Red flowering currant bush

Some psychoanalytical writing suggests that appreciation of aesthetic experiences exists from the very beginning of life, and it is this that enables us to create an inner life that finds expression in artistic creation, and is open to spirituality. The thinking is that the new-born baby actually perceives – or conceives, or experiences – beauty. It is as if there are psychological, or, I would suggest, spiritual processes that lie, as it were, in readiness, awaiting the relevant encounter, before they become an experience. This is about a sense of wonder and being overjoyed or delighted by something we touch, or see, and experience.

Kathleen Raine writes about remembering flowers above her pram:

‘The pink aromatic clusters of the flowering currant bush hung over my pram. I looked up at those flowers with their minute forms. Their secret centres, with the delight of rapt knowledge. They were themselves that knowledge … To see was to know, to enter into total relationship with, to participate in the essential being of each I am.’

She says this was not so much about memory, or a discovery but rather a recognition of something that was ever present coming into itself. It reads as if she were waiting to find this experience of beauty – a coming home to something deep within her soul.

Carl Jung saw creativity as one of the five main groups of instinctive forces – the other four being hunger, sexuality, activity and reflection. Creativity involves bringing something into being – usually involving qualities such as productivity, inventiveness and originality. If we engage in something creative it is about expressing our need and search for meaning. The Jungian analyst Rosemary Gordon wrote about creative acts as forming part of the process of personal growth, development, and the establishment of one’s personal identity, and this is a life-long activity. Creativity in this general sense links with the idea that birth is not just the one physical act of arriving in the world, but rather seeing it as a process of repeatedly coming into being.

Erich Fromm saw the aim of life was to be fully born, although most of us die before we are ‘thus born’. Jung too uses the idea of birth as a metaphor, an incarnation – and being ‘born’ into something always involves a separation from what was before. Creativity involves separation and destruction – actual physical birth involves leaving the womb; the creative act of separating from the parents in adolescence involves the destruction of the intimacy of what went before; and drawing and painting destroys the clean paper. Every poem written on paper destroys a tree.

In all creativity there is the opposite, and our need to create involves the same tension of opposites. The creative process involves being active as well as passive, to give as well as to receive. Being creative is part of the essence of human life – to share God’s life is to find ourselves creating with him. An art historian attributes Picasso’s greatness partly to ‘his inexhaustible power of transformation, receiving all and giving all in endless and engrossing interchange.’

Elizabeth Bishop as a child and an adult

Soul murder is a term probably first coined in the nineteenth century, and used by the playwrights Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. Ibsen defined it as the destruction of the love of life in another person. His character speaks:

‘You have committed the one mortal sin! … You have killed the love of life in me. Do you understand what that means? The Bible speaks of a mysterious sin for which there is no forgiveness. I have never understood what it could be; but now I understand. The great unpardonable sin is to murder the love of life in a human soul … You have killed all the joy of life in me.’

The analyst Leonard Shengold who wrote two books on soul murder, uses the term to describe the wilful abuse and neglect of children by adults that are of sufficient intensity and frequency to be traumatic; and so, the child’s emotional development is profoundly and negatively affected. In one of his books, he looks particularly at writers and poets who suffered serious trauma in their childhood, but, who, despite suffering the after effects in adulthood, were able to find a creative spirit and sufficient curiosity to transform some of their experiences into beautiful poetry and prose, and so nurture their souls.

One of these is the American poet, Elizabeth Bishop who was born in 1911. Her father died when she was eight months old, and almost immediately her mother had a mental breakdown and was in and out of mental institutions for the next five years. With her daughter the mother’s behaviour was unpredictable, and at times rejecting. She was permanently committed when Bishop was 5 years old, and child was sent to live with paternal grandparents whom she didn’t like, finally living between relatives, before, as an adolescent, going off to boarding school and college.

As an adult Bishop struggled with asthma, various neurotic behaviours, complex relationships, and alcoholism, but her gifts were such that she was able to liberate herself in poetic creativity. Shengold calls it the miracle of creativity and writes that:

‘The death of her father and the madness of her mother in infancy were losses that destroyed much of Elizabeth Bishop’s sense of individuation and security. And, partly in identification and partly in relation to people she attempted to love, sexually and nonsexually, she remained fundamentally tied to her mother until her own death. And yet – what an achievement – in art and in life – to have fought with so much success against that strangling, sticky, emotional matrix of longing and hatred, to have been capable of such warm friendships and devotion, and to have created such prose and poetry.

