‘… the knowledge of spiritual things is given through one’s experience of life.’

Martin Israel

Whilst the reasons for ‘losing our way’ in the previous posts were largely collective and societal, there are many individual accounts of people who have ‘found their way’, and these can offer us insight and indeed inspiration. Some of these are through suffering. One example of this is the story that the theologian Martin Israel gives in his privately published memoir.

Martin Israel, priest, healer, mystic, spiritual director, retreat conductor, and counsellor, was part of an emerging movement, where faith developed through integrating life experience rather than through rationalisation and theology based on doctrines and traditional teachings. In other words, he found his way through direct personal experiences. And some of these experiences from which his faith was constructed were hard to verbalise and process so he was involved with much personal struggle, developing a willingness to live with uncertainty.

His spirituality was founded on his traumatic and lonely childhood. He was born in Johannesburg, South Africa on 30 April 1927, the only child of liberal, affluent Jewish parents; his father an eye surgeon whose view of life Martin described as ‘shallow and materialistic.’ In his autobiography he recounts the loneliness of his childhood, the undesirable qualities of his parents and a very unpleasant family background.

‘My mother was quarrelsome and neurotic, and my father was a paedophile who practised fulsomely on me. My mother’s nature ensured that I would have no friends, while my father’s assault on my body degraded me so that I always felt inferior to my classmates at school. I have therefore had an inferiority complex.’

It is not clear when his father’s sexual abuse began, but it seems likely that it was from a young age, as Martin’s first spiritual vision took place when he was three years old when he heard a voice directly addressing him and that carried with it a radiant light. This vision gave the little boy a preview of his life, and the path he would follow to become authentic.

‘The path was a fearsome one. I was to pass along a dark and ever-narrowing tunnel, alone and isolated, and to move further and further away from all personal contact towards a dark, undisclosed future. There was to be no outer comfort … I would be lonely and often misunderstood, yet I would be driven on … compelled to go on in order to find and fulfil the real work in my life, even to its culmination in the darkness of death.’

From childhood Martin had an intimation that death was not the end, and that the suffering to be undergone was a precursor for glorification. The vision as a young child left him with a sense of dereliction: ‘The burden was almost too great to bear.’ Some solace came through the warmth of the African servants who worked in his home, and in whom he sensed a ‘spiritual reality’; some of whom seem to have been able to emotionally reach the traumatised little boy. One gave Martin an evangelical tract about Jesus.

‘The knowledge of this man pierced me to the marrow of my being. I knew in my depths that it was he who had spoken to me … I could never turn away from his life and his solemn witness to the truth.’

A room full of mirrors

The writer Emmanuel Carrère (see previous post) readily acknowledges that there is a fair amount of narcissism in his books. Here he is not talking about what has been called narcissistic personality disorder where there is a serious inability to empathise, or see the view of the other person, but rather what we might call a more everyday narcissism, a form of self-absorption where our self and our ideas are put to the fore in a defensive way. This then excludes anything that might disturb the self, and so we are closed off from the world of human relationships and indeed from relationship with the divine. So, there is a tendency for this narcissism to deaden spiritual growth, and leave us stuck in a room full of mirrors.

Clearly, we all have some of this narcissistic tendency to different extents, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that we hold ourselves in high regard. Often there is awareness of some deficiency and something lacking within oneself; a brittleness and lack of resilience at the core. This narcissism inhibits us living life in a way that is openhearted, vital, and properly receptive to all that surrounds us.

In ‘The Seven Storey Mountain’ the early autobiography by Thomas Merton, he indirectly writes a bit about this, and also about the breakthrough in his narcissistic tendencies that took place just before his conversion to Catholicism. A student at Columbia University, Merton signed up for a course in French Medieval Literature and bought a book called ‘The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy’, Horrified that it turned out to be a Catholic book from the imprimatur at the front, Merton is tempted to throw the book out the train window on his way home, but in fact reads it and is deeply affected by some of it. Why?

