This essay is reprinted from Helen M. Luke’s Old Age, a collection of essays that illuminate the spiritual challenges of growing old.
Passages from several literary classics provide the context for Luke’s discussions, in which she suggests that old age, instead of being a period of decline — marked by anger and denial — can be a time of renewal, the culminating stage of life. Old Age is an insightful book, which emphasizes the choice that always confronts us: to continue to grow, which may require tremendous and sometimes painful effort, or to sink into the repetition of past triumphs, into disintegration and despair.
An eighty-three-year-old Jungian psychologist, Luke is the director of Apple Farm Community near Three Rivers, Michigan, a women’s contemplative community and “a center for people seeking to discover and appropriate the transforming power of symbols in their lives.”
— Ed.
“Suffering” is a word used to express so many kinds of experience that its precision of meaning has been lost. The Latin verb ferre means “to bear” or “to carry,” and “suffer” derives from it, with the prefix “sub” meaning “under.” This is reminiscent of the term “undercarriage” — that which bears the weight of a vehicle above the wheels — which is an apt image of the meaning of suffering in human life.
In contrast to the word “suffer,” such terms as “affliction,” “grief,” and “depression” all bring images of weight bearing down. To be afflicted is to be struck down by a blow (fligere: to strike). “Grief” is derived from gravare, to weigh down, and to be “depressed” is to be pressed down. Only when we suffer in the full sense of the word do we carry the weight. A man may say, “I am so terribly depressed, I can’t bear the suffering,” when in fact he may not be suffering at all, but simply lying down under the weight of outer circumstances or inner mood.
There are, then, two kinds of experiences which we call suffering — that which is totally unproductive, the neurotic state of meaningless depression, and that which is the essential condition of every step on the way to what C.G. Jung has called individuation. Perhaps these images of weight under which we fall and lie in self-pity, or of weight which we carry in full consciousness, may be guidelines in moments of darkness. The blows of great affliction or grief are comparatively rare, but day-to-day onslaught of hurt feelings, black moods, exhaustion, resentment, and — most deadly of all — false guilt are the training ground; and nothing is too small to offer us an opportunity to choose between suffering and depression.
Deeply ingrained in the infantile psyche is the conscious or unconscious assumption that the cure for depression is to replace it with pleasant, happy feelings, whereas the only valid cure for any kind of depression lies in the acceptance of real suffering. To climb out of it any other way is simply a palliative, laying the foundations for the next depression. Nothing whatever has happened to the soul. The roots of all our neuroses lie here, in the conflict between the longing for growth and freedom and our incapacity or refusal to pay the price in suffering, of the kind which challenges the supremacy of the ego’s demands. This is the crux of the matter (and we may pause here to recognize the exact meaning of the word “crux”). The ego will endure the worst agonies of neurotic misery rather than one moment of consent to the death of even a small part of its demand or its sense of importance.
We can do something toward tracking down some of the continual evasions of the ego by uncovering our fear of humiliation. From this fear of degradation, real or imagined, in our own eyes or in the eyes of others, comes a dead weight of moods and depression. For the truly humble person no humiliation exists. It is impossible to humiliate him or for him to feel humiliation, for “grades” and prestige, questions of his own merit or demerit, have no more meaning for him. But the way to humility lies through the pain of accepted humiliation. In the moment of picking it up and carrying it without any movement toward self-justification, we cease to be humiliated and begin to suffer. In this context, it is good to realize the extent to which we are all open in the unconscious to the collective worship of what we may call “grades.”
Worship is not too strong a word. The more the conscious ideal of the equality of man is proclaimed on the wrong levels, the more desperate becomes the unconscious urge to assert the difference, and the yearning for prestige of all kinds breaks loose from the natural hierarchies of being, into the struggles of the ego for ascendancy. The inequalities of class in the aristocratic age, absurd though we may call them, were certainly less conducive to neurosis than the gradings of money, academic prowess, I.Q.’s, and A’s, B’s, and C’s in every department of life, which can so dominate our personal unconscious that we are busy grading our weaknesses day in and day out — a very different thing from searching them out and carrying them. The poison of false values thus invades every corner of the psyche. A question to be constantly asked in moods of weakness and depression is, “Am I grading myself or am I recognizing the golden opportunity to suffer and so to deny to some small degree the ego’s demands for prestige?”
