JOURNEY TO UNIVERSALISM by Elizabeth Watson © 1991, Quaker Universalist Fellowship

Yet once again in our time our country is at war. That fact underlies all our lives, and our being here today. Those of us who work and pray for peace wonder how it could have happened. When will we ever learn the futility of violence? As I have worked on this paper, it has become clear to me that if those who wield temporal power had made the journey to universalism, they would have found other ways to deal with the problems in the Middle East.

We have all seen the pictures of Earth taken from space. Earth looks like a little blue and white marble in the vastness and darkness. That picture lets us see Earth whole. Battle lines are not visible; national boundaries do not show up on that picture. We see that it is a globe. If lines were drawn on it to separate enemies, and then extended, they would eventually curve back on themselves to form circles that include.

British physicist James Lovelock and U.S. biologist Lynn Margulis looked at that picture and brainstormed the Gaia Hypothesis. ¹ (It was named for the great primordial Greek Earth Mother.) They noted that our planet looks different from the other planets. It is a living planet. They sensed that it is all one living entity, with an innate capacity to regulate conditions for the optimum benefit of all the components. Human interference now threatens the whole delicate ecosystem. And war, of course, accelerates the breakdown of the supportive structure on which our lives depend.

If a critical mass of human beings were to internalize the Gaia Hypothesis, that we are all part of a single living organism, and that when we destroy other humans or other species we destroy part of ourselves, war would become unthinkable.

Apparently it is not enough to know this intellectually. Each of us must make the journey to universalism emotionally, experientially, and spiritually. That road is the last best hope we have. "Nobody else can walk it for us. We have to walk it by ourselves." ²

Sharing our journeys may help us clarify our individual paths and discern the landmarks. The quality of our listening will enable a story teller to articulate more clearly the journey. "We hear each other into speech," as theologian Nelle Morton used to say. ³ We have come together for this purpose, and I have been asked to share my own journey with you.

I want to tell my story in terms of actual travel to three places: Israel, India, and Greece. Early in life I had a sense of spiritual roots in these places. The actual journeys took place fairly late in my life: in 1982, 1983, and 1988, but I had been on pilgrimage intellectually and spiritually most of my life. When the opportunities came to make the journeys, I had clear ideas as to where I must go and what I might see. The terrain was familiar. How far back do my journeys go? I began my pilgrimage to the Holy Land, as I called it, in childhood. Israel did not yet exist as a modern state. In high school, India became another spiritual home. And in college I found I also had spiritual roots in Greece. In each place a feeling of coming home confirmed my long sense of spiritual rootedness.

When I was seven, I felt called to the ministry, a sense of being set aside for something holy. This had determined not only the inner events of my life, but to some extent outward ones as well. My concept of ministry has grown and changed during the years.

I grew up a Methodist, a devout Christian. My loyalty to Jesus knew no bounds. Not until high school did I begin to question some of the articles in the Apostles' Creed that I recited each Sunday. From early childhood I have been a Bible reader. I knew the map of Palestine, where events took place, and could trace the journeys Jesus made between Galilee and Judea. For a long time I thought of a Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but by the time George and I went to Israel in 1982, that was much too narrow.

George was assigned to Civilian Public Service in the Second World War, without pay or dependents' allotments. Our three pre-school children and I returned to a settlement house in Chicago where George and I had lived and worked during our graduate school days. An understanding head resident and a supportive staff were there for me. The children and I had two rooms and a bath on the top floor of the main building. I worked for our board and room and they attended a day nursery affiliated with the house. In the two rooms next to ours lived a young staff couple, Gerhard and Ruth Neubeck, newly arrived from Nazi Germany. They had a four year old son, the same age as our eldest daughter. The children became inseparable friends.

At first Gerry and Ruth kept their distance. They could not imagine anyone being a conscientious objector in the war against Hitler, but before long they lost their reserve, and their proximity, along with their love and support, kept me going.

The night the war in Europe ended, the three of us went downtown. The crowds were jubilant but subdued. Many had lost loved ones. My brother had been killed in the south Pacific. Late in the evening we dropped into a restaurant for coffee. Ruth and Gerry began to share in great depth all they had lost: relatives, friends, homes, jobs, country, language. They talked of living with fear day and night, the nightmare of getting out and leaving loved ones behind. So deep was this experience that I said to them that from that time on part of me would look out on the world through Jewish eyes. And so it has been.

The war in the Pacific finally ended. George came home and found a job. The Neubecks and we left the settlement house for homes of our own. We have kept in touch over the years.

