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Experiences of religion in childhood 3

 

Inside a Catholic church – ‘the distant altar’

The descriptions by the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion in the last two posts raise questions about what does religion mean, and how is it understood when we are under five, aged seven, and even adolescent. What does religion do to our sense of ourselves and our attitudes to others – so are we more loving and inclusive or more judgemental and exclusive? Does it increase our guilt and sense of wrong doing or does it make us rigid, or the opposite are we more creative? This is of course so different from spiritual or mystical experiences of wonder and awe that many children experience outside of any religious frame.

Despite all that Bion experienced in terms of critical religion and injunctions about deception, shameful bodies, and being a very good boy, as an adult he became someone able to think outside convention. In his later years he wrote about an almost mystical philosophy on what can sometimes happen in the consulting room when transformations occur between and within two people – a state he called ‘O’. In 1965 he writes:

“O is not good or evil, it cannot be known, loved or hated. It can be represented by terms such as ultimate reality or truth. The most, and the least that the individual person can do is to be it”.

Monica Furlong, a British writer, with a great interest in spirituality and religion compiled a book of what it used to be like to grow up Christian. The world she describes – mostly from people growing up before the 1970s – is no longer present in 2024. Some was good: ‘the strength and beauty, the depth, and influence’, some bad: ‘stuffy and constricting propriety’. Most was incomprehensible to a child. Old conflicts between different Christian groups were rife, with each one convinced their beliefs were right and the others wrong, and there was inbuilt antisemitism. The Muslim religion, Hinduism and Buddhism were barely recognised. Most schools held religious assemblies with daily bible readings, hymns and prayers. Furlong herself remembers how the whole thing felt like a bland façade that deadened any enthusiasm she might have for religions as it seemed so fatally linked with ‘being proper’. It wasn’t until later, as an adult, that she had another look at religion, and stayed on to look more.

One of the contributors in her book is the priest Angela Tilby whose earliest memory is of going into a Catholic church with her mother and brother – they never went back because one of the priests rebuked Angela’s mother. The priest had spotted that Angela’s brother, was wearing school uniform that wasn’t from a Catholic school. However, the visit had a lasting effect on the small girl:

‘My impression of the catholic Church remained vague, huge and mysterious throughout my childhood. The green dome and the singing sensation of space, the dark clusters of sacred images and the distant altar made an ineradicable impression on me. This was nothing to do with religion or morality. I had no formed language in which to understand or respond. It had nothing to do with Jesus or with the stories from the Bible. It was … pure awe …’

In her later childhood Tilby experimented with a range of Anglican churches, a Congregational church, the possibility of atheism when she felt ‘embarrassed by all forms of worship’, and, then, as a teenager making a decision against her family experience and the ethos of the school she went to, to become an evangelist and ‘a baptized Christian’ – the decision ‘to become what I was’- an adolescent assertion of freedom. Searching for true religion lasts a lifetime.

Making sense of religion as a child

Wilfred Bion, brought up as a child in a religious household at the beginning of the twentieth century, shows how very little of the religion he took in made any sense. ‘Our Father’ he heard as ‘Arf, Arfer’ but knowing that whatever ‘Arf Arfer’ was – it was not to be trifled with.

‘Sometimes in my dreams I thought I heard Arf Arfer arfing. It was a terribly frightening noise … Arf Arfer was related, though distantly to Jesus who was also mixed up with our evening hymns. “Geesus loves me this I know, For the Bible tells me so” … I felt Gee-sus had the right idea, but I had no faith in his power to deal with Arf Arfer. Nor did I feel sure of God whose attribute seemed to be that he gave his ‘only forgotten’ son to redeem our sins. By this time, I had become wary of probing too deeply … secretly I felt the green hill city and Geesus were ill-treated.’

Every night the small boy said his prayers in front of his father: ‘Pity my Simply City”.  Once Bion asked his mother what had happened to his Simply City but she didn’t know what he was talking about. The parents, part of the colonial white imperialists in India, were worried that the children might ‘get ideas’ if they had any contact with ‘pagan superstition’ and anything to do with eastern spiritual practices; they were parents of what he describes as an uncompromising mould.

After a tiger was cruelly shot on a Big Game Shoot the tigress came to the camp for three nights to claim her murdered mate, Bion remembers that: ‘That night Arf Arfer came in terror like the King of Kings’. He later asked his mother whether the tigress was loved by Jesus … and how would the tiger get to where ‘Saints in Glory stand, bright as day’ …and what was the tiger who had been shot doing now, was he chasing the lamb? His mother – scarcely listening cannot answer. ‘Following this it was agreed that it was time to go to school ‘to knock this nonsense out of my head – I hadn’t a mind then only a “head”.’

