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.’

I chose to buy a second-hand copy of a book called ‘The Choice is Always Ours’ partly because of the title – taken from a line written by Aldous Huxley. The book is mostly a collection of writings, an anthology, edited by Dorothy Berkley Phillips and originally published in 1948, then republished with later editions up to 1975.

In the general introduction, Phillips writes of ‘the Way’ as being more a walk rather than a state. One to which many are drawn, few people enter and even fewer continue on it. There are no particular set of outcomes that we might expect, as everyone who enters goes at a different pace and with their own individual characteristics. Whilst there are different stages it essentially involves what regular readers of these posts will be familiar with, which is reaching beyond the conscious to the unconscious, and acceptance and experiencing of the ‘suprapersonal reality’ which transforms the individual, and yet is strangely found to be universal across cultures and societies. The philosophic premise to the book is that:

‘All results at every stage of the Way are releasing of the real and expanding self, as opposed to the false and constricting self. They are Life-giving. … there exists an ultimate Reality that is by nature both transcendent and imminent. The immanent aspect “this something of God in every person” traces its ancestry to early Hindu sources, thence to the Socratic movement in philosophy, and on to the teaching of Jesus.’

One universal characteristic found in all religions, in the arts and philosophy is our wish to pass beyond ourselves as we are now, this is about the search for meaning, of purpose, of reality, and Phillips adds of eternity. The difficulty is in mistaking the outcomes of the way for the actual Way – outcomes such as living for certain ideals, or for others, or imitating the virtues of the saints. She sees these as half-truths, and in a sense to what the Way is not. ‘They are “outer”, or imitative, or ends of a process, rather than “inner”, and creative, and means to an end’.

And the way is not to do with any specific religion, as it cuts through any accumulation of dogma and creeds. There are many paradoxical expressions of the Way stressing the negative requirements for becoming free in spirit. They point to the necessity ‘losing of life’, ‘dying to self’ (meaning letting go of egocentric goals), and where the Ground of the Soul becomes transformingly effective in the individual life.

I liked Phillips’ inclusion of this paradox from the poet W.H. Auden:

‘For the garden is the only place there is, but you will not find it

until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere that is not a desert;

the miracle is the only thing that happens, but to you it will not be apparent,

until all events have been studied and nothing happens that you cannot explain;

and life is the destiny you are bound to refuse until you have consented to die.’

Martin Israel did his find his way, but over his lifetime it proved to be a hard path, and in the second half of his life further difficulties, and the resurgence of the early childhood trauma returned. He writes that whilst being able to help unhappy, distraught people his intense sensitivity inevitably left him fearful of insults, misunderstandings, and hostility. He led highly valued retreats to hundreds of people, and offered many spiritual direction and healing. One person who saw him notes that in the sessions there were frequent long silences, but ‘people in their hundreds came to him for spiritual guidance … he seemed to have an intuitive (some would say psychic) understanding of them and their deepest spiritual needs’.

When it was suggested that Martin became a priest he was as he describes it, hastily baptized and confirmation was performed on one evening so that his Christian allegiance was established. He did not undertake ordination training, but was fast tracked through by church hierarchy; however, he was just as quickly dropped when he became ill with Parkinson’s and deteriorating health, and never felt quite the same about the church. He experienced an acute breakdown at this point, and an inability to walk which led to a dramatic near-death experience. He was later restricted to a wheelchair, and looked after by devoted carers.

When criticised for never seeming to enjoy himself, he responded with: ‘Both my misery and my hope are part of the universal scheme of becoming … I can only begin to be a proper person when I am no longer enclosed in myself.’ This last part served to refute the comments that he was avoiding his own inadequacy by involvement in the lives of others, as did: ‘The secret of happiness is to lose oneself in God’s business, which is the regeneration of the earth and the mending of wounded relationships.’ He believed that openness to suffering and vulnerability was the price to pay for spiritual understanding.