In it he reads about a ‘big concept’ that ‘was to revolutionise my whole life.’ This is ‘aseitas’ which he explains as the:

‘… power of a being to exist absolutely in virtue of itself, not as caused by itself, but as requiring no cause, no other justification for its existence except that its very nature is to exist. There can be only one such Being: that is God.’

In other words, God, as an infinite Being who transcends all our conceptions, exists whether you or I, or indeed Merton, believe in Him or not. God is ‘more than ourselves’ and beyond the narcissism that tries to keep control of our thoughts, feelings, and events. Merton writes about how some people, perhaps especially intellectuals, are repelled and offended by statements about God which they are not able to understand or own, and which are experienced as an attack on the narcissistic constructed self, and, that has to be defended against. Merton writes:

‘They refuse these concepts of God, not because they despise God, but perhaps because they demand a notion of Him more perfect than they generally find: and because ordinary, figurative concepts of God could not satisfy them, they turn away and think that there are no other; or worse still, they refuse to listen to philosophy, on the ground that it is nothing but a web of meaningless words spun together for the justification of the same old hopeless falsehoods.

What a relief it was for me, now, to discover not only that no idea of ours, let alone any image, could adequately represent God, but also that we should not allow ourselves to be satisfied with any such knowledge of Him.’

Jimi Hendrix puts such an opening up away from narcissism like this:

‘I used to live in a room full of mirrors, where all I could see was me. I take my spirit and crash those mirrors and now the whole world is there for me to see’

One of the more insidious aspects of contemporary secularism is intellectual cynicism. In the prologue to his rather extraordinary book ‘The Kingdom’, the French writer Emmanuel Carrère, who sees himself as a post-Christian, describes how when he outlines the idea for his book on the early Christian community as described in Acts of the Apostles, one of the friends listening to him responds in this way:

‘He says it’s strange, when you think about it, that normal intelligent people can believe something as unreasonable as the Christian religion, something exactly like Greek mythology or fairy tales. In ancient times people were gullible, science didn’t exist, but today! … Their pie-in-the-sky ideas coexist alongside perfectly level-headed activities. Presidents pay deferential; visits to their leader. Really, it’s kind of strange, isn’t it?’

In this book, Carrère retells the stories of Paul and Luke. He invents what isn’t already known and includes his own sometimes cynical speculations. Twenty years earlier he was a devout Catholic convert, but now he writes as an agnostic. He maps his personal conversion (and later deconversion) onto the story of Paul and Luke. The struggle to believe is the struggle with intellectual cynicism: “I don’t believe Jesus was resurrected. I don’t believe that a man came back from the dead,” he writes. “But the fact that people do believe it – that I believed it myself – intrigues, fascinates, troubles and moves me.” It is his rationalism, that diminishes his rather over the top piety to a state of disbelief, but there’s a wistfulness in the letting go.

At the end of the book, in the epilogue, Carrère, comments with insight first of all about the Church:

‘Christianity situates its golden age in the past. Like its most violent critics, it thinks that its moment of absolute truth, after which things could only go downhill, resides in the two or three years when Jesus preached in Galilee and died in Jerusalem. And by its own admission the Church is only alive when it approaches that moment.’

And then comments about the book:

‘I’ve done a good job. At the same time, I was nagged by an afterthought that I had missed the point. That with all my erudition, all my thoughtfulness, all my qualms, I was completely off the mark. Of course, the problem when you deal with such questions is that the only way not to be off the mark would be to go over to the side of faith – and that I refused to do, and still do. But who knows?’

Finally Carrère writes about being challenged to go on a retreat at a L’Arche centre with residents, most of whom are physically or mentally challenged, living with those who help them. There is a foot washing ceremony which Carrère finds both beautiful and embarrassing, but is relieved he’s not otherwise affected by it. The retreat ends the next morning with singing a ‘Jesus is my friend’ type hymn:

‘… everyone starts clapping their hands, tapping their feet and wiggling as if they were at a disco. … I can’t sincerely join in on a moment of such intense religious kitsch. I hum vaguely … waiting for it to end. Suddenly Elodie [a young girl with Down’s syndrome] … plants herself in front of me, smiles …encouraging me with her eyes, and there’s such joy in her look, such candid joy, so confident, so unburdened, that I start dancing like the others, singing that Jesus is my friend, and tears come into my eyes as I sing and dance and … I’m forced to admit that that day, for an instant, I got a glimpse of what the kingdom is.’

