Page Text: 11/04/2022 by Pete Hulme
I’m starting this with a degree of trepidation, as I’m not sure I can do justice to the value for me at least of what I’m seeking to describe. I’m not even sure what triggered this revisiting of my past and its archive in my diaries of that year. It may partly be due to material in Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things, which I am still slowly working my way through preparatory to attempting a sequence of posts on his perspective. This led me to look back over the notes I took at time from Peter Koestenbaum’s The New Image of the Person, which were interwoven with other records of my experiences at the time.
I’m trying to confine it to no more than three posts. Some of it can fortunately spill over into my pending McGilchrist review as it relates so strongly to what he has to say. It seems so bizarre in that respect that what I read almost 40 years ago should resonate so strongly to what is written in such a recent text. Anyhow, more of that perhaps when I deal with The Matter with Things.
In Leaps of Faith, my original account of my decision to try and follow the Bahá’í path which I’m about to republish, there were at least three things I failed to do justice to:
I gave an insufficiently balanced picture of the Catholic Faith – yes, it was fair to say that aspects of Catholicism played a part in feeding my scepticism which was rooted in my hospital experience (more of that in a moment), but members of that faith also later played a part in eroding that scepticism at a critical moment in my life’s trajectory: I’ll be focusing more on that in this post.
my acknowledgement of the importance of Buddhism fell short of giving a full measure of my debt – that’s for the second post; and
even my much stronger depiction of the role in my path towards belief of Peter Koestenbaum’s A New Image of the Person didn’t really do him justice especially now I have looked again at his anticipation of some key points in Iain McGilchrist’s model – more of that in the last post.
I have given a full description of the impact of my two hospitalisations at about the age of five in another set of posts, soon to be republished (see below for a related poem). Suffice it to say here that the rules under the NHS at the time prevented my parents staying with me during my time in hospital, which left with me with a feeling of being abandoned, not just by them but by God as well, with only myself to rely on. It’s fairly clear why that might have primed my mind to adopt the kind of scepticism towards religion that I described in Leaps of Faith.
Encounters with Catholicism
I focus there mainly on the Roman Catholic Church, stating for example:
My strongest association with the priesthood from my early years was, possibly unfairly, with the eschatological preachers I had heard, ranting after the manner of the hell-fire sermoniser in James Joyce ’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . The one I remember best had been a boxer in his younger days and was reputed to visit the homes of his less enthusiastic parishioners and drag them out of bed to Mass. Both these details could well have been apocryphal but they influenced my attitude strongly at the time. Apart from such stereotypes I had not internalised a clear sense of what a priest might be as all that remained in memory of all the other priests I had come across was a blurred palimpsest of mildly authoritarian impressions. I’d certainly few if any positive experiences to draw on and none had stuck in my memory, not even from my confirmation classes.’
It was only when I recently took a look at my diary entries for 1982, the year of my conscious reconnection with God and religion, that the true picture became clearly much more complex.
At the start of May, I begin with a review of the earlier darkness in the context of some kind of dawn:
Among the non-dogmatically religious I feel some hope. Among the others, I despair. Before I became involved with Buddhism, despair was chronic though submerged. It fades daily. The life force strengthens in me.
The sorts of memories which are floating around the edges of my mind at present are, for example, of the crucifix in my bedroom at home in Stockport. It was a constant presence. It shaped many of my earliest impressions and preoccupations. It occupied the same prominence then as my rupa of the Buddha does now.
This ‘man of sorrows’ was with me all my childhood nights and days. The metal studs under the base struck the metal mantelpiece with a dull clash that grew to be extremely familiar. For some reason the mantelpiece had been painted a hideous blue gloss. This figure, suffering, emaciated, stamped its lineaments upon all my imaginings of Christ.
I used to use the backdoor steps as my altar, and say mass with cups for chalices and aprons for surplices. . . . The Saints also exerted a strong fascination, especially St Francis Xavier and his work with lepers.
For one intensely passionate period of days when I was 11 or 12 I prayed resolutely night after night for this figure on the crucifix’s help in becoming good – to no avail.… I really wanted to be endowed with grace, a true religious experience, solid faith. Nothing changed. I was left to muddle on.
For the rest, religion in my memory is a long sequence of resented confessions, boring penances, meaningless communions and, especially during Lent and Easter, oppressive and lugubrious rituals.
