Lost, like my name.

“The trouble is, Nick, you don’t know who you are.”

It’s true. This Lent I have been occupied by a phrase from the letter of St James: purify [your] hearts, dipsychoi, people with divided souls. Like some kind of fidget toy, I’ve twisted it this way and that, coming back again and again to wondering about honesty, authenticity and truth. The headline challenge from a friend this week came with greater force than the discussion in Confession the weekend before. Three or four, or even more voices and choices have been raised in me and around me, and the nail is hit home with that phrase: “you don’t know who you are.” Dipsychos, a person with a divided soul, and it is friendships, two revelatory friendships in particular, that have shone a light on that division. This post isn’t about them, really, but is trying to make some sense of this “unknowing” model in terms of my work and my research.

It would be lovely to talk about how being outside clears my head, about “the mountains, the solitary wooded valleys,” but is it just about walking?
When Rob Macfarlane writes, it’s not just about walking; in today’s looking at my relationship with Garner’s Thoon and Ludchurch it seems hardly to be about walking for me at all, but a sort of pilgrimage (that overstates it) towards a personal integration. When I have written about “being real” before it has been about creating a relationship with place through story; this post, this week’s thinking is about me making sense of me through people, through place, through story but as I attempt it…

…I am back to Ludchurch and the disquiet I felt when I met that dark place, the darkening wood and the disempowerment of the Green Knight in the dusk. Maybe what I turned from there, the thing that chased me from Thursbitch for weeks after our first visit, was a shapeless Big Thing made of what I couldn’t see: an anxiety that I cannot find a self under all the guises I carry. One of the coats I wear is about the research, the language and literature reading and thinking and walking I have been involved in, the Wild Spaces Wild Magic project. I come back to it again today in something of the spirit of Richard Mabey’s Nature Cure, where he suggests that walking can be “like gazing into a crystal ball.” Walking, maybe, and reflecting on that walking – but he also warns that “the imagining and mythologising of nature is an ambivalent process.” So while pressure of work and demands of family mean not much one-foot-in-front-of-another walking has been going on, there has been a lot of (very ambivalent) crystal ball scrying: it has been a week where time and again, sitting in my office or in my meditation or as I drift off to sleep I have walked from the Gradbach hostel up to the Green Chapel, and as I reflect on this I keep coming back to the blog post and the John Fuller poem I cite often, where in the one I claim I am my own Gawain and in the other Caliban concludes, angrily:

… I think it is not good
To be unhappy with your freedom or
My language (learnt, but nothing understood),
Lost like my name within the magic wood.

This Good Friday evening, the first night of Passover, let me add some more thoughts.

Perhaps it is the rhythm of spring and Liturgy in both Christian and Jewish traditions have been (in part) agents of bringing me to a point where I have to acknowledge, as Rob Macfarlane describes it in The Old Ways, “the co-present ghosts of the former and the future.” The ghosts of past relationships and the uncertainty of present ones; the ghosts of past half-finished research so beautifully topped by more able medievalists at home and elsewhere; the hopes and fears of all the years. Maybe “imagining and mythologising [of anything] is an ambivalent process” – solvitur ambulando, but I feel like I am on a fatigue run, carrying so much. It feels like time to stop running: to change the metaphor, it feels like time to look to the ordering of my life, to make sense of the bits I am carrying, like a hiker rummaging in a disordered rucksack, or a mosaicist faced with the task of creating a picture from random tesserae.

The poet who “got me through” the bleak and beautiful four years of studying and working in Durham, Anne Stevenson, challenges the reader at Easter with the lines

What god will arise and slouch
through this realm of rubbish?

And I think the place I am at the moment is just what she describes in North Easter: a realm of rubbish with real flashes of beauty. That is to say that I am unconvinced by the Olympic myth of “anyone can be what they want to be,” but I am in sympathy with Auden (in lines again I have come to this Lent):

Instruct is in the civil art
of making from the muddled heart
a desert and a city where
the thoughts that have to labour there
may find locality and peace
and pent-up feelings their release…

Let Fuller and Anne Stevenson end this. She complains in her poem A Sepia Garden of creating identity as

the daily irritation,
the cramped frustration of attempting
the jigsaw with pieces missing

and my plaintive joining Caliban in saying

…I framed what syllables I could

because we all create who we are with what we have. The trouble is I’m not sure what the picture I’m creating should look like.

