The normal reaction to a season of suffering is to try to get out of it. Address the symptoms. Have a few drinks. Play a few sad records. Move on.
The right thing to do when you are in moments of suffering is to stand erect in the suffering. Wait. See what it has to teach you. Understand that your suffering is a task that, if handled correctly, with the help of others, will lead to enlargement, not diminishment.
The valley is where we shed the old self so the new self can emerge. There are no shortcuts. There’s just the same eternal three-step process that the poets have described from time eternal: from suffering to wisdom to service. Dying to the old self, cleansing in the emptiness, resurrecting in the new. From the agony of the valley, to the purgation in the desert, to the insight on the mountaintop.
So how do you start this three-part journey? Fortunately, people have been thinking about this for thousands of years, and they’ve given us models on how to do it.
Moses, for example, had an inchoate idea of what his life was about. He was growing up in the pharaoh’s palace (very nice!), but he had a moral conscience. He hated the oppression of the Jews, and he killed an Egyptian guard who mistreated a slave. But his mini-rebellion backfired because it was random and self-indulgent. He had to flee Egypt a failure, even in the eyes of his fellow Jews. Moses went off to be alone. He took his flock of sheep “far away into the desert.”
While he was out there, according to the rabbinic tradition, a little lamb ran away from the flock, and Moses pursued it. Normally, it’s easy to catch a stray lamb. They’re not the fastest creatures on earth, and they generally don’t wander far. But this time something strange happened. The lamb ran like a gazelle. Moses sprinted farther into the wilderness but could not keep pace. The lamb ran out ahead, farther away. Finally, the lamb stopped at a spring to drink, and Moses caught her.
The lamb, of course, is Moses himself. Moses was hidden and unknown even to himself. As the Sufi saying puts it, “I was a hidden treasure.” He had to go far off into the wilderness, and then even farther into that empty place in pursuit of a stray lamb, to finally come to himself.
At the moment when you are most confused about what you should do with your life, the smartest bet is to do what millions of men and women have done through history. Pick yourself up and go out alone into the wilderness.
A lot is gained simply by going into a different physical place. You need to taste and touch and feel your way toward a new way of being. And there are huge benefits in leaving the center of things and going off into the margins. “You are living through an unusual time,” Henri Nouwen writes.
You see that you are called to go toward solitude, prayer, hiddenness, and great simplicity. You see that, for the time being, you have to be limited in your movements, sparing with phone calls, and careful in letter writing….The thought that you may have to live away from friends, busy work, newspapers, and exciting books no longer scares you….It is clear that something in you is dying and something is being born. You must remain attentive, calm, and obedient to your best intuitions.
In the wilderness, life is stripped of distractions. It is quiet. The topography demands discipline, simplicity, and fierce attention. Solitude in the wilderness makes irrelevant all the people-pleasing habits that have become interwoven into your personality. “What happens when a ‘gifted child’ finds himself in a wilderness where he’s stripped of any way of proving his worth?” asks Belden Lane in Backpacking with the Saints. “What does he do when there’s nothing he can do, when there’s no audience to applaud his performance, when he faces a cold, silent indifference, if not hostility? His world falls to pieces. The soul hungry for approval starves in a desert like that. It reduces the compulsive achiever to something little, utterly ordinary. Only then is he able to be loved.”
Solitude in the wilderness changes your experience of time. Normal life happens in ordinary time—the commute to work / do the dishes sense of time. But the wilderness marks time in eons; nothing changes quickly. The wilderness lives at the pace of what the Greeks called kairos time, which can be slower but is always richer. Synchronous time is moment after moment, but kairos time is qualitative, opportune or not yet ripe, rich or spare, inspired or flat—the crowded hour or the empty moment. When you have been away in the wilderness for weeks, you begin to move at kairos time. The soul communing with itself in the wilderness is at kairos time, too—slow and serene, but thick and strong, like the growing of the redwood.
The leanness of wilderness life prepares you for intimacy with yourself. Sometimes that surfaces the pain. There are the red-hot memories of past failures and past grief. There are all the wounds inflicted by parents and grandparents. There are your own bad actions that flow from these wounds—your tendency to lash out, or your tendency to be hyper-afraid of abandonment, or your tendency to be incommunicative and to withdraw at the first sign of stress.
