Aldous Huxley

The way of metanoia is about a change of heart and a change of consciousness. It is about a continuing commitment to inner transformation, psychological and spiritual: the way of awakening to our true identity in God. For those of us interested in this kind of ongoing psycho-spiritual searching, it is clear that conversion isn’t only something that happens once, but many times. Our lives then consist of a series of large and small conversions, and inner revolutions. Thomas Merton believed that it was this that would really lead to our transformation in Christ.

In the next few posts, I’m going to look at this idea of continuous conversion and inner renewal beginning with some thoughts from Merton.

Thomas Merton’s conversion is told in his early autobiography ‘The Seven Storey Mountain’. He had certainly known moments of spiritual wakening as a child and adolescent, but it wasn’t until he was a student that he experienced conversion as a process in which God took the initiative. Hungry for a spiritual life and to find meaning, Merton writes that as he experienced it salvation for him began on the level of:

‘… common and natural and ordinary things … Books and ideas and poems and stories, pictures and music, buildings, cities, places, philosophies were to be the materials on which grace would work.’

From Etienne Gilson, in a textbook bought for his course, Merton read of the power of a being to exist absolutely in virtue of itself. In other words, there was no idea or sensible image that could contain God, and furthermore one could never be satisfied with such knowledge of God. Another of the books that influenced him was ‘Ends and Means’ by Aldous Huxley, where he learnt about mysticism, and the ‘possibility of real, experimental contact with God.’ Here I think experimental is used in the sense of experiential. From Huxley, Merton took this:

‘Not only was there such a thing as a supernatural order, but as a matter of concrete experience, it was accessible, very close at hand, an extremely near, and an immediate and most necessary source of moral vitality, and one which could be reached most simply, most readily by prayer, faith, detachment and love.’

Reading Huxley, Merton then ‘ransacked’ the library for more books on Oriental mysticism. Eventually, pointed by a Hindu monk in the direction of Augustine’s ‘Confessions’ and ‘The Imitation of Christ’, Merton took the path of the western Christian tradition. He was confirmed into the Roman Catholic church.

It’s been said that to some degree this experience of conversion had deceived Merton, who, because he now believed in God and the teaching of the church thought that he was a zealous Christian. Inevitably he began to realize that conversion of the intellect is not enough and that ‘heart’ or as he says, ‘will’, must follow. What conversion demands is that one falls in love – so that one’s being becomes ‘a being-in-love’. As the theologian Bernard Lonergan puts it: Being-in-love with God is, ‘… total and permanent self-surrender’. It is about this constant change, where someone is transformed through self-transcendence into a ‘subject in love, a subject held, grasped, possessed, owned through a total and so an other-worldly love.’

Last year I included some writings from Joanna Field, taken from her book ‘A Life of One’s Own’, originally published in 1934. Joanna Field was the early pen name for the psychoanalyst Marion Milner.

In this extract from the same book, Field is describing how a glimpse of glory can be open to us as we become really present to the most ordinary of activities. There’s something about letting go of the self to enable a different level of reality to break through into the very way we look at things. Initially she tries to let go of the control of her head over her hand while she is darning a sock – somehow letting the needle do the work, without any other interference. She describes how the results startled her, and she found herself working with ease and no effort, as she detached her thinking from the activity.

Reminded of the one-celled animal which can spread parts of its essence to flow round and envelop within itself whatever it wants for food, she felt: ‘This spreading of some vital essence of myself was a new gesture … like a spreading of invisible sentient feelers, as a sea anemone spreads wide its feathery fingers.’

This glimpse is repeated as one day she stands to look at a still life painting by Cezanne.

‘…green apples, a white plate and a cloth. Being tired, restless, and distracted by the stream of bored Sunday afternoon sightseers drifting through the galleries, I simply sat and looked, too inert to remember whether I ought to like it or not. Slowly I became aware that something was pulling me out of my vacant stare and the colours were coming alive, gripping my gaze till I was soaking myself in their vitality. Gradually a great delight filled me … it had all happened by just sitting and waiting …

I began to wonder whether eyes and ears might not have a wisdom of their own.’

Whilst reluctant to call this a glimpse of the glory of God, she writes of opening herself up to a deeper and more satisfying level of reality, where things are not as they appear.