Into compassion-focussed practice

I first met the work of Thich Nhat Hahn in his book Being Peace, which spoke powerfully to me in my first school, as a Reception Class teacher. It taught me that there were oceans of compassion beyond feeling sorry – sorry for myself or (to use the term differently) sorry for the children. This was professional formation just like the day-to-day stuff from the school that still is with me some thirty years later. I certainly am informed by the difficult relationship I blundered into in that first job, and I continue to ponder somewhere what I feel about the children I worked with, for whom some kind of pity was a misguided (and ultimately pointless) way of looking at my job. I might have learned my craft there, but I also learned I was not there to rescue any more than I was there to squash and squeeze children into a preformed version of childhood or, worse still, some dire, conformist apprentice adulthood accompanied by claxons blaring “the children love it,” and (for those that don’t), “Develop your growth mindset!”

I met compassion in wholly other ways in my first Nursery Head, Lesley Grundy, where her immense concern for the children and families was at the same time empowering and for her team almost engulfing. Admittedly, she was less focussed on her staff – but that was because she believed, I think, that we all followed her vision in minute detail, that her idea of an inclusive and imaginative curriculum extended beyond simply sunny

Old Grandpont Nursery School from a drawing by Jo Acty

days in the Grandpont Nursery garden. The school, of course, has a slightly different feel now (several headteachers after her and also a new building), but for me, Lesley roams the Grandpont garden still. I look into the retirement homes that now occupy the site of the old Nursery and see the croci we planted and almost hear her reading in the garden. A real inheritor of the MacMillan ideal, Lesley’s compassion was practical, focussed on the children and families, and still remained long-sighted and visionary. I felt when I was a Head that I was a long, long way behind her.

I meet compassion rather differently in my encounters with what I see as a new version of compassion – what for shorthand I might call revolutionary compassion – in the thinking of my colleague Jon Reid and others (such as Simon Knight and Tim O’Brien) he works with or meets. This is Jon’s area of expertise, both in research terms and in practice, and in this post I am simply reflecting on what he teaches me. Here, inclusiveness is a more radical expedition into the unknown again, further into what I (yes, and others better qualified than I am) have described as the tangled roots of a definition of curriculum, into the realm of the ethical practitioner. We come to a recent discussion on Twitter in which one contributor light-heartedly suggested measuring compassion and I brought heavy wellies to the comment, like an eejit. I was worried about measuring compassion having opposed the notion of measuring spirituality – for example, however cute and useful this clip is, there is a touch of the catechism – and adult control – about the acts of kindness and gratitude the children outline. “Child A has met their mindfulness target…” The idea however that there could or should be some regulation or measurement of compassion has stayed with me, and I am profoundly dubious.

The deeply attitudinal nature of compassion makes it possible to see it more than to measure it. Measuring is only ever going to work for behaviours, and there is the possibility of these atrophying into this or that set pattern: think about the difference between respect and some of the regimented behaviours in the more controversial free schools and academies – free schools with exceptionally limited freedoms, academies where there is no debate unless sanctioned by the adults. I am not a fan of such measurement: if child A gives what they can and it is poorer than child B, then the adults have, I think, a duty to value what the child is giving – not just in the end-of term chocs, but the attention they can maybe muster after an exhausting weekend.

Revolutionary compassion however cannot be confused with letting children (or families) “off” in some way. I remember during my PGCE my tutor coaching me towards an understanding that “you may be the only stability that child has.” David, thank you: that stays with me and often helps me distinguish between genuine active help and simple woolly thinking. However, I don’t believe that confusion is what I see in the good-natured and sometimes hard-won generosity of people who act around me as proponents of compassion. Yes, there seem to me to be effective characteristics of such practitioners, such as an easy-going nature, lots of energy, and maybe a history that informs that compassion, but it is also quite steely; this compassion is deeper than being soft on kids (or students or colleagues). It is not straightforwardly measurable because it is not a set of behaviours that can be ticked off to get your compassion badge.

While I am not advocating a wholesale import of Buddhist ethics, it seems to me that this kind of action-compassion contains a sort of deep appreciation of the kind of interbeing that Thich Nhat Hahn teaches: a mutual interdependence, an understanding that the teacher (or the system) cannot really function without those around them, including the parent and the child. The system supports the learning – and really needs to support the professional adult (another story altogether) – but cannot be the true measure of a teacher. Some element of regulation is possible here, in the setting up of effective, well-funded systems of supervision and training that allows the new teacher to explore what it means to be on the edge of this difficult world where a desire to be empathetic meets real children: hungry for attention, good or bad, hungry for stability, sometimes simply hungry for breakfast… The mindful teacher is not necessarily someone with a candle s/he can bring out when stressed, but someone who appreciates the child, or the parent, or the colleague, in a way that attempts to understand the complexity of the life in their hands, and how we are, none of us, really that different. I think it goes further than that, but that will do for now. I come full circle, back to Thich Nhat Hahn and his book The Sun My Heart: “We cannot take either side, because we exist in both.”

