didn’t know I’d been praying were answered, I think, because not only had my need become so great, but because the change suited the purposes of my soul. Kabbalah and Gnostic Christianity (well, most schools of mysticism) would say that my interest in the spiritual had sparked the interest in turn of Providence in me. Working from a place where time and cause and effect operate differently, the money to leave turned up as and when needed. Any earlier, and I wouldn’t have dared take the opportunity. Any later, and I would have been too ill, and perhaps already left.

Materialists can point to happy but meaningless coincidences if they wish, but this has happened to me one too many times too often now for me to be that glib about it. Again, this is something I might write about in future blogs, and I would be interested in others’ experiences.