His beliefs rested on his personal experience, and included some outside the traditional Anglican belief system. For example, he exulted in what he describes as the mental freedom and mystical beauty of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita of Hinduism, alongside the Buddhist Dhammapada and the Tao. ‘There is breadth and tolerance in the pages of the Gita that have no equal in Western text.’

Unlike the mainstream Anglican church, he took a non-judgemental attitude to all forms of sexual behaviour, except, and quite understandably to the sexual abuse of children. His underlying belief was ‘The whole purpose of life is to know that transformation of fear to love.’

Martin saw evil as an integral part of creation – the dark force of reality; and understood we have to learn to live creatively with the whole: both good and evil. He believed that with mystical awareness and faith, God can be understood as beyond good and evil. ‘God’s grace is universal and eternal. It never fails. He is the universal creator of the bad no less than the good …’

In his book Life Eternal Martin explores what he calls ‘the great transition’ between life and the after-life. He looks at the evidence of near-death experiences, and draws from his own experiences of being alongside the dying, including after the person’s death when during sleep Martin found that he was accompanying them to the threshold of the after-life popularly symbolized as a door, but one that he could not then go through. He staunchly believed that God’s love decrees that all of his creatures, including animals, will eventually be saved, ‘the state of heaven has to include everyone because the absence of even one creature diminishes it’.

Set design (1887) for a revival of the opera Oberon by Weber

Growing up it was very hard for Martin Israel to assert himself out in the world; he was inept at games and physical tasks leaving him a target for bullying at school. ‘I attribute my failures to physical incompetence caused by the abuse I had suffered at the hands of my father’. Feeling contempt for the insensitive, Martin retreated to academic work seeing himself as a strange child loving silence and all creation. ‘Each object, each flower, the sky and the atmosphere were bathed in a supersensual radiance … God had made it, and it reflected, in its own humility, the divine imprint’. This mystical reality stayed with him and influenced his later spiritual writings.

At the age of sixteen, Martin had a powerful experience while listening to the overture to Weber’s opera ‘Oberon’: ‘The music became blurred … the bedroom was bathed in a light of iridescent radiance.’ Initially afraid, Martin submitted to the experience and he was filled with a sense of deep peace.

I was borne aloft by a power that surpassed my understanding … it was the full measure of love, for with it were all things, and in it life found consummation … I was in the realm of eternal life … the ever-living present.

He divined during this mystical experience spiritual truths, including the ascending spiral of life, death, and rebirth as the destiny of all living things, and as part of their progress towards completion. Each he saw as part of the whole and in union with all creation – there was no loss of identity although private experience was transcended, and he felt that he had really experienced the identity of a whole person. The vision ended when God told Martin to return to the world of form, and to put into practice the teaching that he had been given. This revelation of the love of God for all creatures, he said remained the most important event in his life, writing over thirty years later that the memory of it was crystal clear.

He later studied medicine, but was plagued by terrible social inhibitions. Moving to England his psychological problems continued, but when having speech therapy for an inability to project his voice the therapist recognised Martin’s underlying deeper psychological disturbance, and encouraged by her he began to get in touch with his anger towards his parents, attending classes and reading about Freud and Jung and their theories on the unconscious and the inner world. His guide here was Mary Macauley:

I realised I was in the presence of a person I really knew, and could at last start being myself … I began to unburden myself of the knowledge that lay deep within me … for the first time in my life I had a real conversation about the profound issues of existence … and at last I began to move freely amongst people with whom I could converse with ease.

Martin saw that both the inner revelations and the outer suffering he had experienced could be ‘fertilised in service to those on the path of self-realisation … liberating others from the shackles of meaninglessness and fear.’ He developed two spiritual gifts: the first the ability to empty his mind in contemplative prayer, during which he could intuit other people’s needs and dispositions including at times the presence of evil. The second was an ability to give spontaneous inspirational addresses which further developed some years later into writing: ‘It was as if the Holy Spirit was speaking through me, and using the great store-house of wisdom and experience that my educated, sensitive mind had accumulated during the painful process of its growth.’ And he began a vocation of healing and ministry.