Aquarius – the water bearer

It has been pointed out that each generation throughout the ages have believed they were living in particularly crucial times – but it is also the case that some historical periods are more decisive than others – not only in shaping a particular nation, but for humanity as a whole.

Karl Jaspers a German philosopher and psychiatrist called the period between 500-800 BCE across Europe and Asia the ‘axial age’ when ‘thought turned back upon thought’. It was characterised by the flourishing of a new self-reflective attitude towards human existence, and with it an awakening to the concept of transcendence. Most major religions, such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism can trace their roots back to this era, or were actually founded during the axial age, while others such as Hinduism began to reform to become more like those axial age religions. This was the era of thinkers such as Confucius, Lao Tzu, Buddha, Zoroaster, Heraclitus, Plato, and Socrates.

In the West this period also gradually led to the development of what Georg Feuerstein, who writes about yoga and Hinduism, sees as,

‘the enthronement and autarchy [autocracy] of cold reason and the subsequent suppression of nonrational modes of consciousness. … this …lies at the root of today’s moral and spiritual bankruptcy, and its disastrous effects can be witnessed all around us (and in us if we care to look).’

Feuerstein sees that we are well into the ‘dawn phase’ of what the Hindu pundits call the ‘dark age’ or the kali-yuga – the last of the four world ages. According to Hindu mythology the dark ages began on February 18, 3102 BCE – the date of the huge battle recorded in the Mahabharata epic. ‘At that time- just as today – the evil machinations of a few power-hungry individuals with no regard for the larger good had created an intolerable situation demanding to be redressed.’ The kali-yuga dark age is a sinister time where the moral order is reduced: ‘plagues, disease, sloth, blemishes such as anger, as well as calamities, sickness and afflictions prevail’. Perhaps even more daunting is that it lasts for 360,000 years!

Apparently, and hopefully there is not total spiritual darkness as the darkness is pierced with shafts of light – there are counterbalancing influences – partly because the Divine has critically intervened in human affairs. In Hinduism this is in the form of the God-man Krishna. Later, Christians would see that the incarnation of Jesus Christ enters as light in the darkness. Feuerstein writes: ‘… all spiritual teachings affirm that we must do our utmost to cultivate spiritual values in the midst of the great darkness surrounding us … by an inward act.’

In contrast to the Hindu time frame, Western astrologers see the age of Aquarius as ushering a new age symbolised by the Water bearer who irrigates and fertilizes nature, there is something new trying to emerge. The Hindu philosopher Sri Aurobindo and the French priest Teilhard de Chardin were also optimistic of the spiritual evolution of humanity with a tendency to a more benign future. The message is to choose to increase the light in the world.

The sacred in flowers 

photograph by Gordon Humphreys

The ideology of scientism, so prevalent in our thought and culture especially in the west, has obscured the most fundamental dimensions of existence – the sacred – which includes our connection with the rest of creation. To restore the sacred to our lives is imperative, and it is possible for this to happen as the sacred is not annihilated, but merely buried. For sacred wisdom is within each person,  and in all of creation – that of God in every one as the Quaker George Fox puts it. Interestingly the original is the two words ‘every’ and ‘one’ (possible to include all creation), whereas it got changed to ‘everyone’ (possibly implying just the humans).

Finding our way again is about re-establishing this sacred wisdom – different from intelligence and knowledge-based thinking. Rather wisdom is a way of knowing that transcends and unites. This quote from Thomas Merton is helpful, he says wisdom,

‘ … dwells in body and soul together and which more by means of myth, of rite, of contemplation, than by scientific experiment, opens the door to a life in which the individual is not lost in the cosmos and in society but found in them.’