The sense of identity Bishop finally forged, no matter how marred by self-deprecation and masochism, was magnificent.’

Her last poem ‘Sonnet’ (ostensibly about a broken thermometer) written before she died in 1979, captures some of the struggles after soul murder, and some of the glory of her creative life, and lesbian loves:

Caught – the bubble

in the spirit level,

a creature divided;

and the compass needle

wobbling and wavering,

undecided.

Freed – the broken

thermometer’s mercury

running away;

and the rainbow-bird

from the narrow bevel

of the empty mirror,

flying wherever

it feels like, gay!

Death can be a kind of liberation after being broken.

Caravaggio – The incredulity of Thomas 

In an earlier post I looked at Jennifer, who felt she had lost her soul because of her traumatic childhood. Therapy with Donald Kalsched, and the developing trust in that relationship began to restore her soul, and her sense of her real self.

An extract from ‘St Francis and the Sow’ by Galway Kinnell fits here:

The bud

stands for all things,

even those that don’t flower,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness,

to put a hand on its brow

of the flower

and retell it in words and in touch

it is lovely

until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBJ3Llp_Lj8

But and this is the painful part, for all who have been traumatised, the experience may be modified, but the trauma does not go. It can be integrated and so managed, but what happened remains in some form, some trace, some body memory, some dreams and at times of stress some nightmares. This too though has to be part of our soul-making.

The theologian Shelly Rambo writes about ‘resurrected wounds’, and the scenes where Jesus appears to the disciples in the Upper Room. From John 20: ‘Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you”. After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side.’

In showing his wounds, Jesus, ‘is instructing the disciples in the way of wounds’. He ‘takes them on a journey that requires a different way of seeing’. The description with Thomas is equally extraordinary: Jesus ‘said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.’

These resurrection narratives offer testimonies to life beyond trauma, and the ever-remaining wounds. Christianity and the church often want to erase the wounds with a quick leap into Easter Sunday and all the associated triumphalism. Yet the risen Christ owns the wounds of the traumatic crucifixion – they are still present and visible on his body, and are part of the soul of the resurrected Christ. Shelly Rambo writes how the very wounds offer a conception of life and the soul that though marked by the wounds is also recreated through them.

And, in the Upper Room, Jesus breathes on the disciples offering new spirit-filled air, and so the  souls of the disciples crushed by the terrible events that have happened to them, are reanimated. This soul-making means that even the ghastly, cruel events are made sacred, and there is the potential and indeed promise of life beyond trauma.

Sophia – holy wisdom

In our sceptical age, ideas about the soul and indeed the psyche are often reduced to neurological functions, and seen as less important than the brain. Carl Jung and indeed all subsequent analytical psychologists would be totally opposed to what we might call this ‘soul-deadening view.’

Jung wrote that the psyche is the indispensable – the absolute essence of all existence. It is the only category of existence about which we have immediate knowledge. For Jung the essence of life was to ‘be in the soul’. And, ‘Being that has soul is living being’. Soul is the living thing within each person: ‘that which lives in itself and causes life. … With her cunning play of illusion, the soul lures into life the inertness of matter that does not want to live.’

In other words, things come alive and are touched with soul when they ‘come under the realm of the imagination’. Using the term ‘anima’ Jung saw that everything touched by the soul became numinous, existing as a perfect companion to consciousness. He believed the soul/anima was a feminine principle – the embodiment of yin in classical Chinese philosophy; but believed that it was less unconscious or repressed in women where the soul aspect that remained unconscious is carried by the animus – the embodiment of yang.

Anthony Stevens writes that:

‘Its [the soul’s] utterances in words and symbolic images proceed ceaselessly below the threshold of everyday awareness. Normally we are unconscious of these priceless communications, just as we cannot perceive the stars in daytime because we are dazzled by the sun. But if we can cease to be dazzled by ego-consciousness, the soul becomes as apparent as the stars at night.’

Confrontation with the inner soul is a necessary part of Jung’s individuation process bringing a broadening of psychic horizons and great personal freedom. Emma Jung writing of her experience of assimilating her animus wrote: ‘Above all it makes possible the development of a spiritual attitude which sets us free from the limitation and imprisonment of a narrowly personal standpoint.’

