1. Tuesday.

As you know, I’ve been researching the Welsh revival of 1904 and, more broadly, the place of ecstasy in modern culture. On Tuesday, I drove to Cwmbran in the south of Wales, where something called the Welsh Outpouring has broken out. I wondered if the Outpouring was the beginning of a new Welsh revival, so off I went to Cwmbran, like a storm-chaser.

The Outpouring is happening in the Victory Church, which is a breeze-block warehouse in an industrial estate on the outskirts of Cwmbran. There was a small queue of people outside, waiting for the doors to open for the 7pm service (they hold services every day since the Outpouring began in April). I went in and found a seat, in this windowless cavernous warehouse, filled with I guess 400 people, with the band already blaring out the Christian rock. ‘Come on!’ shouted the podgy singer. ‘Don’t hold anything back!’

Then the preacher came on stage. ‘This is day 62 of the Outpouring! Hundreds of people have turned to Jesus!’ There was a sort of large plastic paddling pool on the right, where the baptisms took place. ‘And there have been incredible miracles – just yesterday somebody was watching the service online, and their abdominal pain was healed! Amen?’ ‘Amen! Praise Jesus!’ a woman shouted behind me. ‘Pray in your own words’ said the preacher-man. ‘Shadappa shadappa shadappa’ babbled the woman. ‘Shadappa yourself’, I thought.

Then he asked if anyone wanted to be healed today, and a forest of hands shot up. ‘Now is the time! Amen?’ said the preacher-man. People went forward and the ministry team prayed for them. And many of them keeled right over. Timber! And they were immediately covered up with a blanket, very efficiently. ‘We also have some cloths we have anointed with oil’, said the preacher-man, putting a bucket on stage. ‘You can take them home and use them for healing’. There was a mad-rush for the cloths.

Well, after half an hour I’d had enough. I felt filled with contempt and intellectual snobbery for the scenes I’d witnessed. Is this what Christianity has come to, I thought. Buckets of oily cloths and ignorant popular emotionalism. Perhaps it had only been redeemed by its long association with Greek philosophy, and now it had reverted its initial primitive miracle-working. And a voice in me asked, ‘what did you expect?’

2. Wednesday

The next day I drove on to Pembrokeshire, to attend a four-day conference near Fishguard, at a Christian retreat called Ffald-y-Brenin. A Christian friend had recommended I read a book called the Grace Outpouring, by Roy Godwin. He and his wife Daphne had moved to Ffald-y-Brenin in 2000, and since then, all kinds of miracles have been happening there, apparently. I read the book two weeks ago, and it piqued my curiosity with its tales of people turning up at their door, saying ‘what’s going on here?’ then suddenly being knocked out by the Holy Spirit, like it was Magnumopus hiding behind the door with a club (obscure Asterix reference for you there). So on I drove to Pembrokeshire, like a storm-chaser.

I checked into a lovely hotel in Newport (not the big Newport, this is a little village also called Newport on a beautiful stretch of the Pembrokeshire coast), then I drove to a nearby village hall for dinner with the other conference delegates. They were all over 55. I found a place at a table, feeling a little self-conscious, and introduced myself to the two old ladies sitting there. ‘So’, I said breezily, ‘what can we expect from the conference?’ ‘You can expect to be invaded by God’, said this rather prim-looking old lady, as if I’d asked a crushingly-obvious question.

After dinner we all drove to a nearby church, with very uncomfortable pews. There was a lot of worship, with the old pensioners raising their hands in the air and some of them jumping up and down. Jesus is clearly a good retirement plan, I thought. Then Roy Godwin took the mike. He’s a small man, with a tanned balding head, glasses, a quiet voice and a twinkling sense of humour. He spoke of the 1904 revival, of how Wales is the land of revivals, of how the first drops of a new revival were just starting to be felt, in Cwmbran and elsewhere. ‘But we want more. Come on Lord. Bring it on. We want another revival, in our own time. Come on Lord. Turn all of Wales into a house of prayer. Not just for Wales, but for all the nations.’ Yeah, I thought. Right! Aim low. Start with Wales and go from there.

Roy Godwin

The next day I attended the morning worship and the talks. I realised everyone there were absolutely passionate Christians, looking to start up missions or houses of prayer or what-have-you. Not only was I the youngest, I was clearly the only ‘seeker’. I kept this quiet, and when people asked ‘what church do you go to?’ I felt like an escaped POW being asked for their papers. ‘Er…Holy Trinity Brompton!’ I’d say, and their faces would relax with relief. Phew!

In the evenings I retreated from the retreat, and locked myself into my hotel room. What was I doing here? What kind of a stupid holiday was this? What kind of an idiot goes on holiday, on their own, to a Christian conference? Well, it was research, I told myself. So I carried on my research into ecstasy in my hotel-room, reading books on how Enlightenment thinkers defined religious ecstasy as a medical pathology called ‘enthusiasm’ (from the Greek word entheos, meaning God within). Enthusiasm, the historian JGA Pocock has written, was the ‘anti-self of the Enlightenment’, that which had to be contained and cured, just as Pentheus tried to lock up Dionysus. I’d sit in my hotel-room researching modern ecstatic movements like Pentecostalism, then I’d go back to the church and watch the pensioners being filled with the Holy Spirit, a few of them laughing and twitching and even being ‘slain’ in the Holy Spirit. I’d take notes like a zoologist.