Bion’s account of school is pretty grim and religion comes out of it very badly. Bion was left believing:

‘I knew I was a horrible child and God would never make me a good boy however hard I prayed. I don’t think he ever listened. I really don’t … Church was all right … a respite from tormentors … When Church was over … the trouble started. For half an hour we did “Search the Scriptures”. These were booklets in which texts from a book in the Bible were printed with blank spaces; we were to fill in the chapter and the verse where they were to be found. I could not find them; other boys could. God was worse than useless. I used to pray. One day, in a sermon, the mystery was solved. “Sometimes we think”, said the preacher, “that God has not answered our prayers but he has”. I pricked up my ears at this. “It means”, he went on, “that the answer is ‘No’”. I unpricked my ears.’

The only relief for Bion were some of the hymns and hymn singing practice. A favourite: ‘Art thou weary, art thou languid?’ with a lovely sad tune brought much comfort. ‘I found out that five or six little boys liked it and were just as weary and languid and sore distressed as I was.’

Experiencing religion as a child

Wilfred Bion aged about 6 and his sister 

How we experience religion as children, or not, plays an influential part in our later spiritual development as adults. I know myself that the Congregational minister leaning over the edge of the pulpit and yelling, (probably speaking loudly), about not provoking the wrath of God had a long-term effect on me. This was compounded by having been told that the sound of thunder was God walking up and down in heaven very cross – with me. It’s easy to see how the idea of the punishing God became firmly embedded. But, then there was Jesus who wasn’t cross, but instead meek and mild, and to whom I prayed every night to make me a good girl and to bless everyone I knew, even those I didn’t like. What to make of it all?

It’s easy to see why it’s a relief to let go of that sort of messaging as soon as possible. But it does mean that to develop an authentic religious faith and a meaningful spiritual life most of the old early messages have to be confronted and reworked – seen for what they are, and why they were so powerfully taken in. Then new experiences can be integrated, and so faith and spirituality as an adult start to look a bit different.

In the next few posts, I am going to look at different people’s experiences of their childhood religion and spirituality. The influential psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, who died in 1979, shared his deep, almost mystical insights into the human condition and what can happen between people in intensive psychotherapy. In his autobiography, he describes some of his early religious (mis)understandings. Brought up in India in the days of the British Raj, he was largely looked after as a small child by an ayah (an Indian nanny), before being sent back to England to boarding school at the age of 8.

Bion begins his autobiography with the family crest: Nisi dominus frustra – without God there is no purpose. Underneath he quotes from Psalm 127 verse 1: ‘Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it; except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’ He remembers singing in the evening with his mother and sister the hymn ‘there is a green hill far away, without a city wall’. He writes:

‘– so green compared with the parched burning India of the daylight that had just finished – and its tiny jewelled city wall. Poor little green hill; why hadn’t it got a city wall? It took me a long time to realize that the wretched poet meant it had no city wall, and longer still to realize he meant – incredible though it seemed – that it was outside the city wall.’

His parents kept absolute religious principles that included tolerating no deception, and as a child Bion was often reproached for telling lies. In one incident, he describes fighting with his sister, and replying with a lie that he was doing ‘nothing’ – though it was quite clear that he had boxed her ears as she was ‘bawling’ and blaming her brother.

‘“These children’ said my mother … you’re both as bad as each other!” Up to that point I had fancied that her screams were abating. “Renew a right spirit within me”, but if that was my unspoken prayer it had been wrongly addressed. Her screams were renewed. We were separated.’

Unable to remember why he had decided to punish his sister for earlier wrong doing, which was actually the girl repeating the word ‘lavatory’ in a ‘rude’ way, and, in Bion’s view as the elder brother, not getting sufficiently told off, Bion was given ‘a good beating’ by his father, who was angry with the boy, turning his eyes fiercely on him.

‘From that day on I hated them both “with all my heart and all my soul for ever and ever. Amen.” A few minutes? Seconds? Years? Later I had forgotten all about it; so had they. But as no doubt they suspected I had learned my lesson and so had my sister. So had my parents for they too seemed uneasy, especially when I shrank from them and kept as far away from my sister as possible. “Why don’t you two play together?” my mother would ask in a puzzled way.’

