Evelyn Underhill once observed, in her little book The Spiritual Life.
'to have' and 'to keep'— craving, clutching, clinging—when all the
Spirit wills us to do is to conjugate the verb 'to be.' "
This comfortably off, middle class, Anglican spiritual director, whose devotional writing is a mixture of shrewd psychology and pastoral compassion, rooted in contemplative prayer, lived those words well. I still treasure many of her books – some of them in places laughably dated, but time after time you recognise, with a perhaps questionable spiritual envy, this woman's been 'far ben' with God.
The phrase "far ben" is Scottish, used by Alexander Whyte (one of Scotland's finest preachers and most catholic spirits), to describe a shepherd he knew in his teens, who used the isolation of his days sheep herding in 1860's Glen Clova, to think and pray towards a closer walk with God.
Both Underhill and Whyte, who I'm not sure ever even knew of each other, were steeped in the literature of spirituality – and from their starting points of high traditional Anglicanism with open edges (Underhill), and Scottish militant Free Church Presybterianism in which Whyte pushed the edges outwards beyond confining narrowness, they couldn't be more different. But as one of the puritans remarked of those he admired for their piety, they both "carried the scent of the same distant country of the soul."
Reading some of their work again, along with other spiritual writers from the past century or so, I'm not persuaded, not even half convinced, that what is available in today's spiritual writing comes anywhere near the quality and spiritual perceptiveness of people like Whyte and Underhill. And without being overly judgemental, I wonder if that's because writing today is aimed at the niches of the market, rather than being an essential by-product of a heart and mind with much to say that grows with organic healthiness out of lives that are and have been "far ben" with God.
Leave a Reply