Spirits in the Material World

Abstract

In Chapters 5 and 6, I have shown how personal life stories are rewritten and take on new directions following a spiritual awakening or encounter. I have explored how an individual’s social world alters, embracing both new earthly networks and relations, and an embedding into a collective spiritual world based on relational consciousness. But what of the wider worlds these enchanted individuals and networks live in and move around? What purchase do such life narratives and socio-spiritual encounters have in the ‘real’ or material world? In this chapter, I map out the contexts and everyday articulations of spirituality, locating individuals firmly within practical, experiential contexts, within their homes and working lives, and other quotidian spaces and environments they move through. I explore the broader contextual settings of everyday spirituality, and the strategies adopted to ‘make the ineffable tangible’ in the world (Eipper, 2007: 258). I reveal also how these strategies physically and materially impact upon the wider world with what might be described as ‘modest, but… significant, transformative effects’ (McEwan, 2008: 41).

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

(Albert Einstein)