But while I’m ranting, I’m afraid I have to say that zero tolerance of genuinely disruptive behaviours is not the same as zero tolerance of the wrong shade of grey trousers.

Vocation II: love at the end of work

There was a point, I imagine, when only illness – long and debilitating or short – was what brought the working life to an end universally. “Grow old in your work” is the advice of a wisdom writer 200 BCE (Sirach ch 11) and I read it as an encouragement. However, I find myself wondering, as I start thinking about retirement: what is my vocation?

Sunday’s readings in Mass were about the call of the disciples, and yesterday we remembered three great saints, Paul the Hermit, and the Benedictines Maurus and Placid. The boy Samuel is called at the start of his mission, the earliest disciples move from John the Baptist to Jesus; Paul the Hermit flees to the desert; Maurus and Placid attach themselves to the Patriarch of Western Monasticism; the youthful Antony we remember today (17th Jan) disposes of his responsibilities and flees to the desert – and somewhere inside me I wonder “what will I do when I grow up?”

And today more rows on Twitter about Bold Beginnings, with an OfSTED spokesperson being bullish, and Prof Michael Rosen growling like a dog at a bullbaiting… No: they are all really sincere, trying to make sense of their positions or trying to explain what they think and feel to others. Such is the (to go to the Hardyesque or Cold Comfort country fair metaphor again) cockpit of passion and professionalism. Most of the time I love it or at least follow it with a keen eye: today….

Today I want to try and figure out what I’m doing here. What does it mean at this end of my working life (and do I mean “end,” given my first comments?) to find my work “rewarding,” or to say “I love my job”? This is given added flavour by the fact that tomorrow’s class for my PGCE students is about writing a personal statement. What does it mean to be a professional?

The first question might be whether vocation and profession are coterminous. I shy away from the statements about “passion” and “reward” when describing my job. I have no passion for much of the paper that litters my desk and my reward is fundamentally pay. How about taking pride? Yes, I take pride in a class that goes well, I enjoy talking to all sorts of students and coworkers, and it has come as something of a surprise at this end of my working life to find I have friends deeply woven into my appreciation of a working day. But was that why I became a teacher in the first place? To have friends? If so, I think I have waited a long time. I wonder whether this is a half truth, or a simplified story. Maybe teaching appeals because of the relational aspect of the work.

This particular hare was started by my good colleague Georgina Glenny, whose research seminar today talked a lot, in among her subject (the difficulty of designing for “interventions”) about pedagogy and relationships. I did not become a teacher – in any of the sectors I’ve experienced – because of the standards agenda. I did not become a teacher because I read a book on teaching. I don’t even think I principally chose to teach to “make a difference.” I think I became a teacher because I discern that I am good at getting on with people, by and large; I enjoy people’s company. I really enjoy watching people learn, and helping people to learn, and the best places I’ve found to do this are Nurseries and Universities. As part of that I came, through my own children and then through those I worked with, to love their worlds, and drawing on my own reading history the literature that illuminates it, from Moomins to present day reading such as Raymie Nightingale. I know other people see the job differently, and other people who share my kick from watching learning see it better in other places. Is this vocation? I come (back) to the early monastics, to the advice from Abba Nisteros:

Not all good works are alike, For Scripture says that Abraham was hospitable and God was with him. Elias loved solitary prayer and God was with him. David was humble and God was with him. Therefore whatever you see your soul to desire according to God do that thing and you shall keep your heart safe.

Even without God this makes sense. Do what your heart tells you and you can keep it safe. Love your work is at least part of this.

However.

This takes me to a good (although not conclusive) place, but won’t do for a person spec. and a personal statement. What we need is a way to communicate passion, commitment, love without cliche or threadbare argument, or laying ourselves open to overwork. This is as true of the profession as a whole as it is of the novice looking for a first job. Except for the mere contrarians, this is true of The Twitterers; except for the pale pen-pushers this is true of policy makers and enforcers; except for the person who has lost their way and should have left the profession years ago, this is true of teachers and educators from one end of the sector to the other. We need, bluntly, to know what we profess.

But I wonder – I worry – that we are so individualist that the personal statement is just that: a personal vision, squeezed and pushed into the different shape that may be acceptable for a job.

