Church of the Immaculate Conception, Farm Street, London

The idea that we are always changing – in the sense of a change of heart, and turning ever more towards the person God intends us to be, is well explored in the life of the poet Kathleen Raine. Her real focus was always on inward change, though sometimes seduced by the outward manifestation. So, in the second volume of her autobiography ‘The Land Unknown’, she writes about her conversion to Catholicism, despite already aware that for her the symbolic structure provided by the Church did not accord with her own inner spiritual journeying: ‘in attempting to use verbal forms of prayer I became unable to pray at all’.

She appreciates for many the structure can be central, recording how a quite rational friend of hers during a time of intense concentration on a spiritual and emotional problem of her own, was given a medal of the Blessed Virgin blessed by a very holy Spanish nun. Sitting with the medal, Raine’s friend was astonished to see brownish-red drops running down from the extended hands of the Virgin onto this woman’s own fingers, and found that they were blood. With this strange occurrence, the friend felt she understood some profound mystery of love and suffering.

Despite her misgivings, Raine was accepted into the Catholic church. One day in Farm Street Church in London, Raine experienced a curious shift in consciousness, so whilst still remaining herself, she also seemed to be a younger nun in France and in a sunny garden, wearing a black habit and white head dress.

‘The young nun was radiantly happy, with a lightness of heart and uplifting joy. At the same time I was able to compare from within – to measure, as it were, – my own being with hers, and I knew myself for all my experience of sorrow and evil, to know much more, to possess a much greater reach and scope of experience than she; though I had lost that bird-like innocent joy which she, in her smaller sphere, had been able to attain or retain.’

Raine wonders here about reincarnation, or insight of a possible telepathic kind into another soul – present or past to whom she was somehow tuned; or some sort of waking dream. Raine chose to interpret the odd experience as an epiphany of her situation in the Church where she was trying to evade, or hide herself, in the clothing of a novice, from her true destiny.

 ‘We cannot, alas, reverse the direction of growth, try to make ourselves smaller than we are out of some false sense of humility, or from cowardice. That young nun’s experience of pure joy was not, now, or ever again, for me: not that joy, that walled garden and those flowering apple trees under the sun of France.’

Unexpectedly, thirty years later, long after Raine had left the Church, but was still pursuing spiritual wisdom, writing about William Blake, and visiting India, she experienced a second scene from the same nun’s life. She was in the cell with the now elderly nun, seeing a prayer desk, crucifix, a few devotional books, and a picture of the Madonna and the child Jesus. Out of the high windows were swifts or swallows, crossing the sky; a door opened into the cloisters.

‘And there she had lived her life, and kept her faith. She was not a rebel; only, ever so little, bored. She had a devotion to the Child Jesus; and as she crossed her cell, supported by her stick, I knew that her other hand held, in imagination, the hand of the Puer Eternus. I do not think she would have wished to be a nun again; am I, is my life, what she wished? If so, I hope she felt – as I feel – that, with all its appalling mistakes my life has been richer than those long sinless cloistered days.’