In this post, parts of the second half of Mike’s therapy with Jungian analyst Donald Kalsched (see previous post) are explored. Much of the work took place through dream analysis, and the gradual restoration of the hidden parts of Mike that had been repressed, and gone into hiding during childhood.

After losing his temper with his small son, Mike later dreamt that he has committed murder and in the dream is to be judged in a church where he sits with his son on his lap, looking into the child’s eyes. ‘I can see his innocence and goodness … I feel enormous deadness about my situation, but I’m prepared to give myself up.’ Kalsched interprets this as the baby boy in the dream not only being Mike’s actual son, but also the carrier of Mike’s own early trauma – ‘his soul-child.’ In the dream, the choice is being made by the unconscious to open to vulnerability.

In the course of the work the old defences regularly reasserted themselves – after all often in therapy it’s a question of oscillating between change, and returning to old familiar patterns that though they may be unhelpful are so deeply embodied and established in the psyche. However, over a long analysis these defences do certainly begin to lose their possessive power, and become ‘humanized’ through the analytic relationship.

Mike dreamt towards the end of the therapy:

‘I’m in some kind of spiritual sanctuary. People are praying out loud, each in turn. When it comes to my turn I don’t have a prayer. I think to myself “but I can talk of my experience of God”. I then prayerfully say that “in opening to the pain of life and loving, I touch into God as God … that with that awareness I release myself into the great suffering of all humanity and release myself into God’s mind.”’

Here Mike seems to link his own suffering with the suffering of God, yet it doesn’t appear to be a self-important or omnipotent dream. Kalsched sees how Mike has been able to understand how much his early trauma affected him, and how much suffering occurred through the defences he ‘had’ to employ from childhood.

‘And yet no longer did his suffering these defences seem like a meaningless waste. He had seen the “God” in these defences – their mysterious meaning and intention and he realized that impossible as they had become in his life, ultimately, they had saved him from psychological breakdown.’

The ‘tough God’, who had bolstered Mike in his childhood and early adulthood by being macho etc, now asked Mike to open to the ‘suffering God’ and all the vulnerable feelings of the small child still within.

But behind this apparent clash of opposites there seems also to be something else “waiting” for us to make a choice about our way of living in the world. This would take me (FG) back to the ‘more than ourselves’ the transcendent Other – the mysterious “third”. This is what Jung is referring to when he writes: ‘a living third thing … a movement out of the suspension between opposites, a living birth that leads to a new level of being’. So not either/or, and not both/and, but something more and beyond that contains and transcends all aspects of ourselves.

Donald Kalsched – Jungian analyst

Those who have either worked as therapists and/or been patients will know how hard it is to say what actually happens in long-term analytic work. It’s hard to pin down when change actually happens, and, exactly how those long established and embodied ways of thinking and being are gradually refigured. And yet we do change, and how we are in the world changes too, and it’s primarily done through relationship. What happens between the person being seen and the person in the role of therapist; the dynamics between these two people has the power to bring change. If the relationship works well then what has been imprisoning is brought into consciousness – one could say brought into the light, and re-experienced in a way that allows insight.

The Jungian analyst Donald Kalsched (DK), who works with early trauma in adult patients, describes his work with a man called Mike who grew up in a repressive religious family with a tyrannical ex-army father who would hit him, and a more emotionally responsive mother but who would lock him in cupboards as a punishment; Mike experienced much physical and emotional abuse as a child. As a young adult his rage became channelled into superhuman feats in sport, and his self-esteem gained from sexual acts with women, but without any capacity to surrender and be open as part of a creative relationship.

In the therapy, the relationship between Mike and DK was largely positive for both. Mike brought dreams, and was grateful for the space to talk, and DK began to genuinely like him – though Mike initially had to walk round the room during sessions: ‘pawing like a wild stallion when he got worked up’. It took a couple of months before he could sit down, and then through his dreams the pain from the past began to emerge. DK thought that because he was a male therapist and Mike was gradually able to trust him, it was easier for Mike to share his inner sense of inferiority and shame and how needy he was. Mike also brought to the sessions his vulnerability in now being in a settled relationship with his female partner and the father to a small boy.

Mike’s dreams repeatedly revolved around the theme of a lost boy:

‘I walk into a dark room. Above in the attic I can hear a young person’s voice yell out “help me!” There seems no way to get into the attic. I can hear his or her body pulled along the floor. This person is defeated, desperate, alone, isolated.’

Other dreams were full of violence and cruelty. Responding with feelings of sadness and anger, Mike was also overwhelmed with shame, and imagined that DK was feeling disgust. It took a long time for Mike to begin to allow the deep feelings of grief and loss to emerge. But eventually they did: ‘Having the courage now to feel the helplessness of his losses, he also felt his love deepen.’ He began to see how seeking to master pain through, for example, extreme sports and wild behaviour had been: ‘a kind of inflated macho ritual in order to prevent himself from feeling the psychic pain associated with his unbearable trauma.’

In the middle phase of the therapy Mike worked at the experience of trying to control his aggression by confronting what he and DK called ‘the anger demon’. This included being furious with DK around a summer break when Mike felt abandoned: an experience that they both felt made the relationship between them more real as they survived ‘the rupture.’