Dancing above the hollow place

…will do to start me off on a brief visit to the spirituality represented in Le Guin’s first three Earthsea stories.

And let me start with three sources, rather than end with references:

Paul Reps representation of classic Zen texts in Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, linked here
Alan Watts’ Tao, the Watercourse Way, linked here
And the text itself of the Tao Te Ching, which exists in a number of different versions and translations into English – this one, for example, and this one.

And by saying, as if it needed saying, that I am no Zen master or Taoist scholar. I cannot begin to explore the riches of these great traditions. I might be the scholar of spirituality that the early expression of Christian monasticism dismisses as someone who “has filled his window with books.”

So let’s look at Earthsea. In the first book, A Wizard of Earthsea, Le Guin describes how Ged, the boy who will be at the centre of all three stories, is recognised by the wizard Ogion, and struggles to make sense of his desire to “learn, to gain power,” when Ogion will not even use magic to stop them getting wet. Silence is key to Ged’s learning, but so also is a simple life. It reminded me of the apprenticeship of a young Buddhist with a mountain hermit, where the apprentice asks about the Buddha-nature and the master responds with instructions about tea, or rice. Ged’s choice of action and scholarship as a Mage in the city/college of Roke colours his life in the next books, to the point where there is a wistfulness about his return to his ageing master in the third book – a wistfulness, and something akin to the tension Herman Hesse explores in Narziss and Goldmund, and The Glass-Bead Game (The desert-and-a-city is also a fundamental tension in the early Christian monastic developments in Egypt, where “going back to the city” is a recurring problem, and word-and-silence a theme throughout the great recounting of the sayings of the desert monastics).

But when we come to the Tombs of Atuan, we are, perhaps, more in the labyrinth of Jungian mapping of the subconscious. The protagonist, Tenar, discovers herself, or she discovers the nature of her role as the Eaten One, the priestess of the claustrophobic temple above a dark labyrinth, and then meets the questing Mage, Ged. This is not a master and apprentice relationship as in Book 1, but an uncomfortable negotiation that leads to liberating Tenar to “a vast, clear, wintry sky, a vast barren, golden land of mountains and wide valleys.” As she watches Ged she realises that

Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.

It is the same idea, maybe, as Thomas Merton’s lines

…to be ordinary is not a choice:

It is the usual freedom

Of men without visions.

And the very Le Guin-like pondering of R S Thomas:

…is man’s

meaning in the keeping of himself

afloat over seventy thousand

fathoms, tacking against winds

coming from no direction

going in no direction?

But here we are the heart of the difficulties of very deep spiritual experiences: that there is both enlightenment and no enlightenment, vision and no vision. The night in Ged’s boat, Lookfar, shows Tenar

a vaster darkness… There was no end to it. There was no roof. It went on out beyond the stars. No earthly Powers moved it. It had been before light, and would be after. It had been before life, and would be after. It went on beyond evil.

Is Le Guin referring to the Tao? The core message of the Heart Sutra? No roof, no obstacle, the destroyer of all suffering the incorruptible truth? Maybe I overstate my case, or maybe I’m just jumping the gun.

In The Farthest Shore, the ageing Mage, Ged, has a number of statements very close to classic Taoism. The Chinese links are reinforced by the changing power relationships around the dragons: none of the terrible creatures in Le Guin’s world are really like Qinglong or the other traditional dragons, but the connection seems important: in Earthsea they are also sources of ancient wisdom and magic. They are as necessary in Earthsea as in the heavens of the Jade Emperor.

The Farthest Shore is already a special text for me, and I know I will read it again. This is partly because of the episode below, and the ways that master and pupil interact, lose sight of one another, face doubt and pain and come to their understanding of their lives together. I know this is simply a personal matter, but in terms of tonight’s blog post it has some relevance. For me the most meaningful episode is the confrontation and reconciliation that occurs when the youth Arren recognises his despair as he discusses his all-but abandonment of his hero, Ged. The stricken hero effects the reconciliation with a resounding rhetoric:

…This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.

The dance above the emptiness, the Yin and Yang. The wording echoes the song that starts the first book, which the boy Arren then sings when the summer ritual falters, and brings us back to the silence of meditation.

There is much, much more, of course: Farthest Shore is a moving, insightful Pilgrim’s Progress around society’s attitude to death, for one thing, but for this blog this will have to do for the lyrical prose about self-discovery. I am sailing too close to the Argus posters of the 70s.

