List 43 books that have been helpful on my spiritual path

When I have occasion to define my spirituality, I sometimes refer to myself as an urban pagan. Sounds contradictory: urban as in city, pagan as in honoring the Earth and her cycles, and never the twain shall meet…right?

Not necessarily. Cities, as anyone who’s spent any time at all in one knows, have a life and an energy of their very own. (You know, if you know my goals, which city I ‘belong’ to, and She does too. I am normally, not by choice, a rural dweller, but when I’m in that city setting the energy is completely different and to me, a lot more alive.) It requires a different way of connecting.

Penczak is one of the few pagans who’ve attempted to deal with this issue (there’s one other book on the subject I like, which I’ll mention later in this list at some point), and he’s done it rather well. There are things that don’t change – the three Worlds of the shamanic path, the directions, the fact that there are archetypes (what we often refer to as gods and spirits) that can be connected with…but they manifest here in different ways. Learning how to live with those rather different manifestations is what this book is all about.

For paganism to survive in the modern world, it has to be modern, and we have to admit that we don’t (and, heresy! wouldn’t want to) live the way most of our ancestors did. I had a few moments in this book of the ‘Holy crap, so I’m not the only one who thinks that way!’ variety, which for me is always a good sign. You find the sacred wherever you find it, and this book is a pretty good guide as to how to find it in urban places.

This is a book I actually avoided for years on the grounds that what it was saying came across as…well, creepy. And rather disconcerting.

Disconcert, friends, is of course exactly what it aims to do. Suffice it to say that after I had plucked up the courage to read it, a lot of things from elsewhere that hadn’t made sense were suddenly perfectly clear.

It’s rather hard to explain exactly what this book is about, except that the subtitle – Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious – is spot-on, because it’s about something that has literally been staring you in the face all your life, but which you probably have never looked at in this way ever before. Namely, your real nature.

I’m not deliberately being mysterious, honest, it’s just that you really cannot get the import of what this book is saying without reading it and trying what he suggests for yourself. So, I’ll say no more and leave anyone who’s intrigued to do exactly that.

Confession time: Me and Christianity have not always been best chums. Part of this book is a good explanation as to why not.

Freke and Gandy have written a number of books on world mysticism, and especially on the mystical roots of Christianity, and they’re worth checking out. This one, though, gets to the nitty-gritty of exactly what the problem is with religion in the world today.

It’s not between religions. It’s not even between religion and science. It’s between two basically opposing views.

There’s inner, personal, direct experience of Reality (call it what you like) – which always leads to the realization that we are all One, and consequently to greater love and compassion for our fellow beings. And then there’s the view that one group is privileged with the only, absolute Truth, and that everyone else is deluded, evil, and should be silenced and/or punished.

You can guess which one of those was behind my earlier troubles with Christianity. Although, to be fair, that wasn’t the only place I encountered that attitude – at one time I had dealings with some Buddhists who were like that, which wasn’t nice at all – but also to be fair, I’ve encountered other Christians who truly did exemplify the compassion of Christ. And people of other religious paths who did likewise. That’s the thing; it’s not the name, it’s the attitude, and the real experience that underlies it.

In the first part of the book, Freke and Gandy go through the big three monotheistic faiths, look at their origins and discover some fairly unpleasant stuff about the lies, violence and cruelty that went into making ‘organized’ Christianity, Judaism and Islam what they have been. If you were brought up in any of those faiths, it makes for depressing reading.

But…Part 2 is the interesting bit. Because it’s all about letting go of the literalism and experiencing Reality, oneness, and love – as they are, beyond the dogma. And that is a whole spiritual adventure in itself.

Tim Freke’s website is worth a look, as he has much more on this. Plus, he’s one of the few esoteric authors I’ve come across who actually bothered to send a nice reply when I emailed him. Now I just have to make it to one of his workshops…

The story behind how this book came into being is harrowing, but ultimately hopeful. Bobbi, outwardly successful and (she thought) happily married, had been a perfectionist all her life, constantly seeking approval from her family, husband, co-workers, church and ultimately, God. Eventually, things fell apart, her husband left her, she slid into depression and attempted suicide. But she survived, and realized that after a lifetime of only experiencing Spirit as secondhand dogma and conditional love, she was ready to make her own search for the sacred.

That, in itself, was inspiring – there are some similarities with my own story – but there’s more…

The idea of a personal sacred text is almost certainly not new – after all, what did the standard scriptures start off as? – but to many people from within conventional spiritual traditions, it seems almost like heresy – that you can not only compile your own collection of other people’s words that inspire you, but actually write your own. My response is – why not? Inspiration couldn’t have suddenly stopped with a bunch of clerics hundreds of years ago deciding which books were ‘true’ and which weren’t. Creativity is divine in itself, inborn in all of us, and we all have an inner sense that – if we really listen to it – will guide us to what we most need to know.

