PSI Annual Journal 2002

This is the address given at the Unitarian meeting during the 2001 GA at Chester.

One of the twentieth century women mystics that Anne Bancroft writes about in her book Weavers of Wisdom is Marion Milner, who set out to discover what made her truly happy and how and when that happiness, as distinct from pleasure, occurred.

That is a question I should like you all to consider for a moment, too.

Marion Milner wrote about her answer under the pseudonym of Joanna Field in A Life of One' s Own. Happiness came, she found, when she was most widely aware, and she talks of her capacity to feel herself down into her heart and for being attentive.

For me that attentiveness is often stimulated by something visual. Andy Goldsworthy' s work with leaves, twigs, stones and leaves, for example, and my matching his art with my own collecting, perusing and arranging. I have a shelf on which I weekly arrange Autumn' s acorns, conkers, twigs, beech nuts and their shells, and newly collected leaves. At that time of the year it helps me to see the seeds of the spring in the end of the season instead of being apprehensive about its demise, the darkness of winter and my wanting to hibernate like the intelligent animals. In spring I can display tete-a-tete narcissus and primroses before transplanting them into the garden from their protected early spring shelf.

In this lecture today I want to explore how, in our spiritual lives, we have a very special capacity both to cross over but also to live on certain important boundaries, on the edges where the growing is, and at the intersections, where the usual antitheses and contrasts in our lives meet and fade. It is at the boundaries, as insecure as they are, that we have the opportunity of passing over, of touching what is otherwise outside. Someone hearing the title of the lecture said to me that she thought that the spirit did not have boundaries, and with that I would agree. The NT, using the image of spirit as breath or wind, says it "bloweth where it listeth," carrying us all, in Hildegard of Bingen' s image, like feathers on the breath of God. Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh Community, is quoted as having said that in the eyes of God, perhaps we could add "on the breath of God" there are no Muslims and no Hindus, the human labels and boundaries are an irrelevance. He once visited Mecca, the great geographical focus of Muslim prayer, and accidentally fell asleep with the soles of his feet pointing towards the Ka' aba. Since this was considered highly disrespectful, he was woken up by an angry crowd. To them he said "Show me a place where God is not, and there I will point my feet." We impose on Reality our own sense of limits and boundaries and it is in our challenging of these, our living on these, our crossing or removing them, that is where and when the spirit is most active. It is at limits and on boundaries that spiritual growth occurs, and where we see through and beyond what for many are or have become insuperable borders, walls of separation, not places of transition and meeting.

The boundaries I shall be considering are:

those between living and dying, which place us between what we often symbolize as earth and heaven more than any other experiencing in our lives
the boundaries between living things, sentient beings, person and person, human and animal, human and plant
the boundaries between institutional religions which are so fiercely maintained by so many religious people
and the boundary between the practical and the mystical aspects of our lives.

These areas are not rigidly separated out in what I have to day, they are not dealt with discretely, section by section, but reflection on them flows backwards and forwards from one to the other.

It is not unusual for those who work with the dying or those who know they have little time left, to talk about the quality of that time, even of being happy during it. At such times we are very aware of the fragility and preciousness of life and how thin is the boundary between what we call living and dying. Often people feel more alive with the dying than in the demanding and intensive activities of the rest of their lives, a reflection made by the French pioneer Marie de Hennezel in the subtitle of her book Intimate Death: "How the dying teach us to live." She reflects on this feeling of being most "alive" in her hospice work (p. 104) in the following way:

"Our sharing of experience is ongoing, although on a different plane. It is hard to find words for this intimate, secret joy; seen strictly from outside, the vigil would seem sad, depressing, uncommunicative, endlessly slow, endlessly long. Everything is so subtle, so fine-drawn.

And I feel so vividly present" (p. 4).

There are patients who, without being aware of it, also take care of the people who take care of them (p. 33).

Do people who care for the dying, she asks, experience eternal time within everyday time—become more attentive and aware of themselves, of other people, of the world, savour every moment of being alive, know when to stand still and listen to the soft rustling of existence? (p. 100).

(Intimate Death, Warner Books, 1997)

And it seems to me that this particular process of becoming aware of ourselves, becoming more attentive, is bound to reflect the paradox and tension expressed in the Hasidic saying from Martin Buber Tales of the Hasidim.

Everyone has two pockets.
In one is a piece of paper on which it is written,
"For me the universe was made"
In the other is a piece of paper on which is written, "I am but dust and ashes."