3. Saturday.

On Saturday, the talks were interesting. A pastor (and former GP and psychotherapist) called Richard Roberts gave a very funny talk, and he mentioned that he’d returned to the blues guitar as a hobby to get him through his winter melancholy. He’d started a band, with  some Christians and some non-Christians, they played weddings and so forth, and some of the guests had ended up coming to his church, ‘which must be the first time Honky-Tonk Woman has been a tool of evangelism’. He said: ‘There’s Spirit in there, in rock and roll. You know Jerry Lee Lewis was part of a Pentecostal church, until they kicked him out for playing the piano with too much syncopation? The song Great Balls of Fire was partly inspired by the Pentecostals’ experience of the fire of the Holy Spirit’. How interesting, I thought. Just what I’m researching.

I went up and said hello after his talk, told him I was a drummer – his son is as well, at an HTB church in Battersea (I didn’t tell him I’m drumming in an atheist church!) I told him I also thought the Holy Spirit was there in rock music, perhaps more than in Contemporary Christian Music. There’s more Spirit in U2’s I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For than in most of the bland major-key bubblegum-pop of worship music. That’s because the latter lacks the despair and brokenness and lostness you sometimes get in rock and roll. ‘Yes’, said Rich. ‘The Church isn’t very good at the dark side. But read the Psalms, it’s all there.’

In the afternoon, I sat in my hotel trying to write this newsletter, but it kept on turning into this long and rambling history of ecstasy in modern culture. I decided to leave it for a bit, and go and check out the famous Ffald-y-Brenin. I parked my car at the bottom of the hill and walked up the steep path. At the top is this enclave of little hobbit-houses nestled in a garden, high above the most gorgeous valley like an eagle’s nest. In one corner is a small round chapel, where apparently people often have a direct experience of God. In I went, feeling slightly wobbly, but the Spirit didn’t bonk me on the head with its club. Inside it was like a Russian bath-house, with about ten of the conference attendees sitting in a circle in silence, soaking it in.

Ffald-y-Brenin

I sat there for a bit. I found myself thinking about the incarnation. I had a sense of the physicality of it, even the sensuality of it. How different to Greek philosophy, to Platonism, where the Logos is imprisoned in the body. In Christianity, the Logos loves the flesh, it became it, it delights in it. So I got into that for a bit. Then I strolled around the garden and looked out over the valley, purring as its back was stroked by the wind.

4. Saturday evening

At the evening session, a pastor from Vancouver called Eric gave a talk, where he quoted an Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes -
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

This nice old fella called Malcolm, to whom I’d admitted I wasn’t a Christian, gave me a nudge in the ribs. ‘That’s for you!’ he said. ‘Too much plucking blackberries!’ Then Roy took the mike and was speaking, the music was playing and we were standing up. And this thought came to me, ‘yours are the gifts, Lord’.  I’d been researching charismatic Christianity – the word charismatic comes from the Greek charis, meaning gifts. So I was sort of internally dedicating my life and my work to God. And I felt my chest fill with a painful joy, a powerful energy, which pushed my head back, further, further, until it almost hurt my neck muscles. It took a real effort to push my head forward, then another wave would sweep it back. It was like the pleasure was bursting from my chest, lifting it up, pushing my head and body back so I was rocking on my heels. Sinner that I am, I can only compare it to MDMA, like coming up on a really strong pill, when it’s almost too powerful, it takes your breath away, and you’re just feeling this intense sensual pleasure coursing through you. I remember reading about the 1904 revival, and someone in the congregation saying ‘too much!’, like he was afraid the Holy Spirit would overwhelm him. Well, it was a bit like that.

Rich took the mike, moved by the Spirit and talked about this idea in Orthodox Christianity of the song of God holding creation together, and that triggered another wave of ecstasy in me. This went on for…I don’t know, three quarters of an hour. Then we sat down, and I shakily went and got a bottle of water. I offered some water to the guy next to me – it really reminded me of a rave, when you’re like, whew, that was a strong wave but I appear to be still on the surf-board, and you want to share your joy and your possessions with the people around you. Eunoia, the Greeks call it. Goodwill. Malcolm came up, full of joy for me, and said ‘I take it you’re done with blackberry picking?’ And he hugged me – he was more excited for me than I was for myself. So I drove home, luckily it wasn’t very far and I made it without crashing into a ditch. I lay in bed and I could still feel the joy licking my limbs like flames.

On Sunday I went to the morning session, there was some worship, then Roy spoke again, and once again I felt completely filled with ecstasy, more than the night before, I was standing up but my body was pushed right back, luckily the pew supported my shaking legs. I remembered Roy saying at the start of the conference, ‘we’re going to lean back into God’s love’. A tiny part of me wondered what everyone around me must think of this oddball standing there with his head pushed back and his mouth agape, although I wasn’t making a noise (it was a very reserved, English sort of rapture) then I thought, it’s OK, they’re all nutters too! I also remembered my Quaker ancestry and thought, I have an excuse: I’m descended from mentalists. This was what they were talking about. This was why they quaked.

Roy was speaking to God, saying we wanted another revival, we wanted more of the Spirit, that Wales needed another revival, for itself and for the nations, we wanted the kingdom here on Earth. He was almost demanding grace to pour out, like a lamb stubbornly demanding milk from its mother. He said we’d all been commissioned to work for this revival, to pass on the flame however we could, including online, which I thought was pretty weird considering it was a church full of pensioners. ‘Imagine an online revival’, he said. ‘Imagine an email where people opened it and felt filled with the Spirit’.