Kate Turkington, the South African writer of ‘There’s More to Life than Surface’ describes all sorts of miraculous glimpses of glory covering Native American shamanism, Aboriginal wisdom, and miraculous occurrences from different religions. This includes her own – what she calls everlasting moment, which happens during an ayahuasca ceremony where she felt in touch with the divine, and in a state of perfect happiness, acceptance, and peace. However, I prefer the account of the more ordinary experience some months after this when she is ‘on the most mundane and unspiritual of all journeys’ hanging out the washing in her garden on a summer morning.

‘I had just finished pegging all the wet clothes on to the clothesline when I suddenly had an overpowering feeling – so overpowering that I stopped dead in my tracks, stood still, and let the feeling engulf me. I felt enveloped in a warmth and beauty that I cannot now describe. I shouted out loud with joy, as I stood in the midst of a tangible presence of peace, harmony and goodness.’

Jay in the light – photo by Gordon Humphreys

A number of accounts of people’s experiences of glimpses of glory involve a deepening awareness of our interconnection with all of creation. It is as if the false consciousness that tends to separate us as human animals from the rest of nature is broken down, and we can feel our deep connection with all of creation.

This account from Bede Griffiths describes an evening when he was 17 that changed the course of his life, and changed him from being ‘a normal schoolboy’, towards a lifelong search for God. He was walking alone near the school playing fields, where he had often walked, but this time it was different:

I remember now the shock of surprise with which the sound broke on my ears. It seemed to me that I had never heard the birds singing before and I wondered whether they sang like this all the year round and I had never noticed it. As I walked on I came upon some hawthorn trees in full bloom and again I thought I had never seen such a sight or experienced such sweetness before. If I had been brought suddenly among the trees of the Garden of Paradise and heard a choir of angels singing I could not have been more surprised. I came then to where the sun was setting over the playing fields. A lark rose suddenly from the ground beside the tree where I was standing and poured out its song above my head, and then sank still singing to rest. Everything then grew still as the sunset faded and the veil of dusk began to cover the earth. I remember now the feeling of awe which came over me. I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel; and I hardly dared to look on the face of the sky, because it seemed as though it was but a veil before the face of God.

The account isn’t just about heightened senses, but also about the overwhelming emotion felt from a glimpse of both the glory and the unfathomable mystery that lies behind creation and our own existence. After this, the young Bede Griffiths began to walk more in the country, getting up early to hear the birds and staying late watching the stars. This took the place of the organised religion in which he’d been brought up, which then began to be seen as empty and meaningless in comparison. The glimpse of glory became a sacramental moment, a glimpse of a deeper reality beyond the mind. His life then became directed to that end. As one biographer expresses it, it was this glimpse that led Bede Griffiths to his own lifelong search which enabled him to express ‘with the simplicity and directness which can come only from experience, the underlying unity of religions’, and attain a spiritual wholeness granted to only a few.

Waterloo Station in the early 1970s

Harry Williams describes some of the times when he experienced glimpses of glory. He defines this as a meeting between himself and ‘some other which was alive – a living reality’. He discusses how the sceptical can reduce such experiences, ‘explaining’ away such moments with this or that theory, but how for him, the experiences were enough to convince him of the power of the truth.

He sees how what he calls ‘the encompassing mystery of Godhead’ revealed itself to him as a living mystery because it refused to leave him alone. In one experience, when he was a curate in London, Williams walked in Regents Park where with snow on the ground the park was amazingly beautiful – he sums the lovely scene with the frost lit by late afternoon sun. All should have been beauty and love, but the feelings aroused were of despair, and a deep anguish that he was somehow excluded from this glory that surrounded him. He felt a huge gulf between himself and what he saw: as if exiled from Eden. The glory revealed to him an inner emptiness and dispossession. This contrasted with an experience some years later, when swimming in a warm sea, he had an experience of union with the natural world, and so could say to himself: ‘Whatever life holds for you, nothing can take away the bliss of this moment.’

Discerning how glory can be present in ordinary things, such as a walk in the park and swimming in the sea, but in both these there was a need for discernment. Four years after the swimming experience, Williams was on a bus in Trinidad- a journey of about two hours, but as he writes he was unaware of the time:

I was caught up in a bliss which it is impossible to describe. It was an experience of the ultimate reconciliation of all things as Love, a living presence, flooded over me and swept me into its own radiance, combining in itself an infinite grandeur with a tender personal intimacy.

Another time Williams was in a crowded cafeteria at Waterloo Station, the glimpse of glory came with the force of a revelation that the place was Emmaus.

The tea and buns being consumed by the crowd was the broken bread in the midst of which Christ’s presence was revealed; and I had once again the immediate certainty of some ultimate reconciliation in which everybody was caught up because they were all filled and alive with God’s homely but surpassing glory.

