The path of suffering ahead of those who have been bereaved of that which made their lives meaningful, which assured a precious existence to be protected against the assaults of injury and accident, is one of inner emptiness and outer loneliness. Of the two it is the inner experience that is the more terrifying. It is above all the descent into a void, a chasm that chills the soul and fills the mind with terror. The void is soon filled with material from the unconscious that had previously been censored and kept at bay. All that was secretly feared in the past, that was inflicted on one in one's early years and kept repressed in the depths of silence, is now released. And so one begins to live in a world of primitive terror, of subterranean unease. Nothing can be withheld from the void that was previously occupied by the person or circumstance now departed.
The memory is exquisitely sensitive, so that any object or event that even remotely stirs up the mind produces an unbearable tension. In the end it is a nameless dread that envelops one as one realizes that the past is beyond healing and the future is problematic. The present, always a point of contact with the eternal as it transcends duration, is a chasm of impenetrable gloom. The psychic debris of past times and indeed generations assaults the one groping his way in the gloom. It speaks of fear, torture and extinction, and it emits a pungent odour of panic and horror that can all but annihilate the personality. And there is no help from outside, apart from drugs that might dull the emotional pain, inducing a state of sleep. In this respect it is noteworthy that the body often responds to unhappiness and discouragement by fatigue and somnolence: the oblivion, though temporary, serves the dual function of softening the distress and marshalling the inner resources of hope and faith which may see the sufferer through the immediate state of hell.
For the person who is awake and alert, the suffering of rejection can be especially cruel, but in that darkness he may become aware of another soul in similar pain. To be sure, the awareness is primarily psychic - from soul to soul directly without recourse to verbal or intellectual communication. When it becomes obvious that the past cannot be retrieved and that the way forward is inevitable, a strength is given one that comes from a source outside the personality, although intimately involved in it. The strength comes not only from the divine presence, but also from other people who are in distress or who, even more significantly, have traversed the valley of desolation and are now available to guide and encourage their compatriots struggling through the morass of fear, ignorance and hopelessness. As Pascal said, we would not seek God had we not found him; this encounter is in the depth of the soul, which has now been opened to us as the void widens to disclose insights beyond our normal selfish preoccupation. To proceed to traverse the valley of the shadow of death in faith, groping blindly in the thick fog of spiritual darkness, is to know God in a very different way from that proclaimed in traditional religion or conventional piety. This new manifestation of the divine fills the soul with hope, not so much of personal salvation as of communal deliverance. Once we can get beyond our own hurts and grievances, we can begin to know our fellows in the darkness and assume their burden of grief also. In so doing there is an exchange of suffering, and the burden becomes measurably lighter.
Indeed, a new fellowship has been initiated and forged in the flame of suffering. We can begin to talk in a new language, one without guile or subterfuge. It is a language that emanates from the heart, and even when it is unspoken, it is fully intelligible to all those in the valley of desolation. At first the sufferer is encompassed in his own misfortune, and his mind ranges in futile, though masochistic, circles of resentment and imagined revenge. In so doing, he maintains a contact with his past life and can even, in his imagination, put himself into a realm of reinstatement and power. If the tragedy has been the death of a loved one, there is less resentment to be aired, at least against earthly powers, but a deeper hatred of the whole creative process has to be acknowledged, and this centres ultimately on the conventional figure of God. This is the same type of God against whom Job contested so vehemently; it is in fact the God of the theologians, who is so often a mental construct rather than a living reality. The God of the philosophers is indeed of a different calibre to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, whom Pascal was privileged to see in his famous illumination. All who suffer are to see that God as well if, like Job, they have the courage to persist in the journey through the darkness. This persistence is not simply pious self-denigration; it is also self-affirmation in the image of one's true being.
