"Sorry, no time for God right now . . . I'm busy with my personal angel." The cover of the current issue of The Dubliner magazine leapt out at me from the shelves. Generation Mumbo Jumbo, is written in red letters above the head of an angelic-looking model. Generation Mumbo Jumbo. Could they mean me?
I engaged in some self-reflection. Examined the facts. Incriminating Fact Number 1: It is indeed a long time since I've had any time for God. The God we were told about in school at any rate. Incriminating Fact Number 2: I had a very pleasant encounter with a personal angel just the other week while sitting at my dining room table playing The Transformation Game. The facts don't lie. I'm a fully paid-up member of the mumbo jumbo generation.
Fellow members might like to know that The Transformation Game, developed in the Findhorn community in Scotland, is played with four people and a facilitator over several hours, and sometimes days. It combines my interest in self-development with my passion for boardgames. Briefly, each player starts with an intention - anything from "I want to get out of my destructive relationship" to "what are the obstacles to success in my career?" - and as the game progresses various angels, and other aids, help the players on their way to, hopefully, some kind of resolution.
My excellent facilitator, Mary, suggested that I view the angels as guides, which I was more comfortable with at the start. But by 3am when the game came to a close, I was at ease with the idea that a faith angel could help me with the way I play my life.
This angel encounter was merely the tip of my mumbo jumbo iceberg. Over the past 15 years I have consulted everything from oujia boards to (the shame) a "psychic" hotline. At the time, I was suffering from a broken heart and from a brief listen to my despairing voice the "psychic" cleverly deduced that I was sad "about something". The entire call was, as I should of known, a waste of money I didn't really have.
The oujia board and the psychic excursions may have been pure mumbo jumbo, but it's not how I'd describe other experiences, such as a deep rest and relaxation retreat in Spain, where my time was divided between sleeping, meditating, eating, picking loganberries and learning from Jaya and Gemma, two deeply inspiring spiritual teachers; meditative walks through the French countryside; trips to see Amma, the Hugging Mother in the RDS, and an audience with the Dalai Lama. In India I've sat in an ashram and sung native American chants and felt, as the blackbirds squawked over the Ganges, a deep kind of peace. Then there was the retreat in a Thai temple in Bodhgaya. And The Four Agreements, a book which, for me, offers more in the way of a practical guide to spiritual living than the bible. All mumbo jumbo? Not to me.
I should clarify something here. My most revelatory spiritual adventures have only cost as much as I was able, at the time, to pay. Everything was done on a donation basis, along the Buddhist principle of "dana". Money-making psychic hotlines, which at a few euro per minute prey on the weak, the depressed and the debt-ridden, are genuinely, as The Dubliner article contends, worthy of the name mumbo jumbo. An open heart is all you need, not an open purse. When it comes to spirituality, some of the best things in life really are free or, as with The Four Agreements and tools such as The Transformation Game, comparatively inexpensive.
Generation mumbo jumbo, I believe, may actually be better off than the generations who came before, in that they are exploring spirituality and questioning who they are of their own volition, rather than out of blind belief in any one faith. Far more insidious is the fact that around the world, and indeed in Ireland, we are still categorising children as Protestant or Catholic or Muslim. Labelling children according to the political beliefs of their parents - allowing for Fianna Fail or Pro-Europe or Progressive Democrat children, would not be acceptable to society. But labelling them by religion, somehow, is.
We don't need to belong to a religious group to explore our spirituality. We just have to follow our innate hunger for meaning and our inbuilt thirst to remember who we really are. In this way we can't help but discover that there is more to life than seven different kinds of cappuccino and a rapidly maturing SSIA. How and when we do this is up to each of us. There will be plenty of mistakes made along the way. But if it's a toss-up between angels and inherited religious allegiance, I'll take the mumbo jumbo every time.
Details of The Transformation Game are available from the Be Inspired Centre on Camden Street, Dublin 2 (01-4785022)