It is both a great privilege and an almost unbearable sorrow to live in our world. Its natural beauty cannot but arrest the thoughts of anyone who is not completely steeped in their own concerns. But that beauty is caught in the flow of nature, from its fragile birth in spring, its flowering in summer, its crowning colour in autumn, and then the dropping of leaves, the death of flowers, and the final stark bareness of winter. The daylight recedes to a night that embraces the early hours of the working day and the retiring afternoon. We accept all this without great thought, knowing full well that a new spring will in due course open a fresh year of fecundity, heralded by the snowdrops and crocuses to be followed by the daffodils and tulips that in turn usher in the full efflorescence of early summer, the most beautiful time of freshness and glorious vegetation. How sad it is when we contemplate the tracts of fertile nature that have been ravished by covetous humans, and converted into vast deserts of dreary factories and featureless dwellings! But, it may be objected, these are the life-blood of society, without which not only would humans starve to death, but nature itself run to ruin. I have tried to dispel this second objection in the last chapter, but the first is less easily dismissed. Civilization entails the building of cities, and these in turn encroach on the land around them. At present technology is so far advanced that it threatens to take over the whole world; humans are admittedly in charge but they are less often in complete control, inasmuch as the power contained in vast industrial works fills the owners with so great a feeling of grandeur that they can scarcely prevent themselves being led along the path of even greater development almost as a challenge to their rivals and to nature itself.
Is industrial development therefore intrinsically wrong? I think this question requires a deeper consideration. The human species is meant to develop its potential, a gift that resides in a superbly developed brain (and one also liable to depressive disease in unfortunate people) which will never be satisfied until the pillars of creation have been laid bare, scaled, and formed the foundation for further advances into the unknown. The moralist will term this attitude hubris, an insolent, overweening pride leading to nemesis. This is retributive justice ending in a well-deserved downfall. The biblical analogue is the story of the Tower of Babel recounted in Genesis 11.1-9. If the search for truth can be effected in a spirit of awe for a creation beyond human calculation, then the work may be pursued beneficially for nature as well as the human mind, but if there is no respect for the unknown, tragedy is sure to follow. The ultimate theme of the Wisdom Literature of the Bible is "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" (Proverbs 1.7; Psalm 111.10; Job 28.28; Ecclesiasticus 1.14). This fear is not the anxiety before an unpredictable tyrant, but the awe one feels when one is with something too great to be defined which one knows intuitively to be holy. There is admittedly no clinching intellectual proof of God, for God is known primarily in the heart (affect) and only secondarily with the mind (reason). The workings of the universe are increasingly open to scientific scrutiny and analysis, but how and why it existed in the first place remains a mystery. Creation, in other words, is not intellectually explicable even though its workings are within the range of the human mind. This beneficent mystery fills the sensitive person with awe. When we can register this awe we fulfil the humanity within us, and expand spiritually into something of the nature of the divine.
Holiness is a quality of people close to the God of all creation, and it shows itself in a Christ-like character. It is the prerogative of the saints of all the religious traditions. By contrast, virtue incorporates a way of life that faithfully observes the moral law. In itself it is beyond praise, but unless it embraces the supreme quality of love, it may become hard and judgemental. A number of Jesus' parables and encounters in daily life demonstrate the inadequacy of a virtuous life that has no love at its centre (Luke 7.36-50, 15.11-32, 18.9-14). The type of person who has felt awe on special occasions is bound to be open to the impress of love even if their moral life is not impeccable. Awe informs one of one's smallness before the mystery of creation; it inculcates humility which is the portal through which love can enter the personality and from which it may proceed to serve one's neighbour. This service is a combination of God's inspiration and one's own capability. No wonder the awe of God is the beginning of a wisdom that can serve the world quietly and without fuss or egoistical display. If one knows this awe, the burden of self-conscious posturing falls away, and one can enjoy the vibrant creation with the abandon of a small child.
Meister Eckhart goes so far as to say that in our world God requires us humans just as much as we require him. This does not mean that we are God's equals in power or wisdom, but simply that the divine will has decreed that we are created in the divine image and that we are to work in harmony, even partnership, with the Creator. If we are attuned to the will of God in a life of prayer, we shall do what is right not only for ourselves but for the whole world (and, I believe, the greater universe as well because of the far-ranging power of prayer). The spirit of awe makes us commune spontaneously with God by the action of prayer, which is to be seen primarily as listening to the divine source in quiet contemplation. From all this it becomes evident that the perfect state of mind is one of peace, a freedom from personal striving so that all our efforts can be devoted to the service of those around us. The end of all this is a beatitude in which we may together do the work of governing the world to the benefit of the entire creation. Moods of happiness are by the nature of mundane existence bound to be evanescent, as darkness follows light and death ends even the most glorious life. It may well be that a positive pleasure is preferable to a negative sadness, but both are necessary for the growth of the personality from childish self-centredness to an adult responsibility that can take under its wing the less fortunate members of the created order, who will certainly include ourselves as we approach the waning years of diminishment, to use a favourite Teilhardian concept.
