Most months, this newsletter offers my random observations on the process of using our pains, our “cracks” if you would, as a lens to see the beauty that often lies just beyond that pain or confusion.
September is very personal month for me, full of remembrances and yet the potential for beauty. It is a month when I tend to hold my breath, waiting, waiting to see what the month will bring waiting for that relief that comes when it brings nothing new as the calendar flips the page to October. Maybe you have a month like that too, I don’t know, but September is that for me.
In my work as a teacher and as a spiritual director, and in my life as a human creature seeking ever more access to the peace and wisdom that we all carry inside, I have learned through the stories of others and their personal reflection on those stories than I have learned from any theoretical text. And so, here, I offer you my stories about some major moments of cracking in my life. My stories are but a glimpse of those life events in the rear view mirror, but that backwards glance gives me the chance to see these events alongside the one or two steps towards wholeness I may have taken between then and now. That’s how I learn.
In the months ahead, I’ll take a look at some of the tools that helped me continue to put one foot in front of the other. Today’s words are all about the cracks themselves, the first step in what we often call a spiritual biography, a first step in any kind of spiritual direction work.
I hope you will join me on this journey. I know you have a story to tell, too, so maybe, as we go, we can join each other, share a few laughs and tears, and take a little strength from the idea that others walk their own version of life’s rocky road . If you are subscriber, thank you. If not, I hope you will sign up. You may see information about pledging for the future, but right now, Through the Cracks remains totally free.
Blue skies and bated breath…
I'm always happy when I'm greeted by grey skies and wind on that particular morning in September. It is the sight of bright blue cloudless skies that I remember first most of the before time, blue skies that carried within them the unspeakable events of the day. And, on many such a September day, I have been known to sit at my computer, immobilized, as the clock ticks past the milestones: 8:46 am, 9:03 am, 9:37 am, 9:59 am, and finally, 10:02 am. It is only after the clock passes that last moment, when we as a people moved from event to aftermath, that my body relaxes, my mind clears, and I realize that I have been holding my breath as my body braced with the cellular memory of the events of that day.
This September was the 22nd anniversary of those events that changed so much, but this memory is not my only difficult remembering in this month that holds the place between summer fun and fall transitions. September has been, since 2001, for me, a challenging month, but not just because of 9/11. It become month of remembrances, Septembrances as I like to call them. The days of September now contain a trail of memories that speak to some of the sharpest twists and turns in my life. Septembrances have much to say about who I am and why I do what I do now, and probably, about who I may continue to become as my days in this world continue to unfold.
There are cracks, and then there are cracks…
There is not much more that I can say about the crack broken open in my life on 9/11. We all carry that day in our different ways — it was a global event with personal implications and world-wide ramifications. We each sit this day and others, mourning and honoring those who lost their lives then even as we embrace our own. We all participated as citizens of the planet in our societal responses to those events, as governments sought to punish those responsible as individuals worked to pick up the pieces of lives lost and shattered. We have all participated in our own way to the changes to our world that began on that bright, blue, September morning.
More singular for me is the crack broken open by another September event…the illness and death of my beloved beagle companion, Grace. She may have been known as Gracie the Wonder Dog, but poor baby, she was so very sick with the liver cancer that shortened her time with us. And yet, she hung on to life and love and companionship for so very long. Some around me judged me cruel to keep her close when she was so ill, because that is not what we do with animals in our culture. But for me, the signs of life outweighed the signs of impending death, and so I waited until I could wait no more. As I look back, I am left thinking that I both released her too late and too soon, and the tears flow with the remembrance to this very day.
The two months I walked with her through the end of her life were the most awful and the most wonderful of days in every way, until that September day when goodbye could be delayed no longer, forcing an intervention that went against everything I believed about life and living. Those days were full to the brim with the urgency that comes when we know that time is so short with those we love, an urgency I strive to remember each and ever day because it focuses me in the now, not the then or when. I do the best I can to honor her spirit every day in every way that I can.
Yes, the death of a loved one, two- or four-legged, is one of those places of seismic cracking in life for all of us. Yet, this was the first time for me, the first time in my life that I was ever asked to sit in love as someone so important to me passed this existence. I had never been forced to make these life and death decisions for another, in fact, I had been shielded from them. Most of the “important” deaths in my life — father, brother, mother — had occurred either when I was very, very, young, or when I was very far away. You might say this was my first close brush with the death of another, although it came just a few years after a serious dance with death of my own.
Breaking to heal…
Some cracks have the potential for healing built into them. Such is my third Septembrance. It was another warm September day when I underwent aortic valve replacement surgery to correct a congenital heart defect, although the surgery started too early for me to know if the skies were blue. To make the surgery even more exciting, the anesthesiologist knocked out my front tooth during the procedure, creating the need for a dental implant. Ten years have passed since that day. I have been beyond fortunate in my physical healing; my psychological and spiritual healing took much longer to begin, and, honestly, continues to this day.
