Читать книгу I Was Gone Long Before I Left - Peter C. Wilcox - Страница 8

“The Longest Journey is the Journey Inward”

(Dag Hammarskjold)

It was October, 1979 and the autumn leaves were changing to shades of bright reds, orange, and yellow. I went into the woods to find my favorite bench which overlooked the Severn River. It was a beautiful spot which always seemed to invite me to prayer. It was probably my favorite place during my days when I lived at St. Conrad Friary (Monastery) near Annapolis, Maryland.1 It was actually the second time I had been assigned there. The first time, in the mid 1970s, I was the assistant novice master teaching the novices about our Capuchin Franciscan way of life. This time I was trying to finish writing my doctoral dissertation on Cardinal John Henry Newman at Catholic University.

These were difficult days for me. For the last several years, there was an intense aching in my soul. I seemed to be lost in a baffling crisis of spirit. For some months, I was aware of a growing darkness within me, as if something in my depths was crying out. A whole chorus of voices. Orphaned voices. They seemed to speak for all the unloved parts of me and came with a tremendous force. At times, they seemed to explode the boundaries of my existence. Years later, I know now that they were the clamor of a new self struggling to be born.

A. The Autumn of My Discontent

It was a frightening time for me. I knew I couldn’t go on this way. Years of depression, headaches every day, stomach ulcers, and digestive problems were telling me that something had to be done. In one sense, I was standing on the shifting ground of midlife. I was thirty-seven now and had come upon that time in life when one is called to an inner transformation, to perhaps a crossing over from one identity to another. When the winds of change swirl through our lives, especially at mid-life, they often call us to undertake a new passage of the spiritual journey. But that requires us to confront the lost and counterfeit places within us and to release our deeper innermost self—our true self. They call us to come home to ourselves, to become who we really are.

However, that autumn of my discontent, should not have surprised me. For years, I had been struggling with these issues and questions. Should I stay in religious life or not? Was God inviting me to embrace this darkness and discover a deeper way of being? A deeper relationship with Him? These seemed to be the same kinds of questions I had been struggling with for the last seventeen years.

In a sense, I should have remembered that the life of the spirit is never static. But it can certainly be upsetting. We are born on one level, only to find some new struggle toward wholeness waiting to be born. That is the sacred intent of God—to move us continuously toward growth. During these times of turmoil, we are invited to recover everything that has been lost or orphaned within us and to restore the divine image imprinted on our soul. And rarely do significant shifts come without a sense of our being lost in dark woods, or in what T.S. Eliot called the “vast interstellar spaces.”2

As I sat on my favorite bench in the woods on that autumn morning, I wondered how I could escape the emotional, psychological and spiritual pain I was in. The familiar circles of my life left me with a suffocating feeling. My religious structures were stifling. Things that used to matter were no longer important. Things that had never mattered became paramount. My life had curled up into the frightening mark of a question.

Nevertheless, in spite of all this, I always continued to go about my responsibilities. I would work on writing my dissertation through the morning and early afternoon, pray through the day with my brothers, sometimes see people for spiritual direction, and generally participate in our community life. I have always been very accomplished at fulfilling my duties, even during a crisis. Outwardly, I appeared just fine. Inside, I was a mess.

In one sense, I wanted things to go back to the comfortable way they were before. I wanted to “snap out of it” so to speak, and had ordered myself to do just that on numerous occasions. But it was sort of like looking at an incoming wave and telling it to recede. Simply demanding it, didn’t make it happen.

For a moment, I thought about my external, everyday self—the self I presented to the world. I contemplated the masks I had worn, the “inner selves” or dominant patterns embedded in my personality that had influenced my way of living in the world.

Referring to the multiplicity of our inner selves that inhabit each one of us, Elizabeth O’Connor wrote, “it was during a time of painful conflict that I first began to experience myself as more than one. It was as though I sat in the midst of many selves.”3

I reflected on my many selves. The Pleaser, Performer, and Perfectionist—my trinity of P’s. I was learning how closely these old roles were connected to another powerful role that I played out: the Good Little Boy. He was that part of me that possessed little self-validation or autonomy. He was that part of me that tended to define life by others and their expectations. As a man, I sometimes felt that I had been scripted to be all things to all people. But when I tried, I usually ended up forfeiting my deepest identity, my own uniqueness as a child of God.

My Good Little Boy endured everything with a smile on his face. He feared coloring outside of the traditional lines, and frequently cut himself off from his real thoughts and feelings. He was well adapted to thinking other people’s thoughts and following the path of least resistance.

Now, oddly, I could feel the movements of an unknown person locked away inside of me who wanted life and breath, who wanted to shed what wasn’t real and vital and recover my own uniqueness. I felt the vibrations of a deeper, authentic self who wanted to live out his own unique vision of being an individual and embrace his own mystery. Who was this self inside of me who cried out to be?

During the previous four months, I had been reading the poetry of T.S. Eliot, who at times seemed like a soulmate to me. In his “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” I found my story, the quiet agony of someone who came upon an unsuspecting darkness buried in midlife and met the overwhelming question: “Do I dare/ Disturb the universe? . . . I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;/ I know the voices dying with a dying fall/ Beneath the music from a farther room.”4 In my life, there seemed to be some kind of music coming from a distant room that I couldn’t find. Voices dying to be heard. Did I dare disturb the universe within myself?

Believe me, when I say I wanted to shove all this away and pretend it didn’t exist. In fact, I had actually done that for a long time. But I couldn’t do that any more. My life had become too painful. At times, I found myself shut in a closet of pain, unable to find the door. In my blackest moments, I actually fantasized about running away to find the vital part of me that I had lost.

