Hiking in the Lake District recently my son found a perfect stick to walk with. It was strong, smooth, lightweight and, for the next few days, became my constant companion on the hills. I know I’m not alone in finding joy in just the right stick for woodland walks, there’s something so wild and manly about having one. It adds an extra dimension to a walk, its users transported beyond a gentle stroll into an epic adventure.
As our holiday came to an end I found, to my surprise, that I didn’t want to part with the stick. We’d been through so much together and I’d grown somewhat attached to it. It was more than just any old stick since, for a few days, it had become an extension of some part of me. I wanted to keep the memories close at hand and this friendly stick was a gateway back to them. And so I didn’t, part with it that is. We packed it up along with the rest of our belongings and now it stands in my hallway, alongside another of my favourite walking sticks.
But this isn’t a blog about the joys of walking through woodland with the perfect stick. Instead I want to reflect on what my recent ‘stick attachment’ teaches me about our propensity as human beings to assign meaning and emotion to inanimate objects. Why, I wonder, do we become attached to things like this in the first place? Is it a problem? And what impact can it or should it have on our spiritual life?
Mind in matter
To begin with let’s consider a fairly unusual concept, panpsychism.
Panpsychism is the belief that everything in the world (whether living or not) contains within it a degree of consciousness and that, by extension, the heart and substructure of everything that’s real is mind and consciousness existing in relationship with one another. It's the idea that the universe and all the particles within it are conscious (or at least contain the ‘thing’ that is consciousness) and that learning to live as one who is fully alive involves learning to live with an awareness of the minds all around us.
Of course what we mean by mind and consciousness varies dramatically from how we generally think about those things. A pen does not think in the way that a human being does but panpsychists believe that it nevertheless still contains an element of conscious existence as we relate to it. All of us inhabit this sort of thinking to some extent, often without realising it. For example when we call an old chair ‘grandma’s chair’ we add personality to the object and we relate to it differently than any other chair.
I first came across these ideas in a lecture by eminent psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist. He has written extensively on the nature of attention and is known for his analysis of the different hemispheres of the brain. His insights into attention are fascinating and particularly important in a culture like ours that is so preoccupied with left hemispheric, rational and objective, modes of attending to things.
McGilchrist says about attention that: “Attention quite literally changes the world. How we attend to the world changes what it is we find there.” In the lecture I saw he recounted an emotional experience he’d had whilst staring at an image of Christ. He goes onto say that by learning to pay attention to the world in a way that trusts both hemispheres of our brain we begin to discover relationships and meaning in things where once we only saw objects and laws.
Perhaps there’s enough truth in these ideas to begin to help me make sense of my ‘stick attachment’. Perhaps it isn’t so odd after all to talk of me having a ‘relationship’ with the stick.
Ultra Social
Something else worth considering when trying to understand our relationship with lifeless matter is the idea that we humans are, what psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls, an ‘ultra-social species’. We are intensely relational and we instinctively personify the world around us since we’re designed to operate relationally. There’s a reason why we don’t see craters and blobs on the surface of the moon but a ‘man’ staring back at us; we’re made to see eyes and mouths in inanimate items.
Sociability is built into us simply because life is made up of relationships and grasping this is crucial for our survival. Understanding the inter-dependance of everything and learning to make things and people 'work' for us is vital. From infancy we must work out how to elicit favourable responses from our caregivers and in adulthood it’s those who have learnt to ‘play well’ with others that stand the best chance of success.
Perhaps, given these things, we might begin to understand why young children often have a string of ‘lucky charms’. These are objects they relate to positively and, as a result of their actions, feel that treated with good fortune by these charms. As a teenager I vividly remember sleeping with a basketball in my bed. I was captain of the school team and desperately wanted to win a upcoming match. For some reason I felt that caring for the basketball and treating it well increased the chances of success in the match!
Life is about relationships, we are relational creatures, we therefore attach ourselves to and have ‘relationships’ with inanimate things.
Tactile Teachers
Lastly it seems to me that one of the reasons why we relate personally to inanimate objects has to do with the fact that we learn by touch. The texture and temperature of something we against our skin makes a big impact on us and makes us feel good (if it’s a pleasant feeling) or bad (if it isn’t).