Our response in life is not then from an objective detached position, but rather about an intuitive, participatory awareness of what Merton calls ‘the hidden wholeness’ of all reality. In other words, the world is so much more than facts and material existence, but includes this vast dimension of ‘more than ourselves’ with all the associated wonder and reverence. The cosmos becomes spiritualised, and transfigured, and divinised. Through contemplation, Merton writing as a Christian monk, but also in dialogue with the great traditions of the East sees growing in wisdom, (he also uses the terms sophia and sapientia) as linked to increasing conformation to the figure of Christ. Yet this wisdom or sapiential orientation is found in all religions, and links to understanding that creation is in itself a manifestation of divinity.

‘The forms and individual characters of living and growing things, of inanimate beings, of animals and flowers and all nature, constitute their holiness in the sight of God. Their inscape is their sanctity. It is the imprint of His wisdom and His reality in them.’

Merton is seeing here a dimension that reveals harmony, a pattern and a deep sense of order. Pat O’Connell describes Merton’s insight this way: ‘The same mystery of Being that that finds its definitive manifestation in Christ also is disclosed in many different forms through the natural or cosmic revelation available to all.’

Merton associated wisdom from his reading, dreaming and reflections on the figure from Proverbs chapter 8 who is playing and delighting in all of creation – wisdom is in the feminine, and in play celebrating joy, spontaneity and freedom. Harmony, personal, collective, and cosmic, comes from balancing wisdom with scientific knowledge: balancing the intuitive, spiritual, and spontaneous with the objective, analytic and abstract. Wisdom is needed to counteract the current state of the world, by keeping alive ‘an intersubjective knowledge, a communion in cosmic awareness and in nature … a wisdom based on love.’

Smokestacks and rubbish – nature on the eve of destruction from the UN Extinction Report

I recently heard from a psychologist who really dislikes the word ‘spirituality’ because it’s something that cannot be proved by scientific research. This made me wonder about how mainstream science has relentlessly focused on the material and the physical, with an insistence that consciousness only exists in the brain, and so has created a one-dimensional view of life and what happens in life, and indeed what happens after life.

Anne Baring, a Jungian therapist and writer, includes this quote in her book on ‘The Dream of the Cosmos’

‘Western thought has committed itself to a vision of reality that is based almost entirely on the daylight world of ordinary states of consciousness, whilst systematically ignoring the knowledge that can be gained from the night-time sky of non-ordinary states … Trapped within the horizon of the near-at-hand mind, our culture creates myths about the unreliability and irrelevance of non-ordinary states. Meanwhile, our social fragmentation continues to deepen, reflecting in part our inability to answer the most basic existential questions.’

This of course is exemplified by our separation from the rest of the created world and our treatment of nature. In this secular culture the rational mind is seen as of supreme value – recognising no power or consciousness beyond itself; this means we have become disconnected from the deeper matrix out of which we have evolved and on which we depend. We have been reduced as human creatures to a biological mechanism as exemplified in this statement from Stephen Hawking: ‘Brains are like computers. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark”.

Francis Crick one of the discoverers of DNA put it equally bleakly:

“You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and associated molecules.”

However, there is another view increasingly prevailing and one where the ‘evidence’ of the destruction caused by our one-sided consciousness is only too clearly revealed. I like this quote from the Catholic theologian Thomas Berry representing what has been called ‘Ideational culture’ which is a move away from rigidity of beliefs in both religious and secular worlds and towards values of responsibility towards creation.

‘Suddenly we awake to the devastation that has resulted from the entire modern process … In relation to the earth, we have been autistic for centuries. Only now have we begun to listen with some attention and with a willingness to respond to the earth’s demands that we cease our industrial assault, that we abandon our inner rage against the conditions of our earthly existence, that we renew our human participation in the grand liturgy of the universe.’

17th century Greek painting of Christ as the true vine by Leos Moskos

The colour green as signifying the divine spirit of life in all things, becomes a central metaphor for Barbara, a woman in therapy with the Jungian analyst, Donald Kalsched. Following a traumatic childhood with a mentally unstable mother and an emotionally distant father, she remembered being beside herself with fear when her mother acted out manically, often actually tearing the house apart. As a child Barbara hardened herself on the outside, trying to be good, whilst removing a part of herself emotionally on the inside. She described this as going to a cold remote place.

