Counsel of despair: Neil Morgan finds an other solution

‘Where can we find a container for the deepest level of our pain and hurt?’

In Meeting for Worship recently, someone ministered about a person they knew. They had, sadly, taken their own life. They wanted to simply tell us about it, and say aloud the person’s name. It was a brave, deeply tender contribution.

It made me return to George Fox, and his despair, reported in his Journal of 1647 and rendered in Quaker faith & practice 19.02: ‘…as I had forsaken all the priests, so I left the separate preachers also, and those called the most experienced people; for I saw there were none amongst them that could speak to my condition. And when all my hopes in them, and in all [people] was gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do, then… I heard a voice’.

He hears an inwardly-directed voice. This inward voice draws him to Christ. He ends this paragraph: ‘Thus, what God doth work, who shall let [i.e. hinder] it? And this I knew experimentally.’

This passage is a description of what Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), the German existentialist philosopher, called a limit situation (‘grenzsituation’). Psychologically, these are ‘at the limit of endurance’ feelings, which threaten to engulf one. If we cannot survive them, we may be lost. If somehow, they are surmounted and survived, they may force one to find new ways of communicating and being.

Where can we find a container for the deepest level of our pain and hurt? What if there is nowhere to contain it at all? What if – externally and internally – we meet a brick wall, an absence, a void? This surely must destroy us. Things close in on us, we give up, and we go under. The Hungarian psychotherapist Sándor Ferenczi (1873-1933) wrote about such pain, and how it can shatter and destroy us mentally, and physically.

Fox wrote about his own experience, at the end of his tether, of somehow finding a container for his agony. What might such a miraculous container be?

We can think about this from various perspectives. Fox points to a person, Jesus, and to a transcendent God. Nontheists might want to explain it in a more symbolic way. Perhaps the model for the container is simply a loving other – perhaps the mother of infancy, who we cry out to in the dark, or an ideal alternative. But Fox was exploring a personal sense of being lost that needed some ‘other’ to find him, to rescue him. He has left us a testimony of his own finding. John Bunyan left us another in his Pilgrim’s Progress (1678).

Is Fox’s solution meaningful today? Do we discover it, or do we invent it? Does that make any difference?

I think a challenge for us is to imagine this ‘other’ in a religious way for the future. We should imagine together – whatever we conceive him/her/that to be, and whether we feel moved to write in capital letters, or not.

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