Dorothy stood in the doorway with Toto in her arms, and looked at the sky. . . . Suddenly Uncle Henry stood up. “There’s a cyclone coming, Em,” he called. . . . There came a great shriek from the wind, and the house shook so hard Dorothy lost her footing. . . . The great pressure of the wind on every side of the house raised it up higher and higher, until it was at the very top of the cyclone; and there it remained and was carried miles and miles away.
FRANK L. BAUM
The only way the Self can manifest is through conflict.
MARIE-LOUISE VON FRANZ
On the eve of the spring equinox the sky turned charcoal gray and the trees in the backyard began to bend and swirl. I went to the back door to call the dogs inside before the rain started. A lawn chair had blown off the patio, along with two flower pots which the wind was tossing through the grass. Spring wasn’t going to come gently.
I gazed at the brewing surface of the sky, at the dark wind and serrated clouds, and for one penetrating moment I was aware that what I was seeing—the stormy contents of my backyard—was something happening on the inside of me too, on a terrain just as real.
I looked at the crab-apple tree. My cocoon swung precariously on the limb where I’d taped it. I ran to the tree, dodging the first pellets of rain. Unwinding the tape, I carried the little cocoon inside, the dogs barking and trailing after me.
For lack of a better place, I stuck the twig on which the cocoon was attached in a pot of African violets on my desk, then toweled myself and the dogs dry. I returned to my writing, but I couldn’t concentrate. I found myself staring at the chrysalis, at this lump of brown silence. It overwhelmed me with its simple truth. A creature can separate from an old way of existence, enter a time of metamorphosis, and emerge to a new level of being.
THE THREEFOLD CYCLE OF WAITING
In that moment it struck me clearly that the waiting process actually has three distinct phases that need to be maneuvered: separation, transformation, and emergence. Looking into the heart of that little cocoon, I knew that I had come upon the inner maze of waiting.
The life of the soul evolves and grows as we move through these three cycles. The process isn’t a one-time experience but a spiraling journey that we undertake throughout life. Life is full of cocoons. We die and are reborn again and again. By repeatedly entering the spiral of separation, transformation, and emergence, we’re brought closer each time to wholeness and the True Self.
I picked up my Bible and turned the pages, becoming aware of how God had revealed this ageless process in its stories. I pored over the Old Testament story of the Hebrew’s exodus from Egypt. I read it not only as a chronicle of salvation history but as the story of an inner journey taking place within the landscape of one’s soul.
Egypt, wilderness, and promised land are comparable to interior states of being: larva, cocoon, and butterfly. In both journeys—inward and outward—there’s first a movement of separation, then a holding environment where transformation happens, and finally an emergence into a new existence.
The Israelite slave represents a person in a larval stage of inner development. She lives an existence in which authentic parts of herself are imprisoned. The True Self isn’t yet liberated. Enslaved by the false selves of the ego, she believes that Egypt is all there is. Day after day she makes bricks out of straw, oblivious to the horizons in her own soul.
At a “burning bush” moment the divine fire inside is struck and the summons to separation or exodus comes. It precipitates a crisis, an uprising within. Plagues and doubts ensue. Shall I leave Egypt or not? How can I extricate myself? What awaits me if I go? The “pharaoh” inside her, which represents the powerful voice of the status quo, does everything possible to keep her enslaved. The decision to allow the uprising and see it through despite the risks propels her out of Egypt. She undergoes a stormy Red Sea crossing, a final letting go of the old way, and enters the second phase of the process: the cocoon of the wilderness.
The wilderness symbolizes the inner place where she’s stripped to her essence, forced to wander the abyss of her own depths. She waits without answers, trusting God for the nourishment she can’t produce herself, making covenants with the unseen new.
When that step is completed, she enters the third phase of the process, emerging into the promised land, into a new way of being and relating. Something new and holy within her is set free. She begins to live from the promised place God has created within her.
THE NIGHT SEA JOURNEY
I lowered my Bible. Outside, the wind howled. I leaned back in my chair, filled with the beauty of the interior exodus, trying to think of other biblical examples that express the same inner passages of separation, transformation, and emergence.
Maybe it was the rain splashing against the house that inspired me, because the next thing I knew I was reading the story of Jonah. It opened up to me as a vivid metaphoric journey of waiting and transformation. I read it through tears, for it was my story.
A voice interrupted Jonah’s secure world—a holy summons to go to Ninevah, the new place. It reminded me of the voice of change and crisis that had sliced open my own safe world and beckoned me to newness.