One of my responsibilities at the moment is as Director of the Religious Experience Research Centre, founded by Sir Alister Hardy in 1969, when he began to collect a unique archive of accounts of religious experience and spirituality. Alister Hardy was confident that profound spirituality was to be found not just in the lives of named saints and mystics down the ages, in the "classical traditions" with their virtuoso figures as quoted by William James in his seminal 1901-1902 Gifford lectures The Varieties of Religious Experience, but in the lives of "ordinary" men and women, whether they had institutional religious allegiance or not. Indeed, as with Buber, many sense that "there is nothing which masks the face of God more than religion." But the experience of death, one' s own and others, removes that mask and all the other masks of our wealth, worldly labels and pride. In our attentiveness to death we truly see and know. In the words of the Thai Buddhist teacher, the Venerable Ajahn Chah

"When we do not understand death, live is very confusing."

This challenge has been vividly illustrated in paintings from earlier times on the "vanitas" or "momento mori" themes. Death touches the shoulder of the young, the wealthy, the king and the slave, the bad and good alike and, in doing so, provides a challenge to our living.

This particular journey is the only one we know we all will share.

Bereavement and approaching death are clearly documented in the RERC archives of accounts of religious experience as triggers or antecedents of spiritual experience. It is as if at such times the "veil between heaven and earth" (to use the language of the Abrahamic traditions) is thinned and we are open to Transcendence, to questions about and answers to the question of meaning in our lives. We are aware as at few other times.

Further examples in the archives tap another rich source for reflection on what is exquisitely, powerfully beautiful and yet also fragile, what we call "Nature" or the natural world, and particularly flowers. Their fragility is an important aspect of their beauty and justice towards what we can, indeed, have so mindlessly destroyed, the animals and plants on whom we are so dependent and with which we share our world, as well as towards our human brothers and sisters, is a boundary many still have to cross. The sense of inclusiveness which crossing that boundary can bring, and with it a sense of harmony and attention to meaning, are part of many people' s lives and something they share with many of the classical mystical writers. In "Celtic spirituality," with all the controversy about what that is, there are important expressions of this. Concern about the whole of planetary life, the holiness of everything that is, everything that lives, brings with it questions about justice as well as an attention to beauty and is here expressed in a poem by Anjela Duval (1909-1981), a poem entitled "Why."

Why?
They are heedless
Those who walk on city pavements.
Heedless of killing and injuring
Small creatures moving or not…
Ah! How heedful I am at each step
Heedful of crushing, of smashing
Along the path or through the field
Tiny humble creatures beneath my foot
The green beetle crouched in the moss,
The minute any carrying
With great effort and ingenuity
The short straw to her anthill.
Pretty little flowers half-hidden in the grass,
Trying ot open their hearts to the Sun.
It seems to me that I hear their lament:
- Why then, Lord, did you not give
Wings to man?
Ah! How heavy is the weight of his foot on us!

(Celtic Christian Spirituality ed. Oliver Davis and Fiona Bowie: SPCK 1995: 230)

Anjela Duval was a Breton peasant farmer who had only four years of primary schooling and after that worked full-time on the smallholding, which she inherited from her mother in the Leger River valley. She was self-educated and by the time she died, saturated in Breton culture. I read this poem recently to someone without giving the details of the poet. She said it sounded Buddhist, and was surprised to find that it arose from within a twentieth century practicing, Roman Catholic Christian life. She might equally have thought its roots in the Jain tradition, whose emphasis on ahimsa so influenced Gandhi and possibly Schweitzer. This intelligently inaccurate identification of the source of the poem takes me to our next boundary, or set of boundaries, the boundaries between the world' s religions.

For many years now my task has been to explore with mainly undergraduates the "other" person or people of "other" faiths, the "other" religions. This exploration has been expressed more sensitively by John Parry as that of understanding not "people of other faiths," but "other people of faith." The way I teach encourages the understanding of religious traditions from the point of view of those whose traditions they are. This involves a "crossing over and coming back enriched" in the words of John Dunne, the contemporary American Jesuit writer. The religion on which I have done most writing is Buddhism, a tradition that was important in the spiritual journey of the poet T. S. Eliot. It influenced him to write his own Fire Sermon and to emphasise the cycles of time and fortune in so much of his writing. Many find within the teachings of Buddhism many resonances with their Christian concern for peace and non-violence, the problem of suffering and the interrelationship of living things. Having crossed a boundary of exploration we are often very aware how artificial that boundary is.

The Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh writes most movingly about the basis of his life and work, the Buddhist practice of mindfulness, an awareness which is the opposite of the heedlessness referred to by Anjela Duval.

Thich Nhat Hanh now has a community in France and his way of mindfulness and awareness is widely published. He is deeply attentive to the natural world, as is the Celtic poet from whose work I quoted earlier, and this leads him, much as it might Anjela Duval, to talk to a leaf in the park and to ask if a lot of questions about its role in relation to the tree.

"One Autumn Day I was in a part, absorbed in the contemplation of a very small but beautiful leaf, in the shape of a heart. Its colour was almost red, and it was barely hanging on the branch, nearly ready to fall down. I spent a long time with it, and I asked the leaf a lot of questions. I found out the leaf had been a mother to the tree. Usually we think that the tree is the mother and the leaves are just children, but as I looked at the leaf I saw that the leaf is also a mother to the tree. The sap that the roots take up is only water and minerals, not good enough to nourish the tree, so the tree distributes that sap to the leaves. And the leaves take the responsibility of transforming that rough sap into elaborated sap, and, with the help of sun and gas, sending it back in order to nourish the tree."

(Thich Nhat Hanh The Heart of Understanding Parallax Press 1988: 24-25)

He also asks the readers to look mindfully at the piece of paper in front of them.

"If you are a poet (and Thich Nhat Hanh assumes everyone is a poet), you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating on this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either, so we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. "Interbeing" is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix "inter-" with the verb "to be," we have a new verb inter-be. Without a cloud, we cannot have paper, so we can say that and the sheet of paper inter-are. If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger' s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist."

(Thich Nhat Hanh The Heart of Understanding Parallax Press 1988: 3-4)

Trees are strong and long outlive us. There was a remarkable BBC series last winter with the evocative title Meetings with Remarkable Trees, which involved visiting and reflecting on the lives of trees, meeting them in a way we often think applies only to people. This sense of inter-being takes us once more to our crossing the boundaries of empathy with the natural world and leads me to flowers in particular.

And then the evocative beauty of flowers, which is linked to their fragility, takes us straight back to the theme of death and life, beauty and suffering that I touched on earlier. Its intense beauty combined with fragility makes blossom a powerful teacher and it is not surprising that it is blossom, apricot blossom, that Oleg at the end of Solzenhitsyn' s Cancer Ward wants to visit before he dies.

"He breathed in. It was young air, still and undisturbed.

It was the morning of creation. The world had been created new for one reason only, to be given back to Oleg. "Go out and live" it seemed to say.

His face radiated happiness. He smiled at no man, only at the sky and the trees, and it was that early-morning spring-time joy that touches even the old and sick-

Already catkins hung in bunches from the maple trees, already the first flowers had appeared on the wild plum trees-

But there wasn' t a single apricot tree, though he' d heard they would be in flower by now. He might see one in the Old Town. The first morning of creation—who can act rationally on such a day: Oleg discarded all his plans. Instead he conceived the mad scheme of going to the old town immediately, while it was still morning, to look at a flowering apricot tree.

He could not find one for a long time and then from the tea house balcony he saw above the walled courtyard next door something pink and transparent. It looked like a puff-dandelion, only it was six metres in diameter, a rosy, weightless balloon. He' d never seen anything so pink and so huge.

It was his present to himself. His creation day present."

(Alexander Solzenhitsyn' s Cancer Ward Penguin: 518-522 extracted)

There is an account in the archives of RERC which always reminds me of Oleg.

I always felt I wanted to dance for joy at the sight of a white flowering cherry in bloom. I have done so. I had been feeling empty, spiritually hungry for some weeks; as I was making the beds I turned to the window where the morning sun caught the dazzling white of the double cherry just outside the window. I stood transfixed with joy and wonder and a veil seemed to be drawn back, there was a vibration, a golden thread linking me to a number of people in whose presence I often felt shy and tongue tied and yet I wanted to reach out to them. The dazzling white glory had opened a door into another world in which I no longer felt lonely and lost…I knelt and wept with joy and gratitude.

(RERC archive reference 3800)

The account also reminds me of Van Gogh' s paintings of peach and almond blossom.

