Jean Sulivan

This line comes from a hymn called ‘Through all the changing scenes of life’, and it seemed to fit the idea behind the next few posts. Some of those who scoff at religion, spirituality, or indeed at psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis may do so from having had a bad religious or therapeutic experience; others have not had the experience at all, but have nonetheless decided it is not for them. After all it’s very hard to open ourselves to the vulnerability needed to dive into the inner world – unless, perhaps, we are driven to it.

The reason I prefer autobiographies, or biographies over either theology or psychoanalytic theory, is because it details what actually happens to people, and how they change. Spiritual journals offer the same insights. The book ‘Morning Light’ is the spiritual journal of Jean Sulivan, born Joseph Lemarchand, and who grew up in a poor village in Brittany. He became a French priest/writer – ordained in 1938. He eventually based his ministry on writing: publishing novels, essays, and travel books, but remained a priest, though not in a parish. In 1980 he was killed in a car accident.

His spiritual journal is more or less based on the idea that Jesus, rather than satisfying our desires or needs, sends us back to ourselves at a deeper level. Sulivan’s spirituality is based ultimately on the Gospels which he saw as emerging from ‘a world of peasants and sailors.’

‘Jesus is the rabbi whose word is transpierced with images of trees, water, harvests, cattle, sheep, shepherds and vagabonds. As if there were a secret connection between the earth, that which presses against it and the invisible.

It is obvious Jesus lives in the depths of non-duality – that is, where God, the other, and ourselves form only one reality. This is my body, this is my blood.’

Looking back at his origins Sulivan sees that as a priest he never quite fitted in, but trained himself to act like others. This is a cause of shame revealed when he writes:

‘In short, during my active service as a priest, I have assisted and participated in the humiliation of the Word, both within me and outside me, to the profits of ideologies and sentiments.’

Stopping his work as a parish priest, and distancing himself from the institutional church as an organisation, Sulivan writes how he reread the Gospels as if he had just discovered them on a bookstall. He saw how the Gospel gathers and condenses the wisdom of the Orient as there is: ‘The same call to inner upheaval, to awakening. At the same time it is a revelation, since it points to a love whose logical conclusion is the communion of sharing.’ The most surprising find was how he experienced that the word he was reading was the response to a long-felt expectation, and that it spoke deep within him. Observing his reaction, he felt back to what he calls a peasant childhood. He was left with the belief that anyone in touch with ‘their primordial roots’ had heard the word of God murmured within themselves.

Reading Sulivan on this, reminded me of the idea from the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas about the ‘the unthought known’ which is something deep within each of us that has eluded formulation, but that is strangely familiar. When we can recognise and bring this out of the non-thinking space, or using Jungian words out of the shadow, it makes a difference to us, disclosing new meanings about life and how we understand ourself. This might be the ‘that of God’, the numinous present in everyone – known but unthought – known and yet always also unknown.