Like a lot of us, Jonah resisted separation from his old way of life. Hopping a ship, he tried to run away. A storm then arose, and God is depicted as hurling the winds. In the same way, crisis winds often grow more turbulent as we resist the voice of the soul. Our difficulties become, as we say, a “full-blown” crisis.
As the storm worsened, Jonah hid in the bottom of the ship. Finally, fearing that everyone would perish, he surrendered to the experience. He came out of hiding and let go, offering himself to be cast into the sea. This is the moment of descent into one’s inner depths. In this act Jonah completed the separation and entered the phase of transformation.
As he was swallowed into the belly of a great fish, Jonah entered the cocoon—the dark womb in the sea where his metamorphosis took place. Here we allow ourselves to be “digested”—to be changed in substance. (No wonder we’ve made this story into a Bible tale for children. It’s much too scary for us adults.)
Years ago I told the story of Jonah to my six-year-old vacation Bible school class, and the children fell into a discussion about how they would manage to escape if swallowed like Jonah. “I’d start a fire in the whale’s stomach and he’d cough me out!” declared one fellow, no doubt remembering the scene from Pinocchio.
“I’d stomp on his tongue till he spit me out,” said another. The suggestions grew wilder by the minute. Suddenly a thoughtful little girl spoke up: “I’d call my daddy and wait till he got me out.” All these years later her simple wisdom still resonated in me: call on God and wait.
That’s exactly what Jonah did. But he didn’t wait in helpless passivity as Rapunzel did in the tower. He waited actively—letting go, descending into the depths of his soul, listening, opening himself to change, praying. His cry from the whale’s belly formed the hue and texture of my own midlife prayer: “I called to the Lord, out of my distress, and he answered me; . . . out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and thou didst hear my voice. For thou didst cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas. . . . The waters closed in over me, the deep was round about me” (Jon. 2:2–3, 5).
Waiting is allowing holy waters to close over you. It means having the deep round about you. It means taking the “night sea journey.”
In Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces there’s a picture of the “Night Sea Journey” portrayed in three panels. The first panel shows Joseph being lowered into the well by his brothers. The second shows Christ being placed in the tomb. The third shows Jonah being swallowed by a whale. Campbell wrote that the imagery in each panel suggests that a person “goes inward, to be born again.”1 We don’t cross into the “sphere of rebirth” by power but by descent, by being swallowed.
The last phase, emergence, begins after Jonah’s symbolic three days and nights are completed and he’s released from the fish. He emerges as a new person on the shoreline of Ninevah. He has come upon the new horizon inside himself.
I closed the Bible, the imagery of the night sea journey alive in me. I saw myself in the midst of my own midlife tempest. I glanced toward the window. It was just as I’d imagined when I watched the storm lifting the contents of the backyard—the event really was happening inside me. Like Jonah, I had been lifted into the windy spaces of my own soul.
I let out a long, slow breath. For the first time since it all began, I felt myself relax into the storm. I wasn’t so afraid of it now. God’s presence was round about me.
That moment spoke a great truth to me. We can endure, transcend, and transform the storminess when we see the meaning and mystery of it.
SOURCES OF CRISIS
When my son was ten, he spent an entire afternoon in the carport arranging hundreds of dominoes. He planned to set off a chain reaction so that they would fall in perfect sequence, the last one falling from the top of a little ramp into a bucket of water. He wanted to end with a splash, he explained.
With the last domino in place, he came inside to summon me to the big event. When we got to the carport, we found a dog lumbering through his creation. The whole thing was wrecked. My first thought was to chase the dog with a broom, at the very least, yell at it. Bob’s response was different, however. He sighed deeply, then went over and gave the dog a pat on the head. As he regrouped the dominoes, I asked him, “Didn’t that upset you?”
“Yes, but stuff like this happens, Mama,” he told me.
So it does. I don’t hold to the idea that God causes suffering and crisis. I just know that those things come along and God uses them. We think life should be a nice, clean ascending line. But inevitably something wanders onto the scene and creates havoc with the nice way we’ve arranged life to fall in place. As my son taught me, those disruptions are part of life too. Stuff happens. You might as well pat the dog and regroup.
It helps if we understand the source of the crisis. There are three basic sources: developmental transitions, intrusive events, and internal uprisings.
Developmental Transitions
The natural developmental transitions through which we move from one season of life to another are as unavoidable as the dog that wandered through Bob’s dominoes.
As I struggled to make sense of my life, I wondered if what I was experiencing as a crisis was typical. Did others face what I felt? As I delved into some truths from developmental psychology, my experience grew more understandable.
