Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion (13 page)

Though technology has rendered it more or less absurd to feel gratitude over owning a book, there remain psychological advantages in rarity. We can revere the care that goes into making a Jewish Sefer
Torah, the sacred scroll of the Pentateuch, a copy of which will take a single scribe a year and a half to write out by hand, on a parchment made from the hide of a ceremonially slaughtered goat which has been soaked for nine days in a rabbinically prepared mixture of apple juice, saltwater and gall nuts. We should be prepared
to swap a few of our swiftly disintegrating paperbacks for volumes that would proclaim, through the weight and heft of their materials, the grace of their typography and the beauty of their illustrations, our desire for their contents to assume a permanent place in our hearts.

iii.
Spiritual Exercises

1.
Alongside setting alternative curricula for universities and emphasizing the need to rehearse and digest knowledge, religions have also been radical in taking education out of the classroom and combining it with other activities, encouraging their followers to learn through all of their senses, not only by listening and reading but also, and more broadly, by
doing
: eating, drinking, bathing, walking and singing.

Zen Buddhism, for instance, proposes ideas about the importance of friendship, the inevitability of frustration and the imperfection of human endeavours. But it does not simply lecture its adherents about these tenets; it helps them more directly to apprehend their truth through activities such as flower arranging, calligraphy, meditation, walking, gravel rak–ing and, most famously, tea drinking.

Because the last of these is at once such a common practice in the West and yet so devoid of spiritual significance, it seems particularly strange as well as delightful that Zen Buddhism should have anointed the tea ceremony as one of its most significant pedagogic moments, as important to Buddhists as the Mass is to Catholics. During
chanoyu
, as the ceremony is known, some of the same feelings that hover faintly over a typical English tea are refined, amplified and symbolically connected to Buddhist doctrine. Every aspect of the ritual has meaning, beginning with the cups, whose misshapen form reflects Zen's affection for all that is raw and unpretentious. The slow way in which the drink
is brewed by the tea master allows the demands of the ego to go into abeyance, the simple decorations of the tea hut are meant to draw thoughts away from concerns with status, while the steaming scented tea should help one to feel the truths lurking behind the Chinese characters written on scrolls on the walls denoting key Buddhist virtues like ‘harmony', ‘purity' and ‘tranquillity'.

The point of the tea ceremony is not to teach a new philosophy but to make an existing one more vivid through an activity which carries subtle sympathies with it; it is a mechanism for bringing to life ideas about which participants already have a good intellectual grasp and yet continue to need encouragement to abide by.

To take a comparable example from another faith, Jewish texts make repeated mention of the importance of atonement and the possibilities for renewal through the admission of sin. But within the religion, such ideas are not merely imparted through books, they are made vibrant through a bodily experience: a ritualized version of having a bath. Since the Babylonian exile, Judaism has advised its communities to construct
mikvot –
sacred baths each containing exactly 575 litres of clean spring water – in which Jews are to immerse themselves after confessing to spiritually doubtful acts, in order to recover their purity and their connection to God. The
Torah recommends a full immersion in a
mikveh
every Friday afternoon, before the New Year and following every seminal emission.

The institution of the
mikveh
relies on a sense of renewal which secular bathers already know a little about, but lends it greater depth, structure and solemnity. An atheist may, of course, also feel clean after taking a bath and dirty without one, but the
mikveh
ritual, associating outer hygiene with the recovery of a particular kind of inner purity, like so many other symbolic practices promoted by religions, manages to use a physical activity to support a spiritual lesson.

2.
Religions understand the value of training our minds with a rigour that we are accustomed to applying only to the training of our bodies. They present us with an array of spiritual exercises designed to strengthen our inclination towards virtuous thoughts and patterns of behaviour: they sit us down in unfamiliar spaces, adjust our posture, regulate what we eat, give us scripts detailing what we should say to one another and minutely monitor the thoughts that cross our consciousness. They do all this not in order to deny us freedom but to quell our anxieties and flex our moral capacities.