It seems entirely natural therefore that we would become attached to items we associate with positive experiences. My walking stick became warm after a while of holding it and grasping it kept my hand comfortable; perhaps that’s why I liked it so much and took it home with me - it’s a pleasant sensation walking through a forest with a comfortable stick in my hand.
The things we touch can sometimes morph into something else entirely. James Clear (in his book Atomic Habits) points to an instance of a woman who, after many years of soothing herself by stroking her dog, found that even after her dog had died she noticed that she became calmer simply by lowering her hand to the place her dog used to be. Our movements and our objects get ‘paired’ with feelings such that they then become windows and portals that can transport us to other places.
After having surgery last summer I remember being in hospital, too tired to speak but holding in my hands a prayer rope that I moved between my fingers. As I lay there exhausted and in pain I fingered the rope, grasped each knot and recited a prayer in my mind. In those moments I experienced communion with God and feelings of peace and belovedness that mean that even now simply looking at the rope on my bedside table sparks a desire in me to seek out a quiet spot and pray.
Touch transports us and touching items we associate with another time and place, transports us (in some small way) back there.
The stick I brought home with me from the Lake District will, for some time to come, carry with it properties that border on the magical since whenever I grasp it a part of my imagination will be carried to the North of England. It may look to others like I’m walking in the forest by my house but look closely and you’ll see a far away stare in my eyes. I’ll be present but also wholly distracted, I’ll be 'away with the fairies' as we say.
Which is also precisely why we ought to be careful with becoming sentimentally attached to physical things, fairies.
Fairy Dust and Idol Factories
What a panpsychist calls ‘consciousness and mind’ traditional people have just tended to call ‘spirits’.
To try and identify the mind in the matter is, it seems to me, to try and peer beyond earth and into heaven. Something that is not only forbidden in the Mosaic law it’s also incredibly dangerous, which is probably one of the reason's it’s forbidden! Psalm 82, Deuteronomy 32 and Genesis 6 convey the reality that the conscious beings present around us don’t act with humanity’s interests in mind. Instead God pronounces judgement on them for misleading the nations of the world.
It’s not much of stretch to consider how they could (playing perhaps on our ‘ultra-socialness’ and our ‘touchy feelyness’) attach themselves to the objects around us and use them to garner from us the commodity they lack and long for - physical agency, the ability to occupy bodies and impact the corporeal world. Fairies, before they were depicted as harmless flying pixies, were believed instead to be hobgoblins and banshees, hideous to look at and who appeared only to foretell tragedy! Idols, the scriptures tell us, deceive us and bring only suffering (Psalm 16:8).
The trouble is, we humans are idol factories. We become attached to physical objects and project onto them some longed for deliverance. We all too easily offer ourselves to the enslaving influence of idols, which are simply physical objects that the spiritual forces use against us to, leading us into ruin.
We’re right to be wary of the hold that the things we hold onto can have on us since much of the created world is “good for food, pleasing to the eye, and desirable for gaining wisdom” (Genesis 3:6).. In the hands of malevolent consciousnesses the world may not be all it, at first sight, appears to be.
This is however, only half the story.
The other half is something that’s often overlooked by Christians in traditions like mine, that the physical world is good and important.
Out of a proper concern about the enslaving nature of idols many of the Reformers stripped their churches of any physical adornment. In its context and day this made complete sense. The church of its day had, to all intents and purposes, become captive to bells, smells and spells.
It’s likely that the average Christian in the middle ages had such a superstitious attachment to their prayers and shrines that they had more in common with a temple going pagan than with a devout worshipper of Yahweh.
That being said, the swing away from physicality brought on by the Reformation, combined with the industrialisation and urbanisation of the 19th and 20th Centuries, not to mention the computerisation of the 21st century has left us with a relationship toward the world and the ‘things’ in it that would be utterly bewildering to the Apostles.
We find gardening and walking in the woods to be ‘spiritual activities’ because we’ve forgotten our connectedness to the woods and the soil. Spiritually open people are drawn to monism in large part, I believe, because it takes the physical world seriously.