His wife Daphne got on stage, she’d had a word from God. She said: ‘I hope this doesn’t offend, but God says that some of you are going back to museums. He says, the museum is closed, but the garden is open.’ I got my breath back, and the service ended. I went up to thank Roy – I hadn’t spoken to him the entire week. He said, almost immediately, ‘don’t take this the wrong way, but God says to you that at some point you have to decide: you can stand on the outside analyzing, but He is here and open for you.’

So then I left, hugging some of these dear people I’d met, like Mary, this sweet cockney lady who I’d met on the first evening, who lived in Cyprus. ‘I’ve adopted this one’, she said, hugging me. I’d given her a copy of my book the evening before. ‘I’ve got as far as Aristotle’, she said. ‘He’s alright, old Ari, isn’t he?’ I drove back, the fire still in me, the fire survived the M4, survived the Long Delays from Junction 8 to Junction 4, survived through the fields and suburbs of the United Kingdom back to London. While I was driving, I got an email from BBC Radio 3 – I’m one of their ‘New Generation Thinkers’ this year – inviting me to speak at their Free Thinking festival in October. The theme of the festival, the email said, was ‘Who’s in Control?’ Who indeed!

******

In other news:

If like me you’re interested in the connection between Pentecostalism and rock & roll, check out this excellent article on that, although it’s behind a pay wall alas. Also have a listen to this fantastic NPR story about Brother Claude Ely, the Pentecostal Holy Roller guitarist who was a huge early influence on rock and roll.

This afternoon I interviewed Bernd Bosel, who is a historian of enthusiasm. I’ll post it later this week. And tomorrow I’m interviewing Brian Eno! He has some very interesting thoughts on ecstasy and surrender in music and religion – and he should know all about it, having produced some of the great ecstatic anthems of pop, like David Bowie’s Heroes, U2’s Streets Have No Name and Talking Heads’ Once In A Lifetime. So look out for that later this week too.

It’s funny how little science and psychology has got to grips with ecstasy, though it’s beginning to do so – Jonathan Haidt discusses it in his book, The Righteous Mind, but he is very much standing on the outside analyzing, like Durkheim did, with their clipboards, nodding, and saying ‘yes, it’s all very good for social cohesion’. Haidt criticises utilitarians for their over-rationalism, but he also has a utilitarian view of ecstasy, seeing it as socially useful, which to me misses the mystery and awe of being invaded by God. But still, at least he’s exploring these experiences in a positive and non-pathologising way.

Another interesting avenue of scientific research is recent stuff on Autonomic Sensory Meridien Response (ASMR), or brain-tingling. There’s even an ASMR online community, where people try to trigger brain-chills by watching YouTube videos of women whispering lovingly, for all those lonely YouTube babies out there. To me that’s taking a mechanistic view of ecstasy, missing the theos in enthusiasm, but still, worth a look.

How strange that the experience of spine-tingling etc – such a core human experience – should be so little researched by science. I guess that’s because the Enlightenment has a fear of ecstasy, has kept it locked up and pathologised. And now it’s beginning to research it and to try and find the mechanism that triggers it – whispering or grooming or certain chords or chemicals, so that science can say ‘it’s not God, it’s these neural mechanisms’. And it’s true that you can trigger a sort of ecstasy with chemicals. But there are varieties of ecstasy, surely, and some are better than others. The fire isn’t the point – it’s what the fire motivates you to do.

Anyway, I urge you to go visit Ffald-y-Brenin, or go see Roy and Daphne talk, they’re doing a talk in Norwich on the 26th of June, and in Nottingham sometime in July. Or read Roy’s book. I am quite a sceptical person (as I hope regular readers know) but I think they’re the real thing, genuine people of God.

Public anger over revelations that governments snoop on our internet activity comes partly from a sense that our online selves are not entirely in our control. The more networked we are, the more our selves are ‘out there’, online, made public and transparent to a million eyes.

On the one hand the global interconnectedness of the internet gives us a feeling of euphoria – we are joined to humanity! We are Liked! On the other hand, we get sudden pangs of paranoia – what if all these online strangers don’t wish us well, what if they are stalkers or con-men or bullies or spies? How are we coming across? Are we over-exposed? Does our bum look big in this?

Growing up in today’s online world must be difficult, because every adolescent experiment, every awkward mistake, is preserved online, perhaps forever. This makes me glad that I was a teenager in the 1990s, before the internet could capture my adolescent fuck-wittery for posterity. Depressingly often these days, we read about a teenager who has taken their own life because someone posted an unflattering photo or video of them online. They feel publicly shamed, desecrated, permanently damaged.

There is a word for what the internet and social media have done to us: alienation. It means, literally, selling yourself into slavery, from the Latin alienus, meaning another person’s possession. The concept has its roots in ancient Greek philosophy, particularly in Plato and the Stoics, who warned that if you place too much value on your reputation or image, you enslave yourself to the fickle opinion of the public. You raise the public above you, turn it into a god, then cower before it and beg for its approval. You become dispossessed, your self-esteem soaring or crashing depending on how the public views you. This is a recipe for emotional sickness.

You can end up caring more about your image or reflection than your actual self. You replace actual loving human relations with the fickle adoration of the public. How many times do we see people sitting with friends or family at a pub or a restaurant, ignoring them while they anxiously check on their online selves? Our actual selves end up shriveled and unwell, while our unreal mirror selves sucks up more and more of our attention. We can even turn our loved ones into props for public approval. Your fiance proposed? Share it! Everything is done for the public, for strangers, for people who don’t really care about you at all.