I discovered that developmental transitions are like the tapered neck of an hourglass—difficult but necessary passages that we have to navigate in order to emerge into the next era of life. In Daniel Levinson’s celebrated study of life’s stages I found four natural developmental transitions delineated: early childhood, to age three; early adulthood, from seventeen to twenty-two; midlife, from forty to forty-five; and late adulthood from sixty to sixty-five.2 Levinson points out that these transitions are also times of termination; we must accept the losses each transition brings. The transitions are seeded with imbalance and turmoil, and how we cross each of them has an inevitable and decided impact on the era of life that follows.
I remembered, too, that back in college I’d studied Erik Erikson’s famous eight stages of life-development as “crisis” periods.3 His idea was that in each stage of life we’re presented with two conflicting possibilities, and we need to resolve each conflict successfully in order to emerge maturely into the next era of life.
What did he have to say about midlife? That period coincides with the crisis Erikson called “generativity vs. stagnation.” On one side, the person experiences a tug toward growth, a need to draw on deeper internal resources to create a revitalized participation in life. On the other side, she feels the pull to stagnate, to become “static, stuck, . . . bogged down in a life full of obligation and devoid of self-fulfillment.”4
I received a letter from a sixty-two-year old reader who had read an article I’d written on growing older. She told me about a developmental crisis in her life that arose from a natural developmental transition. She wrote as follows:
I was finishing a nice meal when the waitress brought the check. She informed me that the restaurant had given me their senior citizen discount. Well, I can’t really describe it, but all at once I felt jolted. I’m becoming an old woman, I thought. A cloud fell over me. Ever since, I’ve been facing things, trying to come to terms with what’s ahead. I know it will be different, but I’m determined it won’t be diminishing.
She glimpsed the import of the “cloud” that fell over her and decided to confront the task of her transition, which according to Erikson is to find meaning and value while coming to terms with death. How she deals with it will make all the difference in her experience of the last epoch of life.
Intrusive Events
The second source of crisis comes from intrusive events that impinge on us from without. These crises come in many forms and usually take us by surprise. A death, an illness, an accident, a lost job, a broken relationship, an unwelcome move, a dashed dream, an empty nest, a betrayal.
It may be unwise (probably even insensitive) to suggest to someone at this point that the calamity can be a transformative event. There’s a fullness of time for such an awareness, a fluidity to the crisis that must be allowed. When the awareness does manage to break through, however, it can assume the impact of Abraham Maslow’s “peak event” or William James’s “epiphany.”
My friend Betty had an intrusive crisis event several years ago. In her early forties she was diagnosed with lung and breast cancer and given a rotten prognosis for recovery. I sat with her one day while she cried wrenching tears, feeling that my heart was going to explode along with hers. I couldn’t say to her, “Yes, but just you wait; this could be a transforming crisis.” At the outset, what mattered was survival. “I will not die!” she cried. “I will not! Do you hear me?”
“I hear you,” I told her. But we both knew it was some deep part of herself that she most wanted to hear those words.
She lived her crisis with raw honesty. As the weeks passed, I watched her pound a pillow with her fist in outraged indignation that such a thing could happen to her. I watched her sink. I watched her hold herself with utter love and whisper bleeding prayers.
Then one day it seemed to me she was different. “What’s happened?” I asked her. She smiled, and if I live to be 110 I’ll never forget the beauty in her soul at that moment. She told me, “I looked death in the eyes and I said, ‘I want to live! But if I die, I die. And it will be well.’ I can’t explain it, Sue, but in that moment something in my innermost being shifted. I knew that my experience with cancer was going to be the most transforming journey of my life. Whatever happens, I’m going to be okay.”
She had come upon the “epiphany” buried in her crisis—the creative moment that can’t be forced, only discovered and chosen. Her crisis was the transforming crucible of her life. It propelled her into a new and deeper journey that she continues to this day.
Internal Uprisings
A third source of crisis, internal uprisings, is less easy to identify. Such uprisings are the myriad of agonies that flare up within us.
An internal uprising could be as simple as a vague sense of restlessness, some floating disenchantment, a whispering but relentless voice that says, There has to be more than this. Why are you doing what you’re doing?
Or the uprising may take the form of stress, burnout, a chronic sense of exhaustion, inner voices desperately trying to tell us something. Perhaps an addiction grows too loud to ignore any longer, or the scar tissue of an old wound begins to break down and we have to face the place where life has impaled us.
A common uprising involves an eruption of fear and doubt concerning God and faith. That was the case of a woman who approached me at a conference in southern California. She introduced herself as “a minister’s wife” and asked if she could speak with me.