Those of you who have had any kind of surgery know what I mean when I refer to this moment as a kind of intentional break for the purpose of healing…we don’t pursue a drastic course of treatment like heart surgery for fun. We undertake that uncertain journey because of the hope of life, perhaps even a better life, and the chance to savor days that we would not have without the breaking. We accept the challenges we know will face us in the after days, although most likely, we have no idea the shape or extent of those challenges at the time we decide to begin treatment.
The healing is no guarantee, neither the physical nor the spiritual. Yes, the surgeon can fix the broken thing and stitch our physicality back into good-as-new-or-maybe-even-better shape. But who stitches together the deeper part of us, our soul, our self, our sense of being who we are, our sense of meaning? Who helps us make ourselves over again, into something a little bit old and a little bit new? That job falls to us, to our willingness to question, to dig, to repair, and to change, because nothing ever returns to what it was before. Healing requires imagination.
The thing about cracks, particularly cracks made in “solid” vessels, like pottery and personas, is that they leave pieces of the past creation behind while making room for new creation. These pieces are the clues to that new creation; they are broken, yes, they are not what they were, but they do carry important stories and need to be sorted. And the question is, what can you create with them? There are shards to be honored and cataloged, according to the cosmological midrash of the Jewish teacher, Rabbi Isaac Luria of Safed, known as the Ari (1534-1572). There are shards to be buried with respect and released. There are shadows to be embraced, according to the work of psychologist Carl Jung. Whether I talk about shards of light, as would Ari, or archetypes, shadows and individuation, as would Jung, the goal of the work involved is the same — a renewed sense of wholeness. And my pictures and memories, these Septembrances, although frozen in a past time, remind me of what I knew then and what I have learned since, through the struggle and the pain. They also show me glimpses of what I do not yet know. Memory helps me continue my dance with the questions about living that form that sense of yearning that is all too human. Memory, without the tinge of magical thinking, can feed my imagination as I create a life that carries healing as part of my story.
Embracing brokenness AND healing
We are, as creatures, driven by the need to make meaning of the events in our lives, of our feelings, of our losses, and so much more. And yet, how seldom we spend time consciously doing just that, remembering yet standing still to listen to the present, so that we may imagine the future with curiosity and hope.
Jungian-analyst and author James Hollis suggests that it is our ability to question our existence that fuels our quest for meaning, again, with both conscious knowledge and in the realm of the indescribable, the land that belongs to mystics and the numinous. He suggests that these questions, “the big questions,” the unanswerable ones, fall into four categories of meaning: first, the cosmological questions (or why are here, and to what purpose), the ecological questions (even more important now, how do we live in harmony with the created world around us), the sociological questions (who are my people and what are my responsibilities and expectations of others around me), and finally, the most difficult of all, the psychological questions (who am I, what is my life about, and how do I face the difficult days of my living).1 As Hollis points out, Carl Jung was among the first to recognize and write about the truth that, when we feel discontent, when we feel disconnected, when we feel yearnings that we cannot seem to satisfy no matter how much we eat or drink or buy or what we worship, that these are symptoms of our inner drive toward meaning, a drive that we have not acknowledged.2 The trick in healing, I think, is to consider these questions with love and respect, rather than fear and foreboding. It is a balance, as always. Memory must not overwhelm imagination, it must feed it.
I know that I am one of the lucky ones; this September I am able to tell you these stories from a place of gratitude and hope, the hope that imagination of can bring. That may not be true in September 2024, but it is true today. The more conscious I become of these meaning making questions, the more I can visit the past without being bound to the pain and sorry, the more I can see each crack as a step towards a new kind of understanding, a chance to create newness with the strongest and most beautiful pieces before me. These memories become incorporated shards instead of ghosts of failure haunting my dreams.
These memories and what I do with them now shape each and every day of my living since, sometimes consciously, always unconsciously. Only by holding these memories with love can I embrace both my brokenness, which is my humanity, and the healing that is also my birthright.
And so, I embrace September and all it has to offer me. I don’t know about you, but I have no interest in ending my time on this planet as one of the many who, as Jung said it, “failed to read the meaning of my own existence.”3 I’ll keep turning every page that I can, no matter how old the book nor how deep the cracks.
What’s next in Through the Cracks
Over the next months, I’m going to take myself (and you, I hope) on a journey through Hollis’s questions about the meaning of life. This year is as good as any other for a deeper sense of introspection, and it will give me a chance to talk about the tools that have helped me regain my equilibrium at some of the darkest moments, such as my Septembrances. I’ll be talking a lot more about the role of post-Jungian spirituality in these months, and about my work as a spiritual director. I hope that you’ll come along for the ride. And please, leave a comment if something I’ve said or say in the future moves you to do so!
More about my Septembrances
There was a lot to cover here, because September has been a very busy month in my life. If you are interested in more details about each of my “cracks,” take a moment and read a few of the essays I wrote about them over the years.
A life (and a death) with Grace
The one I didn’t want to write
I know this now: singing saved my life
James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run our Lives (Ashville: Chiron Publications, 2013), 131.
Hollis, Hauntings, 132.
Carl Jung quoted in Hollis, Hauntings, 132.