I remember seeing a family at the beach, in Venezuela last year. The mother was a rather curvaceous lady in a bikini, and she insisted the father take endless photos of her, standing by the sea in various outlandish poses. He took literally hundreds of photos. They completely ignored their little daughter, who gazed on her mother in confusion. Occasionally the daughter would come up to get the mother’s attention, and she would be given a little shove to get out of the shot. It was like some grotesque fairy-tale. The mother was so obsessed with her online self, yet so palpably ugly inside.

The internet has become a vast pool, into which we gaze like Narcissus, bewitched by our own reflection. Our smart-phones are little pocket-mirrors, with which we’re constantly snapping ‘selfies’, trying to manage how the public perceives us. It’s like we have a profound fear of insignificance and nothingness, so we check the pocket-mirror every few minutes to re-assure ourselves that we exist, that we are loved. We mistake Likes for love. We look to celebrities with a million followers, and beg them to follow us. Because then we’d be real! Celebrities do this too, tweeting about the other celebrities they hang out with, to create a sort of Hello! magazine existence for the public to gape at. Everything becomes a pose, a selfie.

One’s whole life becomes a selfie

I’m probably worse than the lot of you. I worry that extensive use of social media over the last decade has re-wired the way I think, so that I now have ‘share’ buttons installed in my hypothalamus. No sooner do I have a thought than I want to share it. In the old days, perhaps individuals quietly spoke to God in their hearts. Now I find my thoughts instantly forming themselves into 140-character epigrams. Sublime sunset? Share it. New baby? Share it. Terminal cancer? Share it. Let’s live-blog death, find eternity in re-tweets.

How much of our selves we offer up to the god of Public Opinion. How devotedly we serve it. How utterly we make ourselves transparent to its thousand-eyed stare, until we suddenly feel over-exposed and try to cover ourselves up.

What is the antidote to alienation? The Greeks thought the cure was simple: don’t put too much value on your reputation or image. Recognise that it is out of your control. Remind yourself that there is not a direct correlation between a person’s image and their actual value, that the public is not a perfect mirror, that it distorts like a circus mirror. And try not to gaze into the mirror too often. Instead, tend to the garden within, to your deeper and better self, even if it doesn’t get a hundred Likes on Facebook.

This is not an easy thing to do. No sooner did I think of this, than I immediately thought, good idea: share it! Pin it! Reddit! My over-networked self needs to be reminded of the value of disconnection, of silence and contemplation, to let deeper thoughts rise up. With that in mind, I’m off on a retreat this week in the Welsh countryside (not a re-tweet, a retreat), in search of a deeper way to connect, a better Cloud to sit on. I just hope they don’t have Wi-Fi…

Next week, I’m off to Wales. First, I’m going to Cwmbran, where something is happening called ‘the Welsh Outpouring’. In April, when a young pastor called Richard Taylor was preaching, the congregation felt filled with the Holy Spirit, there were tears, shouts, groans, and this started to happen every evening. Word got out, congregations swelled, queues formed to get into church, services went deep into the night, and many people were apparently healed from mental or physical complaints. I’m going there with a local GP, who I met at the Hay book festival, who is curious about this outpouring which has helped a lot of local people overcome alcoholism, apparently.

Then I’m going to Ffald-y-Brenin, a Christian retreat in Pembrokeshire, and a place where people have often said they’ve experienced miraculous visitations from the Holy Spirit. It is known as a ‘thin place’ – in Celtic Christianity, there are supposed to be certain places where the border between the sacred and the secular is particularly diaphanous.

Obviously, I feel like a bit of a spiritual tourist. Am I going for my own advancement as a writer, or am I going with a genuinely open heart to see what is ‘out there’? I hope the latter, but as a writer there’s always some ego mixed in.

When writing on religious group psychology, you have to decide how much you should ‘go with it’ and give yourself to the experience, and to what extent you should stay objective and detached. When Jon Ronson, one of my heroes, went on the Alpha course in 2000, he felt he couldn’t switch off his journalistic mind during the Holy Spirit session of the Alpha weekend:

James rests his hand on my shoulder. “Oh Jesus, I pray that Jon will receive Your wonderful spirit. God. Please come and fill Jon with … ” It is not working. The spell has broken. I tell James again that I’m sorry, but I’m a journalist.

I’m also a journalist, although I happen to believe in God and was helped to overcome Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder through a near-death experience which felt like an experience of grace. So I’m more open to the value of ecstatic experiences. But there are aspects of charismatic Christianity that I find off-putting. When an entire church gets ‘slain’ by the Holy Spirit, when people fall over, roll around on the ground, bark like dogs and so on, is it a visitation by God, an outbreak of mass hysteria, or some kind of learned cultural practice?

When it comes to Welsh religious revivals, Welsh Christians think of them as both a supernatural experience and a learned cultural practice. They are very aware of the history of Welsh revivals, and this knowledge creates expectations of future revivals. Wales is known as ‘the land of revivals’ – previous revivals include a Methodist revival in 1735, when congregations would shake, weep, faint and jump for joy, and a cross-denominational revival in 1859, when historians suggest 100,000 people – a tenth of the population of Wales – converted, and services were so ecstatic that ‘people were carried out of chapel unable to move hand or foot’. Both revivals were intensely musical – hymn-singing plays a central role in Celtic ecstasy.

