The (re) turn of ‘religio’ in a frail, broken world? Sacred quests in an age of polycrisis

We live in a world and a moment where ‘too many frailties have become simultaneously acute, and too many remedies have been exhausted or destroyed’. The frailties include climate breakdown, nature’s groaning and species extinction, ‘infantile’ consumerist excess, violence and war. All of which can evoke, it seems, ubiquitous despair, epidemics of mental illness, alongside feelings of hopelessness and desolation.

Yet, at the same time, maybe paradoxically, there is evidence of a revived spirit of religio – a multi-faceted turning back to the sacred, in the original Latin meaning of the word religio. And of a search, among many, for transformation, and transformative learning: a kind of quest for what is good, true, precious, beautiful, awe inspiring, and to be cherished and preserved, like our home Planet Earth. We are in a moment that carries the possibility to rename experience – in educational and therapeutic settings, as well as within nature, of which we are part – that includes the idea of the divine or sacred, moving beyond materialism and narrow notions of scientific rationalism (Voss and Wilson, 2017).

Maybe, as Eugene McGarraher (2019) has written, we are coming to realise that paradise was always around and in us, if only we did but see. It has been waiting for us to come to our senses, ready to embrace and nourish us when we denounce our unbelief in the goodness of things. Perhaps resacralisation involves, albeit still on the margins, aspects of learning, education and therapy in so far as these might transcend left brain hemisphere cognition and encompass the right-brain hemisphere’s poetry of feeling, of the imaginal, and the quest for deepening understanding, nuanced language, and complex meaning and truth.

Wednesday 11th March

6:30pm to 8:30pm UK time – online via Zoom (recording available)

In this session, Linden will introduce his notion of polycrisis, and the troubles that seem to haunt us. The glimpse of his auto/biographical quest will include references to Freud, Jung, Winnicott, McGilchrist, Wilma Fraser, Liz Chapman Hoult, Elizabeth Tisdell, and Hélène Cixous. The literary/poetic spirit, and science, left- and right-brain hemispheres will be introduced, as will the Romantics and their expressions of the flow of nature and wild delight. There will be space for everyone to introduce themselves, and what speaks to each of us.

Wednesday 18th March

6:30pm to 8:30pm UK time – online via Zoom (recording available)

Seeing things afresh; ‘something ever more about to be’. Are we waking to a realisation that history has not deprived us of an abiding and infinitely generous divinity? In this session, we will explore the possibilities and implications of divinity within, through the lens of depth psychology and auto/biographical narrative research. Can we diversify ways of being and seeing? Is it possible to resacralise learning and education, creating possibilities of enchantment? Space is offered in this session for different forms of writing from the group: poetic, journaling, etc, as well as for stories of pilgrimage and quests in whatever form.

Wednesday 25th March

6:30pm to 8:30pm UK time – online via Zoom (recording available)

In this session there will be space for dialogue, for auto/biography, and for our own readings of Self/self, nature and the cosmos in reading the present, as well as hoped for futures. There will be space for poetry, music, art and other forms of experience. We will also take time to consider how the sacred might connect with the political and the ecological qualities of our relationships, and notions of Heaven and Earth. We will reference some of the Romantics, including Blake, Wordsworth and Goethe.

For more detailed information about the course, useful links and references, Linden has prepared a handout which can be accessed via this link.

Dr Linden West is Professor Emeritus of Canterbury Christ Church University, and a celebrated researcher and writer. He is a distinguished scholar in the broad field of adult and transformative education as well as learner motivation and professional learning. He is also a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, drawing on (but not exclusively so) object relations/relational psychoanalytic perspectives. He brings insights from clinical work and training into understanding learning, popular education and what we might call transformative and transcendental experience. He is an historian of popular and workers’ education while his main contemporary interest has lain in the application of auto/biographical and narrative enquiry, and interdisciplinary psychosocial and spiritual perspectives, to diverse educational, social, cultural, political, psychological and religious phenomena. See more here