By contrast (as N. T. Wright and others have pointed out) the believers in the Old Testament were much more concerned with their son inheriting their soil than they were with the soul going to heaven. Indeed there is very little in the Old Testament about the afterlife and next to nothing about ‘heaven’ which, given the emphasis on those things in the average evangelical church, strikes us as being not a little bit odd!
One of the reasons for this however is because believers in the Old Testament were taken up by getting on with doing what God had told them to do on earth. They were concerned about the land they lived in and the people they lived around. Salvation was construed in terms of deliverance from people trying to kill them and their future hope was set on the establishment of a monarchy.
Even Israelites living in Babylon were commanded to plant gardens and build houses (Jer. 29). Think about that for a moment. Living under foreign oppression with the chances of meeting an early death a very real one they weren’t commanded to ‘get themselves right for eternity’ but to build houses!
A Call to Corrective Measures
I believe that what’s needed, particularly at a time like ours with it’s disconnection and the emergence of the cyborg self (to borrow Mary Harrington’s idea) is a return to a more ‘this earthly’ Christianity. Not one that seeks to build a new christendom but that deliberately looks to re-enchant the natural world as both a place where God can be known and as a place we can use for our spiritual nourishment and education. We must aim to re-embed our souls into the soil of the earth around us, not by becoming nature worshipping druids but by being earth dwelling Christians who see and hear Christ in the thousand sights and sounds all around us.
This isn’t about emphasising creation care in our preaching or making sure that everything in our lives is ‘plastic free’ but it’s about learning to live within our world as a place to go to be with God. Communing with Christ involves enjoying fellowship with him in the warp and woof of daily life like when I walk in the world, wait for a bus or touch the grass.
To ‘pray without ceasing’ we must learn to turn every prompt of our senses as a trigger to engage with God. This doesn’t mean I need to talk all the time, saying a prayer in between each mouthful of my cornflakes, but that I learn to love everything in my life ‘for his sake’ (to reference Augustine’s insight on ‘disordered loves’). It shouldn’t be a surprise to us that we love the souvenirs and trinkets we find along life’s way. It needn’t concern us when we have a relationship (of sorts) with those things either. It is inevitable that the things we touch and taste will move our hearts and whilst we needn’t be concerned by this, but we must Christianise it and guard ourselves against our idol making nature.
This isn’t to legitimise idolatrous practices common in some Christian traditions. We mustn’t make images of Christ and pray to (or through) them and neither can we keep a shrine to Mary or any other saint for that matter. Using Visual aids in prayer does not legitimate talking to the dead saints gathered nearby. Given the craftiness and cunning of our Enemy and his track record with using physical matter to manipulate people, we have good reason to give any such practise a wide berth.
Use prompts for prayer, love the world God has made and treat it as a window through which we can see into aspects of his glory - but don’t be naive about evil ‘dear children, keep yourselves from idols.’
The stick I grasp as I stroll through the valley brings me delight as an extension of his world and when I praise it I’m praising him.
The slate on my desk I took from the top of a recent mountain I climbed is a portal into his presence since it calls to mind the struggle of the climb and the majestic views from the top; both of which the Lord uses to teach me.
The sunshine on my skin, the birdsong in my ear, the jasmine I smell around me and the damp earth I feel beneath my feet. They are given to me to enjoy as gifts from a good Father and I mustn’t minimise them or overlook them in favour of some more ‘spiritual’ activity.
This world is the world the Spirit made and I ought to treat it as the spiritual place that it is.
Looking at and looking along
In saying all this I’m saying nothing that hasn’t been said before of course. C. S. Lewis in his excellent ‘meditations on a tool shed’ introduces the difference between looking at things and looking along them.
When I talk of receiving God’s world as a ‘window’ into his presence I am merely encouraging us to look 'along' the world once more. This is different from studying a thing and learning about its molecular composition, what Lewis calls looking ‘at’ the thing.
His whole reflection is worth reading in full but here’s a statement worth concluding this blog post with:
The people who look at things have had it all their own way; the people who look along things have simply been brow-beaten… We do not know whether the lover or the psychologist is giving the more correct account of love, or whether both accounts are equally correct in different ways, or whether both are equally wrong. We just have to find out. But the period of brow-beating has got to end.