The most famous Welsh revival was in 1904-5. It was started by a preacher called Joseph Jenkins, after he had a vision of being wrapped in a blue flame. His sermons started to inspire great excitement among his congregation, particularly young women, one of whom followed him home one night, then stood up at church the next day and declared ‘I love Jesus with all my heart’. This set others on fire, and the normal order of service gave way to spontaneous testimonials, conversions, moans, fainting and hymn-singing.

The fire spread to a 26-year-old miner called Evan Roberts, an intensely religious young man who had prayed for a revival ‘for 10 or 11 years’. He was dramatically filled by the Spirit during a service, bending his knees and crying out. The next nights, he had a series of visions, of hell, of Christ’s victory over Satan, of an enormous religious revival that would save 100,000 souls. Although not a priest and not very educated, he became the de facto leader of a revival that swept through Wales ‘like a hurricane’ as David Lloyd George put it.

A journalist who covered the revival, WT Stead, was struck by the unplanned spontaneity of the services, though in other ways, the scenes closely followed the cultural script of previous Welsh revivals – melted hearts, tears, joy, fainting, spontaneous hymn-singing, public confessions, testimonials, mass conversions, the sense of ‘a country aflame’. All of this was repeated from previous Welsh revivals. What was new in the 1904 revival was that young people, particularly young women, played a leading role, singing and giving testimonials, in a break with religious tradition. And the mass media also played a central role in the revival, helping to spread the fire through their reports – one historian calls it ‘a newspaper revival’.

A postcard of ‘the revivalist’ Evan Roberts and some of the young ladies of the revival.

As Roberts predicted, there were scores of conversions – perhaps 100,000 or so. Many alcoholics gave up drink, and supporters of the revival said the entire moral climate of the country was improved, with pubs emptied, crime down and industrial unrest quelled.

Then, after a year or so, Roberts became more and more exhausted and erratic. He would dramatically stop the singing during the services, declaring there were obstacles to the Holy Spirit’s visitation, naming people in the congregation who were obstacles, including priests. He emphasized there must be total obedience to the Holy Spirit among everyone present. He became uncertain about when it was the Holy Spirit prompting him to speak, or the Devil. He eventually retired from public life, publishing a book six years later warning of the rapid approach of the Apocalypse.

What are we to make of it all? It’s a sensitive subject, particularly for an English journalist (although as my name suggests I have a lot of Welsh blood in me). For the Welsh, the 1904-05 revival was and is a source of national pride, evidence of the country’s special relationship to God, Who speaks to their warm Celtic hearts in a way the mechanistic English could barely appreciate. The academic historian, meanwhile, might look for social or cultural causes of the revival, and interpret it as some sort of mass psychic reaction to the advance of scientific rationalism and the demands of industrial civilisation.

A colleague of mine at the Centre for the History of the Emotions, Rhodri Hayward, has written an excellent book on the question of how to interpret mass ecstatic experiences like the 1904 revival, called Resisting History: Religious Transcendence and the Invention of the Unconscious. He looks at how the unconscious was invented in the late 19th century, as a way for the new secular discipline of psychology to provide a naturalistic explanation for ecstatic religious experiences like trances, automatism, visions and mass revivalism.

Rhodri traces this invention from Frederick Myers, founder of the Society for Psychical Research, who posited a subliminal self to explain the behaviour of spiritual mediums, to William James, who developed this naturalistic explanation of religious experience in his Varieties of Religious Experience, to early explorers of the unconscious like Janet, Charcot and Carl Jung, all of whom were keen to explain spiritual experiences through the naturalistic idea of the unconscious. The unconscious was a crucial device in a broader move to disenchant supernatural experiences and fit them into a naturalistic historical narrative.

What’s interesting is that the early pioneers of psychology remained very ambivalent about whether religious experiences were supernatural or not. The border between natural and supernatural explanations of ecstatic experiences remained rather thin, or diaphanous. Myers, at the end of his life, decided that some spiritual mediums really were communicating with the dead. Jung came to view much unconscious phenomena as genuine communications by spirits. William James was also convinced that some mediums were genuine and remained open-minded about whether religious experiences could be genuinely supernatural. He wrote: ‘The notion of the subconscious self certainly ought not at this point in our enquiry be held to exclude all notion of higher penetration.’

Right at the birth of psychology as a rationalist discipline, there’s uncertainty about whether the unconscious is a trash-heap of primitive impulses, or a cave of hidden treasures.

This uncertainty about apparently supernatural experiences exists for Christians too. Even during the 1904 revival, Welsh people wondered if Roberts was simply a ‘neurotic youth’, if his fits weren’t manifestations of pathology rather than divine ecstasy. One church minister wrote to the Western Mail suggesting there were, in fact, two revivals going on, a genuine revival, and a ‘bogus revival’ being led by Roberts. Roberts also became uncertain whether his visitations came from God or the Devil, and this uncertainty and sense of a cosmic spiritual war being waged in his own person eventually exhausted him.

Speaking for myself, I remain uncertain about the religious experience which healed me of years of trauma and suffering. Was it an experience of the Holy Spirit, or a moment of religious mania prompted by a near-death experience after several years of depression? If it was some sort of supernatural visitation, from who or what?