Reading about the soul, and Jung’s ideas on the integration of the contra-sexual elements within each person to reach a hidden wholeness, reminds me of the revelation that Thomas Merton shows in his great prose poem on divine Wisdom called Hagia Sophia:

‘There is in all things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all … This is at once my own being, my own nature, and the Gift of my Creator’s Thought and Art within me, speaking as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister, Wisdom.

I am awakened, I am born again at the voice of this my sister, sent to me from the depths of divine fecundity.’

The soul – our inner wisdom – the feminine manifestation of God.

The ‘return of the soul’ woodcut 

The Rosary of the Philosophers – ‘the Rosarium’ is a sixteenth century alchemical treatise that Carl Jung referred to in his writings about the transformation of potentials. In the treatise this is represented by two imaginary figures, a king and a queen seen as psychological opposites. A series of woodcuts illustrates this transformation which can happen externally: interpersonally, and, also, inside us: intrapsychically within the person.

One woodcut is called ‘the return of the soul’ and it shows the soul as a baby or a child, diving down from heaven to breathe life into the dead body of the united king and queen. In the woodcut, the child/soul breathes new life bringing insight and the integration of the body and the soul. The soul then emerges as part of the integrated personality born of the two in relationship – for Jung this was also born in the relationship between patient and analyst. In this context the soul is identified with the life force and divinity.

Donald Kalsched, the Jungian analyst, describes his work with Jennifer who had experienced serious trauma as a little girl, and who came into therapy saying that she ‘had lost her soul’. There were fleeting moments when she felt that her soul had returned to her – such as painting alone in her studio, or sometimes when alone in nature, but most of the time she felt devoid of value and self-worth. Convinced of her own lack and ‘badness’, she suffered terribly, but mostly based on self-attacks and self-criticism.

‘It was as though, in the space inside which her soul had vacated a dark mocking spirit had moved in, a mental spirit that negated everything and filled her with despair and hopelessness. … She was surviving, but she was not living.’

As the therapy progressed, the woman was able to draw on a memory that helped her towards self-compassion – a transcendent experience which she called a ‘visitation’ from a ‘presence of light’: a presence that she interpreted as an angel, and a power that had supported her to live. At the time of the angel visiting Jennifer was 7, and near death, having been terribly injured through abuse by a relative. Inspired by another little girl patient in the next bed who was colouring a picture, Jennifer thought there might be reason to live. However, her recovery was slow, and at times doubtful with recurring debilitating episodes of peritonitis. She had been given a box of watercolours, but despite looking longingly at the colours she thought: ‘what use is this to me now.’

‘The angel when it came to her, was in the midst of soft white-yellow light beside her to the right. Neither male not female, it was at once terrible and cool and somehow unsurprisingly familiar. Calmly and caringly, the ethereal messenger declared without preamble. ‘You don’t have to continue; it’s all right to let go now.’ The presence paused then continued, ‘if you decide to stay it won’t be easy.’

Jennifer remembered how it was tempting to let go and not call out for help with her pain, but then her eyes fell on her box of watercolours and in particular a colour called Rose Madder – she thought I need to use this colour – how can I leave earth without using it. I need to paint, so she told the angel she had to stay. ‘With her angel’s visit, came a quiet sense of belonging, a knowing that she was a part of something greater than herself.’ Her pain had been witnessed. She called for help and gradually got physically better. As an adult she became a painter. Working on the memory of the angel with Kalsched gradually began to help her reanimate her soul, and begin to integrate it into her body.

the lost soul 

There are differing definitions of what the soul is, and there are various accounts about the danger of ‘losing’ our souls.

Howard E. Collier was a Quaker – a member of the Society of Friends – and in 1953 he wrote a pamphlet about his personal religious experiences called ‘Experiment with a life’. This extract from it describes his realization that he had a soul.

