A second, different kind of experience of Jesus came through a third person. My teacher John Main was a powerful personality. He never used his power to control others’ beliefs or behaviour. But to be near him was certainly to be influenced by what he believed and how he acted. When I first started to train with him my aim was not specifically to know better who Jesus was. That might have been a long-term goal but in the short term I had to begin to iron out my own problems and grow in self-knowledge. Gradually I came to see how deeply central Jesus was to John Main, not just as a religious symbol. I came to see how Jesus lived in John Main’s own person as a living presence, in a personal relationship that was hidden (mysterious) but not secretive. Perhaps this is why to hear John Main read and comment on the scriptures aloud so refined one’s faith. The words rang with the authority of his own experience. He was not always talking to or thinking about Jesus of course. For some religious people John Main was in fact a little too irreverent and worldly. But, from time to time, I would glimpse with awe the depth, intimacy and reality of his faith-filled experience. These insights accumulated and focussed my attention over these formative years. Perhaps this is essentially how all faith is transmitted. I did not at first know what to make of it. I did not seem to feel it experientially myself. But I was not sure. While I was wondering what to do I put the subject of how real Jesus is on hold.
John Main died at fifty-six. The future of his work of teaching Christian meditation, through the small community he had formed, seemed highly precarious. I was at a loss to know what to do except to continue meditating. I was prepared to see everything he had worked for collapse in ruins. What in fact happened reflected the Resurrection experience of the early Christians. The expansion of the meditation community over the following years seemed like a Pentecostal event, the burst of new life in the primitive church. It was often very turbulent too, but palpably a work beyond the power of the individuals concerned. This is not to say that the development of the meditation community was the creation of a new church. In fact the reverse was true. It was rather about the renewal of the existing church. I came to see that after every death there is resurrection. Within every resurrection there is something universal. Individual experience is part of a greater reality. So, the growth of a world-wide community of meditators became for me another seeing and feeling of the elusive but inescapable mystery of Jesus. It was not restricted to particular experiences but was more like the unfolding of a greater single experience. It was personal but in a sense that exposed the illusion of the individual as an isolated, autonomous existence. It grew partly from that relationship with Jesus that I had felt and in some way shared in with John Main.
Over the years the growth of the work he left behind has transformed my sense of the relationship between the living and the dead. For anyone interested in wondering who Jesus is, this question of our relationship with the dead is an important bridge to cross. The fledgeling Christian meditation community became a way to understand Jesus’ promise to his heartbroken disciples that his death did not mean he was abandoning them as they first felt. He would be ‘with them till the end of time’. I began also to understand that what enriches the heart of a person is not exclusive. It can and should be shared. Through others who shared their spiritual journey with me, including their questions, doubts, insights and fidelity, there came the incomparable gift of feeling the life of Jesus working in them, guiding and teaching them with compassionate personal precision. Usually it has been through the lives of others, rather than by focussing on my own experience, that I have seen the truth that he never leaves us.
Human beings will never cease telling stories. Our lives are understood when we narrate them. Similarly we first meet the question of Jesus through the stories we call the gospels. I am grateful for having grown up with them: the wonder of these stories is precisely that they speak to the child and the man. Coming to love them prevented the dogmatic approach to faith from becoming too dry. The Jesus in the stories always seemed more alive than the catechism. This book then is simply another way of telling an old story. It is one that belongs to humanity and so becomes fresher with every telling. The story’s effect on us, not an interpretation we are told to believe, constitutes its deepest meaning. But the story is now also embedded in a tradition of its own making.
In writing this book I found it helpful to refer to a small but highly charged element of my personal history: a small island in Bantry Bay, on the south-west coast of Ireland, where my foremothers came from. The relevance of this to my attempt to understand Jesus in the light of contemporary spirituality and its problem with faith and experience will, I hope, become clear. I hope it makes the book more readable. It should clarify the subtle relationship between imagination and reality, story and truth, past and present.
Mummy, what was Bere Island really like? My questions about it brought it alive and my mother and aunts (my uncles rarely got a word in) had plenty of answers. There were multiple answers to my question and they were nourished by memories kept alive by the art of retelling them. My questions about Jesus seldom met with the same depth and liveliness. It was not in catechisms but in people who seemed to me to genuinely know Jesus that I felt my questions about him could be answered. Gradually I learned to listen to his question for myself.
Reality, like the meaning of good stories, never stops expanding. No answer is final. This itself spells the pain of loss as a condition for growth. When I eventually went to Bere Island I had to disown the fairy-tale image I had formed earlier. There were family stories I heard later which undermined some of the prettier versions I had been given as a child. But in visiting it as an adult the enticing, magical beauty of Bere Island–like faith itself–has not been lost but developed. In a strangely similar way, through all of my life the mystery of Jesus continues its silent expansion.
The Key Question
The Lost Continent of Atlantis or Shangri-La, Treasure Island or the world of Sherlock Holmes, were not more magical to my childhood than Bere Island in Bantry Bay in the County of Cork. I had not much sense of its geography or of the life really lived there but it burned as one of the most luminous centres of my imagination.
My mother was born on the West End of Bere Island in 1916. She left for England at the age of eighteen, married an Englishman and did not return to her place of birth for half a century when I took her back shortly before her death. Yet the relatively small proportion of her life that she and her ten brothers and sisters lived on Bere Island had an enormous and enduring influence. It coloured their imaginations and shaped their characters. It was the womb, or cauldron, of the myths, legends, histories and symbols which helped them, and later their children, articulate the meaning of their lives. I was proud to learn I was related to the kings of Ireland until I later discovered how many kings there were. The stories and legends of the island, of Irish history and particularly of the O’Sullivan Bere clan enlivened our family gatherings on five continents.
Personally, I constructed a wonderful fantasy about Bere Island and about Ireland in general as I grew up in London. It became a personal myth that did not need facts or even much sense of history. I longed to go there and at the age of eleven made a disastrous visit. My first disillusionment was to see electric light on the streets of Dublin as the plane landed. I had expected gaslight and horse-drawn carriages. The problem with Bere Island, when I got there a few days later, was different. It was too primitive and I felt a very self-conscious and adolescent Englishman.
Years later, in my thirties and as a monk, I was drawn back there again for periods of prayer and solitude. Its