Concluding the Journey: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going?

Abstract

My intention throughout this book has been to show how the presence of ‘spirit’ and enchantment in the everyday worlds of spiritual seekers has significant impacts for the way they live their lives. Far from being set apart, this enchantment finds its way right into the heart of mundane existence, extending its power into every corner of everyday life (Williams RR, 2010). From the start, therefore, to reflect this, I began signposting ‘spirit’ and ‘the everyday’ as two guiding landmarks in the spiritual landscape I wanted to explore. In the opening chapters, I showed how these landmarks have been ignored in most critical social science investigations. Instead the tendency has been to detail an understanding of the spiritual which is individualised, isolated and interior—not linked to any particular meaning system, tradition or social networks, but idiosyncratically developed by each individual practitioner. At the core of such criticisms is the concern that this evolution of spirituality is simply a consumer trend, something responding to market forces rather than any transcendent or divine compulsion. This assumption, I suggested in Chapters 3 and 4, is in part based upon the spurious claim that, firstly, there is no ‘spirit’ at the heart of contemporary spirituality-beyond-religion, and secondly, that it is something divorced from significant everyday contexts.

What is the nature of these spirits and the world they apparently live in… a false comfort, a useful fiction, or is there something real and sturdy about them?

(Stafford Betty, 2006: 38)