AN EXPERIENCE OF CONTEMPLATION*
Fortunato Castillo
There are experiences that resist being translated into words, as they arise from those depths of our being which are, ultimately, out of reach, because they are eternal and infinite. Mystic writers, through the ages, have nevertheless endeavoured to leave records of their “face to face” contemplative encounters, even though their reflection may appear as if “through a glass, darkly.”
Aldous Huxley1 establishes a difference between “adoration” which “is an activity of the loving but still separate individuality” and “contemplation” which “is the state of union with the divine Ground of all being”. I imagine that our experiences as Quakers in the meeting for worship, seldom reach the heights of contemplation. Indeed a Friend has told me that we should be grateful if this particular form of mystical awareness is allowed to us three or four times in our lives.
On the Yearly Meeting Sunday, at Lancaster, last year we were given the opportunity of visiting several of the meetings in the historical Quaker country. I was fortunate enough to be taken to Swarthmoor Meeting. Swarthmoor meeting house is one of the oldest in England, and my knowledge that George Fox had worshipped there made me shudder with reverence on entering its portals—as if the vibrations of centuries of gathered worship under its roof could be physically perceived.
Prior to my visit to Swarthmoor, the atmosphere at the Yearly Meeting had been most stirring. After the most moving Saturday evening address a Friend had spoken, in the silence, of the miracle of our worship and our Quaker heritage. The Yearly Meeting, also, like the walls of a contemplative monastery, had protected, contained and encouraged my daily worship in silence. I felt, therefore, privileged on entering the meeting at Swarthmoor, because of my silent worship every day during the yearly gathering—and my two previous days in our midweek meetings at Westminster. I was thankful, as well, because this was the second week of my annual summer holiday and I had started to relax after a period of hectic and demanding professional work. When I was going to start my worship, at the Swarthmoor Meeting, on Sunday August 13th, I felt, therefore, a rare feeling of peace, within and without, and a profound sense of my identity as a Quaker.
Before the period of worship started, I walked around greeting the local members and exploring the place. I then realized that the local members were observing me—I am, after all, a non-English Friend. It was a kind gesture which I interpreted as their pondering that George Fox had gathered Friends even across the seas. I was deeply moved.
Then the meeting began. I thought that my ancestors would have marveled at being there: worshipping in silence at George Fox’s own meeting. I shook a little and tears streamed from my eyes. I took off my glasses and—because of my myopia and the tears—I imagined that, perhaps, the man in the facing bench could be George Fox, and the woman across, my aunt, the Quaker genius of the family. I felt even more overcome.
Then a fly started buzzing around us and I felt its noise distracted me. Why, I wondered, didn’t the local members prepare so as to avoid distractions on this very special day? But the buzzing sound gradually diminished; it became the noise in my ears of the circulation of the blood of my tympani. Sometimes in deep meditation this sound becomes like a reaching upwards: as if I could fly in its wings to God.
A bird sang outside the window. I thought of Tagore’s poetic description of our Quaker worship when he speaks of us coming to meeting as turbulent muddy water; then the dirt gradually falls to the bottom, the water becomes clear, and the light can shine through it. The bird was still singing and the wind made a sound in the leaves of the trees outside the meeting house.
Then I ceased thinking. The singing of the bird had infused the morning with tenderness. I brought a handkerchief once more to my eyes. The buzzing was now in the heart. I opened my eyes and the whole place was radiant: as if I could perceive the worshipful vibration of every atom around me. Time also ceased and, with awe, my mind became aware of eternity: this moment in time was forever. If I die now, I thought, I have become aware of God. Nobody can take that away from me, ever.
Maybe my moment of enlightenment, I can think now, was reminiscent of the picture The Presence in the midst. I had not, however, seen the image of Jesus as such: He was within each one of us in the profoundly gathered meeting, in every object around us, in the air, in all things. I started thinking again. The contemplative experience had only lasted a short time, one or two minutes, perhaps. A poem by Gabriela Mistral, the Chilean poet, came into my mind. It speaks about children holding hands in a circle, dancing and singing. Suddenly they become silent. They realize Jesus is in the centre of their ring. “All hands press each other, press each other trembling … He has entered the circle without a murmur and at its centre there is radiance.”
After my experience there were spoken messages: appropriate and meaningful. Nevertheless the experience that I had undergone was, essentially, one that cannot be expressed in words. The experience is now part of my life. I have been able to recapture it when I close my eyes at night, for example, and want a restful sleep; or when I am ill at ease or troubled and want some peace. Repeatedly I am reminded, recalling my experience of contemplation, of Jesus’ offer to the woman of Samaria (John 4, 14): “But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.” This is the same passage where Jesus also said (John 4, 24): “God is a Spirit: and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.”
As opposed to other pleasurable or life-enhancing experiences in my life, there was no feeling of hang-over; there was no disappointment that it had ceased; it did not have the perilousness and precariousness of other human joys. Other moments of rapture in my life, the joys of sex, or of holding one’s small children in one’s arms and overflowing with tenderness towards them, great artistic performances, the pleasures of total sharing with a friend, wonder at the sight of the beauty of nature are, I feel, like the spokes of a wheel leading to the nob of the contemplative experiences, or like the waters of the world which come and go, ultimately, to the seas.
Perhaps when the early Quakers spoke of the sacramental quality of each act of their lives they were referring to the reverberations, in their every day activities, of the awareness of God in their meeting for worship.
I would like to end with two quotations: Aldous Huxley again from The perennial philosophy: “Some Catholic writers have regarded contemplation (the highest form of which is the unitive knowledge of the Godhead) as man’s final end.” And St. John of the Cross, the Spanish mystical poet describing one of his own contemplative experiences:
Lost to myself I stayed
From all endeavour ceasing:
And all my cares releasing
Threw them amongst the lilies there to fade.2
*Reprinted from Quaker Monthly, March, 1979.
1. Aldous Huxley, The perennial philosophy. Chatto, 1974, p. 259.
2. Poems of St. John of the Cross. Trns. by Roy Campbell. Collins, 1953.
FORTUNATO CASTILLO, Clerk of London and Middlesex General Meeting, is a psychiatrist who works with both adults and children. He gave the Friends General Conference Rufus Jones Lecture in 1974 on “Aggression and Hostility in Quaker Families”; and was leader of a conference of the West Coast Quaker Association on Religion and Psychology, speaking on “The Dark Side of Quakerism, What Do We Do About It?”