Crying as a spiritual experience – the grace of tears 2

St Peter weeping by Jusepe de Ribera early 17th century

Crying sometimes feels like letting go of self-control – it can be awkward in public – that’s why it’s easier to cry on one’s own. As a spiritual practice it is directly linked to giving up this fantasy of self-control, for although we might think that we are in control that is illusory, yet giving up the idea of being control is real, and so we weep.

Isaac of Ninevah, also known as Isaac the Syrian, wrote about the three causes of tears as: love of God; awestruck wonders at God’s mysteries, and humility of heart. He saw these ‘holy tears’ as progressing from one stage to another and acting as a sign of our transformation. The tears show that we are being born into sacred time which Maggie Ross describes as, ‘not only the interpenetration of time and eternity, but even a reversal of time as we know it’. I think this means we are somehow being moved into a different level of consciousness, something definitely outside of self-control.

There’s quite a bit of crying in the bible: in the Old Testament tears of repentance, tears of lamentation, tears of sorrow. The prophets weep: Isaiah “drenching” with tears those for whom he prays, Jeremiah who was known as the weeping prophet comparing his eyes to a fountain. Yahweh weeps over His errant people. Israel weeps in repentance, and then God cannot resist. In the New Testament, Christ weeps, touched by the sorrow of Martha and Mary at the death of Lazarus. Jesus’ feet are washed with tears of repentance and love. Peter weeps bitterly after denying his Lord three times and meeting Jesus’ sorrowful gaze. Paul tells the Ephesians he has been crying continuously for three years over their behaviour.

Many saints also describe their crying: Catherine of Siena whilst in ecstasy wrote what Christ told her about tears, and Ignatius was advised that his copious tears could harm his eyesight. Ephrem was said to weep continuously, and Thomas Aquinas insisted tears relieved pain. “Tears are the heart’s blood,” said St. Augustine, referring to the tears of his mother Monica, tears which purchased his conversion. St. Augustine, in his Confessions wrote:

“When deep reflection had dredged out of the secret recesses of my soul all my misery and heaped it up in full view of my heart, there arose a mighty storm, bringing with it a mighty downpour of tears”.

More recently Padre Pio says that tears are “the work of God in you”, and as a novice, took to placing a large handkerchief on the floor in front of him: his constant tears were leaving traces on the stone floor of the choir where he prayed. Pope Francis says the gift of tears “prepare the eyes to look, to see the Lord.” “It is a beautiful grace,” he says, “to weep praying for everything: for what is good, for our sins, for graces, for joy itself… it prepares us to see Jesus.” St. John Vianney could not speak of sinners and sins without weeping and when asked, “Fr. Vianney, why do you cry so much?” The answer was given, “Because you don’t cry enough.”

This links to therapy where crying by the person being seen is common – a safe place to express sadness and hurt, but a study shows that a significant proportion of trainee therapists also reported crying in support of the therapeutic process. However, as experience develops the therapist is usually able to feel the suppressed emotion, but in a way that it can be held and then later conveyed to the client when they are ready to open themselves to the feeling themselves.

The grace of tears, crying as a spiritual experience

Isaac of Ninevah, also known as Isaac the Syrian

‘Blessed, therefore, are the pure in heart who at all times enjoy this delight of tears and through it see our Lord continually.’ Isaac of Ninevah

Sometimes, in times of stillness, tears do come – whether for oneself, or for someone else, or what Isaac of Ninevah calls the delight or grace of tears – when we don’t really know why we are crying. Certainly in Isaac of Ninevah’s time, the 4th century, tears were seen as part of a spiritual practice, and were even considered essential. They were seen as representing our inner fragmentation, and then our reintegration accomplished by our tears. In this way the spontaneous crying that can happen when we are in deep silence and stillness is a sign of our soul calling for a greater relationship with the divine. This is then a grace, but usually in our contemporary culture most crying is seen as an embarrassment and a sign of weakness.

In therapeutic work our weeping can be a huge release – people who have been unable to cry about what has happened to them can, in the safety of the relationship with the therapist, allow themselves to soften and be in touch with a deep sadness and grief from way back.

The solitary and theologian Maggie Ross sees that tears signify losing or letting go of one’s life, or what she calls our pseudo-life in order to gain true life, where tears are at the heart of receiving God’s love. Our tears are at the border of our bodily and spiritual state.

‘Those tears which pour forth as a result of some insight provide the body with a kind of unction; they flow spontaneously and there is no compulsion in them. They also anoint the body and the appearance of the face is changed. For a joyful heart renders the body beautiful’.