The worst stumbling block of all derives from this grading. There was no guilt involved in being born into this or that social class, but nowadays we are beset on every side by a false guilt which is inverted pride. If we do not rate a B or at least a C in every department of life, then we deem ourselves guilty. The puritanical strain in our heritage reinforces this until we can even allow our work on our inner life to engender a false sense of guilt about our physical, as well as our emotional, weaknesses.
Of course on one level it is true that any kind of symptom, physical or psychological, is a clue to the working of the unconscious, which should be followed up at the right time. But, if we feel this deadly kind of guilt, it simply means that we cannot accept our human condition, that we have given way to hubris and are saying unconsciously, “I ought to be like God, free of all weakness,” forgetting what happened to God Himself on the cross. The clues are to be worked upon, but the symptom itself is something to be wholly and freely accepted without egotistic guilt or any demand to be freed from it.
Hope for release is another thing, both natural and right, as also are the exterior efforts to come out of the sickness or mood. We are not excused from ordinary common sense by the fact that we accept the suffering and demand no release. In fact the two attitudes are one, and real acceptance will lead us to seek the appropriate help, whether medical skill in illness, the support of friends in grief, rest in exhaustion, work — either physical or psychological — in depression. Thus, we begin to build the “undercarriage” of suffering upon which the superstructure of our lives may securely rest and under which the wheels may move freely over the earth. The four-wheeled chariot is an ancient symbol of the Incarnation, and the thought of suffering as the undercarriage fits perfectly into this image. Suffering is that which carries the weight of the vehicle, distributing it over the four-fold wheels so that the driver may stand in safety and move toward his chosen goal.
However great our efforts may be to achieve this conscious attitude to suffering, we cannot succeed without an awareness that, in spite of apparent senselessness, there is always an implicit universal meaning even in the carrying of small miseries. Every time a person exchanges neurotic depression for real suffering, he or she is sharing to some small degree in the carrying of the suffering of mankind, in bearing a tiny part of the darkness of the world. Thus, one is released from his small personal concerns into a sense of meaning. One may not be consciously thinking in those terms, but the transition can immediately be recognized by the disappearance of the frustrated pointlessness of mood and depression. It is like becoming aware of a new dimension. Meaning has entered the experience.
We may be emotionally moved and filled with horror and pity when we hear of the tragedies of human lives at a distance, but the emotions lift no burden, they carry nothing. In contrast, the smallest consent to the fierce, sharp pain of objective suffering in the most trivial-seeming matter may have an influence, as the Chinese sage puts it, “at a distance of a thousand miles.” We may be entirely certain that some burden somewhere is lightened by our effort. Close at hand the effects are immediately visible. Those around us may know nothing of what is happening, but a weight is lifted from the atmosphere, or someone we love is set free to be himself, and the sufferer acquires a new clarity of vision and sensitivity to another’s need. Nothing is as blinding as neurotic self-pity, which causes us to walk around in a fog.
There is a familiar example of the difference between objective suffering and subjective emotional reaction in its effect on others, which many people have experienced at some time in their lives if they have been seriously ill. A nurse, or anyone else who is close to another’s pain, physical or psychic, and who reacts with intense personal emotion to the patient’s misery, will either repress what she cannot bear and become hard and unfeeling, or will increase the sick one’s burden through unconscious identification. A true nurse, by contrast, is always deeply concerned; she is compassionate (which means objectively “suffering with”) but not invaded by emotional reactions. She is herself changed by the experience through the love that lives beyond emotion. The patient can literally be saved by this kind of “carrying” by another, but can be swamped and pushed deeper into misery by the unconscious reactions of those around him or her, however well they may be disguised. The difference is subtle but absolutely distinct when experienced.
