Feed my lambs

The boys and girls of Sherborne Abbey Primary School enjoyed an early start to their half-term holiday last week, as they were given Friday off so that the teaching staff could have an INSET Day. INSET is short for In-Service Training, and is an important part of the professional development of teachers throughout the country. And this term our Abbey Primary teachers invited me to share part of their day to discuss with them the spiritual development of the children, and how best a Church School like ours can foster that development.

Today is St Aldhelm's Day: Aldhelm, Abbot of Malmesbury and first Bishop of Sherborne; Aldhelm the scholar and Benedictine monk. To this day, wherever there are Benedictines there is education: Downside and Ampleforth spring instantly to mind. So Aldhelm would greatly approve of an INSET Day on spirituality in the Abbey School, and be even more delighted that the suggestion for it came from the staff themselves. It is indeed tremendously encouraging. Only a few weeks ago the School had a highly successful SIAS – Statutory Inspection of Anglican Schools – through which it came with flying colours. And now here are the teachers wanting to discuss how to improve the School's spiritual life, the spirituality of their children.

And Jesus said to Peter, ‘Feed my lambs'.

So what did we discover at the School on Friday morning? First, I think, that ‘spirituality' is a difficult word, a slippery word. Part of the problem is that it has become a dustbin into which all sorts of things are thrown in today's “pick‘n'mix” culture: bits of eastern meditation, Gregorian chant, yoga, nature worship – it's all labelled ‘spirituality' and you pay your money and take your choice. But achieving a clear definition of the word is not easy. Like a bar of soap in the bath, ‘spirituality' has a habit of eluding your grasp just as you think you are about to pin it down.

Perhaps it is easiest to recognise when it is absent. I was reading the other day about a painter who was extraordinarily technically competent. But he had no creativity, nothing to say. His own paintings were flat and lifeless. So he turned instead to forgery: amazingly accurate reproductions of Old Masters flowed from his brushes. It was all skill and no inspiration. As a painter he had no soul. The sculptor, the actor, the musician, the teacher, the preacher: they are all the same. We can all recognise the difference between the merely capable and the truly inspired.

So if our children are to grow spiritually, they must be inspired. That means that our teachers themselves must be inspirational: passionate about their subject and able to communicate that passion to those they teach. All the scholars agree that as an author Aldhelm was uninspiring. The verdict of Sir Frank Stenton is typical: ‘his ingenuity was expressed in the elaboration of a style which deprives his learning of all vitality. He [was] … without a trace of literary feeling'. And yet four hundred years after his death people in these parts were still talking about Aldhelm's habit of standing on a bridge or in the market place, singing the songs of the day and then delighting the folk who had gathered with his preaching of the Gospel as he caught fire with God.

And then spirituality needs a context. The reason that the “pick‘n'mix” spirituality of today does not satisfy is that it is not earthed and rooted, just as fewer people are themselves earthed and rooted. Post-modernism dismisses the need for the big picture: all that matters is you and your personal story. You are your own world. You are the centre of your own circumference. ‘There is no such thing as society', as Mrs. Thatcher once famously, and foolishly, said. And so children are taught history in unrelated fragments. They learn a few things about many religions rather than learning much about their own. At home families seldom eat together, let alone sit down and talk together. The television is their baby-minder when they are tiny; the computer screen their companion as they grow older. We need to give them the big picture by telling the big stories over and again: the stories of their community and their nation, and especially the stories of their faith and of their salvation.

But above all, Christian spirituality is contemplative – that is, it is about seeing and attending. It is about seeing beyond and below the surface of things, seeing into what Gerard Manley Hopkins called ‘the dearest freshness deep down things'. Elizabeth Barrett Browning puts it best of all:

Earth's crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God;

But only he who sees, takes off his shoes:

The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries….

Is not this the very threshold of prayer: to attend, to look, to listen, and there to find God? Speak thou to Him for he heareth, and spirit with spirit will meet. Closer is he than breathing; nearer than hands and feet. In any subject from poetry to physics, from mathematics to music, the faculty of attention, of contemplation, of looking, can lead anyone, child or adult, deeper into the heartbeat of creation, deeper into the heart of God.

And of course none of this applies solely to children. It applies to us all. Jesus said to Peter, ‘Feed my lambs.' But he also commanded ‘Feed my sheep.' We are all students in the school of soul-making, and we all must all feed on the spiritual – on the bread of life and the water of salvation – if our souls are not to die of thirst and starvation. Let us let Hopkins have the last word:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.