Communion and Communication in the Religious Life

Continued from part 1

The ‘shadow’ person has had much such experience, but the lack of open relationship contains their communion in a closed circuit until they are unable to partake in the totality of life. So we begin to realise that, until we experience psychological wholeness, we all remain immature, whatever our category or our age in years, each on a closed circuit, the one type gyrating in the external world and the other in their inner world.

We are now touching on that phenomenon the midlife crisis, which is a spiritual turning point like, for example, the crisis in a physical illness when the high fever begins to abate. The passing of the crisis heralds the turning point from which the healing process takes over. But the open sesame to the human psychological closed circuit is love, that love which by accepting ourselves and others as we are, with understanding but no blame, points the way from what we are to what we can become.

Love in its many forms is a constant need from cradle to deathbed and, if in the course of their lives the gyrating ones of the day or night meet with the teaching and example of those rare teachers who have the wisdom and the compassion to establish with them lines of communication at the deepest level, inspiring them to brave the new dimension of Transcendence, they then find the inspiration and the confidence to face up to that inner or that outer life, whichever they lack, and then they truly begin to grow. They are like seeds in the desert, seemingly static, and then the rains come and the desert blossoms like the rose.

The secret is that the closed circuit breaks and there is no longer any gyrating around the self centre; the will to communicate for the sake of others brings about a change in our orientation and we are weaned from our self preoccupation. It is in this way, by unselfish and loving communication, that miracles of development and healing, big and small, slow and sudden, can and do come about.

Throughout the recorded history of the human race, in myth and legend and in religious parable, the mysterious process of divine redemptive healing has been described in many ways and they are all variations on the archetypal myth of the wounded healer.

We do not need to go into too many complexities, the important point to establish is the fact that the divine healer was initially himself wounded in some way, and carries with him constant knowledge of the wound. The whole mystery of the healing process turns on this fact; it is the wounded one who heals, it is the eternal paradox at work again and again, because it is an archetypal situation.

One is reminded of Chiron who, wounded by a snake bite, developed powers of healing and went on to become the teacher of Asclepius who, in his turn, became a great healer. His symbol was a staff with a single snake entwined about it, representing transcendence and rebirth. Another outstanding example is, of course, Jesus, whose transformative redeeming communion on the cross is a clear archetypal illustration of wounded healing.

In Buddhism, the equivalent example is the Bodhisattva ideal, in which, as most of us have heard, the Bodhisattva or archetypal healing-teacher, often depicted in both male and female form, has arrived at the threshold to Nirvana, but, stopped short by the cries of the suffering world, makes a vow not to enter therein until the last suffering being is liberated. This vow is inevitable because, although enlightenment can be realised only by and through the individual by personal effort, it is no resting place for the individual, who is transformed by the very nature of the awakened state to taking upon him or herself the healing or the teaching role. Such is the religious life to all who open their hearts and minds to compassion.

Today this eternal myth of sacrifice signifies the value of the acceptance and mindfulness of our own suffering stemming from our own conditioning, no longer merely an unjust burden to be carried on one’s back. In the light of awareness, all experience, pleasant or painful, becomes that knowledge which is the raw material of compassion and healing. But without the example of the wounded healer, we would not see this.

Communion with the wound has shown him both sides of the coin and so he discovers the transformation of pain into knowledge and compassion. This is a healing which transcends the dualism of the wound and therefore bestows the power to heal both self and others.

Of course, improved efforts of a political and scientific nature will go on and take us who knows how many millennia to achieve maturity. However, any individual of sincere intent can take up the religious life at any time and by doing so come full circle from the original primal state, through all the suffering of the conditioning processes to holistic consciousness, of which P. D. Mehta wrote:

Holistic consciousness is not “attained” or “achieved” by a holy one. It supervenes when the organism, purified and well prepared to sustain the action of transcendent energies, is in a properly receptive state; that is, when it offers the right conditions for ordinary everyday consciousness to change into holistic consciousness. A bud does not “attain” or “achieve” anything when it flowers. It undergoes a natural transformation out of the bud-state into the flower state. So too holistic consciousness represents the full flowering of a human being. And just as the flowering of a bud happens, so too flowering of the person into fully fledged human-ness happens. To strive to attain, to try to storm the ramparts of heaven, would be quixotic. Simply be good, naturally and happily, and the best will make you its place of rest (Sabbath). In holistic consciousness you are at-oned within Transcendence. And since Transcendence is always blissfully creative — not merely pro-creative — you the fully-fledged human are a blissful creator.

Holistic Consciousness, p. 80

So our quest for justice has brought us full circle to the mystery of that Transcendent from which we will get no dualistic answers but only its own transformative responses. All religious answers end in paradoxical union because the secret of the divine wholeness is in its ambivalence. Our dualistic self-centredness limits us either to jumping from one pole to its opposite, or to trying to compromise with a reality which does not accept compromise. The divine wholeness, which alone can reconcile the duals, can be experienced by the individual only when he or she is willing and able to endure and to contain for a proper period of time the strain of those tearing energies in their personal lives, Phiroz Mehta would say, by ‘practising continence’, both in the inner life of the psyche and in the field of relationship.

Communion, then, is direct experience, where conditioning does not interpret and so divide us, and from this silent blending of essence comes wisdom.

Our lives need to be rounded out and those things we never thought to do can be revelation when we do them and prove to be the key to the ancient city of our wholeness. As we grow in self-knowledge and our conditioning loses its grip, fears and aversions abate and, increasingly, we each become the whole person we were originally born to be and in this we each attain to our true beauty and human dignity.

Being in communion — this is the heart of religion.

Phiroz Mehta, The Heart of Religion, p. 52

Comments

I was glad to read Sylvia Swain’s excellent study on comparative aspects of similarity between Buddhism and Christianity, etc. We corresponded on this topic and on others after I met her at earlier Buddhist Society Summer Schools. I had kept our letters, too. So I may read them again!

Betty Warrington-Kearsley, 29^th August 2022