In grade school our son had a best friend, a boy named Isaac Bonder whose father was a rabbi--not a reform rabbi but a conservative one. This family kept a kosher kitchen. Ruth, the mother, was a social worker for a Jewish agency. Several years later, our post-war daughter entered kindergarten, and there was Isaac's sister. These two now became best friends. The families were drawn together. The Bonders' life was undergirded by their faith, as was ours. Ruth and I became close friends. We had Seder with them and attended Isaac's bar mitzvah. Occasionally they attended Friends Meeting with us.

Isaac grew up to be a rabbi, and within two years of ordination, died of leukemia. We lost our eldest daughter in an automobile accident. Grief drew Ruth and me even closer. They made the decision to emigrate to Israel, and left Chicago the same month that we went to Friends World College.

Ten years later, in 1982, George and I visited the Friends World College program in Israel--my chance at last to visit the Holy Land. Ruth asked us to spend two days with them at the beginning of our time there. Our plane arrived in Tel Aviv and we drove to Jerusalem to the Bonders' apartment on the top floor of a new building. When the elevator deposited us there, Ruth led us to the balcony.

The sun was setting. There lay Jerusalem, its golden domes shining in the last rays of the sun, its buildings of native stone turned a luminous rose in that unearthly light. I had expected the city to be beautiful, but I was overwhelmed by this vision of the Holy City: the City of God imposed on the actual earthly city. It will never leave me. Next morning the vision still touched with radiance the actual streets and buildings and people.

After two days we were guests of Artur and Shirley Isenberg, joint directors of the Friends World College Middle East Program, our dear friends and colleagues. They are Israeli doves, critical of their government's aggression and policy in the West Bank. They scrupulously made sure that we saw all the Christian sites in Jerusalem. The sites were disappointing. Each place something had happened, an ornate church or chapel had been erected, so that there was no sense of the original event. Bethlehem turned out to be a tourist trap.

We visited students on project, as far south as desert research centers near Beersheba. Then we drove north along the Mediterranean. We turned eastward in Galilee and about noon came into Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee. We had lunch at a seaside restaurant, eating "Peter's fish," bony but good. Out on the water we saw a few simple fishing boats. I began to catch a glimpse of Jesus walking along the shore.

After lunch, we visited Nazareth, a modern city, and then Capernaum, which is an archeological dig. Until 1894 a Bedouin tribe eked out a poor existence there among the thistles and scrubby plants. Then a Franciscan order bought the land and began to excavate. We went round the site with a knowledgeable guide. He identified a foundation which they think may have been Peter's house. We walked down what had been a street in front of it. Excavation was going on at other sites. At the end of the street were the ruins of a large Byzantine church, beneath which they had found a tile floor, still in very good condition, in which were ancient Jewish symbols. The guide dated it back to the time of Jesus. This was probably the village synagogue where Jesus had healed the man possessed of demons. I took off my sandals, for the place we were standing, beside that ancient floor, was holy ground. I could visualize him preaching there, and then walking down the street, up which we had walked, to Peter's house. Peter's mother-in-law was ill, and Jesus healed her.

On a Sunday we left our friends and took a bus to Ramallah on the West Bank, to attend Friends Meeting and to spend the afternoon with Faud and Jean Zaru. Faud was principal of the Friends Boys School. We learned something of the difficult conditions under which Arabs--Muslim, Christian, Quaker--exist, with no passports, mail coming "via Israel," and all the indignities, restrictions, bars to communication and arbitrary school closings. There was, of course, no communication between the Isenbergs and the Zarus, but the two women sent greetings to each other. Jean hoped Shirley would find a publisher for her book.

Our pilgrimage to Israel brought into focus my journey to universalism. First, at the center, is a deep commitment to the Jesus of the Gospels, and a rejection of the creeds about him. I am glad to be a Quaker, sharing George Fox's vision of "primitive Christianity revived," that is, first century Christianity, before it became established in the Roman Empire, before the creeds were formulated.

Second, there is the inner knowledge that Jesus was a Jew, and that I am not just a Christian but a Judeo-Christian. I also carry the knowledge that just as we dissent from some policies of our government, so there are Israelis of good will who are critical of some of their government's policies.

Third, I feel a deep compassion for all to whom this land is holy, especially for the Palestinians in the West Bank.