“Your pain is deep and it won’t just go away,” Nouwen continues. “It is also uniquely yours, because it is linked to some of your earliest life experiences. Your call is to bring that pain home. As long as your wounded part remains foreign to your adult self, your pain will injure you as well as others.” As the saying goes, suffering that is not transformed is transmitted.
When people are out there in the wilderness, they learn to receive and review their life. “If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life,” Frederick Buechner wrote. “See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”
The teacher Parker Palmer echoes the theme: “As the darkness began to descend on me in my early twenties, I thought I had developed a unique and terminal case of failure. I did not realize that I had merely embarked on a journey toward joining the human race.”
The core of that, for Palmer, was listening. “Trying to live someone else’s life, or to live by an abstract norm, will invariably fail—and even do great damage.” You don’t find your vocation through an act of taking charge. “Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about—quite apart from what I would like it to be about.”
I have a friend named Pete Wehner who is an amazing listener. I’ll describe some problem to him, and he’ll ask me some questions. There comes a moment in the conversation, after he’s asked four or five questions, when I expect him to start offering his opinions and recommendations. But then he surprises me and asks six or eight more questions, before eventually offering counsel or advice. Real listening, whether to others or yourself, involves that unexpected extra round of questions, stretching the asking beyond what feels natural.
Listening to your life means having patience. Many of us confront most of life with a prematurely evaluating attitude. We have a natural tendency to make up our mind instantly, the moment we encounter something. The problem is that once we’ve filed something away with a judgment—even our very selves—we stop seeing it in all its complexity. The wilderness teaches negative capability, the ability to rest in uncertainty, to not jump to premature conclusions.
Listening to life means asking, What have I done well? What have I done poorly? What do I do when I’m not being paid or rewarded? Were there times when I put on faces that other people wanted me to wear, or that I thought other people wanted me to wear?
When you’re in the wilderness, a better version of yourself has a tendency to emerge. “When I venture into wilderness, I’m surprised by how much I enjoy my own company,” Belden Lane writes. “The person I travel with there isn’t worried about his performance. He sheds the polished persona he tries so often to project to others. Scribbling in my journal under the shade of a pin oak atop Bell Mountain, I’m happy as a lark. I want to be the person that I am when I’m alone in wilderness.” This is the beginning of an important revelation.
“In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us,” Annie Dillard writes in Teaching a Stone to Talk. “But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other.”
This is the pivotal point, maybe of this whole book. On the surface of our lives most of us build the hard shell. It is built to cover fear and insecurity and win approval and success. When you get down to the core of yourself, you find a different, more primeval country, and in it a deep yearning to care and connect. You could call this deep core of yourself the pleroma, or substrate. It is where your heart and soul reside.
After her first daughter was born, a friend of mine, Catherine Bly Cox, told me, “I found I loved her more than evolution required.” I’ve always loved that observation because it points to that deeper layer. There are the things that drive us toward material pleasure, and there are evolutionary forces that drive us to reproduce and pass down our genes. These are the layers of life covered by economics and political science and evolutionary psychology. But those layers don’t explain Chartres Cathedral or “Ode to Joy”; they don’t explain Nelson Mandela in jail, Abraham Lincoln in the war room, or a mother holding her baby. They don’t explain the fierceness and fullness of love, as we all experience it.
This is the layer we’re trying to reach in the wilderness. These are the springs that will propel us to our second mountain.
When you have touched these deeper sources, you have begun to make the ego your servant and not your master. Over the years, your ego has found a specific way it wants you to be in order to win the most approval—what Henri Nouwen calls the “ego ideal.” The ego wants you to point your life to the role that will make you seem smart, good-looking, and admirable. It’s likely you have spent a lot of time so far conforming to the ego ideal.
As the psychologist James Hollis puts it, “Your ego prefers certainty to uncertainty, predictability over surprise, clarity over ambiguity. Your ego always wants to shroud over the barely audible murmurings of the heart.” The ego, says Lee Hardy, wants you to choose a job and a life that you can use as a magic wand to impress others.
It’s at this deep level that you sense a different life, one your ego cannot even fathom. There’s something in you that senses, as C. S. Lewis wrote, “the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
We’re at the first stage of renunciation—shedding the old self so the new self can emerge. It’s at this point you realize you are a much better person than your ego ideal. It’s at this point when you really discover the heart and soul.