Spirit of Unbounded Life: A Reflection for Easter

"When we were freed of all that oppressed us, and gave ourselves to the Holy One, the moon smiled, the waters laughed, the mountains skipped like rams and the hills like young sheep. What tickled you, moon, that you smiled? O waters, that you giggled? You mountains that skipped like rams and you little hills like young sheep? It was nature’s glad notice of the liberation of her offspring and a welcoming of her children home." Psalm 114 reimagined by Christine Robinson

The Franciscan priest Richard Rohr wrote about four layers of meaning – my story, our story, other stories, the story. THE story is the pattern that is always true. This universal pattern is the story of life, death and rebirth, and today I would like to share some of that story through my story and another story – that of the Orcadian poet Edwin Muir (1887 – 1959) – whose life seems to mirror my own in many ways. These reflections on Muir's story are based on the last chapter of The Great Search by John Philip Newell.

Muir spent his childhood on Wyre in Orkney, a tiny island, populated by only a few farming families. There was no church on the island and often the weather was too rough to risk the boat journey to the neighbouring island for church. Sundays were centred around a sabbath meal and his father would read the bible to the children in the evening. In his autobiography, Muir describes an early spiritual experience of light, writing, “The sense of deep and solid peace has come back to me since only in dreams. This memory has a different quality from any other memory in my life. It was as if, while I lay watching that beam of light, time had not yet begun.”

I grew up on a farm in Warwickshire; not as remote as the ones on Wyre, but our lives similarly centred around the land and occasional church-going. I did not find God in church, but in the beauty of the natural world and in the human heart. The first spiritual experience I remember was on Rousay, the neighbouring island to Wyre, on a family holiday when I was about 11 years old. It happened in a chambered tomb, and I felt a deep sense of peace and a strong connection, stretching back in time, to the first farming people who had lived and buried their dead there thousands of years earlier.

When Muir was 14 years old, disaster struck the family when his father's health failed and they had to give up the farm on Wyre. In 1901 they moved to the slums of Glasgow. Within two years, his father, mother and two of his brothers died of tuberculosis. Muir had a succession of office jobs, which he hated. His childhood faith deserted him and he became despondent. He wrote, “Something in me was buried and I was only half there as I worked in the office.. I felt that I had gone far away from myself.” 

My grandmother died when I was 17, which hit me very hard. I struggled with an eating disorder and felt lost. I then moved to the city of Leeds to go to university. I studied comparative religion and felt that my own spiritual quest had been buried in my academic study. Continuing to feel lost, I began a self-destructive path of “partying” hard at weekends, just about holding down a succession of unsatisfying office jobs.

In 1918, Muir was introduced to Willa Anderson. They fell in love, married the following year, and moved to London, where Edwin started working as a literary reviewer. He began having Jungian therapy, and in exploring the shadow side of dreams, he reawakened a sense of the flow of interconnection between all things, which he described as his “original vision of the world.. the sky fitted the earth and the earth the sky.”

I met my husband, Jason, in 2000, and he has been my beloved constant companion through thick and thin. We moved to Manchester together for work. A few years later, a breakdown in a professional relationship in my job at the University of Manchester led to a breakdown in me and I was signed off work for six weeks. My healing began with a combination of therapy and going for long walks along the river, which helped reawaken my sense of the divine presence in nature and in my own soul. 

Edwin and Willa Muir began translating the works of Franz Kafka together. In the early 1920s they travelled around Europe, and when they returned to Britain, Muir began publishing his poems. They settled in St Andrews, had a child, and made good friends among the academic community. In 1939 Willa became ill. While she was in hospital, Edwin had a profound spiritual experience, which he describes in his autobiography, “I suddenly found myself reciting the Lord's Prayer in a loud and emphatic voice – a thing I had not done for many years – with deep urgency and profound disturbed emotion. While I went on, I grew more composed. As if it had been empty and craving and were being replenished, my soul grew still; every word had a strange fullness of meaning which astonished and delighted me... I realised that this simple petition was always universal and always inexhaustible, and day by day sanctified human life.”

Once I began to explore my own spirituality again, I began to long for spiritual community. The building I worked in was next door to the Holy Name Roman Catholic Church on Oxford Road, which was open all day, with Mass said every lunchtime. The theology of the Mass did not speak to me, but the quiet, peaceful atmosphere of the church did, and so I began to pray and meditate there. Then, one day at home, while making dinner, I cut my finger badly with a knife. At A&E the doctor said I would most likely lose the tip of my finger. The next day, I went to the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes in the church and lit a candle. I prayed for healing and promised that I would dedicate my life to the divine. My finger did heal and so I began to wonder if there was a church somewhere that would be right for a heretic like me.

Muir's faith was not simply a reawakening of his childhood Christianity, but was rooted in his own experience of the presence of God. He wrote to a friend in 1940, “I have faith, but I cannot accept the doctrines of any church.” Muir began to weave this experience of the divine presence in the human soul into his poetry. In the last decade of his life, his career flourished. He was appointed Visiting Professor of English at Harvard, then Bristol, and was Director of the British Council in Prague, then Rome.  He finishes his autobiography with the words, “As I look back on the part of the mystery which is my own life... what I am most aware of is that we receive more than we ever give; we receive it from the past, on which we draw with every breath, but also – and this is a point of faith – from the Source of the mystery itself, by which religious people call Grace.”

In 2013 my friend moved from London to Manchester. As I went to visit her in her new home, I walked past the sign for Chorlton Unitarian Church. It said, “a liberal religious community, united by the search for the divine in us all, in a spirit of love and respect.” That sounded exactly what I was looking for, so I went to the Sunday service, and the rest, as they say, is history. I knew from my first visit that I had found my spiritual home and community. Gradually I discerned a call to ministry. The Christian and the Pagan in me are reconciled. My life flourishes in our beloved community.

Looking back at my spiritual journey so far, I see the same patterns of dying and rising, of life, death and rebirth, that I see everywhere – in the story of Edwin Muir, in the story of Jesus, in the yearly cycles of the earth. For this is the pattern that is always true. Death and resurrection happen to us all, over and over again. The power of the story of Jesus lies in its universality. 

Edwin Muir and I were both liberated from the prison or tomb of our suffering through love, both human and divine. It is love that heals us, love that puts us right, love that sets us free. The love of God, we are told, healed and freed Jesus even from death. Love is stronger than death. The Spirit of Unbounded Life is always breaking free, breaking the chains of fear, that we may we come home to our true selves in Love. 

May we share our love, working for the liberation of all oppressed people everywhere, who fear for their safety and their lives. May we join in the divine work of putting the world right, even when this work seems impossible, for we know that with Love, everything is possible. For as the doctor and novelist Abraham Verghese wrote, “Faith is to know the pattern is there, even when none is visible.”

My favourite poem by Edwin Muir is A Birthday, published in 1946,

"I never felt so much

Since I have felt at all

The tingling smell and touch

Of dogrose and sweet briar,

Nettles against the wall,

All sours and sweets that grow

Together or apart

In hedge or marsh or ditch.

I gather to my heart

Beast, insect, flower, earth, water, fire,

In absolute desire,

As fifty years ago.

Acceptance, gratitude:

The first look and the last

When all between has passed

Restore ingenuous good

That seeks no personal end

Nor strives to mar or mend.

Before I touched the food

Sweetness ensnared my tongue;

Before I saw the wood

I loved each nook and bend,

The track going right and wrong;

Before I took the road

Direction ravished my soul.

Now that I can discern

It whole or almost whole,

Acceptance and gratitude

Like travellers return

And stand where they first stood."