The door to the deeper level 2
In their search to find values which could give a meaning to life Raissa and Jacques Maritain opened themselves to what life brought them which was first the thinking of Henri Bergson and then the life and work of Leon Bloy. Bloy who was born in 1846 and died in 1917 was a French novelist and essayist who was initially agnostic and then violently against the church but following a sudden religious conversion devoted his life to search for the Absolute.
Raissa writes that, ‘life cast him up on our shores like a legendary treasure – immense and mysterious’. What developed was a unique friendship and it was Leon Bloy who brought the Maritains face-to-face with the question of God both in all its power and in all its urgency. When Raissa wrote to Leon Bloy that she was a seeker his response was, ‘why do you continue to seek since you have found?’ In other words the actual searching is in itself an experience of finding and being found.
Sometime after this Raissa writes about an awareness of the presence of God when she was looking out of the window on a journey and watching the forests glide by the car window. She was thinking of nothing in particular but suddenly there was a sense of a great change, she says it was as if from the perception of the senses she had passed over to an entirely inward perception. She noticed it when the passing trees suddenly had become much larger than themselves and where the whole forest seemed to be speaking and to speak of Another… It ‘became a forest of symbols, and seemed to have no other function than to signify the Creator.’
I like this description because that sort of perception and that sort of awareness can happen randomly and in any ordinary experience when one is not dominated by thoughts and cares. It is as if something can break through the usual surface experience of things. We might not always see it as the presence of God but it is surely a metaphysical experience. Partly this is because the soul knows that there is something more than human consciousness going on. It seems like a sudden intuition of a reality that we may normally choose to ignore. The door to the deeper level has swung open.