The brook constantly searching for the river

Sulivan’s spiritual journal details his own move away from conforming to finding out for himself what he believes. Part of it seems to be sorting out commonly accepted ideas that need to be debunked. One example is the family, Sulivan is against the idea, suggesting it’s best to be a mother or father for as briefly as possible. He writes how the family opposes ‘the free and joyous movement of life.’ And comments: ‘How much time has been lost in struggles against the jealousy or ambition of fathers, or against maternal love.’

Much of what he says makes good sense in terms of what comes up in therapy. Take this extract:

‘From the start the child has to defend herself against the reflexes, ideas, and dreams that people confer upon her, in which all the riches of experience are stored, of course, but also its fears. Later, if she has not been asphyxiated, she will be forced to break open the very vocabulary she has learned in order to rediscover innocence. It’s a hard battle against convention, pre-judgement.’

Is Sulivan speaking from experience here when he writes: ‘The family seizes the individual and never leaves him alone, just like the society that overwhelms him … each individual ought to tear himself away from the clan and the weight it has on him, and make his own truth conquer the inhuman.’ He sees the gospel as a plea for the essential solitude of a man or woman, and that Jesus has not blessed the family as such, rather offering a rebirth of the spirit.

‘Nothing will ever replace for a child the experience of being completely loved by a father and mother. Let family life be intense but brief, aimed at healthy pain and a new birth. … A divided family is hell. But there’s something worse – a united family … Don’t need your children too much in order to exist … to turn them into carbon copies of you is to assassinate them.’

One idea that he wrestles with from the gospel accounts is what Sulivan calls ‘the vertical instant’. He sees Jesus in the gospels as someone travelling ever onwards, crossing and recrossing the country side – always on the go, and encouraging us to be natural again. The words are filled with the sights and smells of rural life, the wind in the trees and the gestures of ordinary people.

‘His words invite us to become joyously present in the instant, like the brook constantly in search of the river, or the river enroute to the sea. Look for the Father. Your neighbour is yourself, your unknown self. Non-duality is present everywhere. … Jesus’ word touches you like a hand on your shoulder, a threat as well as a friendship, a fraternal and dangerous invitation that leads from the known world and the deciphered text and makes you cross over to a land that is both here and elsewhere, whose image you carry deep within you.’

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.

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.’

Henri le Saux: we are all called to say: ‘I am’ 

Later in his life William Johnston’s journey of continuous conversion moved into awareness of the coincidence of opposites, [where coincidence means the meeting at the same time of the opposites]. Johnston had begun to appreciate, that for many of the students he taught Zen Buddhism offered a deeper awareness and inner peace without the baggage of dogma. He began to teach a Zen-influenced meditation that could be practiced by Christians, Buddhists, and agnostics. He emphasized the importance of sitting with straight backs and breathing from the abdomen: ‘I will breathe in; I will breathe out’ was recited slowly and rhythmically. He also offered those who he taught a sacred word or mantra.

One he thought suitable for everyone was a Buddhist koan: ‘Every day is a good day’. Many protested at this – giving examples of when bad things were happening. The task, he explained, was to break through into a state of consciousness that allowed seeing the coincidence of opposites: ‘That is to say, we see that every day is at the same time a good day and not a good day.’ This breakthrough into getting awareness of the opposites held together comes with great joy and relief.

Johnston thought that old age was especially a time to realize the coincidence of opposites. Especially for those over 80, this was above all the time to meditate, to deepen faith and devotion.

‘Above all it is the time to come to the realization that life and death are not two things but one.

Again the coincidence of opposites! As every day is a good day but not a good day, as life is fair and not fair, as all is one but not one – so too life and death are one and not one. This is the mystical enlightenment … associated with the Hindu advaita, the Buddhist emptiness, and the words of the Heart Sutra that ‘form is emptiness and emptiness is form.’ It is the core of “The Cloud of Unknowing” and the writing of St John of the Cross. Is not this at the center of all mysticism?’

Johnston’s continuous conversion led to the understanding that it is only in collaboration with other religions that a new mystical theology can be found, and what he describes as a universal vocation to mysticism. Writing about the inner life of the Christian sanyasi Swami Abishiktananda – the French Indian monk Henri Le Saux – Johnston writes how he only later in life understood what Abishiktananda meant.

‘[He] found the peak point of mysticism in the “I am” of Jesus. Not “I am the Messiah” or “I am he” but simply “I am”. And Abishiktananda follows this back to Moses who, having asked Yahweh his name, received the answer, “I am who I am”. This, the Swami claims, is the key to all mystical experience. We are all called to say, “I am.” And is not this an experience beyond reasoning and thinking, beyond space and time?’

It is in such experiences outside time and space that the coincidence of opposites can be truly known, where there is ‘realization of the non-dualistic truth that life and death are not two things but one and a dimension of reality that is ordinarily hidden’ – (another glimpse of glory for those who have read the previous months posts).