It is evident that our mood, or state of mind, has both an endogenous (internal) and an exogenous (external) component. The condition of our body will affect the cheerfulness of our mood; thus chronic ill-health, especially if there is severe pain that does not respond adequately to treatment, soon leads to a state of dejection, which may progress to desperation if there is no relief. Desperation is a state of such abandonment of hope that any chance may be taken no matter how reckless it may appear. It has a positive aspect no matter how grave the situation may be. The related mood of despair is entirely negative: the abandonment of hope is absolute and the person sinks into apathy and sometimes a suicidal frame of mind. It is a concomitant of severe depression, but can also occur in the normally functioning individual when the dice of fate seems inexorably loaded against him or her. One thinks of the victims of concentration camps facing certain extermination, or a patient with a lethal disease at death's door. In these cases it not infrequently happens that a braver face is shown as death is about to close the scene. Personally I believe that entities from the other side of life are at this juncture approaching to lead the dying individual to a happier existence of which we can barely speak from the virtual blindness of mortal life.
One thing is certain: no matter how extravert (or outward-looking) our personality may be, we are soon turned sharply upon ourselves when we are in physical pain or when the world and its fortunes go wrong for us. The natural introvert, one whose attention is constantly drawn inwardly to his or her condition, is less overwhelmed by adverse circumstances, because in a way they are unconsciously prepared for them. I am a very typical introvert, and this has helped me to resonate with the problems of other people more easily than I would had I been so outward-looking that I could hardly have articulated in depth with anyone. But, on the other hand, I have had difficulty with superficial social relationships as a result of both my shyness and an awareness of deeper matters than those that usually impinge on most other people, until, of course, disaster strikes. No one personality type is preferable to another; what matters is how we make use of our gifts and strive to strengthen, or at least compensate for, weak functions in our constitution.
In Jungian thought there are, in addition to introversion and extraversion, four psychological types of personality depending on the four "functions": sensation, direct perception of what is going on by the senses; thinking, the ability to fit pieces of information logically by reason; feeling, assessing matters according to value judgements; and intuition, the ability to see beyond the tangibles in a situation to hidden factors. Indeed, intuition comes to us by information that is transmitted by the unconscious. Sensation and intuition are separate ways of perceiving a situation, whereas thinking and feeling are separate ways of assessing it. In a fully rounded person these functions are properly balanced. The experience of fully conscious awareness makes us more open to information acquired intuitively; reverses of one type or another seem to be mandatory for us to be aware of ourselves in relation to the world around us - neither to be lost in our own speculations nor to be immersed in the attraction of outside events to the extent of being passively carried along with them.
Great spiritual teachers have repeatedly drawn their disciples' attention to living in the present moment, which is both the here and now and also the point of eternity in the experience of time. Jean-Pierre de Caussade, an eighteenth-century Jesuit spiritual director, in his classic Self Abandonment to Divine Providence speaks cogently about "the sacrament of the present moment". But it is a sacrament only if we are fully there to receive it; Christ is in fact the eternal celebrant, and he offers us his presence and the divine wisdom that proceeds from it without condition and with full love. "He was in the world; but the world, though it owed its being to him, did not recognize him. He came to his own, and his people would not accept him. But to all who did accept him, to those who put their trust in him, he gave the right to become children of God, born not of human stock, by the physical desire of a human father, but of God" (John 1.10-13). To me this momentous statement about the event and effect of the Incarnation is much more than simply the delineation of a new, and major, religious denomination. It speaks to me of the renewed humanity of all those who have the humility, self-control, and dedication to their fellows to give fully of themselves moment by moment of their mortal lives. Such a person has truly followed the example of Christ and has as a consequence been filled fully with his grace. That grace is the power that integrates the personality to allow the great individuation process, described by Jung, slowly to take form. Here we have a creative synthesis between the polarities of the personality with a living integration of the conscious mind and its great unconscious background. When humanity has attained this spiritual understanding there will indeed be peace on earth and goodwill towards all creatures. Experiencing the world's pain both as onlookers and as sufferers causes us to attain a greater understanding of life as it is, and a more effective means of participating in that life. But then we are transformed individuals; the beam has been effectively removed from our own eyes, and we can see the problems confronting the world more precisely, so that our efforts may in truth help in the redemption of life from sickness to health. In other words, as we move beyond the sin of personal separation to the virtue of corporate action, we grasp the liberating function of service for the world and become transformed people.