The rest of the natural world of which we are part provides us with a rich variety of images and of meaning if we are attentive to it. These images show us both potential and remind us of limitation. The fourteenth century Julian of Norwich' s famous passage is focused on something as "common" as a hazelnut; and sees the whole of creation in that hazelnut:

The Lord showed me spiritually how intimately he loves us. I saw that he is everything that is good and comfortable for us. He is our clothing, wrapping and enfolding us in his love, sheltering us with a warm embrace, assuring us that he will never go away.

And he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, on the palm of my hand, round like a ball. I looked at it thoughtfully and wondered, "What is this?" And the answer is "It is all that is made." I marvelled that it continued to exist, and did not suddenly disintegrate, since it was so small. And again the answer came into my mind. It exists both now and always, because God loves it."

And Julian goes on to explore and express that the most appropriate image of this love is that of a mother, and uses the title "our mother Jesus" in her reflection.

The Vietnamese Zen poet Thich Nhat Hanh, from whom I quoted earlier, not only talks to leaves and sees the world in a sheet of paper, but is also a social activist. He worked non-violently for peace in war-torn Vietnam across all the boundaries of North and South, Roman Catholic, Quaker and Buddhist, monk and layperson. He has experienced in his life extremes of suffering and injustice. The first of his books published in the west was called The Lotus in A Sea of Fire (SCM 1969). The lotus flower image he uses in his title is not one common in England, except under glass in places such as the botanical gardens in Oxford or Kew. For some reason magnolias, though they grow on a tree not in water, always remind me of lotuses. The flowers have a similar shape and exotic beauty. In India, where Buddhism began, lotuses grow wild in slimy, stagnant pools and raise their enormous blossoms on long strong stems, out of the mire, towards the sun. It is not surprising to anyone who has seen a lotus pool, that these flowers are used as a symbol for the possibility of enlightenment in Buddhism.

Nhat Hanh' s book analyses and reflects upon the political situation during the war years in Vietnam and is one of the first documents of what has come to be called Socially Engaged or Engaged Buddhism. This movement does not leave behind Buddhists' deep commitment to mindfulness and peace, but explores the living of these in the midst of the practical involvement needed by people in war-torn Vietnam. This man who talks to leaves is not a sentimental dreamer, not a useless impractical mystic! Thich Nhat Hanh was influenced by Martin Luther King (there are letters between them at the end of the book) who had been in his turn influenced by Gandhi who had read John Ruskin' s Unto This Last and Tolstoy' s The Kingdom of God Is Within You whilst developing his theory and practice of non-violent resistance in South Africa. Tolstoy had in his turn been influenced by the legend of St. Balaam and Josephat which was originally based on the story of the Buddha in a previous birth as a Bodhisattva (for details of this see the introduction to W. Cantwell Smith Towards A World Theology).

Another key figure in these interconnections which cross the boundaries of religious traditions is Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk. Merton in Faith and Violence writes a chapter on Nhat Hanh My Brother. In the chapter on The Contemplative Life in the Modern World he says that contemplation is not a deepening of experience only but a radical change in one' s way of being and living.
(p. 217)

For Thich Nhat Hanh this radical change is based on mindfulness and an awareness of inter-being, the word he coins for the relationships and identifications of all that is. For him peace and compassion go hand in hand with understanding and non-discrimination. This is expressed most powerfully in his famous poem

Please Call Me By My True Names

The poem was written when he heard of an incident amongst the many boat people trying to escape Vietnam. The incident was not unique and involved the rape of a twelve year old girl by a sea pirate. The girl jumped overboard and drowned herself as a result of her experience. Nhat Hanh reflects on the scene and his relationship to the people involved.

Don' t say that I will depart tomorrow-
even today I am still arriving.

Look deeply, every second I am arriving
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with still fragile wings,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone,

I am still arriving, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope,
the rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of every living creature.

I am a mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river,
And I am the bird,
that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.

I am a frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond,
and I am the grass-snake
that silently feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve year old girl,
refugee in a small boat,
who threw herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea-pirate.
And I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.

My joy is like spring, so warm
that it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.
My pain is like a river of tears,
so vast that it fills all four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my laughs and cries at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up
and open the door of my heart,
the door of compassion.