Holy tears are not quite the same as tears in therapy, where the tears are prompted by a conscious feeling or memory and tend to stop after a while when the person feels better for crying. Maggie Ross says that holy tears are potentially unending, because our relationship with God is never ending. As we move closer to God the process of being changed is continuous:

‘More and more sense of counterfeit power and control is lost, and holy tears are evidence of catharsis. These tears are the sign both of the Holy Spirit at work in a willing person and of the willingness itself. They signify … exchange of love between God and the person. They have nothing to do with melancholy or masochism.’

And, what if we don’t weep? Apparently, this might be a genetic disposition or cultural conditioning … or … is it that we are reluctant to be transfigured. Isaac of Ninevah, perhaps harshly, says he will not believe that someone has repented and changed unless they weep, but the monastic John Climacus says that he prizes the single tear of someone who finds it nearly impossible to weep. So the tears are a sign of our transfiguration, evidence of glimpsing deepest reality, and whilst the first stage of tears is about an inward focus as we change then compassion grows.

‘This compassion grows because of the revelation of one’s own wounds. These in turn are recognised to be the wounds of all humanity, and of all creation.’

 

Darkness and light in therapy 2

 

Two of the tapestries – the top one called The Dancer and the lower The Bridge

One of the ways in which Marika Henriques began to be able to balance the light and the darkness that arose in the therapy was through embroidery. She had initially drawn and painted, and she had written too, but she writes that she wanted to repair by working through the fragments of her experience stitching things together to make into one.

‘Change can sometimes be sudden and swift or it can be imperceptibly slow. Like my tapestries where each final image appeared (I counted once) through twenty-four thousand small stitches, similarly my becoming more myself came about with small, hardly discernible movements. In my case, change took time. Two decades.’

All was done through image, and this confirmed for her that healing happened through the imagination. The whole experience of creativity – drawing, writing, stitching became healing and transformative, so that Marika Henriques could say: ‘The effects of hiding no longer ruled my life. … When I finished stitching, I felt that I had fulfilled a scared responsibility’.

However, five years after completing the tapestries and believing that she had completed her personal healing journey Marika Henriques began to have Holocaust dreams again. The dreams became part of a sequence – they were instructive dreams with a clear thread running through them; often there were themes forgetting and remembering and losing and finding. In one there was a stark message:

‘I have to return home from abroad, I am in great danger. A rescue operation is organised by two Jewish people. In the dream a voice was saying “this is a wake-up call, it is the Holocaust”’

The next dream gave a clear instruction:

‘Two men turned away from me, saying “We won’t talk to you, because you don’t have a soul.’

The dreams instructed a spiritual path and for Marika Henriques to come out of hiding and rejoin the Jewish community – this would be the final part of the healing for her to ‘become a complete person’.

In the final dream she is returned to a place where she is not hidden ‘a Jewish place’ where she joins in a dance with others who have all survived the terrible times.

‘I am in an open place. There is a lake. There are many, mainly elderly people there. Most of them went through terrible times in 1944, but they had all survived. It is a Jewish place. I am standing somewhat apart from them. A tall, old, good-looking man asks me for a dance. Somewhat reluctantly I accept. I am surprised how pleasant it was, how well we danced together.’

 

Darkness and light in therapy

Marika Henriques

Part of working analytically is about confronting the shadow – what’s been repressed and shut away. The longing to ‘just’ feel better and to get on with life sometimes means that there’s what’s called ‘a flight to health’, but invariably what has been kept in the dark seeks a hearing, and can often re-emerge with renewed energy long after one feels it has been in some way dealt with.

Marika Henriques a Jungian psychotherapist, describes this in her extraordinary account ‘The Hidden Girl’, of coming to terms with what happened to her during the second world war. Born in 1935 in Budapest she was separated from her family at the age of nine. As a Jewish child she was ‘openly’ hidden as an Aryan under an assumed name; a family were paid to look after her and she remains unclear whether she was used or abused by these people as the events of her year of hiding slipped from conscious memory. At the age of twenty she escaped from Hungary, as once again she was persecuted during the 1956 uprising – this time attacked for her middle-class background. Eventually she arrived as a refugee in England, and in time discovered her vocation as a therapist.

Blocking out almost all of the events of her time in hiding, it was only after two years in therapy that she began to feel what she describes as:

‘a dim awareness of something familiar … Something unthinkable, beyond reach, yet known … Something which occurred a long time ago is here hurting me now … Out of this ominous fog only a profound sense of pain and incomprehension appears.’