“For months I’ve been fighting a terrible realization,” she confided. “I can no longer believe in the God I was brought up with. That God has vanished. I keep trying to go back to the way it was before. But I only end up pretending. I feel smothered by the lie I’m living, but I’m terrified of what will happen if I face the doubts inside.”
She was standing on the rim of a crisis that believers may actually need in order to keep growing. In his book Soul Making, Alan Jones writes of the questions of faith that act as agents inviting us to a deeper spiritual experience.5 He has found that they correspond to the experiences of the apostles.
The first spins around the question, What will I do with my life? This was the question the apostles faced when they decided to leave their fishing boats. It leads us into an initial conversion, with which we’re all familiar. We follow Christ and life is made new. Our conversion is glorious, as it was for the apostles when they left their nets. (Christ was healing and teaching, the crowds were coming, and the apostles were at the hub of it.) When things go wrong, it’s to that conversion that we inevitably try to return. We want to make it happen again.
The next question of faith comes when things in our lives begin to fall apart. Something wrecks the dominoes. For the apostles, it was Jesus’ crucifixion. The life that they had known with him was taken away. They felt numb, betrayed; it was as if the God they had invested everything in had vanished. They could no longer believe as they had before. Jones says that it’s as if their egoism were being burned out. Now the disciples have to go deeper and find a faith that allows them to live not only with the presence of Christ but with his seeming absence. They have to enter the darkness of their own doubts and come through to a faith that is true to where they are now.
It seemed to me that the woman at the conference was experiencing this latter struggle. Identifying her crisis in this new light became her creative moment. She was able to journey on to a deeper and more honest faith.
Throughout life we experience crises from many sources: from natural developmental transitions, from events that intrude from without, and from conditions that rise up within. While it helps to understand the roots of our crises, we also need to recognize that no matter the source, they all have one thing in common—a threshold.
CRISIS AS SEPARATION AND OPPORTUNITY
A crisis is a holy summons to cross a threshold. It involves both a leaving behind and a stepping toward, a separation and an opportunity.
The word crisis derives from the Greek words krisis and krino, which mean “a separating.” The very root of the word implies that our crises are times of severing from old ways and states of being. We need to ask ourselves what it is we’re being asked to separate from. What needs to be left behind?
As I asked myself the question, I drew courage from a Bible story. One man who came to Jesus wanting to be a disciple said, “Let me first go and bury my father.” Jesus gave him what seems like a harsh answer: “Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead” (Matt. 8:21–22). But when you apply the answer to the process of inner transformation, it makes perfect sense. This is a call to separation. To “leave the dead.” In order to follow the inner journey, we need to leave behind those things that are deadening, the loyalties that no longer have life for us.
Crisis is a separation, but it’s equally a time of opportunity. The Chinese word for crisis is composed of two characters. On top is the sign for danger; beneath it is the sign for opportunity. That character graphically illustrates the saying, “Crisis is really another name for redirection.”
A minister friend of mine, who has seen countless Christians through crisis events, told me that he didn’t think most Christians knew how to have a crisis—at least not creatively.
He started me wondering. For the most part, we do one of two things in response to a crisis. We say that it’s God’s will and force ourselves into an outwardly sweet acceptance, remaining unaffected at the deeper level of the spirit. People who have a crisis in this manner are generally after comfort and peace of mind.
Or we reject the crisis, fighting and railing against it until we become cynical and defeated or suffer a loss of faith. People who choose this way to have a crisis are after justice.
Yet there’s a third way to have a crisis: the way of waiting. That way means creating a painfully honest and contemplative relationship with one’s own depths, with God in the deep center of one’s soul. People who choose this way aren’t so much after peace of mind or justice as wholeness and transformation. They’re after soulmaking.
If you choose this way, you find the threshold, the creative moment or epiphany, within the crisis. You discover that the stormy experience can be an agent drawing you deeper into the kingdom, separating you from the old consciousness and the clamp of the ego. It’s not an easy way. As John Sanford notes,
At first the approach of the kingdom may seem like a violent attack from something dark and dreadful. . . . Entrance into the kingdom means the destruction of the old personality with its constricted and uncreative attitudes. . . . The fortress behind which the ego had been hiding must be torn down, and as these defenses are battered down forcibly by the movements from within, it may seem at first like a violent assault.6
It may seem that way, of course, but as theologian Martin Marty writes, “Brokenness and wounding do not occur in order to break human dignity but to open the heart so God can act.”7
Jesus had some curious things to say about the way a person comes into the inner kingdom of the True Self. You do it, he said, by entering a “narrow gate,” which only a few folks ever find (Luke 13:24). You do it by way of tight, difficult, uncomfortable places that separate you out from the rest of the herd.
