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Good morning. I was 17 when the summer of love broke out in San Francisco: an explosion of love, peace, sex, incense, acid, pot , Tibetan chimes and flowers in your hair. I vaguely remember having a psychedelic dress in swirling patterns of yellow, green and red. Quite ghastly.

The music producer Danny Goldberg argued yesterday that the summer of love was much more than a one-off youth rebellion. It brought into the West a new spirituality, influenced by meditation practices from the East. It roused concern for the environment and challenged the materialism that had become so embedded in our culture. Of course there was a dark side to all this. Beyond the golden haze of innocence and wonder misogyny and drug abuse were rampant and there were those who did not recover well from their experiences.

But we should not forget the positive legacy. One aspect was that it became possible for secular minded people with no religious allegiance to experience spiritual practice. Secular spirituality made sense after the summer of love in a way it really didn’t before. And today spiritual exploration takes many forms; for example the spring festival of Mind, Body and Spirit at Olympia invites spiritual seekers to participate in a whole range of exercises, therapies and treatments. You can buy spiritual accessories in the form of clothes, books, music, gongs, crystals, essential oils, beads. All this taps into an interest in wellbeing, more perhaps to do with optimum individual health than with challenging the world. And of course, these days, those who promote spirituality discourage the use of drugs.

There are several reasons I still look back with gratitude to the original summer of love. The first is that its celebration of spiritual experience made it possible for religious people and non-believers to find common ground. For both, a well-lived life involves more than material satisfaction. Non-believers, as much as believers, can be enriched by a sense of the numinous, whether it comes from meditation or music or immersion in the natural world. And whether a believer or not people are challenged by their experience to try to live ethical lives, to protest against injustice and to strive for the health of the earth.

The second reason for my gratitude for what happened 50 years ago in San Francisco is that it challenges me as a religious believer not to grow complacent about the beliefs and practices that sustain me. ‘The wind blows where it will’ says Jesus in John’s Gospel, ‘You hear the sound of it, but you know not where it comes from or where it goes’. A religion which loses its mystical core can go two ways – it either becomes repressive or it becomes boring. And finally the summer of love bore witness to the deep instinct that there is something transcendent at the very core of life – and that whatever you choose to call it, it can be known by anyone and everyone.

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