And finally I carry with me a vision of the City of God imposed on our own over-crowded, violent, noisy, exciting, secular cities. William Blake also saw that vision. He wrote a beautiful poem about it, which concludes:

I shall not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land. ⁴

--and I add, in all Earth's green and pleasant lands, and likewise in the pleasant brown and desert lands.

The summer I was fourteen, my Methodist Church in Cleveland sent me to a missionary conference at which the main speaker was the wife of the Methodist Bishop of India. He had just resigned, because, he said, he felt it time for an Indian to be the bishop.

His wife was more candid. They had come to know Mohandas K. Gandhi, and felt the inconsistency of trying to make Christians of Hindus, when Hinduism had produced a more Christ-like person than anyone they knew. She was full of Gandhi, and talked of him in her formal addresses and informally afterwards. I was fascinated. Here was someone in our own century who was living out the teachings of Jesus, and on a large scale. I wanted to know more.

I sought out the Bishop's wife at her hotel, and she was generous with her time. She answered my questions, gave me things to read, and promised to send more. She kept in touch with me for years.

At first I was interested in Gandhi because he seemed to me to demonstrate that the teachings of Jesus were workable. I soon came to see that Gandhi was important in his own right.

In time I came to believe that what God had to say to the twentieth century was poured into this little brown lawyer in his loincloth. I wanted to go to India and be his follower. I mentioned this at the dinner table one night and my mother reacted with shocked incredulity. My wise father quietly said, "You don't have to go to India to follow Gandhi, you can follow him here." His words made sense to me. I made the commitment to non-violence at that time. It has underlain my life and George's and our life together.

That fall in high school I took a speech course. When it came my turn to make a formal speech to the class, I talked about Gandhi. The teacher spoke to me afterwards. Gandhi was in the news, he said, and people were curious. Would I make my speech elsewhere. He became my booking agent and I went out all over greater Cleveland, to men's luncheon clubs, women's organizations, church groups, and high school assemblies, carrying Gandhi's story.

After graduation I went to Miami University at Oxford, Ohio. Word of my speaking preceded me, and I was invited to join the University Speakers Bureau to carry the message of Gandhi all over southwest Ohio and eastern Indiana. I do not know how many times I have spoken on Gandhi, but it runs into the hundreds.

I had to read constantly to keep up with Gandhi, for these were momentous days in his career. And as my know ledge of Gandhi grew, so also my interest in all things Indian grew. A bookseller alerted me to new material. One day he put into my hands a small book of poetry, called Gitanjali, by Rabindranath Tagore. ⁵ The word means "song offerings." Here for the first time I found in words my own inner experience of practicing the presence of God. The metaphors and similes might be Bengali, the poet a Hindu, but the poetry rang true, for it was my own experience. Tagore's little book has been my companion for sixty years, a never-failing source of strength.

So I discovered India's other great gift to the world in our century. Interest in Tagore ran parallel to interest in Gandhi. I have actually written more on Tagore than on Gandhi, although I've spoken more often on Gandhi.

I continued to try to be Gandhi's follower. In our early years in Chicago, George and I were involved in the civil rights movement. In the Gandhian tradition, we sat-in in restaurants with black friends. I worked for the Regional Office of the American Friends Service Committee at a time when we were opening up job and housing opportunities. Later I worked for a community organization in a neighborhood turning from white to black. Our goal was a stable interracial neighborhood. We bought a house and raised our family there.

Meanwhile we hoped way would open to go to India. Several times we explored this with the American Friends Service Committee, but each time it fell through, either from their side or from ours.

As our fiftieth wedding anniversary approached, our daughter, Jean McCandless, began to think of some sort of celebration. She had grown up seeing Gandhi's picture on my desk, and knew of my longing to go to India. She and her siblings raised the money for an Indian pilgrimage. We took a year to plan it. And in 1988 we spent six weeks in India.

Our pilgrimage was truly blessed. Everywhere people welcomed us and cared for us. Everywhere extra, unplanned things happened, to enrich our experience, like a village festival in West Bengal, and a visit to the studio of K. B. Patel, the sculptor who did the Gandhi in Union Square in New York City.

We had rail passes, and often ate rather dubious looking things, from vessels that were probably not too clean. We were scrupulous about carrying boiled water with us, however. Neither of us had any gastro-intestinal problems the whole time. We both had a sense of well-being.

We visited ashrams and other places associated with Gandhi. We traveled to some fairly remote places to meet people carrying on in the Gandhi tradition. We spent several memorable days at Tagore's school, Santiniketan, northwest of Calcutta.

