by Seth Koven
Lawrence sacramentalized everyday life: he felt more united to God in the conduct of his humble quotidian occupations than when he retired to pray and meditate. Feeling and doing, not thinking, paved Lawrence’s path to God’s love. Pain and sickness were favors from God, whom he called “the only Physician of all our ills … the FATHER of the afflicted, ever ready to succor us.” It was much better to endure bodily pain for love of God than to poison the body with doctors’ remedies. Diseases of the body created opportunities to cure diseases of the soul. “Can a soul truly with God feel pain?” Lawrence asked.80
Many in early-twentieth-century Britain, including Muriel, answered Lawrence’s question, but none did so with more lyrical power than Evelyn Underhill. Instinct and intuition counted more than reason, stillness more than motion for Underhill, Britain’s most eloquent twentieth-century student of mysticism and Christian psychology. Contemplation was the fruit of rigorous self-discipline achieved through meditative mental calisthenics. The mind learned to shut out the false reality of stock exchanges and barristers’ briefs, of surface appearances and the confining logic of classifications in favor of “fluid facts which have no label.” The most intense love and purified desire, abetted by an iron strong will—emphatically not “sentimental aestheticism or emotional piety”—guided the quest for the sensory paradise of union with God. At least this was how Underhill interpreted the signs of her restless times during that fool’s paradise summer of 1914. Nor did Underhill retreat from this position amidst the din of guns on the western front and the ceaseless hum of munitions factories at home.81 War made mysticism more necessary, not less, she argued.
On long prewar rambles in Cornwall, Doris introduced Muriel to Underhill’s ideas.82 Characteristically, it was Muriel who did the most with them in her private life and, later, in her public ministry from the 1920s to 1950s. Underhill and Lester were active members of the Guild of Health and contributed to its publications. Left-wing Anglican ministers like Percy Dearmer and Francis Boyd, eager to reconcile their faith with the latest discoveries of modern science, founded the Guild of Health in 1904.83 They refused to give the psychologist and psychoanalyst a monopoly over tending to the inner lives of men and women. Jesus, Guild members insisted, was “the Divine Psychologist.”84 Silence was the way to welcome God’s indwelling. It cleansed the “subconscious” of its neurotic “complexes” far better than then the noise of psychoanalytic talk. The Guild harmonized God and Nature by arousing the Church to a “fresh recognition of the place due to the healing of the mind and body in the Gospel message of Salvation.” Individual and corporate health was indivisible. Its members, like Underhill and Lester, refused to accept a “mutilated gospel that disconnects body from the soul.”85 The Guild provided a forum to exchange ideas about mind, body, and spirit, many deeply influenced by South Asian religious beliefs and body disciplines.86 The body was nothing less than a school for faith for Lester and Underhill. Mysticism and modernity, faith and science, happily sustained one another. Unlike Christian Scientists, Guild members insisted that the body, its pains and sufferings, were as real as the Incarnation itself.87 Like Mrs. Eddy, they insisted that faith had everything to do with achieving good health.