I then go on to write: ‘The Catholics I have spoken to recently [as part of my research for my clinical dissertation] find their religion as life enhancing as I find Buddhism.’
Later in May 1982 I write a good deal about my encounters with these women from a Catholic background, who clearly made a strong positive impact on my perception of religious faith in a Christian context.
There are three accounts of particular relevance here.
I will start with the mother whose image had remained most vividly in my mind. She was a presence impossible to ignore. As we talked I grew to like and respect her more and more. She had learned to conquer a very severe depression after her first child, something she was totally unprepared for, and felt that other people could benefit from hearing of her experience even though she found it hard to talk about it.
The story which I found so moving was not however to be about her depression. It is this. Her husband was Irish. Before she married him she did not know that he was Catholic. She had not even the vaguest idea of the passionate importance of religion in Ireland. Although she was married in a Catholic church and had therefore been given some instruction beforehand, she had no feeling at all for Catholicism at that time. Her husband did not go to mass. The children were, however, sent to Catholic schools and it was she who took them to Mass when they were old enough to go.
After eleven years of marriage she began to be interested in – no, more than that, was powerfully drawn to – the Catholic faith. After 18 months of soul-searching and instruction she was convinced that she must be baptised a Catholic.
She was afraid that her husband would not understand and had put off saying anything to him till then, but she felt that she could put it off no longer. She told him and the simple words with which she described his reaction brought tears to my eyes born of my own needs. ‘He took me in his arms,’ she told me, ‘and said “Thank God. I knew that some day you would find your own way to the Church and that I mustn’t pressurise you.”’
The other two mothers struck different chords than those.
One described herself as shy. It seemed more than that to me. She had a sort of poignant delicacy, fragility almost, of personality — like Shakespeare’s snail, poised ready to shrink back into her ‘shelly cave’ with pain at the faintest touch of disapproval or criticism. She powerfully reminded me of my mother although she was clearly more competent socially and far more interesting and pleasant to talk to. My mother as a young woman could well have been as appealing.
God was so real for this lady, so necessary, so positive an entity, a person in her life almost. Still, it was the use that she had been able to make of her religion in helping her break the hold of her addiction that testified to its power.
The third mother was different again. She was a political Catholic involved in a battle with the media, fighting for the value of marriage, family and children rather than possessions. I grew to respect her as we talked and responded positively to her views. She painted such a positive picture of the church I had written off, too. She talked of marital encounter weekends, of dialoguing with her husband and of going off with fellow Catholics to participate in TV programmes like Libby Purvis’s Choices. She was a true militant, upfront and indomitable.
The Impact
So, I had seen the positive force of the Christian religion in three other lives, unlike its impact upon my own. I had found also that I experienced a close bond with such people. I also expressed my frustration in my diary about how reducing these rich personal accounts to statistical tables negates their true value, in a way that anticipates the insights I later came to explore in more detail in McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things. Just a taster of that for now. For example he wrote (page 597):
I have seen a 300-page report on the impact of a certain project development on a region of outstanding natural beauty that catalogued possible impacts on the local economy, employment, the return on investors’ capital, the likely productivity of the scheme, its potential for ‘recreational activities’ and so on, and only on the last page acknowledged that there were ‘possible impacts’ on the profound beauty, peace and majesty (naturally the terms are not theirs, but mine) of the landscape, but that these were impossible to assess and had therefore not been included in the calculations.
I came to the conclusion that ‘what is certain is that I belong with such people rather than those who mindlessly adopt the sterile materialism of the prevailing morality, which despises life and venerates technology.’ Shades of McGilchrist even more clearly detectable!
It was becoming apparent to me then that, when I had turned my back on Christ in my teens, I had ‘mistakenly consigned all religions to the same scrap heap,’ not willing to acknowledge that ‘not all religions or all aspects of Christianity belong there.’
It was strange, though, that such apparently deep impressions at the time should have slipped my mind when I came to write Leaps of Faith 32 years later. I suspect part of the explanation for that is the priority I gave, even at the time, to the influence of Buddhism and Koestenbaum.
I wrote in the immediate aftermath of my work with these women: ‘Until I have increased my spiritual strength by meditation and reading about Buddhism I do not think I can hope to make lasting and correct decisions about any . . . aspects of my life.’ These forces were incubating on the way towards my crucial encounter with the Bahá’í Faith six months later at the end of that November.
So let’s take a closer look at the impact of Buddhism next time.
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