Encounter with God, as described by Jean Marie Déchanet
What follows, after Kevin’s commentary, is his translation of passages from L’autre et les autres. Journal d’un yogi (vol. 3), Jean-Marie Déchanet
Translator’s Notes:
Although it was through reading Jean-Marie Déchanet’s Christian Yoga (La Voie du Silence) that I came to practice yoga, it was many years before I was even aware of his other writings, let alone read any of them. When visiting his hermitage in Valjouffrey in summer 2019, I was pleased to receive from his friends and early students, Gerard and Madé, a copy of his book L’autre et les autres, volume three of his journal of a yogi.
The book’s back cover puts this particular book in context:
"[When Déchanet returned ] from Africa and became a hermit in the heart of the Oisans region, he published Mon Corps et Moi [My Body and I], and then Mon Coeur et Dieu [My heart and God]. This third volume of his journal marks the journey of an accomplished yogi who, after having become aware of his body and discovered his deepest self, addresses the encounter between "the Other" (God) and others (people)."
Père Jean’s tiny hermitage in France where he studied, worked and wrote
The following passages strike me as beautiful articulations of the pertinence of yoga to the Christian’s life of prayer. Before all else, this is an experiential discovery for Déchanet. He then goes on to connect his experience with the Christian contemplative or mystical tradition.
The first part of this excerpt Déchanet titles “Yoga leads to God.” The encounter with God (“encounter” is a theme to which he returns frequently throughout the book) comes about as yoga helps the mind to fall into silence. A new kind of knowing is born. He concludes with an allusion to Psalm 34:8, which speaks of “tasting” God.
In the second section, titled “Tasting, Perceiving, and Understanding”,” Déchanet talks about the growth of our spiritual senses. He quotes from his “friend” William of St. Thierry. Déchanet devoted many years of scholarly study to that 12thcentury Benedictine monk and mystic, producing critical editions of some of his most significant works. For William, and for Déchanet in turn, “tasting” God is no mere metaphor. As he points out, Origen (c. 253) and a long line of Catholic and Orthodox mystics since have witnessed to the awakening of spiritual senses through the life of prayer. Déchanet observes that the practice of yoga awakens the spiritual senses.
Sight and hearing can take place at a distance. Touch and taste are the most intimate of senses. Déchanet maintains then that when yoga is part of the Christian’s life of prayer, it can lead to the deepest and most intimate of encounters with God.
It should be noted in closing, though Déchanet does not refer to this here, that some monotheistic traditions within Hinduism such as Vaishnavism[1] also speak of the acquisition of a perfected body whose characteristics mirror but transcend and transform those of the physical body.[2]
As a practice, we encourage a contemplative reading of Déchanet’s words. Consider slowing down and savoring each one.
Passages from L’autre et les autres. Journal d’un yogi (vol. 3) (Paris : Épi, 1978)
Yoga Leads to God
“Yoga leads to God or it is nothing.”
I have the very strong sense that yoga, a certain yoga, can help lead each of us to meet God. The sages of the East have verified this: Yoga leads to God or it is nothing. This is my deep conviction. And I could evoke here the legions of men and women who have written to me and have told me of finding again a taste (note the word) for God, thanks to yoga and through yoga. How do we account for this? Here is my simple perspective.
The discipline of the mind is an integrating part of a healthy, integral yoga.
I don’t need to go back over what I’ve said many times in my books. Yoga leads to silence, it is the “way of silence,” the ending in us of a certain need for discussion and verbalization.
A friend and collaborator has said it well: “In everyday life, our thoughts, both reflective or spontaneous, our gestures, even our words are commented on by a verbal working of the mind. We are talking to ourselves about what we say, think, and do. Yoga practice must make us aware of this verbal diarrhea and accustom us to the suspension of this useless talk.”
As Lanzo del Vasto [Italian philosopher, poet, artist, Catholic and nonviolent activist, disciple of Gandhi] says: “The goal of meditation – an essential pillar of yoga – is the conversion of the intellect, of the senses of the imagination, their redirection inwards in order that they penetrate the inexplicable, invisible, essential unity of our true self.”
It is a fact of experience that once the mind is settled and put in its rightful place by yoga, the energies of the deep self take over. The discursive and reasoning self – so imaginative and chatty, especially with regard to God – falls silent. Then the intelligence of love, as the Ancients wrote, “tastes” and feels God. That is the encounter!
Fr. Déchanet leads yoga on the lawn of his hermitage.
Tasting, Perceiving, and Understanding
In other respects, certain spiritual senses become involved. They play a role for the true self akin to the role the physical senses play on behalf of the intellect. In a passage of considerable density, my friend William [William of St. Thierry], the inheritor of a tradition that goes back to Origen, explains:
“This is the taste which the Spirit of understanding gives us in Christ, namely, the understanding of Scripture and of the sacraments of God. So it is that when the Lord appeared to his disciples after the resurrection, when as the evangelist says, ‘he opened to them the meaning that they might understand the Scriptures.’ For when we begin not only to understand but even somehow, I say, to touch and handle the inner meaning of Scriptures and the virtue of God’s mysteries and sacraments with the hand of experience – which does not happen except by some special sense of conscience and by the discipline of an experience which understands, yes, and I go on to say, which reads inwardly within itself and senses the goodness and the virtue of God which the work of grace itself accomplishes by its powerful goodness and effective virtue within the sons of grace – then at last wisdom accomplishes what is proper to it. Then it judges those who are worthy; by its anointing, it teaches all things. Then, by having affixed the seal of God’s goodness to us, it imprints and conforms [to itself] by this anointing everything calmed and gentled within us. If it finds any hardness, any rigidity, it pounds and crushes it until this saintly soul, having received this wholesome happiness of God and having been strengthened by the principal spirit of wisdom, joyfully sings to God: ‘The light of your countenance, O Lord is settled upon us. You have given gladness to my heart.’ For this also is why the Lord says: [And this is the encounter![3]] ‘This is eternal life; that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.’ O blessed knowledge wherein is contained eternal life! That life comes from this tasting, because to taste is to understand [to perceive and to understand in depth].”[4]
Through this passage, at once mysterious and confident, we hear the deep voice of experience. Now it is an experiential fact that yoga, a certain yoga, contributes to the refinement in us, in our most hidden and truest self, of certain so-called “spiritual senses.” Even as yoga makes our organism more receptive to the vibrations of nature’s rhythms, so too it opens in the depths of the heart and, as it were, sets free a certain sensory organ that vibrates at the touch of “the One who passes by.” For us, here below, this is the most poignant and the most mysterious sequence of this Encounter with God which is the goal of our existence and which gives it its meaning.
Jean-Marie Déchanet, L’autre et les autres. Journal d’un yogi (vol. 3) (Paris : Épi, 1978)
(Trans. Kevin Flynn)
[1] A tradition which describes God (Vishnu) as omniscient, omnipotent, and all loving.
[2] See e.g., William J. Wainwright, “The Spiritual Senses in Western Spirituality and the Analytic Philosophy of Religion” in European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 3 (2011), pp 21-41.
[3] Déchanet’s own comment within the quotation.
[4] William of St. Thierry, The Nature and Dignity of Love. Déchanet quotes the French translation of M. Dumontier found in St Bernard et la Bible, Paris, 1953, pp. 92-93. I have used the English translation by Thomas X. Davis, Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications, 1981. Note that in the last sentence, the translation that Déchanet uses links spiritual taste to “perception and understanding in depth.”
