Something Rich and Strange:: Discovering Your Path to Wholeness

Contents

Foreword by Eugene Peterson

Preface

Chapter One:

Transformation, the Hero’s Adventure

Chapter Two:

The Generations That Come Before

Chapter Three:

When Safety Becomes Slavery

Chapter Four:

Where is My Internal Moses?

Chapter Five:

Homeostasis and Plagues

Chapter Six:

The Red Sea

Chapter Seven:

Wandering in the Wilderness

Chapter Eight:

Taking the Promised Land

Chapter Nine:

Scapegoating, Surrender, and Seeds

Chapter Ten:

Further Up and Further In!

Reflection and Discussion Questions

Acknowledgments

I come from a line of gutsy and going on women¹—

for my grandmother, my mother, and my sisters—

and for my daughters:

Meagan, Kristen, and Hanna.

Foreword by Eugene Peterson

The great irony in America today is that we know so much and can do so much and that we live so badly. These words are from Walker Percy. He wrote five penetrating novels exploring this irony, just in case we hadn’t noticed.

More recently, Tony Judt, out of a lifetime of exquisite political writing, titled his final book Ill Fares the Land published shortly before his premature death in 2010. The title is a line lifted from Oliver Goldsmith’s 1770 poem The Deserted Village,

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey;

Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.

We are fortunate to have voices like Percy and Judt giving careful attention to how badly we are living and that, despite (or maybe because of) our high standard of living, the pain, suffering, and discontent abroad in the land continues to accumulate.

One conspicuous response to what is wrong with the world these days seems to be anger, not infrequently expressed in hate, blaming randomly selected scapegoats. It seems to many of us a cheap way to use these precious lives of ours, bodies and souls that are capable of nurturing beauty and loving our neighbors.

The good news is that there is also a quite incredible company of men and women, far outnumbering the naysayers, who devote their lives to alleviating the pain, mitigating the suffering, dealing with the discontent, and protecting the weak and vulnerable: writers and pastors, healers and counselors, social workers and teachers, advocates for the poor and disadvantaged, artists and farmers, parents and grandparents, police and firefighters, volunteers and philanthropists.

For the most part these people do their work quietly, often unnoticed and unremarked, directing their energies, skills, and compassion to helping and guiding others to live good, wholesome and healthy lives.

Susan Davis, a psychotherapist, is one of these. This book is an invitation to participate in a relationship with her by reading and appreciating who she is and what she is doing.

What is striking and attractive to me is her skill in integrating so much that is involved in the healing of emotions and childhood abuse, work relationships, and intimacies into a whole and good life, a journey of transformation. She tells the stories of her clients, but never by reducing them to problems to be fixed. There is nothing impersonal or condescending in her work. The stories provide the living context for her work. But there is more; she is in touch and familiar with poets and other writers who deal wisely and skillfully with the subtlety and ambiguity of so much of what is involved in being a human being on this planet earth. In the process we realize that she is an excellent teacher, familiar with and adept at employing the psychological insights of accomplished men and women that give clarity to the hidden or suppressed parts of life.

The most distinctive thing about Dr. Davis’ account of her work is that in weaving this tapestry using the threads of story, poetry, and psychology, she does her work on a loom constructed from the parallel stories of the exodus of the Hebrews from twelfth century Egypt and the death and resurrection of Jesus in first century Jerusalem, citing a text from Luke (they talked over his exodus, the one Jesus was about to complete in Jerusalem). This large, all-encompassing loom of biblical story, Exodus and Jesus, holding all the threads in a tight weave, provides an always available orientation for understanding and achieving a life of transformation that enters into and embraces a life in continuity with our fathers and mothers who have been on speaking terms with God and his ways, continuously documented now for three thousand years.

The practice of contemporary psychotherapy set here in the immense context of the Hebrew exodus and Jesus’ resurrection stories prevents psychotherapy from being reductionist, flattened into a secularized individualism. At the same time it prevents us from warehousing the Scripture accounts of transformation as archives of interest only to research scholars.

Reading Something Rich and Strange puts us in the unhurried and gentle company of a friend. As we find ourselves treated with dignity and God treated with reverence, on the transformation journey, we realize we are in good company, very good company indeed—we don’t have to live so badly.

Eugene H. Peterson

Professor Emeritus of Spiritual Theology

Regent College, Vancouver, B.C.

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

William Shakespeare

Preface

Understanding the process of transformation—how we suffer a sea-change, as Shakespeare said—and the result of that becoming—something rich and strange²—is the reason for this book. It is the hero’s journey, the adventure of becoming fully ourselves and fully alive.

Becoming fully ourselves and fully alive sounds great, but though we may long for a change in our lives or ourselves, we humans usually resist it. We prefer the familiar and safe, even when it is costly or painful. So often we are pushed down the path to wholeness, our comfort disturbed. Yet, whether the journey of transformation is thrust upon us or sought out, it will be awe-full and wonder-filled. It takes place where the spiritual and the psychological overlap, in the depths of the psyche. Like the birth process that occurs without our conscious control, it surprises us and unfolds with a power and a wisdom of its own. Also like the human birth process, we can facilitate and enhance the transformative process—whether our own or someone else’s—by understanding it and choosing courageously to embrace it.

