***
Duval stopped writing and rubbed both his hands over the stubble of his beard. Although Christine had inhabited his inner life for years, he could no longer see the face he had long imagined. Now he saw only Marda. Before, he had hoped to instruct Marda by example-Christine’s example-and by slow, methodical preparation. But Templeton, the Church, were stealing his time away, risking the corruption of his vision. He needed to write more directly for Marda, because his inspiration was not diminishing, it was changing.
The keys of his typewriter waited sullenly, mocking his determination to define his mission. A sudden rush of energy surged through him, and he started to jab at the keys.
Yet there was a paradox: only by participating in the divine do we become human. Christine-Marda-could not know it, but there was a God-shaped hole in her consciousness. All cultures in all time have created an archetype, an image of God, a model of how hapless humans should behave. All the philosophers in all of time have groped to shape the symbols, the replicas of the divine world. They searched for unity of purpose, whereas in the modern world we tend to see autonomy and independence as supreme values.
Man is teleological by nature: he must search for God to prove himself human, or more than human, with that greater sense of self. After an intense emotion of tragedy or pleasure, it is a common experience to feel that we have missed something greater that remains just beyond our grasp.
Those who think they have grasped it simply make their own God. They assume that He loves what we love and detests what we detest, but this endorses our prejudices instead of forcing us to transcend them. Personalising God can produce a fatalism, a facile belief that any and all disasters are the will of God. “It is the will of Allah,” say Muslims. We accept things that are normally unacceptable.
There is a mighty difference in making God like ourselves and then blaming Him for everything, and each one of us having the right to seek for ourselves the Godhead. For so long, the Catholic Church has discouraged the individual route to God because it threatened the very basis of its authority. Mysticism was rife in the immediate aftermath of Jesus, but then Christianity became fossilised. For a brief period in the Middle Ages, the Church allowed mysticism-what it called the individual path-to flourish. Some of the mystics, the solitary seekers after truth, were canonised; some were burnt as heretics. Soon the Church in Europe crushed all individualism with the power of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Yet in England, where the inquisitors of the Holy Office rarely ventured, mysticism was entrenched in the soul of the Mother Church. Only a few records survive of these enlightened ones: the unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing, together with Richard Rolle, Walter Hinton and the saintly Julian of Norwich. The greatest of these visionaries discovered the insights to which the mystics of Islam and Judaism also alluded.
Although each great religion has produced magnificent visions which are culturally conditioned, each shares a similar concept of the true searcher being able to ascend to a vision of God; something that human adventurers who have honed their spiritual talent have always wanted to do. The mystical experience of God has characteristics that are common to all faiths in all times. These spiritual voyagers have sought a journey through the imagination, not through a process of scientific or logical reasoning.
Yet all established religions have feared these individual journeys, and so most mystics became outcasts…
Duval felt the silence of his study, the contrast with the frenzy inside his head. He thought of his pupil entombed below, the vessel of all his hopes. He believed in Marda, but could she really understand his mission? For her sake he hoped fervently that she could, because it would save her life. He had done his work, at a more rapid pace it was true, but in the end it was her role, her destiny, to understand. Yes, she
Mysticism is still unpopular in Christianity; today the word is allied with charlatans, gurus and hippies. These self-indulgent cranks seek three things on their selfish path: to feel in control; to feel good about themselves; and to feel that there is a future. But for these misguided people, individualism comes first and last. They have abandoned searching-the ego is enough for them. And their chemical drugs.
Yet the themes of inner contemplation seen in yoga or Buddhism and the fashion for psychoanalysis all display a form of mysticism. It is no accident that both Freud and Jung turned instinctively to myths to explain and explore the inner world of the psyche. So today there is a need for an alternative to a purely scientific explanation of our existence. It may be the only way of preventing the destruction of this world-unless we hold fast to the notion that God will not allow His Creation to become a nuclear wasteland. Perhaps God Himself will bring His Armageddon in the last decades of this second millennium, as a prelude to His Second Coming. Time is short, Marda. I feel events pressing on us. These must be the End Times. I can almost smell the destruction of the world.
Yet the discipline of solitary contemplation can help the skilled and sensitive soul to return to the One, the primordial beginning of mankind, and the ability to create a constant state of God’s presence by tapping into the energy field which surrounds this Earth, God’s energy for God’s Earth. But such a journey to the centre of light and energy, and to the centre of the mind, can entail great personal risks because one soul may not be able to endure what it finds there. Madness is always nudging at our elbow.
I, myself, fight off madness every day, and I walk in the world. A world I often hate, despite God’s creatures, perhaps because of God’s creatures…
So defeat, despair and loneliness affect us all, but especially the solitary seekers. The mystical journey can be undertaken only with the guiding hand of a tutor, a sympathetic and patient expert, who can monitor the experience and guide the apprentice past and beyond the terrors, to give him or her strength when it is needed. Marda, let me be your true guide. But there are also false guides. Pseudo-science says the patient in psychoanalysis needs the guidance of a therapist, except that this is a selfish search for the ego inside, not God outside.
The joy and peace of enlightenment through solitary contemplation can only be attained for a few minutes at a time, and after a titanic struggle between the spirit and the world, God and the Devil as it were. Then, finally, the overflowing taste of God’s sweetness comes as the reward. The soul has to battle its way out of the darkness that is its natural habitat.
There are many ways, all arduous, of achieving this glimpse of spiritual Nirvana, Valhalla, Paradise, Heaven…call it what you will. One example I have tried is a form of Christian yoga, where breathing exercises systematically help to wean the mind away from the passions of pride, fear, greed, lust and anger which tie it to the ego. The self has to be forgotten in the search for the light. Charismatic sects claim literally to see this light which transforms, but the instant “cure” of the evangelicals is no substitute for the long, sure process of learning the love of God.
God is not necessarily an external objective fact, but an essentially subjective and personal enlightenment. The path to God is not, therefore, necessarily taken via a building, an organisation or even reason, but through the creative God-given imagination. The Catholic Church cannot admit that God, in some profound sense, may be a product of the imagination, but it is self-evident that imagination must be the basis of faith. I can see that you have real imagination, Marda.
Imagination is the motor behind all major advances-in science and art as well as religion. The imaginative idea of God, the absent reality, has inspired men and women since the Creation, because it transcends all sectarian divides. The only way we can conceive of a God who remains imperceptible to the senses and impervious to logical proof is by means of symbols and visions, which it is the duty of the imagination to interpret.
That symbol, Marda, is often a woman…
Duval realised he was writing his testament exclusively for Marda. His long-suppressed subconscious motivations were being explained by him, to him. He was being as explicit as he could in order to direct her soul and save her life. The priest wondered whether he should end his own life if Marda could not, or would not, understand his desperate attempts to help her. It would be easy: fly agaric and hemlock in a vial.
A movement in the darkened study distracted the writer: Bobby rubbed against his legs and looked with devoted eyes at his master. Duval, feeling ashamed of himself, instantly dismissed thoughts of suicide; for the moment he was needed. He would not cave in to the pressures of spiritual minnows such as Templeton. Patting Bobby affectionately, he returned to his manifesto for his modern anchoress.