Just as there is no cure for an inferior kind of love except a greater and more conscious love, so there is no cure for inferior so-called suffering except a greater kind of suffering. It is possible by intense conscious attention to pass through this door into the fiercer suffering, which is linked to the whole; and then a strange thing may happen. We have lifted the weight, and, instead of being crushed by it, we find it is extraordinarily light — “My yoke is easy, my burden is light.” The pain remains but it is more like the piercing of a sword than a weight. “A sword shall pierce through my own soul also, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” These are the prophetic words of the wise old man Simeon, spoken to Mary when she took her newborn child to the temple. We have shed blood, the sacrificial blood, and so we can experience joy, not just pleasant feelings and escape.
There is in man a fear of joy as keen as the fear of suffering pain, because true joy precludes the pleasant feeling of self-importance just as suffering precludes all the comforts of self-pity. No man can know the one without the other. It is important here to discriminate between the spurious joy of the martyr complex and the joy which is on the other side of the cross. Christ was not a martyr, going singing to His death. If we catch ourselves feeling noble on account of our sufferings, we may be perfectly sure that we are simply at the old trick of climbing out of a depression into pleasant feeling — all the more dangerous because it is camouflaged as noble.
Real suffering belongs to innocence, not to guilt. As long as we feel misery because we are full of remorse and guilt or shame over our weakness, all we experience is a loss of vital energy, and no transformation takes place. But the minute we accept objectively the guilt and shame, the innocent part of us begins to suffer, and the weight becomes a sword. We bleed, and the energy flows back into us on a deeper and more conscious level. This is real repentance, as opposed to ego-centered shame, for it involves the recognition of the true guilt that lies always in our evasions of objective awareness.
For Christians, it is easy to give lip service to the “innocent victim,” to Christ carrying in innocence the sin and suffering of the world. But rarely do we even think of the essential practical application of this truth in the smallest of our pains. Only when the innocent part of us begins to suffer is there life and creation within and around us; but for the most part, we prefer to remain caught in the vicious and totally unproductive circle of remorse and superficial complacency, followed by a repetition of the sin, more remorse, and so on. In the Book of Job, God’s condemnation falls on the complacent rationality of the false comforters who assure Job that he could not possibly be suffering unless he were morally guilty. To Job, suffering but innocent, God’s answer is simply to reveal Himself in His infinite power and glory, beyond rational explanation.
In these days when the media bring to us daily the sight and sound of the appalling sufferings of the innocent, we all have great need of reminders of the only way in which we can contribute to the healing of the terrible split between curse and blessing in our time.
The poets and great storytellers of all ages come to our aid. When one man takes up responsibility for his blindness without any false guilt, even in the smallest things, the self-pity and the projections of blame onto others or onto God drop away, and the blessing beyond the opposites is strengthened in our environment. It seems infinitesimal, but in Jung’s words it may be the “makeweight that tips the scales.” Thus we suffer the sword of objectivity, refusing nothing, so that the healing may reach “the hearts of many” without our conscious intention. It happens not through our willed efforts to improve the world, fine and right though these may be on another level, but to the degree to which the curse and the blessing have been experienced consciously as one, in the psyche of the individual. It is an experience which, Jung wrote in Mysterium Conjunctionis, reaches “the individual in stillness — the individual who constitutes the meaning of the world.”
We began by defining a word. We end with another — the word “passion.” Derived from the Latin passio, meaning suffering, it is used to define the sufferings of Christ. Commonly the word applies to any emotion that goes beyond the bounds of reason, consuming and possessing a man so that he is in a state of “enthusiasm,” which, in its original meaning, is the state of being filled with the god, whether the god of anger, of love, or of hate.
When suffering breaks through the small personal context and exposes a man to the pain and darkness of life itself, the way is opened to that ultimate state of passion beyond all the passions of desire. There, being completely empty, as Christ was empty when He cried, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me,” he may finally come to be filled with the wholeness of God Himself.
This excerpt is reprinted by permission of Helen M. Luke. Published by Parabola Books, Old Age may be ordered for $12.95, plus $1.30 for shipping, from Parabola, Box S, 656 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
Copyright © 1987 by Helen M. Luke