Underhill’s Practical Mysticism: A Little Book For Normal People (1914) translated for a broad lay audience the arguments and spiritual message contained in her erudite best seller, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (1911). Practical Mysticism was an early-twentieth-century “how to” and “self-help” book for the everyman and everywoman. “Normal People” may have been Underhill’s intended readers, but Practical Mysticism advanced its argument by inventing and invoking a queer genealogy of Western poets and mystics, saints and sensualists like Walt Whitman and Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale and General Gordon.88 Underhill deftly negotiated the fine line separating her celebration of the joyful physicality of mystical union with God from explicit eroticism.89 Practical Mysticism had plenty of competitors on bookshelves overflowing with guides to living a good life. Practitioners of the booming business in physical culture and life reform such as the muscular vegetarian yoga-loving Eustace Miles also promised to rescue beleaguered souls from the enervation of modern urban life.90
Underhill’s Christian psychological understanding of interiority spoke directly to people like Muriel struggling to harmonize conformity to the demands of surface sociability (the temporal flux of “becoming” for Underhill) with pursuit of a spiritual vocation (the eternal permanence of “being”). For those whose “worried consciousness” had become a “restless and complicated thing,” Underhill offered words of comfort. There was, she assured her readers, a “stillness” at the “centre … [at] one with the rhythm of the Universal Life.” This was an insideness utterly at odds with London Hospital’s technologies that allowed doctors to see the inner workings of the body while remaining blind to the needs—and souls—of patients like Nellie. It also differed from what Underhill called “psychoanalysis,” which accounted for the strife and contradictory impulses of mental life without providing a way into the truest self.91
To explain the communion of the purified self with God, Underhill, like Muriel, directed her gaze East to the poetry of Kabîr, the fifteenth-century Muslim weaver-turned-disciple of the Hindu guru Ramananda. The version of Kabîr to whom she turned was one Underhill had helped to invent for the English-speaking world.92 One Hundred Poems of Kabîr was the outcome of her collaboration with the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, who visited England in 1912–13. Tagore and Underhill depicted a Kabîr who exalted a loving God and a God of love. He reconciled Islam and Hinduism, the everyday homespun pleasures of married life with divinely transcendent delights. Underhill likened him to Paul, “the tentmaker,” and Bunyan, “the tinkerer.” Most scholars now concur that Tagore-Underhill’s representation of Kabîr bore at best a hazy resemblance to the historical one. By the time One Hundred Poems was published for the London-based India Society in 1914, Tagore had become a literary sensation. He was awarded the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature for his English-language poems, Gitanjali, the fruit of his engagement with the Irish poet W. B. Yeats.
Tagore’s literary partnerships suggest that Kipling’s oft-quoted line that “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet” could not have been less true in early-twentieth-century Britain.93 As Kipling readily acknowledged, the “twain” met every day in all sorts of exciting ways and unexpected places. Fitness guru Eustace Miles opened his popular Avenues of Health (1902) with a long quote from that champion of a revivified virile Hinduism, Swami Vivekananda, whose teaching had inspired Tagore.94 Vivekananda’s 1895 platform appearances in England, like Tagore’s in 1913, electrified audiences. Clothed in long “orange-coloured robes of the Buddhist priest” with a “monk-like girdle” around his waist and a massive turban on his head, he preached and embodied a universal “spirituality” based upon the renunciation of gross material things in exchange for perfect union with the “supreme and absolute self.”(See fig. 4.9.) Far from asserting the essential and exclusively Oriental origins of his teachings, Vivikananda acknowledged his debts to European Romanticism and the writings of a German weaver’s son, Johann Fichte.95 As Peter Van der Veer persuasively argues, the point of such genealogical excavations is not to identify the true origins of “spirituality” with Christian mystics or German romantics or Indian gurus. Rather, he shows that the very concept of “spirituality” developed in tandem with the idea of the “secular” as twin facets of modernity. Both emerged out of the global circulation of people and ideas between East and West. Spirituality was so attractive to women like Underhill and Muriel Lester because it “enabled the inclusion of a variety of traditions under the rubric of universal morality without the baggage of competing religious institutions and their authoritative boundary maintenance.”96 In the first decades of the twentieth century, Underhill distrusted institutional religion altogether. Lester simply felt fr
ee to move between churches and institutions as she saw fit.
Underhill’s fusion of Indian philosophical and religious traditions with mystical Christianity prefigured and influenced Muriel’s own spiritual therapeutics. Muriel frequently drew upon Tagore in her writings and lay religious services, long before they met and became friends in 1926. A borrowed line from Gitanjali helped Muriel practice Brother’s Lawrence’s “Presence of God” among the crowd of commuters she encountered riding the London underground. As she prayed for passing strangers, she silently quoted Tagore’s words to herself, “Thou hast pressed the signet of eternity upon many a fleeting moment of my life.” To readers of the Evening Standard in 1921, she casually mentioned that she included selections from Tagore and Edward Carpenter, Britain’s foremost poet of democracy and same-sex love between men, along with the Bible in her religious services.97 Such “religious” readings signaled Muriel’s commitment to all sorts of transgressive border crossings.