In another biblical reference Jesus proclaimed, “I have come to bring fire to the earth” (Luke 12:49, JB). The coming of the inner kingdom often erupts through a fiery experience. That verse reminds me of the moment in the Divine Comedy when Dante enters the searing fire through which all persons must pass in order to make their way to Paradiso, the dwelling of God.
Dante is afraid of the flames; but he’s assured that it’s okay to enter, for this is the fire that burns but does not consume. To walk through this fire is not to die but to be transformed and purged. That is the fire of Christ.
FROM KANSAS TO OZ
While reading The Wizard of Oz, I saw striking parallels between the inner quest for the True Self and Dorothy’s journey from Kansas to Oz and back to Kansas. Essentially, her journey is the search for a way to come home.
The image of coming home is a powerful, archetypal symbol for returning to one’s deepest self, to the soul. To come home is to return to the place of inner origin, that original imprint of God within. Therefore, coming home fills us with a sense of being in the right place, a sense of deep spiritual belonging. We all have this profound longing to come home, whether we recognize it or not.
Perhaps the root spiritual problem of our time is that modern people, even modern Christians, have lost their way home. Not only that, we’ve lost the directions to find it. There are few places within our scientific, rationalistic culture that have enough connection to the symbolic realm of soul to point the way. Even the Church seems at times to have forgotten its role as the custodian and guide of the way home. Rather than helping us grow our souls organically beneath our very own hearts and illuminating the way to the deep inner ground, it frequently majors in theological propositions, dogma, intellect, institutional agendas, and the shepherding of great flocks of should’s and ought’s. Jung once pointed out that religion can easily become a defense against an experience of God.
Without maps and signposts, people search for their inner home in the wrong places: in professional success, material status, institutions, persons, pleasure, and on and on. But none of these can ever be home. We end up spiritual refugees.
One day, while I was working in a homeless shelter in Atlanta, a homeless man said to me, “People have one of two reactions when they see me on the street. They either ignore me or despise me.”
“Why do you think that is?” I asked him.
He turned his pained, watery eyes on me and said, “Because they see themselves, of course.”
Of course. We see in this group of wandering souls the condition of our own spiritual homelessness, and we either despise them for showing it to us or we ignore them so that we don’t have to be reminded of it.
Dorothy’s is an inner journey of coming home to herself. Her longing for home is portrayed in her adventure through Oz so strongly that it almost seems to take on the life of another character.
The story begins in Kansas, which is described as a gray place. Not even the grass was green. The house in which Dorothy lived was as dull and gray as the prairie. It was also confining; the house had four walls and one room.
Living within the narrow confines of false selves, in one-room, four-walled roles, is like living in an interior Kansas. Their life is reduced to narrow roles and expectations that leave little room for the deepest and truest part of ourselves to come out and breathe. The color always goes out of such a world.
My fascination grew as I read about the cyclone that tossed Dorothy’s one-room existence into the air. When the tempest came, she was standing on the threshold of the too-small house. In that moment she received her call to go on the quest. It came through a crisis swooping down unexpectedly upon her. It was her moment of separation, her moment of opportunity.
The way the call came to Dorothy is frequently the way it comes to us. We lean on the threshold, unable to separate ourselves from ways of living that cramp the soul. It’s usually at that precise moment that the cyclone appears. Some turbulence lifts our “house” into the air and turns our world upside down. With that, we’re propelled into the journey.
The message that I discovered in Dorothy’s cyclone was that crises can be holy beginnings if we allow them. If we listen, we’ll hear God calling from the tumult, as God spoke to Job from a whirlwind.
When the cyclone struck, Aunt Em threw open a trap door in the floor and disappeared down a small, dark hole into the cellar, shouting for Dorothy to follow her. There’s always the risk that we’ll retreat into the security of the cellar rather than ride the cyclone to a new place.
While leading a women’s retreat, I mentioned the “voice of Aunt Em” that seems to inhabit most of us. A woman who had gone through a crisis with an alcoholic son spoke up and said, “When my life fell around me, I picked up the pieces and put them back together the same way they were before. Nothing changed. When I did that, I was Aunt Em retreating into the small, dark hole in the cellar. I didn’t ride the cyclone; I never left Kansas.”