The concepts of service and duty need to be thoroughly analysed. There is a type of service that is grudgingly drawn out of one. We recall the Parable of the Importunate Friend in Luke 11.5-8: a householder is awoken in the middle of the night by a friend who asks for food for another friend who has suddenly turned up and requires urgent hospitality. The householder is very grumpy at being so disturbed from his sleep, but finally yields to his friend's entreaty and provides food for him. He does this service with a poor grace, whereas his friend performed his service in a spirit of caring and solicitude. If one serves for any reason other than love, the work is not psychically fulfilled even if the material result is satisfactory. In other words, service is intimately involved in personal relationships: in the story recounted above, the householder has not related properly to his friend, who in turn has taken the food in an unhappy spirit. Nevertheless, the thought of his other friend receiving the food with gratitude serves to bring him up to a joyful satisfaction as he speedily returns to his home. It is better to serve with a bad grace than to withdraw from the work, for, apart from helping in an immediate capacity, the habit of serving another person will gradually impress itself on one's way of life, and the happiness that one gives to another will reflect itself on to one's own character. This is in fact the way of effecting good relationships with a multitude of different people. "All real living is meeting": we remember Martin Buber's aphorism from Chapter 2.
We live by duty and discipline, but if these are treated as an end in themselves, they become heartless tyrants. Duty and discipline properly understood and undertaken play an essential part in the maturation of the personality, and in exceptional people its perfection also. To bring peace, however temporary, to a troubled soul is the greatest joy that an aspiring person can know. As Jesus puts it in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, "How could we fail to celebrate this happy day? Your brother here was dead and has come back to life; he was lost and has been found" (Luke 15.3 2). Service properly performed brings joy to giver and recipient alike because it breaks down barriers of class and social distinction on the one hand and stubborn pride on the other. Then both parties start to function as real humans, losing their small concerns in a relationship that brings both to the foothills of the divine nature. Service is the obverse side of growth on the coin of personal sanctification. It may be that "happiness lies more in giving than in receiving" (Acts 20.35), but it is also important to be able to receive with graciousness and gratitude. Giving implies strength, which is always satisfying to show; receiving indicates weakness, which a self-sufficient person is loath to admit even to himself or herself, let alone a benefactor.
When a duty becomes part of one's style of living, and discipline brings with it a constant life of prayer, one can see fully the necessity for both these qualities in the development of the personality to Christ-like proportions. It needs also to be said that our first duty is towards our own well-being, because only when we are in health of body and mind can we perform our duty to our neighbour. Discipline keeps us on the right path especially when we are tempted by the world's various distractions. Discipline strengthens the will, so that we may be masters of various situations, even those that are extremely painful, rather than being wafted like autumn leaves falling to the ground and blown hither and thither by the indifferent wind. There comes a time in our lives when ageing and poor health limit our activities to the extent that we depend increasingly on the service of others, both our friends and professional carers. Our duty now is to practise patience and forbearance, trying to make the work of these people as pleasant as possible by being cheerful even when events in and around us are disheartening. The practice of contemplative prayer can be a veritable lifeline in these circumstances. I have previously noted how my intercession work helped me so well when I had the severe attack of depression that I described in the first chapter. In other words, the more we can turn our attention from our own troubles to those of other people, the more constructively can we live in times of difficulty, and the more we can cultivate the sincere concern of others for our own condition. Our old age shows the fruit of our spiritual life-style (or lack of it) in the love that other people bestow upon us. So let us give thanks to God for the Law that teaches us our various duties to ourselves and our fellows, remembering that love is the fulfilment of the law (Romans 13.10). As we fulfil the law so we become integrated into society, of which we are a constituent, unique member. Our unique contribution is our way of personal growth and also a means of enriching the whole. The law, assuming it is just, gives us an invaluable guideline, but it is not self-fulfilling. It is the Spirit of God within us that moves us on the way, and the example of other people encourages us on our path. It is a great consolation to be carried by the weight of opinion along certain moral paths, but nothing dare be taken for granted, as the life and ministry of Jesus showed the world. The great lesson of any life is the priority of love above all else, and it is the occasional conflict between law and love that contributes to life's poignancy; the lover has to learn to love his or her adversaries, and this is both extremely difficult and the heart of the creative path.
Some temperaments are open to circumstances and are naturally happy. Others walk in the shadows and are naturally melancholy. The artist has a melancholy core, being aware of the tragic impermanence of beauty in the face of the relentless passage of the seasons of life that are mirrored in the changes inevitable in each passing year. But whereas nature has the capacity to renew itself each spring, the path of human life is ceaselessly onwards towards maturity, senescence and death. We can either accept this with a shrug of the shoulders and then pass onwards oblivious of everything except our own selfish concerns, or else we may become deeply involved in the natural scene and experience a melancholy turn of mind that may, if the situation does not right itself, progress to dejection and despondency. Such moods of melancholy, dejection, and despondency all lie within the normal range when one grieves over human cruelty and natural disasters. They are not to be equated with clinical depression with its characteristic lack of self-worth and its crippling of the whole mode of self-expression except in negative categories. The term melancholia can be equated with depression, but it is not used in modern psychiatric terminology; it belongs to a past age of medical practice.
