Lord Acton Part of a Pilgrimage 4 Final extract from Anne Ashworth’s Journal July 1993 Reading David Hay on the Alister Hardy Research Centre, I ask myself how I would reply if selected for questioning about ‘religious experiences’, as studied by the Centre. Looking back with what honesty I can muster, I list: x The ‘long grass’ insight at age 9, reinforced at age 19, setting my spiritual alarm clock for age 40 (as recorded in Annunciations) x The writing desk vision at (I think) ages 10 and 15 (also mentioned in Annunciations) x In my 40s, a day of transcendent golden radiance, for no apparent reason, accompanied by high euphoria, on the dull road to Weeton; and a ‘green shade’ experience of the numinous in Woodland Garden (the latter recorded in a poem) x Also recorded in poems, an ‘encounter’ that actually stopped me in my tracks at the back of my workplace, and the ‘keys to the darkroom’ experience in the (now outdated) dark photocopying room x A cluster of sensations focussed on Preesall Hill, recorded in two poems x The pulpit experience recorded in The Preacher Learns Love x The occasional ‘oblique light’ sensations x Other experiences less memorable but having high numinous quality including a sense of a special sort of air breathed during the state of deep prayer Occasional ‘oblique light’ sensations Could all these be added, quantified – which is absurd, for they are unquantifiable – they would amount to a fairly impressive weight of spiritual experience, though none had the quality of supreme mysticism.
How to explain them? Has that been my whole life’s endeavour, ever since the awareness of what in childhood I called (for myself, having no other language) ‘the lyric thrill’? I think it has. Christianity didn’t provide the language I sought for, after all; and perhaps theism is unequal to it. Perhaps no language will do. But I cannot avoid the need to try and find one.
There was of course the experience after my accident, which I interpreted at the time as religious and recorded in five poems. I now understand that there is a medical explanation (something about endorphins in the brain?) of this common posttraumatic euphoria. Which suggests the question: are there ‘mere’ chemical explanations for all altered states of consciousness? And would these invalidate ‘spiritual’ interpretations? And what about vocation?
Naturally explained as self-fulfilment, is it not still an intensely transcendent experience?
August 1993 Written on a Quaker outing, transcribed into Journal:
I have sought sorrowing, Mourning your death.
I have sought singing, Breathing your breath.
Absence inscrutable Gouged from my knowing, Presence immutable, Root of my growing – You are the magnet That pulls from within, You are the dragnet Fishing me in.
Force of velocity, Stillness of stone, Love’s reciprocity Felt when alone - How can I know you Or know you a lie?
Nothing can show you And nothing deny.
Images founder, Words lose their role, Yet in profounder Silence of soul, Past each illusion Searching and losing, Through all confusion You are my choosing.
May 1994 All cultures – well, many, at least – look back with nostalgia to a time when the gods talked with humankind. Later the gods withdrew, often into the sky, as people imagined. Julian Jaynes’ theory, in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, accounts rather well for this, though other scholars take issue with him. Reading his book, and discussing it, I was reminded of an old African story.
A woman wanted to renew contact with the god gone up into the sky. She wove baskets and piled them high. At last she ran out of reeds, though she felt the pile was nearly high enough. All she could think of was to pull out the bottom basket and place it on top of the pile. Like the Babel builders, she failed. [I used this in a poem later.] Relating this in a letter it occurred to me afterwards that I am that woman! All my life I have sought God with love and longing.
Now I withdraw the bottom basket, the basic belief in God as personal or as divine purpose. Does the whole edifice collapse?
What does it mean to be an atheist lover of God? Tennyson, in In Memoriam:
I heard a voice, ‘Believe no more’… [but] tho’ my lips may breathe adieu I cannot think the thing farewell.
November 1994 Today I was admitted into membership of the Society of Friends. Monthly Meeting began with a ‘testimony’ to a deceased Friend: Quaker jargon for an obituary.
The record of this man’s achievement with so many campaigns for peace, truth, environmental concern and for the Society was an inspiration. It was also a measuring rod, shattering my hopes of living up to my vocation as a member of the Society – for how could I be such a person? All I can be is myself, but in the context of the Society I can be myself to the utmost. I am resolved to render any service asked of me if it could conceivably be within my scope; and to seek diligently for the stirrings and gatherings-together of the Spirit, be it divine or human or both.
August 1997 The oblique light reached me again today. I first used this phrase many years ago for a wordless and perhaps ineffable experience, a sense of opening and illumination that takes place in the psyche when something that is like a beam of light enters transversely, at an angle to both reason and emotion.
Others have known it. Once, browsing in a secondhand bookshop, I opened at random a musty old book, I think a translation from the Chinese, which actually mentioned the experience and used this very image of an oblique or slanting light. How I wish I had bought that book; I shall never find it again. Whistler’s engraved glass entitled The Slanting Light is perhaps another reference to the phenomenon. In my poems on glass and keys in the Annunciations sequence I tried to convey the experience, but failed – as prose too must fail.