We worshipped with various communities after the pattern Gandhi had established. Worship morning and evening was out of doors, with no walls or doors to keep anyone from joining. There were prayers and hymns of all the great religious traditions. So we recited the Lord's Prayer and sang "Lead, Kindly Light" with each group, participating in the other traditions as we could.

On Gandhi's birthday, we sat in silence at the Friends Rural Centre, Rasulia, with a friend of Muslim background. We shared "Lead, Kindly Light" together. Aziz Pabaney will be at Pendle Hill in the Spring Quarter, 1991.

We spent an evening with Jai Gopal Malik, a Friend of Muslim background, and the only Quaker left in New Delhi. He goes each Sunday morning to the Y.W.C.A., hangs out the sign announcing meeting, and if no one comes, meditates in silence for the hour. We spent an evening with him. He is a scholarly man who shared the fruits of his study with us. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, he said, all begin with the fact of God's existence. From that creeds develop. Buddhism begins with the fact of human suffering--universal suffering really--and from that comes compassion.

We visited Vinoba Bhave's ashram, near Wardha, which he left to a group of women who had walked all over India, making contact with women in villages. They manage it now, using consensus decision-making. Some men have joined the group.

One of our richest experiences was with Narayan Desai, son of Mahadev Desai, Gandhi's confidant, secretary, and close friend, who died in prison with his head on Gandhi's lap. Narayan spent his boyhood at Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, and his teenage years at Sevagram Ashram. Gandhi was part of his family. Now he heads the Institute for Total Revolution, a training school for people wishing to carry on Gandhi's work in villages. We visited classes and spoke to the students, with Narayan interpreting, since none of them spoke English. In the evenings he talked of his life with Gandhi. It was history come alive.

Narayan's wife was visiting her sister in Delhi, but he spoke of her with so much love that we felt her presence. She had designed the simple buildings and laid out the plantings of the Institute. At our next stop, the ashram at Ahmedabad, we learned that she had died of a heart attack. We participated in a moving memorial service, which began with chants and prayer and turned into something like a Quaker memorial service, with people speaking out of silence. George was led to speak.

It would take a book to convey something of the richness of the whole experience, and indeed, George and I have just completed writing it. A cousin, into desktop publishing in retirement, is helping us produce it.

From India I carry the experiential knowledge that there are many paths to God, and that among those who are truly seekers, there is no barrier to communication at the deepest level, though we may not speak the same language or worship in the same way.

But mostly India was people. Tagore wrote:

Thou hast made me known to friends whom I knew not;
Thou hast given me seats in homes not my own.
Thou hast brought the distant near and made brothers
and sisters of strangers. ⁶

And Gandhi said,

It is enough for me to see the Light and act up to it, and it is more than enough when I gain companions on the onward journey.⁷

The human race is my family. The planet is my home.

When I entered college, I registered for a class in Greek. I was preparing for the ministry and wanted to read the New Testament in its original language. At the first class session I found I was the only student: for several years, no one had taken Greek. The professor had been teaching Greek art and history and classics in translation. I had expected to take two years of Greek, but the professor was due to retire the year I graduated. How could I leave him with no Greek class? I took a major in Greek.

Professor Clark was a scholar of the old school, steeped in the classics. He had spent much time in Greece and loved the country and its ancient heritage. I was to spend time with this man five days a week for four years. Our relationship became one of deep friendship. I was learning much more than the language.

We read the New Testament together, and we also read Plato, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and much more. As I gained in fluency, I did not have to look up words constantly and could appreciate the flow and sheer beauty of what I read. I came to share my professor's appreciation of the perfection of Greek art, sculpture, and architecture. I came to cherish the Greek ideals of proportion, of beauty and truth.

One day he brought a poem I already knew and loved, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," by John Keats, with its closing lines:

"Beauty is truth; truth, beauty," That is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

We discussed whether this was really true.

Greek mythology also entered my life. I came to love those ancient myths that underlie our Western Civilization. The interaction of mortals with deities--those very human gods and goddesses--spoke deeply to me.

Rilke has a beautiful sonnet about an ancient torso of Apollo which is in the Louvre. He says that this fragment, without head or limbs, is so perfect in itself, so suggestive of the whole, so powerful, that once experiencing it, you will never be the same again. He ends the sonnet abruptly with this line:

...You must change your life. ⁹

My whole experience of majoring in Greek did change my life. Greece was my professor's spiritual home, and it became mine also.