(Thich Nhat Hanh Love in Action Parallax Press 1999: 107-109)

The "I am" of the above reminds me intensely of the Sufi poet, Jalal-ul-din Rumi who writes:

I am the dust in the sunlight
I am the ball of the sun
To the dust I say, remain
To the sun, roll on.
I am the mist of morning
I am the breath of evening
I am the rustling of the grove
The singing wave of the sea.
I am the mast, the rudder, the steersman and the ship;
I am the coral reef on which it founders.
I am the tree of life
And the parrot in its branches
Silence, thought, tongue and voice.
I am the breath of a flute,
The spirit of man.
I am the spark in the stone,
the gleam of gold in the metal,
The candle and the moth fluttering round it.
The rose and the nightingale drunk with its fragrance.
I am the chain of being,
the circle of the spheres,
The scale of creation,
the rise and fall.
I am what is and what is not.
I am, O you who know, Jalal-ul-din.
O say it, I am the soul in all.

In Lee Hall' s Radio play, now made into (in my opinion less powerful) television play and film, Spoonface Steinberg (text of same name published by BBC Books 1997), the 7 year old autistic child who is dying of cancer discovers Hasidic teaching, the teaching of Jewish mystics. She expresses what she had learned from it in these words:

"There is this different way that was invented by these people in Poland quite a while ago- this is when everything you do is a prayer- when you smile that is a prayer- when you talk that' s a prayer- and when you walk that' s a prayer- and when you brush your teeth and when you give someone a kiss…, that is a prayer….when you spit, when you suck, when you laugh, when you dance, when you snore- everything you do is a prayer- ‘specially what you do when you meet other people because all the people in the world are in God' s kingdom- and it doesn' t even matter if they are Jewish-….and all the birds and bees and fishes and swans and llamas and piglets and worms and trees and houses and cars and people and that- because when the world was made, God made it out of magic sparks- everything that there is was all made of magic sparks…and now the sparks are deep down inside and the whole point of being alive—the whole point of living is to find the sparks (p. 153 ff.)

The classic examples of those who crossed boundaries, who saw the sparks, are the mystics in many traditions, but some of the examples I have given you are everyday, accessible to all of us if we open our physical eyes and the eyes of our heart. A common definition of mysticism highlights it as an experience of Unity, and experience where boundaries are transcended. These are not only the boundaries between Ultimate Reality and the human person, but those between persons and all else that is. The study, even pursuit of, the mystical quest and spirituality is rarely to the exclusion of practical concerns. Like the great Teresa of Avila, there is the sense that Reality, in her case "the Lord walks amongst the pots and pans." This is what many have called practical mysticism.

Danah Zohar has been exploring recently in her book the idea of SQ (SQ, Bloomsbury Press 2000). We have all heard of IQ and there is a lot of this about in Oxford, where I work. But there has been an additional exploration of Emotional Intelligence, EQ, without which IQ is not used to its full potential. The criteria of SQ, spiritual intelligence, Zohar suggests are:

being flexible
being self-aware
being vision and value-led tending to ask "why"
being holistic and looking for the connections between things
having the capacity to stand against the crowd
being open to diversity
having the ability to shift paradigms
being spontaneous
having the ability to use pain and adversity

One of the books written by Edward Robinson, a former Director of RERC and a working artist, is called Living the Questions. This takes a line from a Rilke poem. Crossing the boundaries in the spirit is not about answering questions so much as having the courage to ask them and then in the living of these questions to find resolutions in the contradictions and challenges that they bring. This is a life that goes beyond the labels and institutional barriers that provide only worldly and temporary security.

Not only the serious sadness of death to which I referred earlier, but joy and laughter, singing and dancing also thin the veil between this world and another, between transcendence, immanence and ordinariness.

Peter Berger in Rumor of Angels talks of joy and laughter as "signals of transcendence."

He also identifies our sense of justice and hope as two of these signals, the echoes immanent within our lives of that which is also beyond. His latest book focuses entirely on humour with the title Redeeming Laughter. Laughter "transcends the reality of ordinary everyday existence; it posits, however temporarily, a different reality in which the assumptions and rules of ordinary life are suspended" (ibid. 205 f.). Laughter makes life easier, it suggests a world made whole and one in which the miseries of the human condition have been abolished; one is transported over a threshold, over a boundary, into a different order of things, a counter-world, an upside-down world, as in the sermon on the mount where the kingdom is within and amongst us, even now and not yet, as one passes in and out of the new Reality.

Conclusion
To end I want to quote a story that might engage the mystic in you. It comes from the work of a young Quaker researcher from Pennsylvania USA, Jennifer Elam, who visited RERC during the summer of 2000 and who shared with me her work with the stories of 97 Americans who were in some way contemporary mystics. Here is a story from one of them:

PSI Symposium Annual Journal 2002