‘On a certain summer afternoon towards the end of the first quarter of this century, I came home after a long and tiring day and, sitting down in the shade of the garden, I fell into a brown study. Quite unexpectedly I began to talk to myself, and to my surprise, I heard myself saying to myself, ‘If you don’t take care, you will end up by losing your soul!’ The humour of this remark struck me, since, as far as I was aware, I did not believe at that time that I had a soul to lose. Looking back now I realise that particular afternoon marked a turning point in my life. Anyone who begins to refer to their soul as something that can be lost and found has discovered a new field of experience and a new inner reservoir of facts to be studied and related to the outward facts of their ordinary life. This redirection of my search – from an outward search for truth in nature, to an inward search for truth in myself – was the next step necessary for the healing of my own divided mind.’

Collier felt that he then began to learn whom he really was – ‘less estimable than I had previously supposed, I was uncomfortable and ill at ease’. The initial feelings of emancipation and inspiration were followed by despair and deflation, but he gradually began to experience a measure of divine healing. He describes how Jesus – once ‘shorn of the sentimental trappings of Victorian piety that had hid Him from my view’ – came alive, ‘I had not hitherto realised that He was actually within the compass of myself.’ So, for Collier the soul was clearly linked to a sense of Christ.

The Jungian analyst June Singer sees losing the soul, as losing the connection between what we know of ourselves and the vast unknown and unknowable. She doesn’t personalise it as Christ, or, for example, Buddha nature, instead she calls the soul ‘the connecting ribbon’, and ‘a traveller’s highway’ between the conscious and the unconscious.

So why might we lose our souls? Perhaps like Howard Collier – too busy and involved in the realities of everyday living and working, and so having no time for space to reflect and consider – like his ‘brown study’ lost in thoughts. However, from the analytic perspective if we have experienced trauma in childhood then that connecting ribbon that Singer describes can fail to get established, and we become alienated from the original oneness, and the ‘splinter of divine radiance’ that we might call the soul. The development of the soul in infancy and early childhood depends on a reasonably empathic environment, where there is a sense of the soul safely indwelling in the body. Winnicott describes this as the pattern whereby the mother or mothering person ‘introduces and reintroduces the baby’s mind and body to each other’. The gradual development means the small baby becomes a whole person with psycho-somatic unity, but who embodies in their very centre a vital spark. Trauma, especially emotional trauma, interrupts the normal processes by which the true embodied self comes into being. That of God within, becomes cut off and exiled or deeply hidden to protect the soul from further damage.

Defining the soul is something that both theologians and psychoanalysts have separately grappled with, to the extent of sometimes displaying reluctance in using the word. Undoubtedly there is a deeply personal essence within each one of us, and in animals too. It’s the vital spark – the imperishable personal spirit – the soul.

Donald Winnicott the paediatrician, and child and adult psychoanalyst, (often referred to in my posts), referred to a ‘sacred incommunicado centre’ of the personality. He also called this the true self, which he says, cannot be defined, except to say that it ‘collects together the details of the experience of aliveness.’  Harry Guntrip used a metaphor – the ‘lost heart of the self’ and another analyst Neville Symington called the soul ‘the lifegiver’.

Amongst the Jungians, Carl Jung framed the soul as the sacred dimension essential to human life: ‘In the darkness of the unconscious a treasure lies hidden, the same treasure “hard to attain” … the shining pearl’. Donald Kalsched is a contemporary Jungian who writes that this part of ourselves – the soul – sometimes encapsulated in the image of a divine child, does not belong entirely to this world. And neither do we.  He sees the human soul as always, a creature of both worlds – divine and human, time-bound and eternal, mortal and immortal. ‘Straddling these two worlds, the soul is the seat of our dual destiny and home to what Shakespeare called our “immortal longings”. It is also home to what Jung called “our religious instinct”’.

The poet John Keats saw the world as ‘The Vale of Soul-Making’ – where each soul is personally itself. In his view the soul begins as innocence, but then through suffering and the person’s confrontation with pain and troubles of life, their intelligence becomes ‘schooled’ and then a soul. We begin as human/divine oneness, but then, as we develop, we fall into a state of twoness. Each of us leaves the garden of our innocence, and so becoming conscious and knowing good and evil we live in exile – alienated, but conscious. Kalsched writes:

‘Such alienation from our essential nature seems to be the necessary and inevitable price paid for becoming conscious, and yet there remains within us a part of the original oneness that longs to return to that great spiritual reality from which we came and about which we have forgotten.’