This double insight – that we should train our minds just as we train our bodies, and that we should do so partly
through
those bodies – has led to the founding, by all the major faiths, of religious retreats where adherents may for a limited time abscond from their ordinary lives and find inner restoration through spiritual exercise.

The secular world offers no true parallels. Our closest equivalents are country
hotels and
spas, though the comparison serves only to reveal our shallowness. The brochures for such establishments tend to promise us opportunities to rediscover what is most essential to us, they show us images of couples in plush dressing gowns, they vaunt the quality of their mattresses and toiletries or boast of their twenty-four-hour provision of room service. But the emphasis is always on physical satiation and mental diversion rather than on any real fulfilment of the needs of our souls. These places have no way of helping us when the incompatibilities in our relationships reach a new nadir, when reading the Sunday newspapers provokes panic about our careers or when we wake up in terror just before dawn, paralysed by the thought of how short a span of life remains to us. Otherwise solicitous concierges, brimful of ideas about where we might partake of horse riding or mini-golf, will fall suddenly silent when questioned about strategies for coping with guilt, wayward longings or self-loathing.

Religious retreats are, fortunately, somewhat more rounded in their attentions. St Bernard, the founder of the first Cistercian monasteries (organizations which in his day functioned as both retreats for the laity and permanent residences for monks), suggested that all human beings were divided into three parts,
corpus
(body),
animus
(mind) and
spiritus
(spirit), each of which must be carefully looked after by any decent hostelry.

In the tradition of St Bernard, Catholic retreats continue even today to provide their guests with comfortable accommodations, extensive libraries and spiritual activities ranging from the ‘examen' – a thrice-daily survey of the conscience, carried out alone and in silence (usually with a lighted candle and a statuette of Jesus) – to sessions with counsellors who have been specially trained to inject logic and morality into believers' confused and corrupted thought processes.

Although the specific lessons taught therein may differ markedly, Buddhist retreats embody an equal commitment to the whole self. After hearing of one in the English countryside specializing in seated and walking forms of
meditation, I resolved to see for myself what benefits might be derived from a course of spiritual exercises.

At six in the morning one Saturday in June, some 2,573 years after the Buddha was born not far from Kapilavastu, in the Ganges river basin, I sit in a semicircle with twelve other novices in a converted barn in Suffolk. Our teacher, Tony, begins the session by inviting us to understand the human condition as it is viewed through Buddhist eyes. He says that most of the time, without having any choice in the matter, we are dominated by our ego, or, as it is termed in Sanskrit, our
ātman
. This centre of consciousness is by nature selfish, narcissistic and insatiable, unreconciled to its own mortality and driven to avoid the prospect of death by fantasizing about the redemptive powers of career, status and wealth. It is let loose like a demented dynamo at the moment of our birth and does not incline to rest until we breathe our last. Because the ego is inherently vulnerable, its predominant mood is one of anxiety. It is skittish, jumping from object to object, unable ever to relax its vigilance or engage properly with others. Even under the most auspicious of contexts, it is never far from a relentless, throbbing drumbeat of worry, which conspires to prevent it from sincere involvement with anything outside of itself. And yet the ego also has a touching tendency constantly to trust that its desires are about to be fulfilled. Images of tranquillity and security haunt it: a particular job, social conquest or material acquisition always seems to hold out the promise of an end to craving. In reality, however, each worry will soon enough be replaced by another, and one desire by the next, generating a relentless cycle of what Buddhists call ‘grasping', or
upādāna
in Sanskrit.

Nevertheless, as Tony now explains, this sombre picture of one part of ourselves does not have to define all that we are, because we are endowed too with the rare ability, reinforceable through spiritual exercises, occasionally to set aside the demands of our egos and to enter into a state of what Buddhists call
anātman
, or egolessness, during which we can take a step back from our passions and think about what our lives might be like if we were not burdened by the additional and painful need to be ourselves.