Many Lights of Inspiration
An Outtake from a Forthcoming Book
In this post, I would like to explore the sources of inspiration for my writings through an imaginative evocation of the vanished worlds that have shaped my contemplative practice and thought over the last six decades. First of all chronologically was the sensation of light and balance that overcame me as I walked through the Brooklyn Museum as a child, and I felt mentally unified for the first time with the values of classical antiquity in the Mediterranean ecumene. I don’t know why I sensed this then, but it may have been suggested by the Beaux-Arts and neoclassical architecture of the vast building and its capacious halls through which I was passing, and perhaps I saw the names of Aristotle and Plato and other touchstones of European sagacity under the carved figures, which stand atop numerous columns in the building’s façade and in its imposing tympanum. Later, when I first began to learn ancient Greek and Latin, I felt as if my mind had touched immortality. Whenever I read Plotinus or Aristotle or Plato or Boethius—even if this reading is now usually assisted by translations—this suave light of the properly ordered humanism of Hellenistic antiquity still floods my mind with its restorative rays.
Close to these sensations but irradiated with the divine light refracted through the translucent panels of stained-glass windows is the light that shines upon my mind from the solemn and soaring sanctuaries of my Catholic childhood in Brooklyn. What I glimpsed there, I perceived more clearly later in Europe in the meditative ambience of countless cathedrals, in the contented continuities of ancient monastic foundations, and in the unhurried calm of the contemplative life brooding in the old cloisters of medieval Catholicism.
And then another light, one so central to my life now for more than a half a century, is that which shines out of the ashrams of ancient India and from the Upaniṣads and the Bhagavadgītā. This light was taken from India to the rest of the world beginning in the late 1800s, where it has inspired religious pluralism, comparative religion, vegetarianism, meditation, deep spirituality, interest in deities outside the old European pantheons, and yoga. This light shines benevolently on me and serenely assures me that nothing is outside of the divine, of Brahman, and that the whole of life will in time be resolved into its blissful and everlasting awareness.
I first caught a glimpse of the sober light of the critical and quantifying mind of the modern university on the oval of The Ohio State University as an undergraduate there. Something of the confidence of nineteenth-century science lingered in the halls and laboratories overlooking the vast green heart of the campus. I felt as if I could overhear the confident musings of the new masters of matter contentedly mocking superstition as they progressively and patiently reduced the old mysteries of the mind and spirit to the positive methods of empirical science. Later, at Harvard University, I often sensed this mood, although a glimmer of the older certainties, muted by the newer certainties, glanced out from hiding places around Harvard Yard and in the recesses of Harvard Divinity School.
The vibrant light of Protestantism, which I encountered in many forms as a one-time convert and ministerial student, still illumines my mind with the calm clarity of Sunday mornings, when a purple shaft radiating transcendent light and love heals earth’s woes, and the challenges of the week behind and the week ahead fade in redemptive peace.
These many lights still shine on my mind and illumine the scenes painted in my writings. Because the light of being, of the divine, comes in many colors, my writings are illumined by a broader palette of colors than I would have applied had I wrote a century ago.