Young men and spiritual experiences
P. Mark O'Loughlin cfc
[October, 2000]
Anyone who drinks the water that I shall give will never be thirsty again: the water that I shall give will turn into a spring inside, welling up to eternal life. Jn. 4: 14
During some recent conversations I was having with a Year 12 student, whose world was falling apart, he initiated what could be called "God questions". At one point in our conversation I felt it relevant to ask whether he could recall any personal experience of what I described and explained as "otherness", "beyondness", "transcendence", "the sacred". Without hesitation he said "No", paused for some time, and then recounted an experience he had during the previous summer at Lorne. He was alone, lying on a surfboard beyond the lines of breakers, being gently raised and lowered on the swell. A bright morning sun was creating beads of glittering light on the rippling surface of the sea. He looked up, and shoreward, and noticed an ominous cloud bank looming over the darkening hills of the Otway Ranges. It threatened the blue and green and brilliance of the sea and sky around him. At that moment he was flooded with awareness, with an overwhelming sense of being and of connectedness, with a consciousness of light and dark, of good and evil. He was transported. The experience was vivid again as he recalled it. It was a profound spiritual experience. In the language of our western culture's Myth of Parsifal it was a Grail Castle experience, a brief residence in that place which holds life to the full. It is in the inner rooms of the Grail Castle that the Grail King lives, that person whom we call in our religious language "God". Dr. Robert Johnson, a Jungian therapist and scholar of myth, says that such a one-off experience is very common for adolescent young men, and that the experience subsequently informs everything that a man undertakes in his life. He lives his life in a generally unacknowledged yearning and searching for the Grail Castle.
In one of The Search For Meaning ABC radio interviews conducted by Caroline Jones, Robert Johnson described his own first Grail Castle experience, something which he didn't understand at the time but which he was able to find meaning for later in his life. Robert was frail as an adolescent, having lost a leg in a car accident when he was 11. At the age of 16 he decided to begin to make his way in the world and get his first job. It was a night-time labouring job in a cannery. His first night was distressing, physically and emotionally. He finished work at 4.00 am, totally exhausted, and felt that before he collapsed into bed he needed to see something beautiful or he would die. He went into the hills and onto a promontory. At about 5.00 am the sun rose. At that moment he was, in his own words, "flooded with glorious meaningfulness". He heard and felt and touched and smelt and tasted, even more than he saw, that moment of sunrise. He was transfixed, transported, for half an hour. A profound spiritual experience. Then the experience disappeared. He was to subsequently understand this to be his first Grail Castle experience, and that his life was to be lived with an unconscious hunger to be again given that experience of ultimate meaning. In the language of the Myth he became a Fisher King, longing and searching for meaning and that taste of ecstasy. He pursued his study, a career, relationships, recreation, and creativity, largely without meaning, but in this Fisher King living caught occasional glimpses of the Grail Castle.
In his published works Robert Johnson interpreted the Myth of Parsifal as indicating a second Grail Castle experience in a man's life, following the Fisher King journey. But he had not experienced it himself. Then, as he recounted to Caroline Jones, at the age of 53 his personal quest for meaning took him to India and to Delhi. He arrived totally distressed by the ordeal of the 24 hour flight and what he remembered as 13 time zones, and finally entered his tenth floor hotel room in Delhi in the early hours of the morning. He opened the window drapes. His room faced east, and overlooked the ancient skyline of the old city of Delhi. And as he looked the sun rose. He was again "flooded with glorious meaningfulness". It was his second Grail Castle experience, and as promised in the Myth it never left him. Meaning and the experience of transcendence remained available to him.
Two stories struck me recently while I was watching some recreational television on a Sunday morning. One was during a nature program which depicted a secluded rocky chasm in Wales, a place of boulders and tumbling water and ferns and mosses. The images captured an awesome rugged beauty. An aged man stood in the chasm looking up at the rock faces, and reminisced about the countless times he had returned since his youth when he first discovered the chasm and had been overwhelmed. I reflected that this was surely the place of his first Grail Castle experience, and that his many returns throughout his life were expressive of a Grail-hunger and Fisher King experience. His obvious serenity and captivation with this special place suggested to me that this might also have been the place of his second transformative Grail Castle experience.
The second story was during a news program which reported the purchase of a Monet landscape painting by an English millionaire, a middle-aged man. When asked why he was prepared to pay a fortune for this painting he told a story of his youth when he visited this place in France which Monet had painted. He had been totally captivated, and had returned to the place and to the Monet painting often throughout his life. I again reflected that here was a Grail-hunger, and memories of a first Grail Castle experience. And descriptions of the Fisher-King experience, a life-long searching for the Grail Castle of youth.
In my own life journey I do identify with the archetypical figures in the Myth of Parsifal: a naive young Parsifal, a Knight battling Dragons, and in particular a first Grail Castle experience and a lifetime as a Fisher King searching for meaningfulness and transcendence. Sometimes I caught a glimpse of the Grail Castle as I lived my Fisher King journey as a Christian Brother with Edmund Rice, attempting to be faithful to my Brotherhood, my teaching, my youth ministry, my marine science research, my cultivation of an interest in the fine arts, my friendships, and the retreats and counselling of my inner work. Then in the mid-1980's I was asked to go to Africa to explore whether the Christian Brothers of my Province might find a place there. After arduous planning and negotiating, and travelling across an ocean, and feeling my way into an African country and culture, and travelling on hazardous roads in the hands of strangers, I finally found myself in the Pare Mountains in north-eastern Tanzania. I was with a small party of U-Pare tribal people in Bishop Josaphat Lebulu's diocese, travelling on unsealed tracks in a four-wheel drive vehicle to look at a site where Christian Brothers might assist with education and youth formation. The road ended high up amongst the villages and gardens of the mountains, and in hesitant English my guides invited me to walk up to the edge of the escarpment. I was in a real sense alone, and I was physically and emotionally tired, but I was resolved to take every opportunity offered me, so I accepted. We climbed in single file along a bush track. The Pares are a chain of fault mountains with a modest gradient to the east up which we were ascending, and very steep escarpment falling a few thousand feet at the western edge. We finally emerged from the bush onto this escarpment edge. To the west lay the Masai Steppe, dotted with volcanic cones, and beyond was Mount Meru and Arusha, and beyond again the Great Rift Valley and the Serengeti and Olduvai Gorge. Filling the northern horizon was the awesome volcanic dome of Mount Kilimanjaro, snow-capped in spite of its tropical latitude, and beyond Kilimanjaro was Kenya. To the east, in the distance, lay the Indian Ocean. The Pare Mountains and escarpment continued to the south. In that moment of arrival and exhaustion and being greeted by these vistas laid out before me I was transported. I had an overwhelming sense that I was deeply a part of all things. That I belonged in the universe. I felt wonderfully free, and enjoyed a profound sense of well-being. And these feelings have continued to be never far from my awareness. It was a spiritual experience, a transformative moment. I have no doubt that this was the second Grail Castle experience of my life.
We are living at a time of great spiritual hunger but widespread indifference to formal religion. I believe that a necessary response for us is to focus again on the spiritual experiences which we are given in our lives, so often through nature and the cosmos. As educators and parents it is an urgent challenge to us to affirm our youth in the authentic spiritual experiences which they are given. We are invited to ponder the Gospel wisdom of John where he articulates the promise of Jesus that the water that I shall give will turn into a spring inside, welling up to eternal life.
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