In the darkness we can be ourselves and cease to live the lie of successful people. What comes up to us can be accepted without flinching from it or trying to mollify it by psychological or sociological expertise. It is ourselves, and also an aspect of the unconscious life common to all mankind, if not all rational creatures. When we realize this, a great barrier between ourselves and others begins to lift, so that we may start to glimpse a new type of community emerging from the debris of past preconceptions and illusions. It must, however, in stark realism be said that this community does not take root spontaneously, nor is its establishment rapid. Even in our pain, with fierce tenacity we tend to cling onto past roots, since these appear to establish our identity. At the same time, we can blame other people, ranged into social, racial or religious classes, for our own suffering. A scapegoat is an especially satisfactory target onto which to project, even to jettison, our unhappiness. Then we can relieve ourselves in a cesspit of hatred, while overlooking the real cause of our suffering - the selfish life of the past and our membership in the community of people whose suffering we must accept no less than the security it affords.
Ezekiel diagnosed the human condition well when he spoke about hearts of stone. He also saw correctly the divine power of healing in terms of awakening those frigid hearts to the vibrancy of life, the life of the flesh. If we all had hearts that beat in unison with the music of creation, that palpitated in the face of cruelty and rose up in sympathy to support even one creature in distress, the world would be transfigured. The darkness of those in the depths of suffering is in fact continuous with the darkness of the visible world where we all lead our self centred existences, even when we pay lip service to the ideals of true religion and piety. But whereas the victim is freed to confront that darkness as part of his journey towards the light, the majority of those living comfortably in the world have not even begun to glimpse both its darkness and the supernatural light on which all creation depends for its sustenance and its eventual transformation. When those imprisoned in the darkness of suffering can begin to glimpse this light of God whose uncreated energies sustain the universe, they will have made their great movement to a new world where pain is lifted up in triumph. But the way is outside human contrivance.
As the pain continues, so the traveller senses others on the path, not only the bereaved who lament the passing into extinction of the joy they once knew, but also those whose deprival is of a more urgent quality. These are the physically and mentally handicapped, and the millions who are destined to spend their whole lives in squalor. Some are in this extreme destitution because of their own inadequacy, but many more are the victims of social injustice and human improvidence. The wretched of the earth inhabit large areas of the undeveloped countries where a small social elite lives in luxury while the bulk of their fellows stagnate in a poverty that knows no ending. In this degradation the human character rots until it becomes a purely animal consciousness. It must be said also, however, that poverty in itself does not necessarily degrade a person, any more than affluence exalts him. It is the human solidarity in our situation that binds together the units into a composite whole. The social realist may deride the spirituality of communal poverty and the religious tradition on which that spirituality hangs. If this opium could only be removed, the people would wake up and take their plight into their own hands. While there is some truth in this condemnation of religion - pageantry often thrives on the poverty and exploitation of the masses - the matter is more intricate than this. Spirituality is a natural quality of the soul, as necessary for its workings as are air and food for the health of the body; its incarnation into a living religious tradition is a very necessary part of the life of a community. In those countries where traditional religion is banned, an ideology has, at least to some extent, subtly replaced the previous spiritual expression of the people. The results are seldom impressive, either in terms of the general well-being or even the overall economic situation. The root of the human problem is meaninglessness rather than poverty, terrible as this may be in terms of human dignity. If life did have meaning that transcended the mere stimulation of the senses and led people on to an encounter with the eternal truths, war would give way to peace, and poverty would be dealt with creatively by a much more just distribution of resources. At the moment, this aspiration seems purely visionary, but until it becomes a practical issue there will be no end of suffering. Those who are going through the pit of darkness are glimpsing this truth, for at least the old values that sustained them are being revealed in their naked inadequacy.