At the threshold moment, when the True Self within is demanding emergence, things can go either way. We can let the crisis thrust us into the heart of transformation or we can regress into our same old patterns.
Dorothy risked the whirlwind, and as a result she was carried miles from Kansas. The book describes her reaction:
It was very dark, and the wind howled terribly around her. . . . Hour after hour passed away, and slowly Dorothy got over her fright. At first she had wondered if she would be dashed to pieces when the house fell again; but as the hours passed . . . she stopped worrying and resolved to wait calmly and see what the future would bring. [Italics added.]8
Hope lies in braving the chaos and waiting calmly, with trust in the God who loves us. For if, like Dorothy, we wait, we may find that God delivers us somewhere amazing—into a place vibrant with color and startling encounters with the soul.
Dorothy arrived in a place that presented her with parts of herself: with a Scarecrow who had lost his brain and needed to learn to think for himself, a Tin Woodman who had lost his heart and needed to learn to feel his own feelings, and a Lion who had lost his courage and needed to find the inner mettle to be himself.
Walking such an inner spiral is the only way home. Dorothy walked the spiral and arrived back where she started, in Kansas. But Kansas wasn’t the same. She came home to find a different house—one that was new and spacious.
Likewise, through our journey of waiting, we come home to live out a new, more expansive, more authentic vision of who we are. As T. S. Eliot wrote,
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.9
PRAYER OF FAITH
To believe that you can find your way “home” through the crises and sufferings that fall upon you—and believe it even in the midnight of your struggle—requires a transfigured vision. It requires faith.
Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit priest, paleontologist, and philosopher, asked for such faith when he prayed, “In all those dark moments, O God, grant that I may understand that it is you who are painfully parting the fibers of my being in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance. . . .”10 That deep and beautiful prayer can help us learn to trust that inside us is a loving, divine power that heals and guides.
I find something breathtakingly hallowed about this truth: that in the midst of pain and crisis God is drawing us to wholeness. I prayed often for the faith to believe, to see that in my experience God was parting the fibers of my being. I struggled to trust that the whirlwind I was riding was a sacred opportunity—that it wanted to take me somewhere.
GROANINGS OF THE HEART
While a crisis is a summons into transformation, we must also recognize that it’s an advent into an entanglement of feelings. Part of living a crisis creatively is identifying and understanding the feelings that come with it. Otherwise, we don’t have a crisis; it has us.
As a little fellow my son used to walk around singing a line from a song that was popular at the time. It always came out, “Feelings—whoa, whoa, whoa, feelings.” An interesting combination of words. Most of us ride a crisis, pulling the reins on our feelings, hoping somehow to stop them so that the pain will go away.
That was my initial reaction to my own crisis.
That March Ann brought me the box in which she kept her hair ribbons. Shut away in the little box, they had become tangled and knotted together. “Will you separate them?” she asked. As I began to sift and sort the jumble of colors, it occurred to me that this was the very work I needed to do with my own tangled feelings. I needed to open the box and sort.
Like most crises, the midlife trial is a complexity of feelings, a delicate knotting that has to be untied. One of the first strands of feeling that I isolated was a vague sense of grieving and loss. With the breakdown of false selves—what Fritz Kunkel referred to as the “Seeming-Self”11—came the fear that the earth under my feet was melting away. Then what? I wondered. It was an empty feeling, an odd kind of mourning.
I felt inward pressure to change, yet I also felt pressure to remain the same. I got anxious over the way my old identity was losing its contours. A part of me wanted to shore it up as a child would pat a crumbling creation in a sandbox. Another part wanted to shed the old identity too quickly. No more Little Girl with a Curl, no more Little Red Hen, no more Tin Woodman. Peel them off like skin. I want out!
Walking inside “the ragged meadow of my soul,”12 as e. e. cummings so perfectly described it, I met an expanded reality of who I was. Some of it glittered like gemstones, but not all of it was shiny. I treaded shadow places; and there were deep fissures of suffering as I faced realities, ego wants, illusions. One day I said to my counselor, “Surely one of the hardest things in life is learning not to kid ourselves.”
“Maybe it’s the hardest of all,” he said with a smile.
Maybe.
Another strand of feeling was twined around my marriage. Some days I stared painfully into my husband’s face, knowing that the vitality had gone out of our relationship. Some days the marriage felt like an empty commitment, a hollowed-out shell that I couldn’t figure out how to fill. Somewhere along the way the tide had shifted.