William James, who helped to invent the psychological concept of the unconscious, remained unsure whether religious experiences were supernatural or natural

William James suggested that, even if we can’t know for sure where such experiences come from, we can still empirically weigh their effects: ‘What comes must be sifted and tested, and run the gauntlet of confrontation with the total context of experience…Its value must be ascertained by empirical methods.’

We see chroniclers of the 1904 revival trying to do just this, taking statistical evidence of the numbers of conversions in each village and town. Judged by the number of people it saved from alcoholism, the 1904 revival seems socially valuable (although Marxist historians like EP Thompson might argue that such ecstatic outbreaks put back the cause of political agitation).
It’s very difficult to empirically asses all the effects of a revival – particularly as historians can’t peer into the spiritual realm to see what might have been the effect there. Certainly, the Welsh revival had a huge impact on modern Christianity, helping to popularise a new, highly emotional form of worship which one meets on the Alpha weekend. The revival didn’t seem to have such great long-term effects for Roberts himself, though for all I know his reward was in the afterlife.

I wonder, finally, if one can combine cultural historical accounts of ecstatic experiences with an open-mindedness to the possibility that such experiences are, at least partly, supernatural.  In other words, is it possible that spirits or the Spirit really do speak to humans, but that we also interpret such experiences through pre-learned cultural scripts (such as the history of Jewish messianism, or the history of Welsh revivals)? Some of those scripts are perhaps better than others, in that they more successfully ‘run the gauntlet of confrontation with the total context of experience’. I think that one problem with the Christian eschatological script is it leads to mass Millenarian expectations that the world is about to be utterly transformed into a perfect Age of Love. History has repeatedly disappointed this ecstatic expectation, yet somehow it keeps coming back.

*****

In other news:

Talking of Millenarian expectations, the NYRB reviews a new book that looks at Millenarian expectations and the idea of the demonic enemy in fascism and communism. Behind a pay-wall alas.

The New Yorker, meanwhile, looks at a new neuroscientific attempt to measure and quantify consciousness.

I did a 5 min essay on Radio 3′s Nightwaves this week, about the 2400th anniversary of the founding of Plato’s Academy, asking whether philosophy belongs inside or outside of academia. Its 26 minutes in here.

On that theme, here’s Philosophy Bites’ Nigel Warburton, on why he’s left academia to practice philosophy outside of it. And here’s a BBC article looking at philosophy’s central role in French school education.

Here’s an New York Times article covering a successful trial of cognitive processing therapy for rape victims in the Congo.

Here’s a Spectator piece by Norman Stone looking at the political crisis in Turkey and Erdogan’s over-played authoritarianism.

Here’s a piece I wrote about the Sunday Assembly and why I don’t think God minds me playing the drums there.

Here’s a piece on how psychedelics is turning into a subject of serious academic research (man).

UCLA has a great centre for investigating mindfulness. Its website has some good free meditation podcasts.

Finally, this week I got very excited about Laura Marling’s new album. Here’s a short film she helped to make of the first four songs of the album.

See you next week,

Jules

How did I end up playing the drums in an atheist church last Sunday?

I’ll tell you. I need to go back a decade. I promise I’ll keep it brief.

In my late teens and early twenties, I suffered from various emotional problems, which I’d inflicted on myself by messing around with LSD. My recovery began when I fell off a mountain, while skiing in Norway in 2001. I fell 30 foot, broke my leg, knocked myself unconscious, and when I came to, I saw a bright white light and I felt filled with love. Weird huh?

I felt, at that moment, that there is something in us that is unbreakable, that even death cannot destroy. This realisation helped me overcome my trauma and begin to heal, because I could let go of my terror at having permanently damaged my psyche. And that moment of gnosis led me to Greek philosophy, because I knew, somehow, that Socrates, Plato and the Stoics had talked about learning to honour the  ‘god within’, and had suggested that our emotional problems arise because we don’t trust the god within and instead go looking for validation in externals like public approval. This fitted with what I’d experienced on that mountain-side.

For a few weeks after my strange experience, I felt completely healed and in love with the universe. It was like I was permanently on E. I loved everyone – I literally fell in love with my physiotherapist in hospital. Then the epiphany wore off, and the old habits of anxiety and depression came back. So I did a course of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), as it seemed to me to offer the insights of Greek philosophy in a systematic and clinical structure. CBT helped me to turn my epiphany into habits.

I then wrote a book about how Greek philosophy still helps people today, and how it inspired CBT. I told the stories of people I had met, from 2007 to 2011, whose lives had been transformed by coming across Greek philosophy. And I also went looking for communities, for instances of people trying to follow philosophy as a way of life together.

Some members of the London Philosophy Club

There are not many such ‘philosophical communities’ around. Few academic philosophers are interested in the community organization aspect of philosophy, beyond the occasional public lecture. But there are a growing number of philosophy clubs, including a club I’ve been involved with since late 2010, the London Philosophy Club. There are also some commercial organisations like the School of Life and the Idler School, both of which I have worked with, and both of which I admire.

However, much as I love these new philosophical communities, I find I’m still unfulfilled, still yearning for more community in my life, and more love. I need help – divine assistance – to be more loving, and I think perhaps we all do.

Perhaps, I wondered, what was missing was God. Perhaps these philosophical communities were too rational and intellectual, too detached from that deep ecstatic experience of love that I felt on that mountain and that I am still trying to re-discover.