The temperament may be thought of as the result of our whole bodily constitution on our way of confronting the world - in action, emotion and thought. The ancients classified temperament in terms of the four "humours", which were blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. The first alludes to the sanguine type of person, whose disposition is hopeful and courageous; the second to a sluggish rather apathetic individual, who is described as phlegmatic. The choleric (yellow bile) temperament is angry and irascible, whereas the melancholic (black bile) temperament moves towards pensive sadness. We no longer think of temperament in terms of the body's fluids, but the four types of temperament thus delineated are still worthy of reflection if only in a poetic context. It would be wrong to identify the melancholic group par excellence with depression, for the other three are also liable to this affliction. A number of fine humorists have tragically ended their lives in a fit of suicidal depression.
There are certain times in the year when one feels very unhappy. A notable one is the period leading up to Christmas, the family holiday with a vengeance. For those of us who live alone and are alone in an indifferent society, the emptiness can be almost intolerable. I myself have no family in Britain, and so I feel for the numerous people who have no home at all worth living in. To be sure I am given much hospitality commensurate with my work as a priest and writer, but the time of leaving to return to an empty flat has its own sadness which cannot be erased. What a privilege it is to share that aloneness with many millions of other people whose living conditions are quite appalling, unlike my own very comfortable flat! T. S. Eliot writes at the beginning of The Waste Land:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
He compares this with a paradoxically warm winter under snow-bound earth and a rainy, sunlit summer full of life. Indeed, in spring the world around us starts to move from the previous decay to the beginning of a new life. But the depressive type of individual becomes stuck in the old ways, while the world passes on to blossoms and flowers. No wonder spring is so cruel for those who are prevented from living. But there is always the joy of appreciating a new birth, at least for those whose minds are supple even if their bodies are failing under the burden of disease and the accretion of years. The pain of the world, as we feel it, is acutely related to our own mood, which in turn is a resultant of our temperament, our state of health, and the attitudes of those around us, especially those with whom we are in close relationship.
Some people are naturally optimistic, believing that in the end good will prevail over evil. They tend to have a sanguine temperament, and have a cheerful view of life. Others are naturally pessimistic, tending to see the worst in all situations and having a gloomy view about the future of humanity and the world. These are by no means all of melancholy disposition. Angry and phlegmatic types of people often express pessimistic views, and there are some groups who gain enormous pleasure from giving or attending pessimistic dissertations on the future of society or the world order. I myself have a somewhat paradoxical temperament that embraces both melancholy and sanguine elements, and though I am subject to periods of depression and am intimately involved with people who are in serious mental and physical ill-health, any feeling of pessimism is soon overridden by a glorious optimism that all is well in God's care despite material evidence to the contrary. It is my faith in God and my admiration for suffering humanity that give me a hopeful view of life. As St Paul puts it in Romans 8.28, "And, as we know, all things work together for good for those who love God". The essence of this declaration is the love of God. This shows itself in the lives of many agnostic types of people by the caring they bestow on their fellow creatures - which to some extent includes all that lives. Our love of God is measured by the depth of our love for our fellow creatures. If our love of God leads us to hurt all those who do not subscribe to our own faith, we may be sure that the object of our devotion is not the Deity but some subordinate psychic entity which has successfully mimicked God, not a very difficult thing to do since no one has ever seen God fully at any time.
The sentiments expressed in Tennyson's poem "Break, Break, Break" speak of the nobility of the human spirit as it confronts the facts of life and eternity day by day.
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
O well for the fisherman's boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!
Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
The transient quality of mortal life infuses it with an ineffable beauty, though the greatest music effortlessly captures the mood. The composer must have known the agony of unbridged separation before the notes could sound true. We frail humans look for the ultimate union of that separation, despite the arrogant disdain of the unimaginative mind. This union starts now as the creative impulse renews our character, progressing to the life beyond death which comes to us in unheralded glimpses which at present can scarcely be articulated let alone confided to our fellows. The end of the process is such an openness to God that his love transfigures our bodies. From them flows a blessing that brings peace to all whom we meet in our daily work. All the moods that the pain of the world evokes work together for our re-creation as servants of God, so that we may strive for the transformation of the world from a place of sordid commerce to a vale of transcendent beauty.
So let us finally immerse ourselves in the fount of Blake's "The Divine Image":
To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is God, our father dear,
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is Man, His child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine,
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.
And all must love the human form,
In heathen, turk or jew;
Where Mercy, Love, & Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.