At times on the journey we may feel afraid and alone, but the path is well traveled, as we will see. It is, I think, that we are all so alone in what lies deepest in our souls, so unable to find the words and perhaps the courage to speak with unlocked hearts, that we do not know at all that it is the same with others.³ One of the gifts of being a psychotherapist is that you find that it is the same with others. I’ve traveled the path of transformation myself and with dozens of patients whose pain and courage have deeply affected my understanding of the journey, of my life, and of my faith. Moreover, I have discovered that the Exodus story of the ancient Israelites lights the road we tread when we, too, begin the journey of deep psychological change.

I hope you will make the same discovery as you read the pages of this book. Come and see!

Susan Davis, Ph.D.

Redwood City, California

May 2011

The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes

to your adventure… . the adventure of the hero—

the adventure of being alive.

Joseph Campbell

Chapter One:

Transformation, the Hero’s Adventure

I never thought I’d be here. Never expected this. Don’t want it. Yet here I am, walking down from the Sinai—of my own free will—back into Egypt. Well, my own free will? Yes, but with that strange experience a few weeks ago, things have somehow shifted for me. I see more clearly now. It doesn’t mean I’m not afraid. I know fear—of death by sword or serpent, of loneliness so great it chokes, of meaning nothing and belonging nowhere—and I am afraid now of all those things. But Zipporah was right, as she so often is. She said, When God speaks to you, what choice do you have? All roads but his are lesser things, and your soul knows it. She said, Moses, you must go.

Egypt. I see it lying green and fertile before me, delta of the life-giving Nile. It is the land of my birth, yet somehow never home. I am going down to challenge Ramses, whom they call the Great.⁴ I know him well, grew up with him. Stubborn and proud, from birth held divine, nothing denied him. He has intelligence, but of a crafty kind, schooled in the intrigues of the court, the priests. This will not be easy.

I am going down to set my people free. That’s what the voice said from the bush that did not burn: I have heard the suffering of my people in Egypt. I intend to set my people free. My people, my mother and brothers and sisters, descendents of Jacob called Israel, groaning in slavery, abused and shamed, neglected and used. Yes, that is a worthy goal, an honorable task. It disturbs but it also thrills me. The ember of outrage, so long banked under deep ashes, was fanned by those flames that did not consume, aroused by the voice calling my name. It is glowing now, ready to burst into flame. So I am afraid of myself. I am afraid I am not able to carry out this task, but I am more afraid of that flame within me. It has been destructive before, destroyed a life, and then destroyed the life I had. Yes, that is the deeper truth. I am less afraid of my death or my weakness than I am afraid of my anger and my power, a consuming fire. But when God speaks to you, what choice do you have?

