Book Review: Spiritual Emergency

In case of Spiritual Emergency: moving successfully through your awakening,

Catherine Lucas, Findhorn, 2011

In Case of Spiritual Emergency 

Awakening can be acutely uncomfortable. But being buffeted by life events after a shock also makes me more alive and open, more creative, more self-aware than I have been at any other time in my life. I hope I have gained some gift, some new practice through surviving this experience but while it's fashionable to say `I'm on a journey', I'm not so sure. `My life is a series of unconnected events,' may be truer for me than `the universe is guiding me to a deeper self-knowledge.' To some, this kind of eclectic spirituality: a belief in a caring universe is a melodramatic hope which might lull us into a smug, pious sleep.
       It's comforting to think that the human race is evolving towards some new opening in spiritual development but the evidence of cruelty and inequity suggests otherwise. Natural selection is favouring the brave, the outrageous and sadistic as much as the pious, self-denying and compassionate. Story telling celebrates a glorious cycle of renewal and recovery but it is stretching credulity to apply narrative structure to the whole human race or just one life.
No one would choose to be rejected in love, for instance, but rejection is the risk we take in committing ourselves to people; that's how we discover real friends. We need people; even a hermit needs help to find the herb tea at Tesco's. Seeking feels more natural to me than finding; to say `the reason I'm angry is almost certainly not the reason I think,' comes more easily to me than: `I've found the answer.' While many people attribute their recovery from dismay to medication, meditation, counselling or a change in diet, isn't the real truth that having a job I love and a partner I love is more empowering?

      Aren't we deceiving ourselves if we think that anything else can substitute for a meaningful relationship? Inspirational leaders write books full of aphorisms and accounts of adversity faced up with courage. Medieval `Lives of Saints' gloss over the skeletons in the cupboard, the compromises behind every noble human life. I can't forget the feet of clay beneath every hero: Carl Jung seduced a patient and agreed to Nazi stipulations for the journal he edited. Stanislav Grof was an inspired writer but his experiments into LSD risked provoking psychosis in his volunteers. Personal accounts are coloured by the language, cliches and opinion of the speaker. Can we really learn anything from someone else's crisis? I'm doubtful. If the message is: `you have the resources within you,' then how can a book persuade you?

     Catherine Lucas' book is a brave attempt to link the personal to the archetypal. Catherine's definition of the spiritual encompasses all imagery and her inventory of triggers for a spiritual emergency includes everything and nothing. It's hard to disagree; maybe spiritual is an impossible word to define. The book takes me back to a recent crisis in my life and revives the intense desire for change that I had then. It reminds me of the people who helped me and how my search for spiritual insight led me to banal conclusions: `appreciate beauty, live in the present and be open to surprise'.