And:

‘Once when in a therapy session I attempted to lie on the couch, as is customary in analysis, I fell into a deep terror, crouching trying to hide. I stared at the white wall as if onto a screen. But the wall remained blank. No one keeps a secret as well as a child. Her survival depended on silence and I could not persuade the frightened nine-year-old in me to trust and speak out.’

After a break in analysis following a serious medical operation, Marika Henriques brought various drawings that she had made to show her therapist. His comment: ‘there will be dark times ahead of us,’ as indeed there were. What began to happen was as Marika Henriques wrote in a poem: ‘Light is giving birth to darkness’, and she became preoccupied by the question of evil. As ‘the Holocaust cast its monstrous shadow over the analytic space’, she began to re-live the repressed and terrifying wartime experience.

‘Unconscious forces pushed and pulled us about, relentlessly tossing us into a vicious archetypal pas-de-deux in which it was impossible to know who was who and what was what … It was our identification with huge compelling archetypal energies which clouded our reason and dimmed our eyes to the truth. I realized that the passive and suffering victim and the active and aggressive victimiser were two aspects of the archetype of abuse and I understood … that both of us were both victim and victimiser and that we injured each other. … I could now bear witness not only to Evil but also to Goodness, to the islands of light, the scintillae in the sea of darkness’.

 

 

The light that comes from an ecological conscience

 

How can we recognise our self-contradictions? Some are deeply personal, but others are imposed, ready-made by what Thomas Merton calls ‘an ambivalent culture’. In an essay called ‘The Wild Places’ written in 1968, Merton urges us not to accept a false unanimity of how things are just so as to give ourselves inauthentic psychic security and satisfy our fears. Becoming aware of the contradictions and lies about what we are told, and so being able to criticise and protest when we can, frees us up from some of those imposed contradictions. Merton looks at the American state of mind as still operating a frontier mythology, long after Americans have ceased to be a frontier or rural people, and where success as a pioneer depends on an ability to fight the wilderness and win.

The mind set of England as a ‘green and pleasant land’ is somewhat similar – the reality is rather that rail and road projects slice through the countryside destroying mature trees and the green and pleasant land. Both are about controlling and transforming any ‘wildness’ into a farm, a village, town, city – until we are, as we largely are, an urban nation.

The contradiction is that we all profess our love and respect for nature, and at the same time confess our firm attachment to values which inexorably demand the destruction of nature. When light is shone on this contradiction those who do so are seen as fanatical and counter cultural. Merton in his essay sees that this ambivalence toward nature is rooted in religion – the Biblical, Judeo-Christian form. The tradition is one of ‘repugnance’ for nature in the wild, where it is seen and hated almost as a person, an extension of ‘the evil one’ opposing the kingdom of God; the native Indians were associated with this too, and so decimated. Fighting the wilderness and nature then became a moral and Christian imperative. Superimposed on this was later the idea of nature as beautiful, so Henry Thoreau living in the woods saw that balance was needed – an element of wildness was necessary as part of ‘civilised life’.

There exists then this contradiction internally as well as externally of the mystery of nature and the wildness mystique alongside what Merton calls ‘the contrary mystique of exploitation and power’.

The light comes from an ecological conscience which is an awareness of our ‘true place as a dependent member of the biotic community’. Merton sees the ecological shambles created by business and profits as a

‘… tragedy of ambivalence, aggression, and fear cloaked in virtuous ideas and justified by pseudo-Christian cliches. Or rather a tragedy of pseudo-creativity deeply impregnated with hatred, megalomania, and the need for domination. … Money is more important, more alive than life…

An ecological conscience is also inevitably a peace-making conscience … Meanwhile some of us are wearing a little yellow and red button with a flower on it and the words “Celebrate Life!” We bear witness as best we can …’

Over 50 years later there are many millions of people who now have an ecological conscience, and so the light shines on in the darkness. As the campaigner and teacher Satish Kumar recently reminded us:

‘Realists say they are practical, but they are bringing havoc. We inherited such a beautiful world. … But what are today’s realists leaving for future generations?  … The time for realists is over. … It’s time to give idealism a chance.’

 

Light in the darkness 4

Etty Hillesum 1914-1943

One of the most extraordinary personal accounts of keeping the light shining in the darkness comes from the diary and letters of Etty Hillesum. She began her diary in 1941 when she was 27 years old. She wrote about her life as a Jewish woman in The Netherlands, including her inner personal work with Julius Speier, a palm-reading psychologist for whom she later worked and entered into a relationship with. In 1942 and again in 1943, she was taken to Westerbork concentration camp – a transit camp in the northeastern Netherlands – the last stop before Auschwitz for more than one hundred thousand Dutch Jews.