After a long period devoid of mystical experience, today it fell on me again. Near the beginning of Meeting for Worship, a pale shaft of sunlight briefly fell athwart the room and under the table, obliquely; and this was enough to trigger the psychic invasion, which lasted for perhaps a minute or a few minutes only. I am left wondering… could I write a book (a Universalist Pamphlet, perhaps?) entitled The Oblique Light? [I did.] It is a moment of supreme but ineffable significance, when a light seems to strike obliquely across consciousness. Sharp as a laser beam, it cuts into, between, across assumptions and preoccupations.
Powerful as a depth charge, it explodes ordinary two-dimensional awareness, opening depths in the psyche to its invasive yet warming and healing illumination. This slanting light provides, as it were, fresh angles in the imagination. Incisive, it is nevertheless not analytic but synthetic, connecting what had seemed unrelated, offering the sense of a transcendent unity of being.
We have the light of reason and the light of love.
These lights we can call on at will, we can diligently improve their brightness. It is not so with the oblique light. It does not come at our call, but always unexpectedly – and rarely.
The shaft of light, the stab of pain, the surge of joy which no biology or psychology can explain away, yet to which no religion can put a name! The world is a place of annunciations and epiphanies.
July 2000 It is long since I wrote in this spiritual journal. I keep it for moments of spiritual awareness and renewal.
A day of deep deafness. Without hearing aid, and with one ear totally blocked, I walked in the park in unwonted silence. The visual and tactile senses were heightened. Sun-warmed paths and grass were transmitting heat and life to the blood in my feet. I felt every step, as though treading warm cushions. Sun Laurence Whistler. Engraved glass prism. Salisbury Cathedral. through leaves: dappled sunand-shade, colours intense.
As I passed beneath trees, they curved over me and seemed to include me.
Movements of butterfly, blackbird, gull, swan, squirrel were indivisible from stillness. Connection, oneness.
Om mani padme hum.
I meditated deeply and reverently, without distraction.
Om. The syllable of creation, the syllable of eternity, of a state without dimensions. The divine, heaven, the beyond. Mani padme: the jewel in the lotus, Buddha nature, that-of-God in all things, including the human heart; incarnation, pantheism; the glory of blossom above water, from stem rooted in slime. Hum: the earth, as in humus; the divine in earth, in all creatures, in rock, tree, grass, wildlife, in ecological interdependence. In us? Where ‘only man is vile?’ Yet it takes human consciousness to recognise and articulate all this. Rilke wondered whether we are here precisely to recognise and internalise it all.
The park today was beautiful, it seized and held me in the palm of its divine hand. But what is a park? A human creation. The product of human imagination and human labour. Left to itself, that land would be – like the adjacent neglected woodland garden – a tangle of rank weeds and a muddy stream.
Whence that human creativity? It’s a secondary work, prompted by earth herself - how else? But a sign of grace, even in our fallen race. Buddha nature. That of God.
Postscript, July 2000 A reflection written at Woodbrook Quaker Centre but placed in my journal afterwards.
AWAKENINGS Fifteen years half asleep. Oh, not unhappy. Enjoying life. Learning. Even giving birth. But just Half-Asleep Anne (as I put it in The Girl Who…).
But at length the mist began, here and there, to clear. A crust or carapace began to crack. A question rose from the depths, insistent: whatever became of Anne?
What Anne? Why, the one who was a poet. The one who had a lively spiritual dimension. The one who needed a language. In the wake of Honest to God, I approached Christianity. Might it after all have the words I needed, to articulate the spiritual and aesthetic depths? However inexpertly, the poems began again.
And there was more. Does life begin at forty? For me, yes. This coincided with a return to my profession, a reawakening of that side of my mind.
Poetry, God, work, these three. But the greatest of these was poetry. A little later came love, real love, the love of my life so long awaited. I was dancing in a new morning.
There were negatives. Midlife crises. Later, the agony of decision, of leaving a comfortable marriage, a husband who loved and trusted me. These darknesses too were awakenings, ways into understanding.
Poetry, love, work, these three. But God?
Progressive awakening revealed to me that Christianity did not after all fulfil my need for a language of the spirit. Just as I had read my way into faith, I read my way out again. Cupitt, Hampson.
Scales began to fall from the eyes I had thought were already opened. Eye-opening is not a single moment, like Zen satori. It is more like peeling layers from an onion - and like onion-peeling, not without tears. Tears that temporarily blind one again. This was a process, a slow slow awakening, a stripping of veils. Part of it was a real bereavement: I had lost my God.
Or rather, we had. For there were by now several of me, the products of various awakenings. AA poet, AA preacher, AA lover, AA mother, AA librarian.
Such different women, yet all had at least united in one certainty: we were all lovers of God. What could it now mean to be a God-lover when God was gone?
Strangely, I didn’t disintegrate. I integrated. I am no longer AA this or that, but one person even when performing many roles. And the identity, the I-ness, no longer matters. I live in a wonderful, fearful, diverse world, all so much more interesting than me.
The world is so full of a number of things I think we should all be as happy as… no, not kings. As butterflies.
Not as the Crow Flies. The Journal and Selected Poems of Anne Ashworth will be published by SOF launched at the annual conference in Leicester on July 14th 2012.