I just started reading Etty Hillesum’s diaries, An Interrupted Life. She writes well. But the interesting thing about her is not her writing style but her personal and religious development. Unusually for a spiritual writer, because that is what she is, the sexual dimension of her life is an important factor, one that she deals with openly and frankly. She was a Jew, a rather detached one until the Nazi attitude to the Jews made her aware of her racial and religious inheritance, so she was never exposed to Jansenist attitudes. She became a mystic with none of the negative feelings about sex which seem to infect Christians, especially Catholics. So I hope to learn something from her.
There is an enormous chasm in Christian spirituality, which is only now beginning to be addressed. On the one hand there is the insistence on celibacy. Not just celibacy as in the married state but celibacy as in detachment from any sexual relationship. The mystic ideal – and every spiritual life is oriented towards the mystical in Christianity, Buddhism and Islam, as far as I can gather – involves an absolute detachment, sooner or later, from everything that is not God. Later this is reversed when all that is egotistic and selfish has been detached from and the person is able to give her/himself in absolute freedom. The Ten Oxherding Pictures can be applied just as easily to Christianity as to Zen. This detachment process is the cause of the two ‘nights’ and the depression which they often induce. It is also the reason why the spiritual life is such a struggle. It runs counter to the natural human instinct towards greater integration and involvement with others – which brings us to the other hand.
We are social beings and our identity and consciousness of who and what we are is determined by our relationships. Each one of us is a nexus of relationships. This is where Christianity and Buddhism complement each other. The Buddhist insight is that when the knot of these relationships is unravelled nothing is left. There is nothing inside the knot, no hidden and enduring kernel such as a permanent self or soul. Which raises some very interesting questions. What is a relationship if the poles of the relationship are themselves ephemeral nexus of relationships? This is an impossible question which leads to the suspicion that its posing could only arise from a misunderstanding of what reality is, an understanding which is too mechanistic. Another question – what is the nothing which remains? Again this can be understood in a nihilistic way, which gets us nowhere, or in the sense of nothing which is not something, nothing in the sense of sunyata, emptiness, a void which is a dynamic process. This is as far as Buddhism goes. The Christian insight, revelation, is that the nothingness is God, the Transcendent Other.
Now the journey from the beginning of the spiritual life, when one asks, ‘Who am I?; Where am I going?; What is the meaning of life?’ – to the realisation of the loss of self in God is a long one, a lifetime long. And it is a journey in a vehicle with just a tiny window to the side. We cannot see what is ahead but we can see a little of where we are. Sometimes the vehicle stops, sometimes it gets stuck on a side road, sometimes it even goes into reverse. But we think we know where we are going so we press on. We have plenty of guide books, many of them conflicting. As the journey progresses it gets darker and darker. Soon we can see nothing out of the side window and don’t know whether we are on the right road, or even whether we are still moving. There are a very few exceptional people who have a vehicle with lights so that they can see fairly clearly and their stories give us courage and reassurance. Eventually we are going to have to get out of the vehicle and go on without it but this is the last thing we want to do. We cannot even imagine ourselves doing it. The vehicle is all we have. We have no idea of what is outside, even if there is an outside. At least inside we have our books and can read about our journey and about the journeys of others. We can even talk to others in their vehicles and compare notes. We hope that eventually the vehicle will arrive and we’ll know, perhaps we’ll be told, it’s OK to get out now. But that is not going to happen. The vehicle is not going to get us to the end of the journey. It cannot. Sooner or later we are going to have to step out into the darkness. That’s when we encounter the biggest problem of all. We cannot remember getting into the vehicle and, on looking around it, we do not see a door. How do we get out? This reminds me of the Zen koan of the goose in the bottle, in fact it is the koan of the goose and the bottle. There is no concealed entrance, no hidden latch which will open a secret door. When we come to understand what the vehicle is and why we are in it, then it will no longer be a problem.
A Zen monk called Riko goes to his master Nansen and quotes the famous Zen koan.
‘You put a gosling into a bottle and the gosling grows up to be a goose.
Master, how to get the goose out of the bottle without breaking the bottle?’
The master doesn’t answer.
Riko walks away from the master and then the master shouts out, ‘Riko!’
Riko replies, ‘Yes Master.’
And the master says, ‘There, the goose is out!’
I have strayed from the point I was trying to make – the conflict between the injunction to detachment, including celibacy and sex, and the human need to relate to others. I remember a story about an old abbot of a monastery in Ireland. When po
stulants came and asked to become monks he would say to them, ‘Have you ever been in love?’ More often than not they would indignantly deny that the thought of such a thing had ever crossed their mind. He would then send them away, telling them to find a girl and fall in love, and if after that they still wanted to be monks he would welcome them. No doubt the story is apocryphal but the point is a serious one. Becoming a person is a long, and for some, slow process of growth and development. It is a process of relating to and being related to, of giving and receiving, of giving up and receiving back, of being filled and of being emptied. Above all it is a process of opening up and allowing others in. It is the discovery that being is more important than having and that in order to be it is not necessary to have. In all of this sexual feelings and orientation are defining factors. There is a sexual dimension in all our relating. Men relate to men differently than they relate to women. A woman can give something to a man no other man can give simply because she is a woman and vice versa. Each relationship is unique but the sexual chemistry is always a factor, essential in order to become a lover, a father/mother, a son/daughter, a brother /sister, a friend, a companion. It is in these becomings that we discover who we are. It is in these becomings that we take possession of the self that we give in each relationship. Now to ask a person who has not yet achieved a measure of personal stability, who is still not quite sure who they are, to ask such a person to renounce the sexual dimension of themselves, because that is what the vow of celibacy amounts to in the Church, is to ask them to renounce personal fulfilment. It is no wonder that so many go off the rails.