William Johnston in a kimono

The continuous conversion experiences of William Johnston, the Jesuit priest and Zen practitioner involved moving, a bit like Kathleen Raine in her vision of the devout nun, out of the narrower remit of Roman Catholicism, but for Johnston into embracing aspects of Zen Buddhism. Johnston wrote about and immersed himself in the teachings of St John of the Cross and from ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’ as both firmly rooted in the Gospel, but after moving to become a missionary in Japan in 1951 he realized there was much to learn from Buddhism. He set up a dialogue with Protestants (who in the meetings read from the Bible), Catholics (who celebrated the Eucharist), and Buddhists (sitting in silent meditation). Occasional visitors joined including the Quaker Douglas Steere, and the interfaith proponent and Catholic priest Raimon Panikkar.

‘I quickly saw that Buddhist contemplatives easily transcend the ego, or small self … to be in contact with the big self. Are they, I asked myself, entering into what we have called “infused contemplation”? The attention they attached to the body, the breathing and the unconscious – all this was teaching me something.’

Even sitting on the train running through Tokyo, Johnston thought that the Japanese were living at a deeper level of reality than most Westerners. ‘Now I see that contemplation pervades this country and has got into me by a sort of osmosis.’

Some twenty years later and on a thirty-day retreat in the US, Johnston seems torn between following the prescribed Ignatian exercises and bringing in the Japanese influences. He was seriously challenged about what he was doing by the retreat leader, who questioned Johnston continuing as a Jesuit priest. Sharing this unexpected attack with a young abbess in a convent where Johnston stayed while on the retreat. the abbess advised him to sleep on it. She explained that always the answer comes from the unconscious.

‘I did sleep. And I had a dream … it had something to do with my being in a room in a big house, feeling very happy and comfortable. I woke up in peace, convinced that this room was the Society of Jesus and I was in the right place. I had no doubts about my vocation. I was where I should be. The answer, as the abbess had predicted, came from my unconscious.’

Returning the next day for the exercises on retreat Johnston demands that his life as a Jesuit and the new methods of contemplation are respected – both can co-exist, and the retreat continues. Yet Johnston remained shaken and became ill, having to go to hospital – the sickness he knew coming from the retreat and overwork.

‘Looking back at the whole scene again I can see that earth-shaking retreat as one of the blessings of my life … In zooming in on me and breaking down all my defences, Vince [the leader] was the Zen master leading me to enlightenment …’

Together with the insight from the abbess Johnston was:

‘… knocked into the unconscious realization that my vocation, my basic choice in life, was not a rational choice. It was somehow mystical, something like an awakening … a choice made at the depths of one’s being. “You have not chosen me; but I have chosen you.”

.

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.’

Thomas Merton

The initial conversion experience that involves taking spirituality more seriously, is perhaps a bit like opening a door into another perspective on life, and eventually another way of being. However, what may have felt joyous at the start, almost inevitably becomes something much more complex and demanding.

Some years after Merton had entered the Abbey of Gethsemani and was preparing and undergoing ordination, he was writing that what he had thought was the end was merely the beginning. Whilst the summer months following ordination were filled with great joy and were a period of consolation, by September 1949 Merton reading the book of Job felt that he was about to begin living it. And indeed, for the next year, it seems from the oblique hints in his journal that he underwent an extraordinary experience.

‘When the summer of my ordination ended, I found myself face to face with a mystery that was beginning to manifest itself in the depths of my soul and to move me with terror.’ Merton cannot really explain what is happening. He did suffer some ill health, but this it seems to him was only ‘an effect of this unthinkable thing that had developed in the depths of my being’. ‘It was a sort of slow, submarine earthquake which produced strange commotions on the visible, psychological surface of my life.’

He writes about no longer feeling a real person, but also about being alone:

‘… with a different loneliness from that of Christ. He was alone because he was everything. I am alone because I am nothing. I am alone because I am nothing. I am alone in my insufficiency – dependent, helpless, contingent, and never quite sure that I am leaning on Him upon whom I depend.

Yet to trust in Him means to die, because to trust perfectly in Him you have to give up all trust in everything else. And I am afraid of that death. The only thing I can do about it is to make my fear become part of the death.’

By Christmas Merton was sensing that things were building up to a deep decision about what the outcome of letting go of this sense of his own self-importance might mean. He writes that when the time came it was a decision of neutrality and liberty and too difficult to write down.

‘There is a conversion of the deep will to God that cannot be effected in words- barely in a gesture or ceremony. There is a conversion of the deep will and a gift of my substance that is too mysterious for liturgy, and too private.’

This seems to be about belonging to God, but such an elusive whilst profound experience. The next inner revolution of continuous conversion involved Merton in the insight that to ‘belong to God I have to belong to myself.’ So, the death that is needed is not of the actual self, but rather on one’s absolute trust and dependence on the self. Ironically a painful conversion because there remains a self to suffer it. The place to be with this is in solitude.

On the same day as this insight Merton notes how deeply he is moved by Psalm 54,(55). ‘My heart is troubled within me: and the fear of death is fallen upon me. fear and trembling are come upon me: and darkness hath covered me’ Merton writes that he felt he was chanting something he had written himself from the very depths of his own soul.

And so the continuous conversion continued.

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.’