At the heart of these moments of awareness there was a rich reality of redemption – and the deep knowledge that ‘all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.’

One of the less likely occasions when he experienced a glimpse of glory was in a cinema watching A Star Is Born. He’d gone feeling depressed and defeated, but then in the film an older woman character spoke of the necessity of perseverance, and how you had to be tough and believe in yourself and so get up after failure and try again.

The words of this matriarchal figure came to me as the voice of God. They thrilled me. And in the thrill I was aware of God’s presence with me in the cinema giving me new life and inspiring me with fresh courage…. The matriarch’s utterance undoubtedly verged on the corny. To speak to me deeply and powerfully by means of it seemed to me grotesquely funny. I couldn’t deny the reality of the experience, but it was precisely its reality which made the occasion of it so hilarious. There was no knowing where God would explode next. … God does indeed make himself known to us by means of what we feel, and that our emotions can often be the angels of His presence.

Gal Vihara at Polonnaruwa

The title for the next few posts is taken from the epilogue to Harry Williams’ autobiography, called Some Day I’ll Find You. In the epilogue, Williams is comparing his life and himself to Thomas Merton, and especially to Merton’s epiphany, shortly before his death, in front of the Buddhist statues in Polonnaruwa, where Merton writes of experiencing what he, Merton, sees in the faces of the giant figures:

The great smiles. Huge and yet subtle. Filled with every possibility, questioning nothing, knowing everything, rejecting nothing, the peace not of emotional resignation, but [that which] has seen through every question without trying to discredit anyone of anything – without refutation – without establishing some other argument.

In his wonderful account Merton gives us a glimpse of glory:

The thing about all this is that there is no puzzle, no problem, and really no ‘mystery’. All problems are resolved and everything is clear simply because what matters is clear. The rock, all matter, is charged with dharmakaya* – everything is emptiness and everything is compassion …. I have now seen and pierced through the surface and got beyond the shadow and the disguise.

Williams comments on this as the ideal, but that for him the reality is very different. He too has seen glimpses, but they leave him feeling increasingly out in the cold. And he quotes the old men in T.S. Eliot’s poem:

We returned to our places, those kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

Williams is suggesting that glimpses of glory leave him somewhat apart, away from the mainstream, longing, and yet uncertain. He is reminded of a quote from the Spanish novelist and philosopher Unamuno: ‘God forbid you peace and give you glory’. Williams writes that his life seems to have been an answer to that prayer – not that he has attained the glory, but that he has caught glimpses of it now and then. He concludes with a small epiphany of his own:

Nothing is for nothing. You always have to pay for what you get. Without pain there can be no birth; without death no resurrection. In that necessity the ideal and the actual are reconciled and seem to belong inescapably to one another.

So, what is this glory? Whilst largely indefinable it’s often an experience of a different dimension of the ‘something that is more than ourselves’; the presence of God, and the magnificence and beauty of his presence in God’s creation …

*dharmakaya: the Sanskrit term for  “the cosmical body of the Buddha, the essence of all beings”

In Kathleen Raine’s first autobiography she writes of the idyllic setting in Northumberland where she spent the first three years of her life, before moving to Ilford in Essex where she spent the rest of her childhood.

An early memory is of a fair northern summer’s day when she was pushed in a pram.

We set out my mother, my Aunt Peggy and my infant self in my little push car. We crossed the farmyard with its scent of camomile and cow-dung, and through the one of its several gates which opened upon the high bare pasture where the peewits are always wheeling over the outcrop of rock where they nest, their high domain, set out towards the wild hills. We were already above the level of trees, and as we climbed the turf became finer and softer, with wild pink and wild thyme and rock-rose. We came to the little crag where in the warren there were always a few black rabbits among the brown – I knew the place well later. Wild it seemed, without wall or man-made road, the creatures wild in the rocks, and far and wide. …

And there- so memory has composed the picture, or imagination has – the sun was setting their crests on fire with gold, and we were walking along the green road of the long summer day towards those bright hills until it seemed to me I could see the purple of the heather on their slopes … after tea [at a nearby farmhouse] we walked long in the garden among the phloxes and sweet peas and late summer flowers.

After moving to Ilford in Essex, Raine found consolation in the fields that were then behind their terraced house. She describes a summer day at the start of WW1.