That, it seems, is what Bobbi is saying in this book, and she guides you through the whole process of exploring traditions, making choices, and learning to trust your own connection to Spirit. (Some nice, unusual recommendations of writing to check out, too.)

Ultimately, though, this isn’t just a book about words, but about the very nature of your journey. And two themes stand out. One is that it’s your journey, nobody else’s. The other is the fact that you and your attitudes will change over the course of time, and that’s OK. This is a book not for the person sure that their visions are always true for everyone, but for the explorer who knows a little uncertainty is no bad thing.

Julia is, of course, the author of ‘The Artist’s Way’, that celebrated book on rediscovering your inner artist which I totally recommend to anyone (especially if your immediate response is ‘But I’m not an artist!’....you really need this book). And she’s written loads of other books on the creative life.

This one, however, is mainly about spirituality. It could be subtitled ‘God for the spiritually frightened’, because what it does is take and debunk a lot of the myths that put people off religion: the idea that you have to suffer to be ‘good’, that God’s old and stuffy and someone you really wouldn’t get on with if he (or she) were human, that sex and your body are not essential parts of the whole meshuggah (and delicious ones at that), that prayer and meditation and service are dreary things to add to your ‘must-do’ list. Not so. At all.

While we’re at it, Bad Julie, as they called her at convent school, also takes a long, hard, shrewd and very funny look at the New Age movement. I’m sure the people concerned know who they are, but there are useful eye-openers here for anyone confronted by come-hither gurus or the more dodgy type of wholefood nut (the ones who sneak out of ashrams at night to buy burgers! With meat in them!). Overall, she emphasizes trusting your own instincts and developing your own personal relationship with the Divine, rather than taking God ‘as told you by’ anyone else.

The book is made up of short mini-essay chapters on different subjects, each with a selection of exercises – stuff to write about, or think about, or do, just to shake you up and get you looking at stuff in different ways. There are also kooky little poems that give a wry sideways look at some of the topics. And there are great stories like the nun who had an unexpected revelation over the washing-up, and personal memories like Julia’s late dad and how his love of birds permeated his life. A friendly, irreverant little book that’s ideal for anyone who hasn’t considered things spiritual in a long time. Or thinks they haven’t – because as this book points out, far more of life is spiritual than you might have believed.

I’ve been interested in ‘alternative’ forms of spirituality since I was quite young, and I first started reading serious books on Wicca and paganism when I was about 17. This was in the late 80s, bear in mind, and the situation was rather different from today. Back then, witchcraft (very few people used the term Wicca) was regarded, by anyone who’d heard of it (usually via the tabloids) as ‘devil worship’. Popular ‘teen witchcraft’ was yet some way in the future (possibly no bad thing), and you couldn’t just walk into mainstream bookstores and buy those books. So, things were pretty limited. I cobbled together a few books from secondhand stores, and searched out a few more in the far reaches of the library system, and that was more or less it till I started work in London, which allowed me access to some more unusual stuff.

After getting through the unhelpful and somewhat complicated ‘spellbook’ stage, I learned a lot from authors like the Farrars and the late Doreen Valiente. Later, I discovered the extensive and very useful works of Scott Cunningham. They are all authors I’d still recommend to any interested beginner.

But Starhawk’s book, for me, was a watershed in that it was one of the first I’d seen to look at Wicca, and ritual in general, as a living thing, something you could create yourself – using the raw stuff of your own life, your own concerns and celebrations and needs – rather than something repeated from an old script.

It was also part of (more on that later) my introduction to the meaning of gender relations, the whole business of what being male or female meant in relation to spirituality, of how the spiritual and personal were political, and the meaning of power. Those are recurring themes in Starhawk’s work, of course, but the idea that they were connected was utterly new to me, coming from a background in which politics and religion were both separate and taboo, and personal power was nothing to do with either of them.

Also, it simply contains some fantastic, visionary writing, and puts across some of the poetry of good ritual.

I have a list to this effect on Lists of Bests, but it needs revising as I haven’t been on there for ages, and I prefer doing stuff on the one site really. I’ll deal with them one entry at a time and give some info on why they’ve been useful.

My spirituality is pretty eclectic, so there’s quite a variety of stuff in there. Sometimes I can’t really pinpoint any one book on a particular subject. The stuff I find wise and helpful is unfortunately, in many books (and especially those in the ‘New Age’ category) mixed in with a bunch of stuff I find superficial, or offensive, or simply don’t agree with.

Ultimately, experience is your best teacher. Books are not the territory, but they can be the map -or parts of it. So, with that in mind, I’ll take a look back at some of those that have helped me (and still are) to navigate.