The book that opened the door …

Spiritual searching it turns out isn’t just about being given something, but rather about making space for the ‘something’ to develop. If one is full up with the past (either consciously or unconsciously), and all the associated mixed emotions, then there’s little room for the present moment, and for the Presence of the Divine – whatever form that takes. A long period of analytic psychology, the Jungian branch of psychoanalysis, was needed for me to make that space and to open up to a deeper reality. Once one starts delving into the inner world in therapy, then old beliefs and destructive ways of thinking are gradually explored, and at least dismantled enough so new shoots can emerge. That too is a lifelong task.

The final example to share of my spiritual searching took place some years after my first analysis had ended. During that time I had also trained and was working as a psychotherapist. I had stopped attending Quaker meeting (after a falling out about safeguarding); attended many Buddhist teachings – had taken ‘refuge’ at a Buddhist ceremony too, but, after a disillusioning pilgrimage to India in search of enlightenment (coming home early physically ill), I decided to stop the searching – I’d had enough, so I let go of the egoic driven striving.

I can now see this as surrender …

And yet, as the Buddhist saying goes: when the student is ready the teacher appears. I actually tripped over the last volume of Thomas Merton’s journals, and when I saw he had been in Asia, I bought it and read it, and then I read all the other journals and some of his books. I had read The Seven Storey Mountain some years before, and although loving his personal stuff couldn’t quite get alongside the religious part – but now I did. Here was my teacher who appeared to point the way to Christ consciousness; firstly, through Merton’s books, and then via a leaflet found in a country church during a walk which said that if you were looking for God, you could try going first to a big church where no one would know you, or bother you, and you might get a sense of something numinous.

Some months later I did just that, went to evensong at Bath Abbey, and listening to the woman vicar thought perhaps I could come to this – it was peaceful, nothing was being demanded, I was just there: the door was slowly opening. Nine months later after confirmation classes (on my own as I was the only adult) I became an Anglican, and went on retreat with the Franciscans where one of the sisters said to me: make a note of this joy you are feeling – the memory will sustain you when things get difficult. For I was feeling something new – accepted by God and wanted just for being me. Bumping into a vicar, a trustee of a therapy centre I worked for, I explained I had been converted, I was now a Christian – his words were – watch out, once Jesus Christ is really in your life everything changes – and so it did. Within a couple of years, I was working in safeguarding for the C of E, and, writing about therapy and spirituality in gratitude to Thomas Merton.

What committing myself did was give a framework, a context, a relationship with Christ through the experience of the extra/ordinary Eucharist – it also left enough space to keep the door from shutting again to allow for on-going journeying deeper into the inner psycho-spiritual world … Twenty-three years later I can see that nothing from the past is wasted – the school assemblies; the Eastern spiritual practices; Quaker meeting and social action; therapy and more therapy, all connected – all part of on-going spiritual searching.