On the last of childhood’s timeless days, I was gathering buttercups in the meadow behind the house when I heard a sound new to me, of a steady relentless humming in the air; and I looked up and saw aeroplanes approaching, with a terrible slowness; like four-winged mechanical gnats. The intensity of that sudden terror has left an imprint on my mind, like a photograph, of that moment, and the very place in the sky where I saw the enemy planes. I fled to my mother; and, as so often later, we sheltered in the cellar. I remember sometimes sleeping there, among the sacks of potatoes grown by my father on his allotment just beside the house.

This first book of her autobiography, written in 1973, is poignantly called Farewell Happy Fields as Raine sadly documents the increasing housing developments and road building that transformed Ilford, which then lay on the edge of the countryside into a sprawling suburb. Trees, fields, wildlife and wild flowers all swallowed up by “progress”.

Annie Dillard, author of ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’, writes about different ways of seeing. She compares the different ways as like seeing with a camera where she walks from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter, and then when walking without a camera – where her own shutter opens and there is more of a letting go that means she can become transfixed and emptied. This way she sees so much more.

‘It was sunny one evening last summer at Tinker Creek; the sun was low in the sky, upstream. I was sitting on the sycamore-log bridge with the sunset at my back, watching the shiners the size of minnows who were feeding over the muddy sand in skittery schools. Again and again, one fish, then another, turned for a split second across the current, and flash! The sun shot out from its silver side. I couldn’t watch for it. It was always just happening somewhere else, and it drew my vision just as it disappeared: flash, like a sudden dazzle of the thinnest blade, a sparking over a dun-and-olive ground of chance intervals from every direction. Then I noticed white specks, some sort of pale petals, small, floating from under my feet on the creek’s surface, very slow and steady. So I blurred my eyes and gazed toward the brim of my hat and saw a new world. I saw the pale-white circles roll up, roll up, like the world’s turning, mute and perfect, and I saw the linear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down a rolling scroll of time. Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like a water. I was the lip of a fountain the creek filled forever; I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was flesh flake, feather, bone.

When I see this way, I truly see. As Thoreau says, I return to my senses.’

But it’s not possible to always see like this – as she says, the best that we can do is to try to hush the endless interior noise that keeps us from seeing. The best we can do is follow the example of all the spiritual traditions of East and West which is that to try and damn all the muddy thoughts is impossible but:

Instead, you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mi8ldly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real, where subjects and objects act and rest, purely without utterance. “Launch into the deep, says Jacques Ellul, “and you shall see.”

Sirius – the brightest star

Most of the trees are still looking pretty green at the moment. In the UK we’ve had a cool and at times quite wet summer, but the horse chestnuts already have conkers, and their leaves are turning brown. Before the summer ends, I’m going to post some accounts to remind us how lovely it can sometimes be, and how sometimes less so. The first post is from Thomas Merton, who first comments on the beauty of the summer, but then turns to reflect on his own too human waywardness, and his sense of turning away from the grace that surrounds him especially when dealing with social visits.

August 16 1963 from Thomas Merton’s journal ‘Dancing in the Water of Life’:

A lovely cool, dazzling bright afternoon yesterday. Blue sky, clouds, silence, and the immense sunlit sweep of St Malachy’s field. I found a mossy turf under pines in that little island of woods, along which the Lespedeza hedge we planted ten or fifteen years ago is still growing. And yesterday it was blooming with delicate, heather-like purple blossoms and bees were busy in them.

An entirely beautiful, transfigured moment of love for God and the need for complete confidence in Him in everything, without reserve, even when almost nothing can be understood. A sense of the continuity of grace in my life and an equal sense of the stupidity and baseness of the infidelities which have threatened to break that continuity. How can I be so cheap and foolish as to trifle with anything so precious? The answer is that I grow dull and stupid and turn in false directions, without light, very often without interest and without real desire, out of a kind of boredom and animal folly, caught in some idiot social situation. It is usually a matter of senseless talking, senseless conduct and vain behaviour, coming from my shyness and desperation at being in a bind I cannot cope with – and if there is drink handy, I drink it, and talk more foolishly. This is of course rare – I was thinking of visits of Father John of the Cross’s people (other side of the field) when I was not true to myself.

Two weeks on and Merton writes how August had ended beautifully, with bright days that were relatively cool.

September 2 1963

After the Night Office – cool and dark – mists on the low bottoms, a glow of red in the east, still a long way from dawn and small, clear purple clouds in the glow. Sirius shining through the girders of the water tower and high over the building a star travels east – no sound of a plane, perhaps it is some spaceship.