Many will be familiar with her book ‘An Interrupted Life: the diaries and letters of Etty Hillesum’ which also documents her developing spiritual consciousness and belief in God. It is a testimony to love and faith written in the very darkest of recent times: ‘Everything is so mysterious and strange, and so full of meaning, too.’

Still in Amsterdam, Etty Hillesum wrote in a letter to a friend:

‘One day when there is no more barbed wire left in the world, you must come and see my room. It is so beautiful and peaceful. I spend half my night at my desk reading and writing to the light of my small lamp. I have about 1,500 pages of a diary from last year … What a rich life leaps out at me from every page. To think that it was my life – and still is.’

Although, decades later, there is still barbed wire, and high walls keeping people apart from one another all over the world, Westerbork camp with its sickness, overcrowding, noise, fear and despair has been grassed over. Its history is chronicled in the museum and remembrance centre now located there, and Etty Hillesum’s words and inspiration showing such courage and humanity live on. She was determined to share the fate of her fellow Jews without despair, and also without bravado knowing well that she would not survive – ‘willing to act as a balm for all wounds’. And, in the hell of Westerbork Etty Hillesum was able to write: ‘Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.’

‘The earth is in me, and the sky. And I well know that something like hell can also be in one, though I no longer experience it in myself, but I can still feel it in others with great intensity … And when the turmoil becomes too great and I am completely at my wits end, then I still have my folded hands and bended knee … my story … the girl who learnt to pray.’

One of the ways that Etty Hillesum carries a light in the darkness is her capacity to hold both the horror and the beauty in a deeply uncomfortable tension of opposites, as in this extract from one of her letters, where she comments on a transportation leaving for Auschwitz:

‘Just now I climbed on a box lying among the bushes here to count the freight cars. There were thirty-five …The freight cars had been completely sealed, but a plank had been left out here and there, and people put their hands through the gaps and waved as if they were drowning.

The sky is full of birds, the purple lupins stand up so regally and peacefully … the sun is shining on my face – and right before our eyes, mass murder. The whole thing is simply beyond comprehension.’

 

Light in the darkness 3


The feminine face of God

Linking back to the issues in the first post in January, on the left brain/ right brain there are differing views on whether men predominate in one, and women in another – one view is that women are more able to move between the two. Clearly both men and women have both in their psyche.

Carl Jung wrote extensively about the masculine and feminine parts in each person using a different terminology. He saw the animus in women as their repressed masculine part, and the anima in men as their repressed feminine characteristics. In the discussion highlighted in the last two posts between the three men, aspects of the overwhelming dominance of the patriarchy, and the more masculine ways of organising were alluded to, but not explicitly acknowledged and further explored.

In 2009, the Dalai Lama famously said that the world will be saved by Western women. He called for an ‘increased emphasis on the promotion of women to positions of influence’.  In response to a question about priorities in the quest for world peace, here’s what the Dalai Lama said: ‘Some people may call me a feminist…But we need more effort to promote basic human values — human compassion, human affection. And in that respect, females have more sensitivity for others’ pain and suffering.’ It is not entirely clear what he meant about western women, but one commentator has suggested that travelling the world and seeing so many women impoverished and repressed, the Dalai Lama thought that western women of all ages were in a position to speak out for justice, and to take loving care of the planet and its people.

However, in the UK we know about women in power – especially recently in the Conservative Party, and sadly this has not led to increasing compassion, but the reverse. Rather it surely has to be a re-evaluation of the qualities of compassion, empathy and interconnection as linked to the sacredness of life that need to be acknowledged within enough people to tip the balance away from the scientific materialism and left brain dominance.

Anne Baring, Jungian analyst and writer, calls this way of thinking the sacred feminine, or the Holy Spirit of Wisdom, a feminine ethos with the focus on the need to cherish, to nurture life without any attempt to impose an ideology or creed:

‘…the influence of the feminine principle is responsible for our growing concern for the integrity of the life systems of the planet and the attraction to the mythic, the spiritual, the visionary, the non-rational — all of which nourish the heart and the imagination, inviting new perspectives on life, new ways of living in relationship to body, soul and spirit, generating a new understanding of the psyche.’

The recovery of the feminine principle within each of us is the key to the transformation of our world culture from decay, disintegration, and progressive regression into uniformity, banality and brutality, a transformation into something longed for and extraordinary.