4.9. Swathed in orange turban and robes, the Swami Vivikananda captured a wide following in Britain and the United States in the 1890s with celebrated appearances at major international congresses and gatherings. Swami Vivekananda, December 1896, London, image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Through prayer, Muriel learned how to heal her sick body while loving all of God’s creation. To think like God meant ignoring “barriers of class, race, and nation” and “dropping all labels.”98 In her Christian therapeutics, the quest for individual health necessitated the pursuit of global social justice. A world without labels was one free from oppressive hierarchies. In Underhill’s terms, this promised fluidity without flux. For Muriel, the body was the most intimate locale from which humans embarked on the task of building up the Kingdom of God on earth. Her own body functioned as a fine-tuned barometer, registering not only her own struggle to achieve health-giving balance but the world’s. Spiritual practices such as her Prayer of Relaxation restored Muriel to health. Health was itself spiritual.
The actual techniques of breathing and posture Muriel used in her Prayer of Relaxation were heavily indebted to those of Henry Lindlahr. Lindlahr popularized the science of German naturopaths, Louis Kuhne and Adolph Just, as well French psychologist Émile Coué’s work on the power of autosuggestion.99 Kuhne and Just taught modern men and women how to lay claim to their most primitive life forces through contact with water, light, earth, and air. Coué championed the power of self-spoken words to shape each person’s physical and psychic reality.100 In Lindlahr’s Practice of Nature Cure (first published in 1901 and often reprinted), he outlined a daily regimen for health that anticipated Muriel’s. “When you awake in the morning from sleep, lie flat on your back in a completely relaxed position. For a few minutes let a feeling of rest, peace and good will permeate your whole being. Then in a prayerful attitude of mind … say … I am thankful for being alive and for all the privileges and responsibilities which life confers upon me…. By the power of the divine will within me I WILL BE WHAT I WILL TO BE.”101
Here was a democratic system of self-help calculated to empower every man and woman. Achieving good health lay largely in the hands of the afflicted, not in expert knowledge controlled by institutional allopathic medicine.102 Disease, far from manifesting either the will of God or the invasion of germs from outside the body, stemmed from the individual’s failure to live in harmony with God and Nature. “We are what we say and believe we are,” might be one way to summarize Lindlahr’s lowbrow scientific teaching. The dark side of this relentless do-it-yourself optimism was its implication that the sick were responsible for their own infirmities.
Muriel’s Christian therapeutics, consolidated in her 1917 Prayer of Relaxation, gave her a portable healing technique combining solitude and contemplation with action. Derived from a wide range of global sources, it reflected her syncretic approach to faith and spirituality. It made literal her rejection of the opposition between mind and body, reason and feeling, science and faith. The Prayer of Relaxation was a ritualistic practice and a highly disciplined performance of bodily postures and utterances that Muriel enacted with sacramental devotion. Her health problems from 1910 to 1917 are a powerful reminder that Muriel struggled to achieve the persona of inward and outward serenity that she later came to project so effortlessly. Through habitual repetition, Muriel and those around her must have found it hard to differentiate the performance of self from the self. This was Muriel’s paradoxical goal: to produce an inside so filled with God’s love that there was no agonistic self to be anatomized, psychoanalyzed, or pathologized.
BODIES AT WAR
Muriel’s catastrophic collapse must be set against the extraordinary traumas war exacted on human bodies at the homefront and the warfront. Praying oneself back to health with “autosuggestive” messages about God’s loving “breath” may have done wonders for Muriel in 1917. But what could it do for millions of women and children suffering hunger and the shattered bodies of soldiers returning home from the War’s far-flung fronts?103 As Muriel convalesced at the Grange in 1916–17, this thought must have crossed her mind. Every day, she had no choice but to see the injured soldiers in the fifteen-bed Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) Hospital, Braeside, established two hundred yards from the Grange in a “gabled Victorian villa” in its own garden.104 (See fig. 4.10.) Braeside was a satellite institution attached to the Colchester Military Hospital. Such hospitals were staffed by doctors and nurses, many, like Muriel, daughters of the well-to-do who volunteered to do their part for the nation at war. Wounded soldiers were sent there to convalesce, some to return to military service, others to civilian life with pensions based on the extent and nature of their disablement.105 Muriel positioned such men as neither blameworthy perpetrators of war’s horrors nor as soldier-heroes, but as instruments and victims of mechanized mass violence. Like the soldiers’ wives and women war workers fed at Kingsley Hall’s suffrage kitchen, they too needed to be counted among the victims of an industrial capitalist imperial state.