As an adult Barbara dreamt that she was on a cold, dying planet, invited to rescue any surviving creatures, and bring them back to earth. The only being on the planet is one known as ‘the emissary’, which she cannot see, but she can hear the voice. At the end of the dream, Barbara sees that the emissary is a green monster with a tentacle that wraps itself around her, and around the bundle of repulsive rescued animals that she carries. She deduces that in the dream she both suffered the monster, but also loved him fiercely; somehow the green monster was part of her that needed to be brought to earth and to dry land.

In the process of her long analysis, new understanding emerged when Barbara learnt that at 16 months, she had been separated from her mother for six weeks, suffering a serious rupture in her early attachment; a pattern that was repeated in subsequent relationships and situations, and that left her with a deep sense of insecurity, and an abiding threat of loss of love. Towards the end of her work with Donald Kalsched, Barbara dreamt: ‘Green tendrils of a plant were waving in the breeze, with an accompanying voice-over that said: “I am the true vine”.’ Whilst a simple image it was clear that it was a further and meaningful development of the earlier dream of the green, tentacled monster. In the therapy session, Donald Kalsched immediately linked this to John 15, 1-11; he found the excerpt, and read this section to Barbara:

Jesus said:

‘I am the true vine and my Father is the vine-grower. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit … Just as the branch cannot bear fruit unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. If you abide in me, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit. As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.’

Kalsched writes that for both him and Barbara a deep spiritual truth flooded into the space after he had read this – like a blessing:

‘… though neither of us could grasp its full meaning … In that moment, the wisdom of the psyche came into full view. It was as though the benedicta viriditas – the blessed greenness – had settled over us both, blessing us, and filling the “third” space between us with a beauty and a mystery whose meaning could only be sensed and felt, not fully known.’

Carl Jung around the time of his vision

Blessed greenness – Carl Jung’s vision of Christ

‘Now the green blade riseth, from the buried grain,
Wheat that in the dark earth many days has lain;
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.’

In 1939 whilst Carl Jung was researching for his work on Psychology and Alchemy, he woke from sleep and saw bathed in a bright light the figure of Christ on the cross at the foot of his bed. The figure was not quite life size but quite distinct, and Jung saw clearly that Christ’s body was made of greenish gold. Whilst the vision was remarkably beautiful, Jung felt deeply shaken by what he had seen.

Jung had also just given a seminar on the ‘Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola’, and his first thought about the vision was to link it to the Anima Christi, one of the meditations he had been thinking about. But it seemed as if the vision was a reminder too – Jung deduced that he had overlooked the analogy of Christ with the alchemists search for gold.

Jung explains that the serious alchemists realised that essentially their attempts to turn base metals into gold wasn’t so much to do with either ‘common gold’, or ‘philosophical gold’, but rather with spiritual values and psychic transformation. It was the psychic transformation between patient and analyst that particularly drew Jung’s interest. The vision, Jung writes, points to the central vision of Christ as an alchemical symbol – a force for transformation.

Here the green-gold is the life spirit that animates the entire cosmos.

‘This spirit has poured himself out into everything, even into inorganic matter; he is present in metal and stone. My vision was thus a union of the Christ-image with his analogue in matter …  If I had not been so struck by the greenish gold, I would have been tempted to assume that something essential was missing from my “Christian” view – in other words, that my traditional Christ-image was somehow inadequate and that I still had to catch up with part of the Christian development. The emphasis on the metal, however, showed me the undisguised alchemical conception of Christ as a union of spiritually alive and physically dead matter.’

Jung was grappling with his understanding of the symbolism of Christ: the gold at the heart, and the green of the living water, and the animating spirit that gives life to everything in creation – including all that seems to us as dead matter. The spirituality pervades everywhere and everything. The Kingdom of God is everywhere, and as Thomas Merton says: ‘Here is an unspeakable secret: paradise is all around us and we do not understand. It is wide open.’