The year George and I were at Woodbrooke, in England, we went to Greece during the winter holiday. Unlike India, where a sense of well-being accompanied us, my Greek experience did not get off auspiciously. Modern Greeks are heavy smokers. On the plane from London, people smoked all over the plane, ignoring the no-smoking section. When we arrived in Athens, we were all funneled into a long line for customs. Everyone but us was smoking. When we finally got to the counter, the official, smoking like a chimney, gave us a hard time, and went through our bags thoroughly. The taxi driver puffed away, and felt it too cold to have a window open. I arrived at the hotel, quite ill, and spent the first few days of our precious time in Greece in bed with pneumonia.

In many ways December is a good time to go to Greece. Air pollution is at a minimum, and tourists are relatively few in number. However, boats do not run to the little islands, so I have unfinished business in Greece.

As soon as I was well enough to be up, we began our sight-seeing. There were only a dozen or so on the huge tourist bus that took us to Delphi on a bright winter day. My sense of excitement grew as we traveled, for the dramatic mountainous countryside seemed somehow familiar. I sensed the configuration of mountains against the sky around each bend in the road.

Delphi was an ancient city at the foot of Mount Parnassus. The mountain has a deep cleft or ravine roughly in the center. At the bottom of the cleft is a cave, with a spring, home of the oracle whom Greeks consulted before making a journey, or a marriage, or a war. The road has been brought in at this level.

This shrine was sacred to Apollo. Scattered on the hillside to the left of the oracle's cave are the ruins of temples and other buildings and a small amphitheater. The guide lined us up to tour the site.

My lungs were not fully healed and I knew I was not up to the climb. I urged George to goon, and I sat down on a marble column that had fallen over, probably centuries before. The stone was slightly warm in the sun and made a comfortable bench.

In addition to not being entirely well yet, I was depressed over a tragedy in the life of one of our daughters. In the course of a bitter divorce, her husband had disappeared with their small son, barely two years old. They had been missing almost a year. ⁹

Suddenly there was a burst of bright bird song, catching my attention and directing it to the right side of the mountain beyond the oracle. Out of that hillside grow many trees; in addition to evergreens, there are aspens, their leaves all golden at this time of year. The wind had set all those golden leaves a tremble. I knew that in Greek mythology this is a sign of the presence of a deity. And then I felt it, that overwhelming sense of Presence, flooding my whole being.

I believe that God comes to us according to our needs: sometimes as a burning bush; sometimes as a stranger asking for a drink of water; sometimes like a father, strong and courageous, standing between us and disaster; sometimes like the comfort of a mother's lap. Do you know Psalm 131, with its haunting line, "My soul is like a weaned child on its mother's lap"?

The Presence I felt at Delphi was unquestionably female. I had a sense of a warmth and comfort, of being gathered into everlasting arms. And I felt assured that wherever our small grandson was, whether alive or dead, he too was held in those arms.

I had been a feminist for some years before I went to Delphi. This experience confirmed for me that God is larger than our human sexuality, and inclusive of both feminine and masculine qualities. Our patriarchal conception of an exclusively male God is too small.

For perhaps four thousand years we have lived in a society in which the qualities generally associated with men have been in the ascendancy: courage, risk-taking, a tolerance of violence, a willingness to assume power over other people for whatever reason, noble or base. The experience of men has been normative for all people. This shows up in our language, job opportunities, and the reduction of women to sex objects in advertising, and consequent violence against women.

Other qualities are generally associated with women: caring, healing, nurturing, and a concern to protect life, particularly young life. These are generalizations, of course. Not all men are violent and greedy for power, and some women are cruel and devious.

The men in my life--grandfather, father, brother, husband, son--have all been supportive of me, and I love them too dearly to want to build a new matriarchal society to replace the patriarchal one that has brought us to the war in the Persian Gulf. However, caring, healing, nurturing, and a concern for life--all these feminine qualities--must become part of our nation's value system, if we arc to save the planet from destruction.

A Jungian analyst, Edward C. Whitmont, reports that a number of his patients, both men and women, are having dreams of an archetypal female figure. ¹⁰ Another Jungian analyst, Marion Woodman, reports a "Black Madonna" and a crone-like figure appearing in the dreams of some of her clients. ¹¹ Both Whitmont and Woodman see this as evidence that we are collectively undergoing a shift of values, and that qualities of tenderness and caring will be coming into ascendancy. In this they see hope of a way out of our global problems.