This sweet story from Marcus Borg captures this forgetting, when he recounts how a 3- year- old girl – the firstborn – asked to be alone with her new baby brother with the door shut as she wanted to talk with him. The parents, concerned in case she might have ‘mixed’ feelings about the new arrival, anxiously listened on the intercom in case anything untoward happened:

‘The moment finally arrived and the little girl was shown into the baby’s room and the door closed, with both parents rushing nearby to the intercom to hear what this “conversation” might be. They heard their little girl’s feet walking across the room; then there was a pause. And then they heard her say to her three-day old brother; “tell me about God; I’ve almost forgotten.’

The writer and poet Kathleen Raine records a series of big dreams she had about life after death. She doesn’t analyse them, but they deepen her spiritual searching, and her sense of other realities and dimensions beyond the merely rational surface level of life.

The first vivid dream was of her friend whose rented house Raine had moved into following the friend’s death, and at the friend’s request:

‘Very often I would hear the door-bell ring, usually at night, when there was no one there. I thought nothing of it, not even that it was odd; I used to suppose I had simply been mistaken. It was, all the same, very persistent.’

Raine believes that her friend ‘visited’ her old house on these occasions, although she never saw her; but a few years after her death Raine had a vivid dream of her:

‘In my dream she was in a charming garden-house or arbour; and, as in life, full of humour, and at the same time happy with a kind of serene gaiety; she reproached me saying “you have not remembered me for a long time, have you?” – which was true. The flavour, the atmosphere of the dream was indescribable yet unmistakeably that of her; but this quality, which convinced me that this was no ordinary dream, I cannot communicate.’

A second dream with the same unearthly quality was of a friend who had died firm in his belief that there was no life after death – when alive he would regulalrly say: ‘when we’re dead we are dead’, very bitterly and passionately. In the dream the friend appeared, dreadfully unhappy and convinced of being dead: ‘I am dead,’ he said in the dream, and with this belief Raine writes that he was confined within this terrible fantasy.

The third lovely dream of the after-life Raine had was on Christmas Eve, almost a year after the death of fellow poet and friend Edwin Muir:

‘I was a child in a village, wet and wintry … I had in my dream, to guide Edwin across intricate footpaths and low wire fences, and other small foot-entangling obstacles; but then he began to lead, and I followed him to a stone building, a broch, or fort, or perhaps only an old stone barn; yet ancient, with a quality of anonymous ancestral dignity. Edwin now climbed with ease the stone wall, to enter the upper floor; and with an effort, I followed him. In front of me he went on into a great empty loft, without windows or doors, and in darkness. From the far end of this great hall or loft there blew towards us a warm gentle wind of indescribable fragrance, and I exclaimed, “it’s the breath of the spirit,” Edwin went on before me in the direction from which that sweet wind was blowing, until he came to the far wall which was not, like the others, of stone, but a thin partition. This he merely touched, and it fell away, and then he was no longer there; but beyond lay the fields of spring radiant in the rising sun. I looked into that far-distant sunrise with the knowledge “there I must also go”; but my time had not come.’

Carl Jung The Red Book – Mandala of The holistic Self

Carl Jung – whose whole work on dreams is remarkable, recorded a number of his own ‘big dreams’. The dream Jung had of Liverpool, came at the end of his personal experimentation with descending into the depths of the unconscious. This experience brought Jung to the edge of madness, and was precipitated by his disagreements and traumatic break from Sigmund Freud, when Jung had to let go of all his achievements including the presidency of the International Psychoanalytic Association, a journal editorship, and, work at the University of Zurich. With his public reputation tarnished he felt isolated, and there were marital difficulties. ‘I was living in a constant state of tension; often I felt as if gigantic blocks of stone were tumbling down upon me. One thunderstorm followed another’.

Jung’s experiment began with a regression into childhood, and profound introversion, where Jung ‘dropped’ into fantasies encountering symbolic figures, writing, drawing, analysing and trying to understand what emerged from his unconscious. He called this active imagination. Through drawings and in particular drawing of mandalas he began to understand that the goal of all psychic development is the Self: ‘I knew that in finding the mandala as an expression of the Self I had attained what was for me the ultimate.’