Nicky Gumbel, head of HTB and pioneer of the Alpha course

So why not look to Christianity? As a theist, I’m half-way there, and Greek philosophy and Christianity have always (or almost always) had fairly cordial relations. So this year, I’ve tried to re-engage with Christianity. I went on the Alpha Course earlier this year, and was in a group with Nicky Gumbel, the head-vicar of Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) and the man who has shepherded Alpha’s expansion all over the world.

I really enjoyed Alpha. I found HTB to be a very friendly community, and I felt honoured and welcomed. You’re high status if you’re a ‘seeker’ in a Christian community, because they have a religious injunction to try and save your soul. So you feel very welcomed and attended to, like a customer in a Turkish bazaar, though you know that, at some point, you need to decide whether to buy the carpet or not.

I felt I couldn’t buy the carpet, because there are fundamental aspects of Christianity that, try as I might, I just can’t accept. Although I really love the Christian emphasis on the Holy Spirit, in other ways I find Christianity too parochial and over-confident, above all in its insistence that Jesus Christ is the only Messiah and the only way to God. Why did God create the 80% or so of humanity who never heard of Jesus or who keep dutifully to their own faiths? Why did He create the rest of the universe if the whole cosmic point is Jesus’s life and death here on Earth?

I also can’t accept the deep apocalyptic strain in Christianity. The idea that, any day now, Jesus is going to re-appear in the sky, all the dead bodies will come out of their graves and the End Days will begin seems completely fanciful to me. So too does the idea that Satan and his minions rules over the Earth, with a complete license from God to go around misleading us and possessing us. That idea doesn’t just seem wrong to me, it seems paranoid and toxic.

So I find myself in that horribly wishy-washy position of believing in God – passionately believing in God, desperate to be closer to Him  – and yet also believing that there is not just one path to God, and that God remains something of a mystery to humanity.

The problem with this ‘spiritual but not religious’ position is that, seeing the value of various different religious traditions, you end up committing to none of them and not really doing the work. For all Christians’ over-confidence and parochialism, at least they are committing and practicing, day in, day out.

Anyway, while Alpha didn’t quite do it for me, I was hugely impressed by HTB as an exercise in community organization. Nicky Gumbel is a master community organizer, a sort of super-vicar. And the HTB churches’ many Sunday services all around London are packed, full of people singing along to the Christian worship. They are far more emotional experiences than, say, a philosophy club, and that’s at least partly because of the music (Christians would say it’s also because of the Holy Spirit).

So, about a month ago, I thought, well, if you’re not a Christian, at least you could learn something from successful Christian churches like HTB. Above all, you could learn about the use of music in bringing people together and lifting up their hearts. Perhaps, I wondered, I could start some kind of secular soul band and gospel choir (I play the drums), and organize philosophy events with music as well, to connect with people’s emotions as well as their rationality.

Just as I was pondering the complexity of putting together a soul band and gospel choir, I saw this tweet:

The @sundayassembly is desperately seeking a volunteer drummer for 11 am June 2nd. There’ll be super songs, and lots of fun. Pls RT. Thx!

— sandersonjones (@sandersonjones) May 24, 2013

Sanderson Jones is one of the two founders of the Sunday Assembly, a new ‘atheist church’ which launched in London earlier this year, and which has attracted a lot of media attention and several hundred attendees each month. And they needed a drummer!

Well, that was synchronicitous. Could it be a sign? Does God want me to drum in an atheist band? I excitedly replied to Sanderson, and told my friends to come along. They must have thought I was a complete spiritual yo-yo, going on the Alpha course one week then drumming in an atheist church the next.

But I figured God would be OK with it, because I imagine that what He wants is for people to come together and try to improve themselves and the world, and He wants everyone to do that, not just Christians, but Buddhists, Muslims, Jews and, yes, even atheists (I imagine this is what He wants, He hasn’t expressly told me).

So last week I went along to the band rehearsal and met three lovely musicians, including Pippa Evans, the other founder of the Sunday Assembly. Then last Sunday we all met at York Hall, an enormous hall in Bethnal Green usually used for boxing events. We set up our band stuff, and watched in wonder as 600 people filed in. People are clearly really hungry for community.

The theme of the event was ‘Happiness’, there was a talk by Lord Richard Layard, founder of Action for Happiness, and the congregation sang along as the band played ‘Happy Together’, ‘Come Up And See Me Sometime’, and ‘Livin’ On A Prayer’.

Did it work? Yes and no. What I love about the Sunday Assembly is its volunteer spirit. It is funded by donations, so that immediately makes it more of a community, run by its members. The School of Life’s Sunday Sermons, by contrast, are ticketed events (the tickets cost £15) – the School isn’t making much of a profit of such events, but still, I think it creates a passive consumer mind-set in the attendees. I spoke at a School of Life ‘philosophy breakfast’ one Sunday, and when I arrived, one of the attendees said ‘you’d better be good, the last speaker was excellent’, like some spoilt hotel guest demanding their money’s worth from the breakfast buffet.

And yet it’s difficult for atheist Londoners to get out of that consumer mind-set. One friend of mine attended the Sunday Assembly, and came up to me afterwards, distinctly unimpressed.  She said ‘the sound was terrible and the whole event was ‘meh’. I can find way better things to do with my Sunday morning.’ Last Sunday she’d gone to the ‘Sunday Papers’ (£30 a ticket), where Jon Ronson and others had given a talk – that, she said, was much more entertaining. It seemed to me she was basically looking for entertaining events to be curated for her, rather than any sort of meaningful collective endeavour….which is fine, but not what I’m looking for in this instance.