Perhaps it boiled down to the fact that old ways of relating to one another simply weren’t adequate. My inner growth propelled me to be my own “I”—to be an authentic woman who was contained in herself, who chose and determined and handled her life from her own genuine spiritual center. Yet at the same time I needed a deeper “we” in our relationship, a sense of journeying together inside. Where was the intimacy that comes when you open your soul and allow the deepest and tenderest of things to flow between you? I needed the sort of honest communion that happens when souls truly meet.
But how do you renegotiate the matrix of a marriage after eighteen years? How do you knit new and deeper cords of intimacy against a backdrop of autonomy and individual personhood? Those are the questions of a midlife marriage. With them can come awe-ful feelings of being trapped, of hopelessness.
A crisis of soul draws up a sense of being caught in in-betweenness, in the “middle space between being able to say ‘I am’ in a new way and yet wanting to run away from it. We are caught between the ‘now’ and the ‘not-yet’ of our identity,” notes Alan Jones.13 In-between was exactly how I felt.
Jung compared this feeling of in-betweenness to being “suspended in mid-air.”14 But I think St. John of the Cross painted the best word picture when he called the in-between experience a “dark night of the soul.” He wrote, “David, one who also had experience of this trial, refers to it very clearly in one of the psalms: I was very afflicted and humbled; I roared with the groaning of the heart” (his italics).15
At my darkest moments it did feel as if my heart was groaning. As I write about those terrible sounds, I do so with that odd kind of trepidation that comes from being human in public. Recently I received a letter from a reader who was “surprised at me” because I’d written an article expressing some of these midlife feelings. “Christians shouldn’t feel that way,” she said. (The implication was pretty obvious.) But the truth is Christians have all kinds of feelings. Their hearts groan in many ways. And frankly, I believe we’ll all be better off when we take off our religious masks and become more human. Then we can get on with what really matters—the act of cupping our ears to one another’s hearts with compassion.
I have a quote propped beside my computer as I write. It comforts me. “To accept the dark night is to accept being human. . . . It is to accept being who I am. This is holiness.”16
EXPRESSING THE CLIMATE OF YOUR SOUL
Along with sifting and sorting crisis feelings comes the equally important task of expressing them. In my waiting I found the time and space to give expression to the climate of my soul.
I spent time writing my feelings in my journal. I spoke them to my counselor. I prayed them. I dreamed them. I danced them. I drew them. We each need to find our own unique ways of giving expression to the storm inside us.
We seem to know the value of finding a caring person to listen to our feelings; we understand how helpful it can be to write feelings down. But few of us seem to know the healing that can come from expressing our feelings through symbols.
Symbols are the language of the soul. Because they give us a way to communicate with the soul, they open doors for transformation. Unfortunately, symbolism has become a foreign language for many. Theologian Paul Tillich believed that Protestants were particularly in grave danger of literalizing or impoverishing their symbols. Along with Jung, he called Christians to a revitalization of their inner lives through the recovery of symbols.
Jesus also believed in the spiritual power available within symbols. I am the vine; I am the door; this bread is my body; this wine is my blood: with these words he was creating symbols—images that point to much deeper realities—and giving us a way to contact those realities.
Participating with symbols allows their deeper meaning to wrap around us and penetrate us. Through them, what is lost and unutterable inside us becomes real and accessible. “As the mind explores the symbol it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason,” wrote Jung.17
When I came upon the cocoon in the tree, I stumbled upon the healing power of personal symbols. To discover a symbol means allowing yourself to be grasped by it when it presents itself. For instance, not long after reading the story of Jonah, I was flipping through a catalog and came upon a medieval print of Jonah descending into the whale amid a storming sea. (Another one of those inexplicable “coincidences.”) I cut it out, framed it, and hung it on a wall of my study. I had only to glance at it to know what was inside me. The picture embodied an almost inexpressible sentiment floating within me, some beautiful ache and daring hope that I could scarcely articulate. The image made sense of my pain and enfolded me with Presence. Like the cocoon, it became part of the story of my soul.
The picture of the night sea journey, the cocoon, the encased butterflies on my desk, the charcoal sketches of the flapping tent and the homebaked bread—all these, and other images—helped me express the flood of sensations I felt and release the spiritual energy needed to transform them. They were ways of creating a story for myself to live in—a story that began to hold me up like a pair of arms. My symbols mirrored my feelings of dark and light, descent and ascent—images of hope and transformation. Each one seemed to clear a deeper path inside, one that would eventually take me to the other side of my anguish.
