Stirling Campbell:
She is a fascinating figure I'd love to know more about. I'd love to hear more of your anecdotes about her Tim. It is interesting that she worked so hard to try to fit her insight into such a fixed worldview.
Tim Farrington:
She always insisted on her orthodoxy as a Catholic, and that's her story and she stuck with it to the end, but in most other eras of the Church, she would have been dead or in a dungeon.
I am trying to dig up the 5-page letter in which she tore me a new spiritual asshole from heel to cap. It is a brilliant summary of the basic John of the Cross teachings on the dark night, as well. But Jesus, that woman packed a punch. Gotta love that.
“The awakened mind is turned upside down and does not accord even with the Buddha-wisdom.”
- Hui Hai
brilliant, yes, exactly. What she found wasn't supposed to be there.
In a way it is surprising that she was able to have such an insight at all. Having fixed ideas about what it is you are aiming for can be greatly limiting and turns out to be obviously and hilariously wrong and flawed in the most spectacular ways when seen for what it really is.
That's why she was my rock for 30 years, with John X himself: she knew her shit, inside and out, and she was honest to the point of unbearability. Sort of like, uh, certain people around here, maybe, if certain people had attained enlightenment--- yeah, yeah, "union with God," fucking nit-pickers--- by age 18 or so as a nun in spite of the best efforts of her spiritual director to tell her that what she was doing in her prayer was actually the heresy of Quietism. BR's characteristic capacity to ignore the old bag is utterly typical of her; she was always able to dismiss anyone who obviously didn't have a clue, which of course, as we all know, even the clueless among us, is pretty much everyone.
The other thing is it totally fucking surprised her. She thought union was it, left the convent, got an education and got married and raised four kids, and lived her life "giving love," per God's will, basically. Her thoughts on Christ are fascinating, and could get her killed even today in certain areas of the American South. And then that no-self shit--- told in exquisite phenomenological detail in The Experience of No-Self. She got blown out on a hillside by some monastery in Big Sur or someplace, gate, gate, gate, gone baby gone. And, being BR, she basically said, well, i guess John of the Coss just wasn't as good at this stuff as I am. I think he was, and just kept his mouth shut, prudently. But she is definitely the one with the cajones to say to the world that John of the Cross stopped short.