Glastonbury meditation is a homage to British inclusivity and goodwill

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/apr/14/glastonbury-meditation

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Since I wrote about how Glastonbury was a kaleidoscope of shared, sacred space the Pilgrim Reception Centre in the town has estimated that there are around 70 different faith groups here – including several I've never heard of. Some of those 70 will be emerging from the sociological woodwork on 21 April, when a community ceremony to celebrate this diversity is going to be held at the Chalice Well gardens.

The Chalice Well itself is run by a trust founded by the redoubtable Major Wellesley Tudor Pole, (the lead singer of punk band Tenpole Tudor is a relative) the man who proposed the idea of the Silent Minute. Originally from Weston-super-Mare, Tudor Pole was one of those stalwarts of the British Empire: an adventurous soldier with an enquiring mind. Meeting the head of the Baha'i faith in Constantinople in the early 1900s, he became a keen adherent of that faith. He served in the directorate of military intelligence in the Middle East throughout the first world war, and information received by him proved pivotal in altering plans for the war in Palestine. After the war, in collaboration with Winston Churchill, he set up the Silent Minute alongside the Lamplighter Movement – which culminated in the establishment of Remembrance Day commemorations. The Silent Minute itself is a curiously potent idea: a "null", if you like, the absence of action. After the war, one Gestapo officer described it as a weapon that the Germans could not counter: an interesting concept in an age which prioritises speech and the flourishes of rhetoric.

"There is no power on Earth," Tudor Pole wrote, "that can withstand the united co-operation on spiritual levels of men and women of goodwill everywhere."

Whatever your views of spiritual practice, the key word here is "goodwill". I think that the power of the Silent Minute lies in its inherent lack of external direction: what participants actually do during that minute – prayer, contemplation, focus – is up to them.

Tudor Pole's own association with Glastonbury began at a young age, after he had a vision of himself as a monk at the abbey. His letters to novelist Rosamond Lehmann reveal an endearingly gung-ho, Sax Rohmer-style attitude towards adventures on the astral plane. He was one of the group of people known as the Avalonians – a diverse bunch of writers, artists, sculptors, occultists and archaeologists, who were a kind of West Country version of the Bloomsbury set. All of them devoted themselves to their principles, which varied, and to the town, but some of them hated each other, so it's not as though they were all earnestly wedded to higher thought at all costs.

The gardens themselves (a staunchly mobile phone-free zone where you are asked to conduct yourself quietly) are not based around any particular ethos: they're open to everyone of any spiritual persuasion or, indeed, people who just like gardens. Everyone participating in the 21 April event has been asked to speak, but to keep it simple, short, and appreciative of other people. The aim of the whole event is simply to acknowledge the different groups in the town, and, like our Avalonian predecessors, how we manage to get along with one another with a reasonable degree of amity, even if we don't necessarily agree.

The ceremony will end with the Silent Minute and we are invited to send our thoughts, prayers or blessings to wherever or whomever we choose. I shall probably spend it thinking about the man who invented the Minute, with all his idealism, tenacity and peculiarly British eccentricity. As a metaphor for conducting one's life, shutting up and devoting the time to acknowledging other people and their values instead, it is no bad working model.

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