At Delphi all this was confirmed for me. My journey to universalism is based on the full personhood of each human being. And I experienced the Deity as fully feminine there. But I am sure it is fully masculine too, and with infinite additional possibilities we cannot fathom.

But wait. There is more. I had known for years that long before it was a shrine to Apollo, Delphi had been sacred to the great primordial Earth Mother, as far back as the dawn of human experience. "The navel of the world," the Greeks called the place. I had not yet heard of the Gaia Hypothesis, but I experienced its truth at Delphi. The Presence that enfolded me and comforted me was indeed the Earth Mother. And I knew inwardly that her ability to comfort me grew out of her woundedness.

Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen Buddhist monk, says we must "hear within ourselves the sound of the Earth crying." ¹² I heard it at Delphi. I felt Earth's grief for the oil spills, the destruction of the forests, and all the endangered and extinct species.

At Delphi I committed myself to the whole living planet, and felt oneness with every member of creation. Later reading Lovelock's book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, I knew beyond doubt that he and Lynn Margulis were right.

The Earth Mother came to me a year later, in December 1984, the night before major surgery for cancer. She held out both hands to me. In one was life, and in the other death. I wanted desperately to live, for I have work still to do, but I knew that in the end it did not matter. My body would, sooner or later, go back to the Earth to become part of the ongoing recycling of life. This was a further stage on my journey. Life and death too are a whole.

Thus far I have come on my journey to universalism--my journey to the whole of Earth. With George Fox, my journey has been coming "to walk cheerfully over the earth, answering that of God in everyone."

It has been acknowledging, with Martin Buber, the autonomy of each member of creation by greeting each as Thou. In his beautiful book, I and Thou, he writes movingly of saying "Thou" to trees and to animals. ¹³

The journey to universalism is walking the Indian road, making the Hindu gesture of greeting, and saying, "Namaste," "I greet the God in you."

And it is knowing with Asclepius, the legendary Greek physician, that "only the wounded can heal." We who feel the brokenness of the human family and the woundedness of Earth as our own must be the healers. The fate of the earth is up to those who make the journey to universalism.

And then I go out under the night sky and feel the vastness of the universe, knowing that we live on a satellite of a minor star in one of the countless galaxies of that universe. And I know that the journey is not over. The journey to universalism is a journey to the universe.

1. J. E. Lovelock, GAIA: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford University Press, 1979. See also, Lovelock, The Ages of GAIA: A Biography of our Living Earth. New York, W. W. Norton, 1988; Bantam Paperback, 1990.

2. Quoting the spiritual, "Lonesome Valley."

3. Nelle Morton taught at Drew University, and was the first theologian to teach a university course on women and religion. She was active in movements for peace, human rights and women's liberation, and a mentor to many of the present generation. Her major work is The Journey Is Home, Boston, Beacon Press, 1985. 1 heard her use this phrase at a conference In 1976, and it has been widely used.

4. Final four lines of a poem by William Blake called "Jerusalem," which appears at the beginning of a longer work called "Milton."

5. Rabindranath Tagore. Gitanjali (Song Offerings), a collection of prose translations made by the author from the original Bengali, with an introduction by William Butler Yeats. New York, Macmillan, 1934.

6. Lines from Gitanjali no. 63.

7. From a book called Gandhi: One Hundred Years, published in 1969, in England on the centennial of his birth, p. 239.

8. Rainer Marie Rilke, "Archaischer Torso Apollos," in Neue Gedichte, Anderer Teil. Translated by various people, including M. D. Herter Norton, Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Marie Rilke. New York, W. W. Norton, 1938, p. 1811, and more recently by Robert Bly, Selected Poems of Rainer Marie Rilke, Translation and Commentary, New York, Harper and Row, 1981, p. 136 (commentary), p. 147, (translation).

9. Our daughter lives in Minneapolis. Our grandson was found by the FBI in Atlanta, Georgia in February 1984.

10. Edward C. Whitmont, Return of the Goddess. New York, Crossroads Press, 1982.

11. Common Boundary, March/April 1989. "The Conscious Feminine," an interview with Marion Woodman by Barbara Goodrich-Dunn, "The feminine in many guises--like the Black Madonna and the Crone--is erupting in individuals the world over."

12. Thich Nhat Hanh is quoted as saying this in John Seed, Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming and Arne Ness, Thinking Like a Mountain, Philadelphia, New Society Publishers, 1988, p.7.

13. Martin Buber, I and Thou, translated by Walter Kaufman. New York, Scribner, 1970.