It is now commonplace in the January of a new year to be regaled with advice about striving to become “a new you” with health programmes, diet and exercise. We’re urged to “train like an A-lister” (get fit like a celebrity), “learn kick-boxing/running/walking/yoga/cycling for health”, “join the gym”, “commit to a dry January” (no alcohol for the month), “make better diet choices”, and “eat more spinach, asparagus and bircher muesli”, with an endless supply of healthy new recipes.
This annual ritual seems to bear witness to the materialistic aspect of our contemporary culture – and the quasi-pagan worship of the material body. There’s an underlying message that if you exercise enough, eat the right foods, don’t smoke and invest in “dry January”, you could live forever.
Among the “new you”, self-cleansing regimens that appear every January there is seldom a mention of improving the soul, or aspiring to a higher spiritual or even moral state.
And yet, interestingly, elements of the semi-spiritual are creeping into these values. Some spas – which have always been a source of de-toxification – are now beginning to offer, if not spiritual, at least psychic “retreats” aimed at reinvigorating the whole person.
You can, for example, now choose a yoga retreat in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia (a mere £1,995 per week), where you will live in a yurt for the good of your inner self.
You can, according to the self-help author Jane Alexander, also choose a “serenity retreat” at Lefkada in Greece, which will help put your life into perspective (a mere £479 a week). Or, if austerity appeals, you could take a retreat in Finland called “Radical Honesty” (£450), where you can experience a week of hardship at a cottage by a lake, and experience the anger therapy of expressing (and receiving) verbal abuse.
From Zen to Tantra, retreats are blooming, mixing a spiritual element with the cult of the body.
Everyday diets too, draw on spiritual legacies. Dr Michael Mosley’s popular Fast Diet explains the efficacy of fasting two days a week. Throughout human history, our bodies were accustomed to fasting for religious – and practical – reasons. Thus, fasting is the healthiest way to lose weight and be healthy.
The old Irish tradition of visiting St Patrick’s Purgatory (Lough Derg) where you fasted for the time and dwelt in exacting accommodation may yet be hailed as the latest fashion for body and spirit.
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A renowned woman of letters, Diane Athill – she was a distinguished editor, publisher and writer during her working life – was asked on her recent 100th birthday what had been the key factor in her fulfilling life. “Luck,” she said. “I was terribly lucky.”
Baroness Trumpington, a colourful House of Lords peer, aged 94, made a similar point in looking back on her life. All her achievements were mostly down to luck.
I find this a discomforting attitude – perhaps similar to the Calvinist tradition of predestination. If everything is just luck, then why bother trying at all? Why bother working hard, studying diligently or cultivating ambition?
I know Napoleon took the view that a commander is either “lucky” or not, but surely that’s a form of Corsican superstition? I prefer what the golfer Gary Player said: “The harder I practice, the luckier I get.” It’s more aspirational.
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This year will be widely marked as the centenary of women’s suffrage – when Countess Constance Markievicz was the first woman elected to the House of Commons in December 1918. (As a Sinn Féiner, she didn’t take her seat – and anyway, she was in jail at the time.)
The Pope, Benedict XV – a good man who had tried, without success and attracting some abuse, to halt the slaughter during the First World War – declared his support of votes for women. This prompted opposition by the influential and anti-clerical French Left, in particular. Concerned that women might favour the “Catholic ticket”, they subsequently managed to withhold women’s suffrage in France until de Gaulle ushered it in by fiat in 1944.
The Left today behaves as though it owns the feminist cause, but it doesn’t. Many of the founding feminists were committed Christians, and in Britain, not unusually from the families of clergymen.
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