Two Important Gifts

Baron Friedrich von Hugel (1852-1925)  is visiting with me this morning.  He has been a mentor and friend (through the written word) for over fifty years.  He wrote a number of books, including The Reality of God and Mystical Elements of Religion.  His writing is not easy to read and I’ve been wading through his writing for years. In spite of that, von Hugel has helped me in two specific ways.

The first thing von Hugel helped me understand is that my religious experience is not the norm or the only “right” experience.  Other people have their own unique spiritual experiences and those experiences will most likely be unlike my own, but no less real.  Therefore, I must never try to shape other souls to be like my own.  “One is enough,” Ralph Waldo Emerson warned a teacher  who sought to stamp his pupils with his own signet, attempting to make them carbon-copies of himself.  Von Hugel often repeated the final sentence of a lecture on Ignatius of Loyola, to make this point: “this think, my dear brethren, is St. Ignatius’ way to heaven:  and thank God, it is not the only way.”  

My way is not the only way, nor is my way your way. One of “me” is enough!  One of “you” is probably enough too!  We must avoid attempting make others carbon copies of ourselves, or to allow others to make us carbon copies of who they are.  This is true in all matters and not just in the realm of religion.  

The second way von Hugel helped me was by encouraging me to spend a little time each day reading a devotional book.  His favorites were the Bible,  St. Augustine’s Confessions and Thomas a’Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ.  (There are, of course, many other religious classics  ranging from John Donne’s Devotions, Thomas Kelly’s, A Testament of Devotion, John Woolman’s Journal,  to William Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life).  

Such devotional reading is “to lift the sights…It is to reengage the soul in its divine vocation.  It is read in the hope that some phrase or line in it may single out the reader’s condition, may be an occasion in which God may speak to him, may perhaps convict him of sin or of untilled ground in his life that he has been reserving, or may lure him on in something that may have long since been undertaken but that is lagging.”

Von Hugel wrote to his niece, “Such reading is, of course, meant as directly as possible to feed the heart, to fortify the will—to put these into contact with God—thus, by the book, to get away from the book, to the realities it suggest…”. Then he adds, But I would not exceed fifteen minutes at any one time; you would sink to ordinary reading if you did.”  

How grateful I am for these gifts given by Baron von Hugel. He reminds me, with his visit this morning, how important these two gifts have been in my journey.