The great impediment to all human progress is the dominance of the ego-consciousness. However, the ego, which may be seen as the expression of the person's identity in the world of forms and matter, is not in itself bad - indeed, without it the person could not do the particular work that he had been called upon to perform during his mortal life. In this respect it is as necessary as the physical body. But when either the ego or the body claims a dominant position in the personality, it takes over the person and starts to war with anyone who threatens its power and thwarts its ambitions. It demands recompense, and is offended when it fails to get its due recognition. The Parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) portrays the pretensions of the ego very clearly: each labourer seeks his own, and is extremely annoyed when someone else gets the same reward as he. He should have been attending to his own condition instead of prying into that of the other person; he should have been grateful for the payment of his own previously agreed wages, rather than comparing these with those of the workers who joined him later in the day. In the world of material values and workaday commerce the complaints of the early workers are justified; in the world of eternal values they are merely puerile, for we are all members one of another, parts of the same body, and the very concept of an atomistic ego is absurd. What is for my good, in the larger life, is for the common good also. Conversely, in the words of John Donne, "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind". All these considerations, so alien to the world of affairs that we inhabit in our time of prosperity, become clearer to the person in pain that cannot be relieved, in suffering that refuses to be ameliorated.
As the descent into darkness proceeds, so the claims of the ego become muted, as if by sheer exhaustion. It is wrong to submit to life's misfortunes, to the apparent slings and arrows of a dark, inscrutable fate, with a bovine passivity. It is far more productive spiritually to accept them actively, and this acceptance usually follows a period of furious revolt; Job himself disputed angrily through the medium of his comforters with the unseen God, an attitude of sharp questioning apparent also in a number of the Psalms. It is to the credit of the disputant that he takes his suffering seriously enough to bewail it and cast doubts about the ultimate love of God, or else the power of God to control the universe he had created. Now at least the realm of theology is being broached even if the victim affirms a negatively atheistic point of view. In the end the mind does look for a first cause of creation which the soul clothes with a personality that can be questioned and arraigned. This is probably as near the existence of God as the rational mind can attain: he is already known in the depths of the soul, but before he can be of positive help to us he must be made intellectually available. As Isaiah puts it, "Surely God is among you and there is no other, no other god. How then canst thou be a god that hideth thyself, O God of Israel, the deliverer?" (Isaiah 45:14f). In fact, he is hidden from us until we make ourselves available to receive him. In a state of suffering the dross of worldly glamour is taken from us, and we are more open to the divine presence. But first the ego has to become a servant of the soul, and we have to proceed with the ignorance of little children. The process is a long, arduous one. I believe in fact that the ego cannot be set aside in its claims of justice and reward until it is changed by divine grace. Until then the creature continues to grope in the darkness of suffering which he makes his own hell; cursing life, fate, God, or whatever concept he has of ultimate reality. But, in fact, he is as far from God as the religious fanatics who, through the ages, have destroyed disagreeing with them. The purely human understanding has first to come to terms with the divine reality of love before the transformation can occur.
As the darkness gathers, so does the terror increase. The person made redundant faces a hell of inanimacy. Even if his economic state is viable, so that he is in no danger of poverty, he is out in the cold of the world's respect. He is like the solitary figure on a frozen railway platform, with the trains rushing by but none stopping to receive him. A terrible emptiness encompasses him as he sees into a future of meaningless inactivity. It is like death with no one to care about his situation. The person bereaved of a loved one is likewise out in the cold. There is no one to share the intimate experiences of life as they flow by, day after day. The capacity to share and enjoy life's pageant with another person is fundamental to the well-being of us all. All real living is meeting, says Martin Buber in his book I and Thou. Once the supreme Thou in our life has departed from us, we are left with a collection of "Its", with whom we can engage in conversation but among whom we cannot communicate from the depth of the soul. It is this deeper psychic communion that is the basis of a true meeting. When all was going well with us, we could prosper quite plausibly on a number of "I-It" relationships that occupied our time pleasurably but inconsequentially. Now all this has been taken from us, and our inner spiritual bankruptcy is made apparent. This is the basis of a terrible void, one in which we are cut off from the awareness of all those around us except for the rare person who has been to hell himself and has experienced resurrection. But will we ever be able to follow the course of regeneration known to that enviable person?