Finally, the whole extraordinary experiment ended with a dream:

‘I found myself in a dirty, sooty city. It was night and winter, and dark, and raining. I was in Liverpool. With a number of Swiss – say, half a dozen – I walked through the dark streets. I had the feeling we were coming up from the harbour, and that the real city was actually up above, on the cliffs. We climbed up there … When we reached the plateau, we found a broad square dimly illuminated by street lights, into which many streets converged. The various quarters of the city were arranged radially around the square. In the centre was a round pool, and in the middle of it a small island. While everything round about was obscured by rain, fog, smoke, and dimly lit darkness, the little island blazed with sunlight. On it stood a single tree, a magnolia, in a shower of reddish blossoms. It was as though the tree stood in sunlight and was at the same time the source of light.’

In the dream Jung’s companions, comment on the abominable weather surprised that another Swiss had settled in Liverpool, but Jung carried away by the beauty of the sunlit island and the flowering tree thought: ‘I know very well why he has settled here.’ The darkness and fog represented the black opaqueness of what Jung had gone through, but he had been given an image of unearthly beauty, and with that he could go on living in the ‘pool of life’:

‘I saw here the goal had been revealed … The dream depicted the climax of the whole process of development of consciousness. It satisfied me completely … Without such a vision I might perhaps have lost my orientation and been compelled to abandon my undertaking. But here the meaning had been made clear. When I parted from Freud, I knew that I was plunging into the unknown. Beyond Freud, after all, I knew nothing; but I had taken a step into darkness. When that happens, and then such a dream comes, one feels it as an act of grace.’

Sophia – wisdom 

Thomas Merton shows how a spiritual seeker might analyse and make use of a big dream.  His dream of Proverb happens at the end of February 1958. It takes place after a day of what Merton describes as ‘frustrations’: he was cross about the rota for taking mass; put out by some visitors who were late; had an annoying meeting with the Reverend Father, including the definite news that Merton would not be sent to a new Foundation in South America, and notes his irritation at the Abbot’s habit of calling new novices names by silly by-play (anyone who is a little fat is called Aquinas – as Thomas Aquinas was reputed to be fat). Later in the day a novice ‘talked at considerable length about nothing’ when Merton wanted to do other things, and he was annoyed by a new postulant talking in platitudes. At the light meal Merton got something he didn’t like, whereas it seemed everyone else had something appetising. In his honest way, Merton writes that he is ashamed to write it all down as life is made up of such things and normally, he doesn’t notice them, or soon forgets any annoyance.

‘But after all these things, I had a dream. It may have had no connection with them whatever.

On the porch at Douglaston [his grandparents’ home when Merton was a child] I am embraced with determined and virginal passion by a young Jewish girl. She clings to me and will not let go, and I get to like the idea. I see that she is a nice kid in a plain, sincere sort of way. I reflect “She belongs to the same race as St Anne.” I ask her her name and says her name is Proverb. I tell her that it is a beautiful and significant name, but she does not appear to like it – perhaps the others have mocked her for it.’

Merton writes that he rationalizes the dream in a complacent way quoting the Latin for the Wisdom of Solomon – ‘I loved wisdom and sought to make her my wife – Sophia he links to the sofa on the back porch in Douglaston – he adds ‘no need to explain it. It was a charming dream.’ But the dream remains obstinately with Merton – so much so that a week later he addresses a devoted and intimate love letter to Proverb. The letter is also in a sense dream analysis – not in the conventional psychoanalytic sense – that’s referenced in the earlier rather sardonic throwaway comments, but instead we read a deeper sense of what happens if ‘big dream’ content is spiritually worked with and integrated. For Merton the dream opens up a feeling of being loved: ‘How grateful I am to you for loving in me something which I thought I had entirely lost, and someone who, I thought, I had long ago ceased to be…’

This feeling from the dream of being loved by this one mysterious young girl figure (perhaps representing the relational and vulnerable part of himself), then seems to break open Merton’s capacity to love the many. Two weeks later Proverb comes to him ‘in Louisville, at the corner of 4^th and Walnut’ when Merton is overwhelmed by his love for everyone he sees, even though they are total strangers. The dream of Proverb opens Merton to one of his most powerful epiphanies through re-awakening an innocence he thought he had lost, and opening him to a capacity to ‘see’ and embrace God within everyone. Merton calls this ‘le point vierge’ – ‘the point or spark which belongs entirely to God’ which is in every one of us, and which ‘shines like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven’.