Lights of Avalon: What is Spiritual Activism?

🌈☮🕊✞☯🛕💓🌍🌳🐬🛌 🌞🌙

Who is the spiritual activist? He, she or they could come from any background, any culture, faith or creed. What defines them is their burning awareness of injustice in the world, their realisation of its sacredness, and the desire to put their ideals into action.

Stonehenge, one of the spiritual centres of Britain, and one of the most political

Imagine you live in a small town in the countryside. You might be just out of school, or perhaps well into adulthood. Either way, you’ve been trained by various people across your life, family members, teachers, peers or colleagues, to conform to certain behaviours and expectations. You may have fallen in line easily, or perhaps you felt uncomfortable, never quite fitting in. Whichever path you came from, however, will not be as shattering and as fulfilling as the one to come.

True to your upbringing, you want to stand on your own two feet, have a good job, and accomplish something worthwhile. So when it’s announced that a new fulfilment centre is being built nearby, along with a major road, you go along to the town meeting about it. There are some residents who are unhappy about this, but the Company representatives pose offers that simply cannot be refused: thousands of jobs for locals at all levels and across multiple disciplines, apprenticeship schemes to massively alleviate unskilled unemployment within the town, funds to build a new school, new doctors’ surgeries, a state-of-the-art library, heritage centre, wildlife sanctuary, better roads, cheaper and more frequent buses, new parks, and even a new homes built and sold at discount for first-time buyers native to the area. It sounds incredible. You know the town, you know it’s depleted, needs investment, needs better amenities. You know that the quality of life here is low, general health is bad, education is lacking, there’s no aspiration. This could turn the town around completely.

Better still, you apply for a job with the Company, and get it.

Photo by Rob Reid, from Tomorrow's People

In short time both the fulfilment centre and the new road are built, and you begin work on-site. You start your role as a floor picker, maybe you’ll progress to another role in the Company as time goes on. It’s exciting at first, everything is big and busy and impressive. You make some friends there. The work’s hard, but doing a good day’s work feels meaningful, your money earnt.

Over time, however, things seem less and less reasonable. You’re asked to work overtime, or work through your lunch break, for no extra money, particularly if your pace of work is not meeting the targets. Yet, if you’re just a minute late to clock in, they dock you an hour’s wages. Toilet breaks are timed, there’s a supervisor constantly on your back, and you’re threatened with dismissal for the slightest infarction. And while you may be quite stoic, your colleagues around you seem to be breaking left, right and centre. Your aisle buddy, a father of two, tells you the supervisor has only giving him 17 hours this week, which means he’s only working 1 hour more than the minimum to receive his social security money – ultimately finding himself significantly worse off than if he’d just stayed on benefits. But the supervisor gave him a choice: either work the 17 hours, or be reported to the Job Centre as someone refusing work, sanctioning all benefit contributions for up to 6 months. Next you see an Estonian worker, bullied by the locals for being a foreigner, reduced to tears. You see women being perved over, objectified and harassed. You’ve seen vulnerable workers mercilessly teased and victimised by their more spiteful colleagues like it’s a school playground. On the whole, however, everyone both in the Company and in the town seem happy and in-line with the new system. The horrible things you are seeing seem not the register with most other people, and while you are only passively absorbing the things you witness or hear about, it’s quickly beginning to feel like you’re in a dystopian only you can see. But you don’t have to worry for long. Your hard work, lateral thinking skills and flare for action has not gone unnoticed, and soon enough you are promoted to an office job in logistics. Now in a shirt and tie, sitting at a desk, it all feels much more forgivable. You are still set to searing targets, but overall the new job’s much less soul-destroying.

Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, 1980s

You have more responsibility, more respect, more money. You want to do a good job but there’s a tugging feeling in your chest. You still spend time on the shop floor for evaluation purposes, and you still see those awful things happening. Worse, now you’re higher up the ladder, you see how the managers behave – their callous disregard for the workers, their harassment of the female admin staff, their daily ritual humiliation for whoever hasn’t met targets. More and more you just can’t ignore it. More and more you feel shattered and overcome by grief. Then, one day, you see something you can’t overlook. Maybe it was a female co-worker receiving inappropriate unwanted attention from a male colleague. Perhaps it was an older worker being belittled and threatened by a supervisor. Or it may even have been the ringleader of a bullying clique making their usual moves on their victim. You stop, turn around, and make a stand. This. Stops. Now.