We can at this juncture visualize the course of the Prodigal Son in Jesus' most famous parable. When he leaves the protection of his father's house and ventures forth into the wider world, he thinks only of himself, his sensual desires dominating his field of awareness. He uses every person he encounters as a tool for his lust and gluttony, so that his relationships are of the I-It type. Then he loses his inheritance and falls into penury. While he tends the pigs who seem to have more than he, a voice speaks with authority from deep within himself: it is the Spirit of God speaking from his own spirit. In the darkness of a hell he has inflicted upon himself because of his selfish improvidence, he has lost the company of all those who were his friends during his time of profligacy. When he descended into darkness, they vanished out of sight, and there is none left to support him. In his dereliction he has attained a quiet attentiveness sufficient to hear the still, small voice of God speaking within him, a voice that moves him to truth and humility. It shows him a way of approach to reality: an honest appraisal of the past, conscious acknowledgement which ends in a confession, and a commitment to amend his future way of life. He returns in sincere repentance and can, for the first time in his life, effect an I-Thou relationship with his father, whose joyful relief at receiving his son intact overrides any possible anger he might have felt for the son's irresponsible behaviour.
It is the recognition of God that has effected the conversion of the young man from profligacy to honest labour. But would that recognition have taken place without the period of intense humiliation and pain, without the experience of traversing the valley of the shadow of death? In the case of most of us the answer is probably in the negative, because we tend to lead lives of blind self-gratification until the blow strikes. In the valley of dereliction God's presence - as powerful in hell as in heaven, as Psalm 139 so memorably states - is more immediately felt, since there is less to distract our attention. It is acknowledged, and the hell is passed over and a life of spiritual renewal started. In the parable, if the younger son had not taken the plunge into the wider world with -such apparently disastrous results, he would have stayed dutifully at home and probably remained as emotionally stultified, as immature in love, as his angry elder brother. The brother's complaint, his righteous indignation that the returned scapegrace should be so generously received by his father is, of course, fully in accordance with the standards of conventional morality. But both the father and the returned son have moved beyond those standards in the hell each has known: the father mourning for his lost son (like Jacob mourning for Joseph, whom he believed was killed), and the son surrendering his soul to the inclement elements of the world and entering the darkness of despair. Once one has emerged from such hells as these, one's priorities are radically reviewed and one's perspectives are immeasurably broadened.
But how can the understanding of the elder son be broadened? If we were to extend the parable to the time after the festivities had ended and the repentant son had started work in earnest in his father's estate, he would still have had to face his elder brother's hostility. This cannot be dispelled simply by his father's joy; the injustice of it all rankles, and the virtuous son will continue to recall his brother's folly, perhaps indefinitely. The work of penance in store for the reformed sinner would be to reconcile his brother, and this might be quite impossible. How hard it is to break through the shell of an implacably proud person! He is, in fact, in his own hell, though he does not realize it. This, in a way, is the predicament of a loving God in relation to a sinner who refuses to repent and inhabits the region of hell indefinitely. The free will given by God to his rational creatures ensures the capacity of those creatures to spurn God's advances as easily as respond to them. The impasse, whether in respect of the two brothers in the parable or of God and intransigent man in real life, may finally be resolved by such suffering that the proud, unyielding one has to invoke aid, whether fraternal or divine as the case may be, to relieve his distress. In the instance of the two brothers this would mean that, although the elder may continue to nurse in his heart resentment that his sibling has come off so lightly, a time might come in which he was faced with some danger and his brother came at once to his aid, rather like the Good Samaritan in Jesus's other immortal parable. This act of spontaneous mercy would surely break the carapace of the embittered one, and be the basis of a new relationship between them. It should also be said that God is to be found wherever love is shown, but until we are stripped of all illusions and in the darkness of hell, we may remain impervious to the love around us. The human tragedy is not so much one of evil intention as of unawareness. In the great cosmic battle another Father and Son, in the eternal bringing forth of life out of chaos, are to mourn at the insensitivity of that life to the gift of love. But in that conflict the nature of God will become clearer to mankind as it goes along the path of unknowing, where everything tangible or intangible appears to be an illusion.