Fritz Kunkel 

In July 2022, I wrote about the Jungian analyst Robert Johnson and his encounter with the psychotherapist and psychiatrist Fritz Kunkel (and used the same photo). In the collection of writings that make up the book The Choice is Always Ours, Fritz Kunkel is quoted in the context of his understanding of stages of progression on the way. Following spiritual leaders throughout history, Kunkel calls this journey of conversion the ‘Great Turn’ or the ‘Great Way’, but he looks at the stages of this partly from a therapeutic perspective.

The first stage is to do with regression and reintegration, and in the religious context this corresponds to the ‘purgation’ of medieval mysticism. He sees this stage as about the collapsing of old ways of thinking about oneself, including the rigid structures that we set up: these include prejudices, resentments, desires, and fears. As this rigidity begins to open up and fall apart so does the censoring between the conscious and unconscious, which means that all the old stuff (my word not his) can come to mind: ‘Old images, forgotten emotions, repressed functions, come to life again.’ This stage is spoken of in psalms such as psalm 18: 4-5: ‘The cords of death encompassed me … the sorrows of hell compassed me about.’ The only solution is to turn to the real centre which is God.

Even the atheist, if anything disagreeable takes him by surprise, reacts with a superficial turn to the centre. He says “Oh God!” or “For goodness sake!” If the believer can do the same thing in a more serious way, even though in the moment of fear or pain his concept of God may be vague or childish, it will help him more than anything else.

The turning towards the centre is then the second stage. This involves leaving behind old images of what God is: the limitations that we inevitably impose on our projections of what God might be, or how God will fit in some way into an empty but restricted frame. Then we might feel fear, that turns into anxiety, and then finally to awe. Kunkel writes about the power of darkness that is now manifested as light, and how what he calls the ‘tremendum’ inevitably originates as a subjective human experience, so that any rigid theology or convictions are smashed by the Grace of God. ‘We live in a jail which we call our castle’, so the breaking through of our defences by this experience of God is an act of grace, and even if we initially reject this, Kunkel sees that this too is part of grace: “it shows that the Kingdom is there already and is working in spite of and even through the errors and felonies of its prospective citizens.”

The breaking through of the experience of God leads to the third stage, which Kunkel equates to the ‘illuminations’ of the mystics. This is characterized by both intellectual insight and emotional experience of utmost reality, and what he calls ‘a volitional change’, which gives us a new way of seeing and being in the world.

Deeper insight, more power, increasing responsibility, and above all a higher kind of love, more detached and more comprehensive … conditioned by the centre. It is creative power, using the images, now cleansed and timeless, according to its creative plans, which are our own unconscious goals … This transforms the individual … that is love; and proves to be also our relation to God … that is faith.

Oscar Wilde

The Way as hidden treasure is rather nicely illustrated by this story about a pious Rabbi Eisik from Cracow in Poland, who after dreaming several nights running about a treasure to be found under the castle bridge in Prague, made the long journey to check this out. The place was closely guarded, so he kept returning day after day to check on the situation until one of the guards asked the rabbi whether he had lost something. The rabbi told him about the dream, at which the guard laughed and responded that he too had once had a similar dream where a voice commanded him to go to Cracow and search the home of a rabbi called Eisik where the guard would find a great treasure hidden in a dirty corner behind the rabbi’s stove. The rabbi thanked the guard and hurried back home, where he found the treasure behind the stove, and so put an end to his poverty, building a house of prayer, called ‘The Treasure’.

In this story we are reminded that the real treasure that will end our misery is never far away. Rather:

‘… it lies buried in the innermost recess of our own home, that is to say, our own being. And it lies behind the stove, the life-and-warmth-giving centre of the structure of our existence, our heart of hearts – if we could only dig. But there is the odd and persistent fact that it is only after a faithful journey to a distant region, a foreign country, a strange land, that the meaning of the inner voice that is to guide our quest can be revealed to us.’

When Oscar Wilde was stripped of everything losing his name, position, possessions, and then his children and put in prison, he wrote of his spiritual journey and going to the depths.

‘I saw then that the only thing for me was to accept everything. Since then – curious as it will no doubt sound – I have been happier. It was of course my soul in its ultimate essence that I had reached. In many ways I had been its enemy, but I found it waiting for me as a friend.

Now I find hidden, somewhere away in my nature, something that tells me that nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all. That something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is Humility.

It’s the last thing left in me, and the best … the starting point for a fresh development … the elements of life … One cannot acquire it, except by surrendering everything that one has.’

This self-acceptance and letting go leads in the experience of many and in many spiritual practices to knowledge of God. ‘Being true to oneself is the law of God.’