You cause a scene. You disrupt the flow of the environment. No-one is used to you speaking truth. They don’t know how to act. Your manager takes you to a quiet room. ‘Your values are commendable,’ they say, ‘but this is the real world.’ Their tone is calm, patronising. There’s even a little backstage frankness – you both know you’re not playing 'the game' at the moment, and for a few minutes you talk not as players, but as human beings fully aware how fake the game really is.

Battle of Orgreave, 18 June 1984. The showdown of the miners' strike (and of a hundred years of labour empowerment), which saw a bought-for police force brutally suppress the working class's challenge to the British establishment. As of Dec 2022, the working class has not recovered.

You return to your normal working routine. The game resumes. But there’s a splinter in your mind now. You cannot go back to the way things were, even if you wanted to.

This is why, down the line, you refuse to follow your manager’s instruction to asses a time and motion study and select 15% of the shop floor workforce for dismissal. ‘It’s wrong,’ you offer, simply.

‘You’re fired,’ they reply.

You feel a mixture of humiliation and liberation. It’s strangely breath-taking. Security escort you off the grounds, but you walk tall, your chest lighter.

Back in town, your family and friends are miffed. You were fired because you made a moral decision? That’s not something that happens in your family. It’s a weird night. Everyone is gathered around you, the telly’s off, all phones are put aside. There’s a big discussion. Family members seem to have a renewed interest in you, sounding off you, using you as a capstone upon which to compare their own morals, or to denounce you as wrong. Some praise you. You stood your ground, they say, that’s good. Overall they realise you’ve brought them into a higher moral consciousness, even if it’s just for a couple of hours.

Black Lives Matter. For a time in the 1990s, it felt like the younger generations were overturning the racial prejudices of their parents' and uniting into a new post-colonial Britain of solidarity between its brow-beaten subjects: the old peasant class (white working class, as they call us now), Africans, Indians and Pakistanis of Hindu, Sikh and Muslim background, West Indians, Scots, Welsh, Irish... Sadly, the powers that be decided divide and conquer was a good tactic, and the media and politicians set to work sowing the seeds of fear, xenophobia and hatred. Anyone who isn't a Norman-descended landowner in Britain, is a subject of its imperial, authoritarian control - that's not just the English (their original serfs since 1066), but the Celts, Indians, Nigerians, West Indians, Pakistanis, and anyone else they conquered over the centuries. As such, we are all committed to walking the ruins of the British Empire, and we are all children of its oppression. It's time we united under that common purpose, and become children of the revolution.

The next day you walk around town. The Company has been around now for over two years, but unemployment hasn’t improved all that much – just as soon as someone’s recruited another is sacked. The library’s been scrapped, the heritage centre quietly forgotten, no new school, and only a very basic, very austere park with one small climbing frame and unfinished swings. It’s clear to you now that the Company was not the answer to the town’s needs. The Company, you realise, simply wants profit. That is the only motive for all its decisions.

Worse still, the resulting traffic has increased pollution in the area, children are developing respiratory problems more often, and the new roads have torn up the fields and woodlands, displacing the wildlife, and driving certain species out of their habitats completely. If that wasn’t bad enough, the Company plans to buy more land, expand the fulfilment centre, build more roads, bring in more lorries, more pollution, and squeeze its influence tighter around the town council and civic leaders.

You cannot unsee these things, you cannot unknow them. So you make your choice. You start making your opposition to these plans vocal, with increasing loudness. You attend marches, protests, you support strike action. You even start to sabotage equipment surveyors use to plan the Company’s expansion, or lodge appeal after appeal in regards to local fauna and flora that fall under preservation orders. You discover the Company are secretly killing the protected species preventing them from advancing, or bribing and blackmailing landowners to sell. You often fall foul of the Company’s heavies, but you’re not alone. Others are with you, others of the same honest conviction to do right. It feels like an endless fight that you will never win, but you keep fighting.

Photo by Rob Reid, from Tomorrow's People

All the while you do, your connection with your fellow human beings is deepening, your unity with the earth and its creatures strengthening and becoming sacred. You feel there’s something beyond you, a higher consciousness you are reaching toward, a Wholeness of Self. There’s an ocean of oneness, an interconnectedness of things that guide you along with an inexplicable synchronicity. More importantly, you are working in service to others. You may not even realise it at first, but everything you are doing is for the health, security, equality and happiness of all people, all animals, and the very Earth herself.