4.10. Muriel and Doris Lester must have seen disabled soldiers convalescing from their war wounds at Braeside hospital, a very short distance from their parents’ Loughton home, the Grange. “Braeside, annex of Colchester Hospital.” (Courtesy of Epping Forest District Museum, Waltham Abbey.)
The men’s bodies with whom Muriel had the most reason to identify were those of her many friends who refused to serve the warfare state. It was one of the few compensations of Kingsley’s death, Muriel admitted, that he had been spared the social opprobrium, pain, and suffering that awaited conscientious objectors in World War I Britain.106 In its exaltation of the right and need of the individual to exercise free moral will, the prewar liberal state affirmed two principles incompatible with its war effort: an all-volunteer army and the legal category of conscientious objector. In theory, the volunteer army ensured that only men of the highest caliber would be sent into battle because they had chosen to serve their country. This form of recruitment was meant to demonstrate the superiority of the British state and its respect for the freedoms of its citizens compared to its continental counterparts. It proved a dysgenic nightmare as the opening months of war disproportionately claimed the lives of highly educated, physically fit well-to-do men.
Suffering for the sake of conscience has a long history in modern Britain. However, the individual’s right to claim conscience as the grounds for exemption from complying with a law had been codified only recently around parents’ refusal of compulsory vaccination of their children. Parliament included a “conscience clause” in the 1898 Vaccination Act (amended and made simpler in 1907).107 Muriel had also seen the power and limits of “passive resistance” at the turn of the century when leading Nonconformists led by Reverend Clifford invoked religious conscience and refused to pay taxes to protest the new Education Act’s funding allocation for Church of England schools. Henry Lester had joined Clifford’s movement and some of the family’s property had been placed under an order of distraint.108 H. H. Asquith’s Li
beral government established a set of procedures and institutions (Local Tribunals, Appeals Tribunal and a Central Tribunal) by which men could prove the bona fides of their conscientious objection to war and be offered a range of alternative forms of non-combatant service or absolute exemption. Put another way, the Liberal government invented the conscientious objector to wartime service who then confronted the State as an intractable problem. Britain’s manpower needs far outstripped its ability to attract recruits at home and in its empire—which contributed hundreds of thousands of colored men from India, Africa, and the Caribbean. As Asquith’s government teetered on the brink of dissolution, an illiberal wartime coalition gathered strength; compulsion in the name of militarist patriotism was inevitable. Muriel’s breakdown more or less coincided with the state’s introduction of conscription in 1916—a process set in motion by the National Registration Act of 1915 followed by conscription of unmarried and finally married men in June 1916.
What impact did this have on Muriel? Many in Muriel’s close circle of friends and fellow workers, including Ben Platten and Stephen Hobhouse, claimed conscientious objection and went to prison for their convictions.109 She spent her days “accompanying friends to tribunals, attending the subsequent proceedings, and visiting them in jail.”110 Ben Platten had been one of Doris and Muriel’s first students in their Loughton Sunday school in 1902. His family was part of a small number of artisans and laborers living in their well-to-do suburb. Platten and his best friend George Bowtle had volunteered their services for each of the Lester sisters’ schemes in Loughton and Bow. They had been part of the original group of men and women who created Kingsley Rooms on Bruce Road and refurbished the first Kingsley Hall. Platten wrote to Muriel on behalf of her Bruce Road men’s group to console her after Kingsley’s death in September 1914. By that time, he had taken a post as an elementary school teacher at Buckhurst Hill Boys’ School near Loughton. His application for exemption from military service on grounds of conscientious objection was thus a matter for more than usual public concern and discussion. After all, he was charged with instructing and guiding boys and young men. A well-known town elder publicly declared that he would rather his son dead than endure exposure to Platten’s despicable teachings on Christian conscience.
