Belfast during the Troubles 

Between 1985 and 1990, the Jesuit priest and Zen practitioner, William Johnston experienced a crisis in his conversion that he called an awakening but:

‘… a frightening awakening, that I later associated with the Song of Songs when the bride, asleep in her bed, hears the knocking on the door. “I slept but my heart was awake”. I like the bride, slept, but something deep inside me was awake … The knocking on the door! This was a constant theme in my dreams.’

Johnston had recurring and frightening dreams with strong men breaking down his door, someone knocking but then disappearing, and one where he fell into a dark hole. Something was going on where also the sound of any bell sends ‘shivers down my spine’, and the phrase ‘I am’, spoken by Jesus in the gospel filled him with terror. Johnston discussed the situation with friends, a psychiatrist, and other Jesuits, and it seemed no one could really help, except for a Chinese religious sister. Together they tentatively explored this as a time of transition where Johnston might be on a path of growth, where the deeper part of the unconscious self was being roused.

Often unable to sleep, Johnston experienced a tremendous energy that seemed to vibrate in his head: ‘call it kundalini … call it the fire of love. Call it the life force … Whatever it was it kept me frightened and awake and I kept swallowing sleeping pills.’ Back in Ireland for a visit Johnston had what he describes as one of the most terrible and significant experiences of his life.

‘One night I was lying awake in bed … I was looking up at the ceiling, when suddenly a column of smoke came down from the ceiling and struck my breast very violently with the tremendous clang of a bell. It was not just a symbolic experience. I felt deep physical pain and I shouted out, “Oh! Oh! Oh!” Then I lay awake. What was happening?’

The two people he spoke to after this dismissed it as a dream or in his imagination, but Johnston knew that something within himself had been finally smashed open. He later described this as the awakening of his true self which hard and brittle, had to be broken open violently with the crash and the clang of the bell. The smoke he saw as the fire that came to burn within him. None of this was pleasant – but was this the fire of love.

In his autobiography, Johnston links the experience to the dark night of the soul and the need for purification. Reading Jung and practising Zen, Johnston came to see that in part some of this frightening experience was rooted in his childhood with his relationship to his parents, and also the daily violence he saw and was witness to in Belfast, when British soldiers were questioning and searching people in the streets.

‘Perhaps the process of purification goes back even further into the collective unconscious. That is how I understand the agony and the dark night of Jesus in Gethsemane when he took on himself the sin of the world and faced up to all evil. … And I, like Jesus, though in my own little way, had to face up to the purification through painful prayer in which my unconscious came to the surface and the trauma of my past claimed to be accepted. Only then could I forgive everyone in my life, not only my parents and teachers but even the British soldiers who walked backwards down the Falls Road with guns pointing to the ground.’