PATHOS AND JOY
“Soul-making,” wrote philosopher and educator Jean Houston, “is not necessarily a happy thing. Crucial parts of it are not. It almost always involves a painful excursion into pathos wherein the anguish is enormous. . . .”18
One day at my desk, feeling the intensity of my own “excursion into pathos,” I stared at the cocoon still hanging in my African violets. I felt acutely aware that I was in the passage of separation. I wondered what had compelled the caterpillar to detach from its old larval life and create the chrysalis. Was it responding to an inner voice of change and uprising? Was there a pressing, even painful, sense of the “fullness of time” that made itself known in the creature?
The phone rang, breaking into my thoughts. I picked up the receiver to find Sandy on the other end. Still pondering my questions, I asked him, “How does a caterpillar know it’s time to spin a cocoon?”
There was a pause as he waited for the punchline. “I give up,” he said. “How does a caterpillar know it’s time to spin a cocoon?”
I laughed so hard that the dogs, who’d been napping in the kitchen, came to the door of my study and cocked their beagle faces at me. It felt good to laugh.
Hanging up, I was reminded that laughter is soulmaking too, that no matter how dark and serious a crisis seems, I shouldn’t abandon my joy. That small human moment on the phone caused me to consider the paradox of pathos and joy in the midst of crisis. Could they coexist?
I remembered that when Ann was four, she tugged on my skirt for attention and asked, “Mama, does God laugh?” God laugh? The idea had never entered my head. (I suppose that’s one reason we have children: to make us think of inexplicable things.) “Why do you ask?” I said to her.
“Because I think I heard him today,” she said.
I gathered her into my arms. “Yes, of course God laughs,” I whispered. Maybe that’s what life is, I thought: God laughing, God rejoicing.
Eckhart wrote that God laughed into our soul, bringing us joy. He also believed that God suffered.19 I had no problem with his suffering. It seemed to me that many times when I was crying, I heard God crying too. Perhaps, like Ann, I needed to listen to God laughing.
I once saw a painting of Christ laughing. It touched me deeply. The “man of sorrows” was also the laughing Christ—a man in touch with both the ground of creative suffering and the ground of deep gladness. The most endearing verse in the Bible, to me, is “Jesus wept.” He knew about tears and pain, yet he also exulted in the festival of being fully alive.
Standing as I was, in the passage of crisis and separation, I needed to grasp the paradox that while soulmaking can be fraught with tears, it doesn’t require the abandonment of joy. After all, nothing is so painful that laughter can’t shimmer through it now and then.
I thought back to when Sandy’s father died. I was nine months pregnant with our first child—“great with child,” as the Bible says. Very. (People were always asking me if I was expecting twins.) At the funeral home the family gathered to pay their respects at the casket. I had been sitting in a low chair. The others waited as I struggled to get to my feet. Someone said later that it looked as if I had banana peelings under my shoes and a watermelon in my lap. Finally not one but two people came to hoist me up. My grieving mother-in-law began to laugh. She said, “You’ve reminded me that there’s still joy in life.”
In the crisis we need to hang onto God’s little jokes, to those priceless moments when something round with pleasure bounces upon us. We need to hold onto the celebration of becoming, to the bliss that wells up from the deeper places we’re tapping.
SPIRITUAL EQUINOX
As I climbed into bed on the eve of the spring equinox, a soft rain was falling. The storm that had seized the backyard earlier in the day had gone, leaving its imprint on torn limbs and battered shrubs—an equinoctial gale, the weatherman had called it. He commented that at the spring equinox, when the sun moves over the equator, the pattern of warm and cold air masses sometimes changes, stirring up the atmosphere. Storms happen.
That seems to be the way of the universe, inner and outer. Crossing spiritual meridians stirs the atmosphere within. People have equinoctial storms too. We need to accept them as part of the crossing over to a new season.
I looked at the clock. Nearly 11:00 P.M. The equinox was due to arrive at 4:39 A.M. At that precise moment the sun would cross the equator and spring would arrive. Afterward, the nights would be shorter and the days would be longer.
The prospect encouraged me. I thought of the darkness that comes upon us in crisis, the black orbits of pain through which we move. I asked God if there would be a spiritual equinox inside me, a crossing over after which a new season would come and the darkness would gradually begin to wane.
I kissed my husband goodnight and drifted to sleep, listening to the night murmur outside my bedroom window. Later I woke to a room full of shadows. The numbers on the clock read 4:38 A.M.
It took a few seconds for the mystery to register. I had awakened for the spring equinox. I slipped from beneath the blanket and tiptoed to the back door. I stared into the night, my heart pounding. Above me, far beyond the bounds of my comprehension, God was threading the night with spring.
I stood still and let the darkness move inside me too.