You don’t know why. You don’t know how you got these morals. It wasn’t all those schooldays of having the Bible shoved down your throat. Jesus was just some ancient bearded bloke who was born in a manger, told people to worship him or go to hell, died a brutal death, and came back from the dead (and something about Easter eggs). No, you’re the way you are because humans have evolved to be altruistic and cooperative, and in your case these characteristics are heightened for one reason or another.

The 2010 student protests in London. The Coalition Government had announced the tripling of student fees as a means to disincentivise working class participation in higher education, and boost profits in the education sector.

And now you are walking in the footsteps of people all throughout time who have taken a stand against the darkness and firmly rejected it in service of the light. Socrates, Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks, Emmeline Pankhurst, Che Guevara, and even Jesus (the real Jesus, the one they never told you about).

This is spiritual activism.

My Personal Beliefs

I was initially brought up an Anglican (not a very good one), although my childhood gradually gave way to total secularism. My various experiences have amounted to core set of spiritual beliefs, but I prefer to keep things vague because frankly I will never know anything for certain, and because sometimes keeping things out of focus keeps your life fluid and flowing. The Code I created for myself isn't a strict law, but has arisen from my own moral compass rather than imposed from without. As such, I can only fail myself if I break the Code, and only I can make amends.

At heart I guess I'm a humanist, as I believe that all religion, all spirituality arises from the human mind, and human interactions. Ideas of morality and ethics in an abstract, self-aware species such as ourselves means that all things start and end with the human being - and the onus is on us to take responsibility and save one another.

I understand spirituality and religious belief through the analytical psychology of Carl Jung. As such, I believe in the journey of individuation that brings us to the Wholeness of Self, and to the individuation of the collective (our society) into a balanced, equal, peaceful and utopian system.

I also subscribe to Jung's theory that every human has a collective unconscious, a foundation substrata in our Psyche that influences our personal unconscious. It's a psychical dimension composed of 'archetypes' that find expression in our dreams often as mythological figures. It is what gives us our religions, folklore, etc.

New Age Spirituality

I have a very specific and defined personal understanding of what is meant when I identify as a New Age Seeker. I freely adopt the term because it's the best fit. It's my route to psychological wellbeing and positive action, and even if I don't exactly always believe everything about these beliefs are 'really-existing', and let myself be led by open-mindedness, critical thinking and my own 'mystical' experiences.

OK, so here's a quick rundown of my definition of New Age, formed in an English radical context:

Rejects capitalist, class-based mainstream English society
Relies of intuition, instinct, synchronicity/alignment and the inner voice to inform decision, judgements and choices in every day life (because we have evolved to be cooperative mammals that intuitively know right and wrong). It means in touch with your inner psychic landscape
Anti-authoritarian, anti-fascist
Expression in practice of theatre, music, carnival and poetic/prose writing
Exists in the pagan chronotrope (Gaian time), following the Wheel of the Year, developing eco-spirituality, resonating with the land
Seeking our true Self and seeking the Real behind the capitalist realist fantasy around us - leading to the New Age (Aquarian age, Nirvana, Kingdom of God, etc.) - particularly in anticipation of the coming climate apocalypse and societal breakdown
Healing (as in psychological healing, and communal healing)
Cosmological beliefs
Autonomous spaces

Wheel of the Year

I also try to keep the festivals and traditions, organised into the Wheel of the Year, to remain mindful of the environment, the seasons, and the coming together of communities. These gatherings represent an expression of emancipation, of radicalism and political empowerment, and of peace, love and giving. Below is a list of traditions, each with a link to a BFI video on the subject:

Summer Solstice (Midsummer) - 21 June

Lammas - 1 August

Autumn Equinox (Harvest Festival) - 23 September

Michaelmas - 29 September

All Hallows (Samhain/Halloween) - 31 October/1 November

Guy Fawkes (Bonfire Night) - 5 November

Winter Solstice (Yule) - 21 December

Christmas - 24 - 26 December

Twelfth Night - 5 January

Wassailing (Epiphany) - 6 January

Plough Monday - Monday after Wassailing

Beating the Bounds (Candlemas/Imbolc) - 2 February