That was about my feeling, in that hour. Because I loved this Guy with the whole of me, anything that happened, or did not happen, would depend wholly on what He wanted, and did not matter to me at all.

was an enormous

But the most remarkable thing. as I remember all this afterward feeling that this Guy wanted and needed me fully as much as I wanted Him, and was as completely mine as I was His.

From that very hour on, life began taking on a different turn for me by very slow degrees, at first and then suddenly, in a way that solved a whole slew of problems. overnight.

I had stumbled, you see, by sheer accident or was it? onto some realization of what the First Commandment was really talking about.

I'm sure a Freudian psychologist would raise alarmed eyebrows over that bus-ride. matter. But then, the Freudians have plumbed so shallowly into the psyche, have discovered nothing more than the first level down. C. G. Jung would view that experience quite differently. Many a Catholic priest would understand it very well, in terms of the religious ecstasy recounted in endless Catholic annals. A Hindu familiar with Bhakti Yoga might say that a First Step had been taken. As our own Claude Bragdon has put it:

Yoga is that endless and all-absorbing love affair with God to which all others are initiatory this mystical experience partakes of the nature of sex-intoxication. There is nothing with which we can better compare the mystic union of the finite with its infinite ambivient than the self-oblivion of earthly lovers locked in each others' arms, where 'each is both'.

Introduction to Yoga, Knopf, 1933

s between man and God much as between man and mana great love relationship has in it many elements; there can be the ecstasy as between lovers absolutely equal, such as Bragdon mentions; there is also the Big Brother-Little Brother relationship; there is the Father-son relationship; and all interweave and enrich each other. In the Song of Solomon, God is always as the great Lover who brings gifts; in David's 23rd Psalm, as the Leader who guides; in the New Testament as the Father whom one may ask for what he needs. "Ask and ye shall receive". And no qualification is written into that promise, please note. It requires no belief in a single dogma. "If a son should ask bread of any of you that is a father, would you give him a stone?"

came

I said that things changed after this. The fact is that within a few months a miracle if that is the right word for a key event which you cannot personally raise a finger to make happen, which is completely improbable under all circumstances you can see, and which you still have asked God to bring about.

Perhaps I can not say better what I tried to say at the start. Religious experience (as I stumbled on it) starts with meeting a Power in the psyche which is not one's self, and wholly transcends the selfyet a Power that must be felt deep in the heart and loved there, before it also lights our sky, and transforms our world.

Why it is that we do not begin to realize the care of God for us, until we have first found a way to love God, I do not know.

Now I should like to retrace my steps a little, in sympathy with those who point to the world around and say that a God of Love is incredible. I couldn't even conceive of such a God in my 'teens when I sometimes even had to eat my rations with my hands encrusted with blood -the dead blood of guys like me who were lying around in pieces and remnants, and

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