There is, however, one, much more explicit, Taoist link, in Ch 4. The reader begins to understand what might be in store as Ged, the understanding and compassionate leader whose decisions will take Arren into danger and death (yes, there are shades of Dumbledore and Harry, or rather we might check off another source for Rowling), sees the youth’s future as king. He talks to the youth of kingship and its role in the Earthsea world:

We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence we must not act in ignorance. Having choice we must not act without responsibility. Who am I – though I have the power to do it – to punish and reward, playing with men’s destinies?

[…] I will continue to do good, and to do evil … But if there were a king over us all again, and he sought counsel of a mage, as in the days of old, and I were that mage, I would say to him: My lord, do nothing because it is righteous, or praiseworthy, or noble, to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do, and which you cannot do in any other way.’”

Powerful. Compare these extracts from the Tao Te Ching:

[37] If kings and the nobilities can abide by their true nature and follow the great Tao, All things shall be reformed naturally. If during the process of reform, desires arouse. I shall overcome with the simplicity of original nature. With the simplicity of true nature, there shall be no desire. Without desire, one’s original nature will be at peace.

[46] The greatest crime is to have too much desire. The greatest disaster is not to find contentment. The greatest mistake is to desire for endless possession. Hence, when one is gratified with self-contentment, True contentment can then long endure.

Le Guin puts her hero Ged into questing and travelling narratives, and while the wandering scholar is at home in Buddhism and Taoism, it would be misleading to ignore the Tao Te Ching when it says

[47]…there is no need to leave the house to take journey in order to know the world. There is no need to look outside of the window to see the nature of Tao.

To end the post. If we understand there are religious/philosophical influences here, how might it warn the reader to read carefully? I find the points at which Le Guin seems to lay bare a theological approach based on Buddhism/Taoism (I am very aware they are not the same) almost at the same level as C S Lewis lays bare in Narnia a Western Christian cosmology. If this is the key to Le Guin’s world as Anglican Christianity is to Narnia, then it is more than an oriental wallpaper, and needs to be treated with as much regard.

Forsaken

Among the rich threads of thinking in Rick Greene’s latest blog is his account of his own Tolle Lege: I won’t impinge on his post by doing more than pointing to the My God, My God why have you forsaken me? It is a well placed stroke, well written – unlike this, which is just a personal ramble, with no answer.

And I just wanted to add something to that intimation of loss. March is, for me, Theo time, when I remember the little boy who we waited for, and watched grow, and who in the end came and went in a day: born 20th March, died 21st, 2000. We can do the folklore: a child of the eclipse, a child of the vernal equinox. We can do the grief, the anger, the bewilderment.

Today, however, with Lent beginning and the dreadful news of so many children buried in a common grave in Tuam, it was too confused in my mind to make sense of. I am gobby, and it is unusual that words fail me, but I could not finish my bidding prayer at Mass. It was a poor show, a lack of human compassion for all those girls, and for the institutional callous indifference, and for all that human loss. How many children were lost, and died sick or frightened, how many mothers lost and angry and disempowered and bewildered? The only consolation- and it is a thin gruel – was that as I stumbled to silence I looked up at the big, modern cross at the back of church and found that silence echoed back. My silence. Theo’s silence. All his brothers and sisters put away like so much landfill, and then (and now) the sisters’ own silence.

So here’s a blog post that goes nowhere, but which I’m going to post tonight. Tomorrow we go – finally – to see a stone carver to ask for a headstone that reflects the sermon at Theo’s funeral, from Bede’s account of the conversion of the North:

Cuius suasioni uerbisque prudentibus alius optimatum regis tribuens assensum, continuo subdidit: ‘Talis,’ inquiens, ‘mihi uidetur, rex, uita hominum praesens in terris, ad conparationem eius, quod nobis incertum est, temporis, quale cum te residente ad caenam cum ducibus ac ministris tuis tempore brumali, accenso quidem foco in medio, et calido effecto caenaculo, furentibus autem foris per omnia turbinibus hiemalium pluuiarum uel niuium, adueniens unus passerum domum citissime peruolauerit; qui cum per unum ostium ingrediens, mox per aliud exierit. Ipso quidem tempore, quo intus est, hiemis tempestate non tangitur, sed tamen paruissimo spatio serenitatis ad momentum excurso, mox de hieme in hiemem regrediens, tuis oculis elabitur. Ita haec uita hominum ad modicum apparet; quid autem sequatur, quidue praecesserit, prorsus ignoramus. Unde si haec noua doctrina certius aliquid attulit, merito esse sequenda uidetur.’