Photo from Contemplative Monk FB page

By the 1960s Thomas Merton was writing more and more about nature, and some of his loveliest writings are found in his journal ‘Dancing in the Water of Life’.

This description comes from late April 1964:

‘Real Spring weather – these are the precise days when everything changes. All the trees are fast beginning to be in leaf and the first green freshness of a new summer is all over the hills. Irreplaceable purity of these few days chosen by God as His sign!

Mixture of heavenliness and anguish. Seeing “heavenliness” suddenly for instance in the pure, pure, white of the mature dogwood blossoms against the dark evergreens in the cloudy garden. “Heavenliness” too of the song of the unknown bird that is perhaps here only for these days, passing through, a lovely, deep, simple song. Pure – no pathos, no statement, no desire, pure heavenly sound. Seized by this “heavenliness” as if I were a child – a child mind I have never done anything to deserve to have and which is my own part in the heavenly spring. Not of this world, or of my making. Born partly of physical anguish (which is really not there though. It goes quickly). Sense that the “heavenliness” is the real nature of things not their nature, not en soi, but the fact they are a gift of love, and of freedom.’

Here Merton also offers us an image of the tension of the opposites – which is always present and in everything: including the loveliness of spring but the transience of the season. He decides that the heavenliness or the sacred heart of everything is the essence of creation, but offers us the phrase of physical anguish. Is it that the joy can only be seen in opposition to the sorrow, the rebirth in the light of death, and the blessed greenness as the contrast with the bare branches that precedes the spring growth.

In the following journal entries Merton continues with the idea of the “heavenliness” of the blessed greenness, describing the hills as clothed in green sweaters and the light green of the new leaves on a tulip polar. All feels clean and fresh as if washed clean. He sees this season as one where we are given a glimpse of a reality which is that all of creation has a heavenly existence. Everything is transformed in this rebirth of creation.

Hildegard of Bingen

‘My beloved speaks and says to me: ‘Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away; for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; and the time for singing has come, and the voice of the turtle dove is heard in our land. The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom; they give forth fragrance.’

Song of Solomon

When Noah looked out over the endless ocean, he finally saw the white dove return with the iconic olive branch: a sprig with green leaves – the end of the destruction of the flood, and a symbol of hope, peace and renewal. It represents the dove’s and every living creature’s yearning for independence, and that life will thrive again.

Here in south west England, it’s been a long, dark, and extremely wet winter with lots of flooding, and very high river levels; but spring is more or less here. The trees I can see from my window are now turning green – and although it’s still not warm there is growth, and the promise of sunshine.

This is the ‘blessed greenness’ – benedicta viriditas. The term ‘blessed greenness’ is taken from the writings of the twelfth century Benedictine Abbess Hildegard von Bingen, and is about the greening power of God. She wrote ‘Hymn to the Holy Ghost’ which begins:

‘From you the clouds rain down, the heavens move, the stones have their moisture, the waters give forth streams, and the earth sweats out greenness’.

The idea of greenness is one of Hildegard von Bingen’s guiding images, as an expression of divinity and the creative power of life that is mysteriously inherent in all life forms – plants, flowers, trees, animals and in all the beautiful things of the world. The word ‘viriditas’ is possibly derived from two Latin words: green and truth, and as well as its literal definition as in greenness and growth, there is also a metaphorical meaning as in freshness and vitality, and by extension the intrinsic power and potential for all human beings to grow and heal.

Carl Jung was also attracted to the benedicta viriditas, blessed greenness, as a psycho-spiritual state:

‘… of someone who, in his wanderings among the mazes of his psychic transformation, comes upon a secret happiness which reconciles him to his apparent loneliness. In communing with himself he finds not deadly boredom and melancholy but an inner partner, more than that, a relationship that seems like the happiness of a secret love, or like a hidden springtime, when the green seed sprouts from the barren earth, holding of the promise of future harvests. …the secret immanence of the divine spirit of life in all things. … Therefore this … might be called the Soul of the World’.

The soul, as the life force in the body, is green, and spiritually this greening power lies at the heart of salvation; it is the force toward healing and wholeness and is the Word of God.