B. Embracing the Confusion

As I sat on that bench that autumn day beneath a beautiful, crisp blue sky, I felt like everything inside me was churning, trying to find a way out. And suddenly, at the height of my chaos, I began to entertain the overwhelming question confronting me. Actually, I had been circling it for a long time, but now, at last, I walked right into the center of it. In a sense, it was a dangerous thing to do because those who enter the heart of a sacred question and feel the searing heat it gives off are usually compelled to live on into the answer.

Is it possible, I asked myself, that I am being summoned from some deep and holy place within? Am I being asked to enter a new passage in the spiritual life—the journey from false self to true self? Am I being asked to dismantle old masks and patterns and unfold a deeper, more authentic self—the one God created me to be? Am I being invited to disturb my inner universe in quest of the undiscovered person who clamors from within?

Unfortunately, there has been little emphasis on this summons within Christian circles. And, when it comes, we don’t understand that we are being thrust into personal transformation. Most of us tend to write it off as just another predicament or plight—perhaps the result of burnout or our dissatisfaction with life.

I believe, however, that in such a summons we are actually being presented with a spiritual developmental task. We are being asked to unfold a deeper self—what we might call the life of Christ within us.

As I reflected on my struggle that afternoon, I remembered the discoveries I had made in the writings of the famous Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. I had been studying his works over the past several years, trying to understand his approach to how we grow psychologically as we age. When I told a friend that I was doing this, he reminded me that I was looking for truth in rather unorthodox places. However, I told him that this was like what Abraham Heschel said in his book I Asked for Wonder, “God is hiding in the world. Our task is to let the divine emerge from our deeds.”5

Moreover, for the past six years, I had been teaching theology in the Washington Theological Union. My area of concentration was teaching courses in Christian spirituality. During the years when I was working on my doctoral degree in theology from Catholic University, I had studied the classic Western spiritual writers like St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart, and especially the contemporary Cistercian monk and spiritual writer Thomas Merton. In fact, I had been teaching a course on Merton, entitled The Theology and Spirituality of Thomas Merton. Since Merton had recently died in 1968, there always seemed to be a lot of interest in him and his understanding of how we grow spiritually. In trying to comprehend Merton’s understanding of the contemplative journey, I discovered that Merton believed that the spiritual life always involved entering the depths of oneself. Later, when I began to study Jung, I was amazed at how much of his work in depth psychology paralleled the spirituality of Thomas Merton that I had come to know, and how they enriched one another.

Jung believed that “every midlife crisis is a spiritual crisis, that invites us to die to the old self, the fruit of the first half of life and liberate the new man or woman within us.” I recalled Jung’s words in Stages of Life:

Wholly unprepared, they embark upon the second half of life. Or are there perhaps colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce our young people to a knowledge of the world and of life? No, there are none. Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and ideas will serve as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning—for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.6

Jung divided life into two major phases. The first phase, or “morning,” is reserved for relating and orienting to the outer world by developing the ego. The second half, or “afternoon,” is for adapting to the inner world by developing our true self. The midlife transition between these two, Jung likened to a difficult birth. This was certainly what I had been experiencing.

This transition is always very difficult, Jung believed, because it involves a real breakdown of our old spiritual and psychic structures—the old masks and personas that have served us well in the past but that no longer fit. The overarching roles that created the theme song for my life—Perfectionist, Performer, Pleaser, Good Little Boy, began to lose their music. It’s agonizing to come to that place in life where you know all the words but none of the music.

In our youth, we set up inner myths and stories to live by, but around the midlife juncture these patterns begin to crumble. It feels like an inner collapsing of everything inside of us. This is why it is so painful and confusing. As John Shea writes, “when order crumbles, mystery rises.”7

One of my favorite passages in Scripture comes from the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes. “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die, a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted” (Eccles. 3:1–2).

Most of us need reassurance that it’s okay to let the old masks die, and to “pluck up” what was planted long ago. And as I was struggling with whether to embrace this experience or run away from it, a friend said to me “if you think God always leads you only beside still waters, think again. God will also lead you beside turbulent waters. If you have the courage to enter, you will think you are drowning. But actually, you are being churned into something new. It’s okay, Pete, dive in.” All I had to do was trust the process. So, I told myself that if I could stay with this process and not run away from it, I would discover that a sacred voice at the heart of me would cry out, shaking my old foundation. It would draw me into a turbulence that would force me to confront the false roles, identities, and illusions that had become a part of my life.

I leaned back on that little bench that chilly autumn day in October and tried very hard to say yes to what was struggling inside of me. It seemed to me that my quest was to find the part of me that I had lost. Jung said that we all have a “shadow.” It’s the rejected, inferior person inside that we have always ignored and fought becoming. For me, my shadow seemed to represent an essential part of me that was buried in darkness. It was that part of me hidden beneath the masks and fabrications. It was that part of me struggling to find the light.

I suppose in some way I kept hoping that some wise, loving person would come to my rescue and lead me out of my darkness. In fact, by this time, I had already been sharing my struggle with my spiritual director and seeing a psychiatrist to help me through this difficult time. I talked with both of them about my “dark night of the soul,” but I hadn’t yet been able to find my own vision of transformation. How would I be able to do this? What was being asked of me?

1. In the Catholic Church, the Franciscans are one of the Mendicant Orders. Men belonging to this Order, are friars (brothers) and they live in friaries (monasteries). Technically speaking, monks live in monasteries. However, for my purposes in this book, they can be interchangeable.

2. Eliot, “East Coker,” 126.

3. O’Connor, Our Many Selves, 3.

4. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” 4–5.

5. Heschel, I Asked for Wonder, 124.

6. Jung, Stages of Life, 783.

7. Shea, Stories of God.