The text – and more – appear in translation and with comment in Eleanor Parker’s wonderful blog. We have asked for a sparrow for the headstone. The image of one sparrow feels like it stands for so many sparrows, in one window and out the other. Talis vita hominum, such is the life of men.

Still no answer.

Difficult Spiritual Experience and Landscape

One of the reasons I suspect beautiful waterfalls and so on are attractive when people (including me) talk about spirituality is that they exalt but do not challenge. The Great Bell Chant by Thich Nhat Hanh is a wonderful example of a series of pictures and text that mostly show natural beauty – “the beautiful child appears in the heart of the lotus flower.” [3’23”] – waterfalls from a great height, whales, then Masai leaping, monks walking. But pay attention to the children at around 5’15” and see where they are, what they are doing. Meditation is about truth. Thick Nhat Hanh has worked with the war refugees from his homeland: Boat People who saw the same crippling suffering we see in the refugees from Syria, from Africa. In the same way, in the Great Bell Chant there are children gleaning from a rubbish tip. This is not comfortable living for people who want to Zen their home – however much I look enviously at their photos of libraries, sunrooms, bathrooms!

In the same way, the film that reduced me to tears last night has an ambiguity: when I sit in a comfortable cinema, watching expensive SFX and carefully coached acting and think about the anger of grief and loss, I spectate a deep – but hugely uncomfortable and potentially damaging – spiritual experience. So there’s my disclaimer. In reading A Monster Calls and seeing the film many people will be challenged. The critics were ambivalent. Variety didn’t like it; their advert-heavy review linked here says “we’ve heard the same lesson countless times before in other movies” (I’d disagree, but it shows the tone of their review), others refer to a “cheap tear-jerker” but Rotten Tomatoes is at least somewhat warmer. So it is on the level of the protagonist’s experience rather than the success of the book or film that I want to ask these questions:

Can a spiritual experience be damaging? Can trauma be a spiritual experience?

There are a number of gnomic statements we might at least look at here: “The best way out is always through,” “We learn through suffering,” etc., and it is Philip Sheldrake in Spirituality and History who really pulls these to pieces for me in considering spirituality in a post-Holocaust era. Spirituality, when it is at its most genuine, confronts pain. The easy inspirational poster draws on the spirituality-laden themes of waves and whales, maybe, but can we tell Patrick Ness’ protagonist Conor these things, as he struggles with his nightmare, facing the ravaging decline of his mother? Will the poster help the war child?

This is where the earlier editions of A Monster Calls are so powerful: the illustrations (echoed in the film) show a menacing creature, full of earth and storm and history and danger, from the grasping hands of the half-title page and the stalking wildman of the cover. This is a Lud-like demigod, who shows no mercy at one level but in a deeper way is the psychopomp who leads Conor through the death he has to face. And the message this creature brings to suffering Conor is simple beyond a motivational poster’s reach: “If you speak the truth, you will be able to face whatever comes.”

Misappropriated, mishandled, a spiritual experience might well be damaging. It is open to willful or stupid misinterpretation (as Teresa of Avila discovered); it is open to manipulation even (almost) to the point of murder as Katharina von Hohenzollern discovered; it is open to the demagogue, the cruel, the convincing psychopath. In this sense, it can be damaging. There is another sense, too, in that someone who is misled might move to convince themselves – to allow themselves to be convinced by that cruel demagogue – to hurt others, to despise them. And sometimes the urge is simply to give up on them. The Headmistress after Conor attacks his bully sums this last position up in her first words: “I don’t even know what to say.” They reminded me of my tutor’s comment on my weekly test at University when I came back from my mother’s funeral: Forgiven for this week. He didn’t even know what to say – and maybe neither did I. How does anyone come back from something huge and have something to say? At best, perhaps, we can say that spiritual experience is like any experience: it has a yesterday and a tomorrow.

Or perhaps it has, rather, an inside and an outside: an enclosed and controllable aspect, and the wild, Ent-like, elemental rage Kathleen Raine (whom I quote more here) so vividly depicts in her Northumbrian sequence:

The storm beats on my window-pane,

Night stands at my bed-foot,

Let in the fear,

Let in the pain,

Let in the trees that toss and groan,

Let in the north tonight.

This spiritual experience (of loss, of choice, of change) is going to change the boy Conor forever. He is left (more or less) without a father and without this magic (is that the right word?) spiritual guide: the losses he sustains are huge. The reason this traumatic loss of so much is – we guess – not going to damage him, is this lesson he learns at the end: “All you have to do is tell the truth.”