Conclusion                                                       Page 60

In my work accompanying others on their life journeys I meet numerous people

caught in a more or less anxious search for God. Even when God is

understood as "within... the presumption is that something has gone wrong if

 one is plunged into darkness or can’t pray or find time for "spiritual exercises”.

There is fear of missing the path, fear of not being "spiritual" enough, or of not

practising the right kind of prayer. These fears presume a "plot" or a "plan”

contrived by a far-distant god. Something of the spirituality contained in this

study offers release to people bogged down in a plot that does not exist. Many

seem to respond immediately when some of the themes of this study are

suggested to them.

If there is no plot “out here” we are drawn back to flesh, to love, to simple

sight and to the flow of all that is.  No answer is proposed to the pain of

 sorrow and violence and death. The loss of the transcendent God and of the

transcendent self leaves pain as pain with no rationalisation capable of turning it

into something else. By the same token, the joy of life and love becomes

somewhat more "immediate" when creation is perceived with a simple gaze. A

spirituality of correspondences between apparent opposites, such as fire and

darkness, involves living into both joy and sorrow with all senses open to both

delight and to the frightful. It means flowing with the life of all things that live

and die.