As for me…I found myself missing the God bit. The Sunday Assembly was by no means aggressively atheist, but I still find that, lacking God, atheism also becomes somewhat parochial and over-confident, because it is not open to the mystery of being, to the Spirit which I believe animates all of us and which I think is sort of the best bit of us.

So where does this leave me? Just with an intention, to keep on trying to be closer to God, and to keep on trying to find ways to serve Him together. Bare with me!

Laura Marling’s new album, Once I Was An Eagle, is that rare pleasure – an album to which you listen all the way through, and then want to start again at the beginning. There are only one or two albums like that a year, for me at least. Fleet Foxes’ debut album was one such. But the sense of a complete work of art is, perhaps, greater here, in that Once I Was An Eagle feels like the working out of a particular idea, musically and emotionally. It is one continuous movement, for which Marling apparently recorded the vocals and guitar in one take (if this is true, it’s a remarkable feat because the album is 16 songs long).

The emotional idea the album explores is, as far as I can tell, whether to be vulnerable in love or whether to be defiant, hard and alone. This may be connected to Marling breaking up with Marcus Mumford, the lead singer of Mumford and Sons. They went out from 2008 to 2010, then broke up, then Mumford married Carry Mulligan last year. Then again, this may be a crude biographical reading.

The first five songs are one continuous movement, all in the same chord and time register, all in the same style. The style reminds me of Qawwali, the ecstatic Sufi music. The songs have the same ascending and descending chord patterns, with a tabla drum accentuating each footstep up or down. Here’s a short film Marling made to accompany the first four songs, which give you a sense of their feel.

Their Qawwali / Sufi feel may come from a trip that Marling and Mumford and Sons took to India in 2010, where they met and recorded with some Rajastani musicians. Both she and Mumford and Sons seem to like exploring the link between Celtic folk ecstasy and Sufi ecstasy.

But these first five songs are far from declarations of spiritual harmony or unity with God. Marling apparently leaves that to Mumford, the good Christian boy (his parents are founders of the Vineyard church’s UK branch). Marling sounds more like a witch, like Circe, a woman scorned who laughs in the darkness, transforms herself into an eagle and says to her former lover, ‘you don’t leave me, I leave you!’ If these early songs are ecstatic, it is an ecstasy of the damned. The songs manage to be both uplifting but also troubling – the witch enjoying the darkness while also longing to come off the heath and find a hearth.  The album gets its title from a wonderful line: ‘When we were in love, if we were, I was an eagle, and you were a dove’, which is a wonderful put-down to a Christian ex – though also hints at Marling’s own culpability in the break-up, her remoteness, her pride.

The fifth song, Master Hunter, reminds me of Dylan’s great break-up song, Tangled Up In Blue – Marling even nods to this with the line ‘it ain’t me babe’. It also reminds me a bit of Bjork’s song, Hunter, the video for which shows Bjork transforming herself into an animal like a shamanic witch (Bjork into a bear, Marling into an eagle). Marling and Bjork are both intensely vulnerable somewhat elvish creatures who’ve been a little unlucky in love, and yet who refuse to be victims and who transform themselves into strong almost mythological figures (think of Bjork transforming herself into the Hunter, or Bachelorette, or Isobel, married to herself).

But the transformation Marling achieves seems like a hollow victory. She has pulled back from the risk of love, which she depicts as a sea she nearly drowned in:

I don’t stare at water anymore,
Water doesn’t do what it did before,
It took me in into the edge of insane when I only meant to swim,
I nearly put a bullet in my brain when the water took me in.

She has become hard, separate:

I am a master hunter I cured my skin, now nothing gets in
Nothing not as hard as it tries

After the ‘interlude’ (yes, it’s an old-school album with two sides), things begin to cheer up a bit. In ‘Undine’, which has a country and western feel to it, she becomes a figure watching a beautiful sea-nymph, who is apparently capable of giving herself to the sea of love (‘love in her had not yet died’). The protagonist asks her ‘oh Undine, so sweet and pure, make me more naive’.

The style of the album shifts from here on. She stops looking backwards and looks forwards, asking ‘Where Can I Go?’ and apparently deciding…America! The B Side feels less like a midnight walpurgisnacht and more breezy, more mellow… more Californian in a word. Just to extend my clumsy biographical reading of the album, Marling moved to California recently and seems to enjoy the independence there, the anonymity, and the opportunity to try her hand at love again. ‘Where Can I Go?’ is, to my mind, the only weak song on the album, the only one that sounds a bit commercial and obvious, but maybe I’ll grow to like it.

But the album really returns to form with Pray For Me, in which some of the musical and emotional themes of the A Side – the urge to be alone, the qawwali scales – are returned to and in some way resolved. It’s a really beautiful song, that builds to a peak of strings with Marling crying ‘I can not love, I want to be alone’, and then realising ‘That’s not me a-trying, that’s the Devil and his lying’.

That realisation – that the Devil in her is the self-destructive urge to wall herself off and separate herself from others and from love – reminds me very much of Nathaniel Hawthorne (just to be a bit Lit Crit), who also has this idea that to separate yourself from the flow of humanity is a form of spiritual death.

Well, a fine album all in all and, as I said, it has the feel of a complete work of art, making you want to return to it and figure out how the songs weave together and comment on each other musically and verbally. It’s great that someone in our culture is producing good art (even if she has bunked off to America). And I can’t wait to see her perform at the Secret Cinema gigs later this month.