Let us go.

~~~~~~~

So we might imagine Moses as he stood on the cusp of a choice and an adventure, both for himself and for the people of Israel. His choice—returning to Egypt to accomplish an impossible and beautiful task because he heard a voice and saw a mystery—was the beginning of a story that has molded human history.

Stories can be powerful things, and human beings are story-telling, story-loving people. Let me tell you a story is an irresistible invitation for young and old, regardless of such incidentals as history or culture. Stories are how we make sense of our world, our lives, and each other, and stories are how we remember. Stories have been chanted, written, filmed, sung, acted, mimed, and you could even say that the thoughts going on inside our heads are the stories we tell ourselves. History, psychology, art and literature, holy Scripture—all stories. In the pages that follow, we will explore many stories: biblical stories of the Exodus and of Jesus’ death and resurrection, clinical stories of some of my patients⁵, bits of my own story, psychological stories or theories, and stories told by artists in poetry and literature.

The Exodus journey of the children of Israel has served as a core metaphor or story for both Judaism and Christianity and is also embraced by Islam. It has been told and retold around campfires and Sabbath dinner tables, from pulpits and in the writings of monks and mystics⁶ for more than three thousand years. Its power to fire the human imagination and feed the soul comes from the truth it tells of a universal process of deep transformation—one we may seek, or one we may try to avoid; one that lights our individual paths toward wholeness. Its message is as important and current today as it has been for millennia.

My own interest in the deep truth of the Exodus story was sparked by one of my patients. Depressed and anxious, Joanna⁷ was caught in repetitive patterns of personal and professional relationships in which she found herself ambivalent, passive, and passive-aggressive. She felt stuck in the muck, neither giving her all nor moving on. Perhaps most painful was her exquisitely attuned awareness of her own emotional and psychological state. One day she returned from celebrating Passover and said, "The children of Israel went to Egypt for security and it became their slavery. Where is my internal Moses?"

Joanna was using the Exodus story to understand what was happening in her own life. Her comment opened broad avenues of thought for me about the Exodus story as a journey of transformative change. How often do we find ourselves in circumstances or patterns of behavior that began for security but ultimately became a kind of slavery? Do we each have elements within us that can lead us into new freedom and new life? What are the signposts guiding us through that journey of deep transformation? Are there predictable stages in the journey? The Exodus story points us toward true and practical answers to each of these questions, answers we will explore in the pages that follow. Let’s get an overview of the journey now.

The Stages of the Transformative Journey

Whether it starts with a dream, a symptom such as depression or panic, or an external circumstance such as a tragic accident, the general outlines of the transformative journey are universal and proceed in predictable ways. Moreover, the same process takes place in individuals, relationships and families, organizations and political systems, and cultures—and one level affects the others. It is deep—affecting us both spiritually and psychologically—and fundamentally restructures the way we organize ourselves and, sometimes, our lives. Though we may long for transformative change and the wholeness and freedom it offers, we usually fear and resist it. Though it is of such fundamental importance that Scripture, poetry, self-help books, and psychotherapy research all explore it, we don’t fully understand it. When we are in the midst of it, it can be frightening and seem the opposite of the gift that it is.

As Joanna had pointed out, it began in Egypt. The family of a man named Jacob, who came to be known as Israel, went to Egypt to survive a region-wide famine. Four hundred years later his descendants had become the slaves of the Egyptians. How often we adopt ways of being in the world in order to survive one situation only to find that we are stuck and creating problems for ourselves in others. Stage One: Egypt—when security and safety become slavery.

It is difficult to break out of slavery—at times even difficult to want to break out. The familiar and known, though it may be uncomfortable and sometimes actually destructive, exerts a powerful influence. How then do we come to change at all? Moses encountered the burning bush. The Egyptians and Israelites experienced plagues: frogs and boils and the angel of death. Stage Two: Burning Bushes and Plagues. In our safe slavery, we find ourselves disturbed and troubled by forces within us—psychological and spiritual—or outside us—the external circumstances we often do not choose and may not even deserve.

Stage Three: The Red Sea. Here Moses and the Israelites were camped on the shores of a shallow inland sea. They had begun their journey by leaving Egypt, but Pharaoh’s chariots were in pursuit. Ahead lay a desert wilderness, barren and dry. They were frightened and had to choose to go back to Egypt or forward into the unknown. The Red Sea represents a decision point, something often called a leap of faith. Shall we go back to what is familiar, or forward into the unknown?

Tell the Israelites to go forward!⁸ So God commanded and so the people chose. The waters parted and the people went through, but they did not walk straight to the Promised Land. Stage Four: Wandering in the Wilderness. They needed time to regroup, to develop a new identity as a free people, new ways of being in the world and with each other, a new understanding of reality and a new experience of the presence of God. When they were ready they would be able to enter the Promised Land and remain true to what they had learned.

Stage Five: The Promised Land. The children of Israel finally entered into a new land, one filled with giants to be conquered, but one flowing with milk and honey. This is the stage in which we are ready, having left the old and learned something new, to implement our new ways of being in the world. We can create new outcomes, conquer our fears, and take possession of new and fulfilling areas of our lives and our relationships. We have become increasingly better armed for life, more whole. Become increasingly better is a good description of what happens through the transformative journey. The journey does not lead us to an ending but to new beginnings, not to stasis, but to the opportunity for greater scope and further growth. Ironically, we become something new and yet at the same time more truly ourselves than we have ever been.

Dreams and Killer Whales

Transformation began in my own life without my conscious decision and even against my will—at the juncture between graduate school and my career as a psychologist, between youth and middle age, on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean—with a nightmare. I sat bolt upright, alone in my bed, not exactly afraid but absolutely alert. Later that day, in supervision for my pre-doctoral internship at the Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu, I discussed a young Filipino with a C-2 level spinal cord injury. He’d be on a respirator and probably warehoused in a care facility for the rest of his life. I thought of my dream and found myself sobbing. The world seemed such a dangerous place. My supervisors suggested psychotherapy… . for me.

In my first session with René Tillich, Ph.D.—brilliant clinical psychologist known on the island as a master therapist and therapist to therapists—he asked, What brings you? I told him my dream:

I was swimming in a pool with small, butterfly-like tropical fish. Suddenly the dream shifted, and I was no longer in the pool. I heard that killer whales were breeding in the North Atlantic. Now confined to a small bay, they would destroy humankind if they were allowed to continue. With alarm and anxiety, I was putting their mothball-like eggs into test tubes with stoppers, but they were hatching anyway. I took a huge knife and began cutting the hatchlings—they looked like sardine fillets—in half.

Suddenly, two full-size killer whales stood in front of me. One had the head of a baby, and he asked me, Why are you killing us? And I didn’t know why.

There are a lot of biologically incorrect images in this dream, but that was not what disturbed me most. The truth is that if someone had offered me a kiss from Shamu the Killer Whale, at this time in my life I would have preferred death. On my first trip to Hawaii, I had discovered to my horror that I had a phobia about swimming with the fishes. This was pretty inconvenient since I loved the tropical waters and even loved the beauty of the fishes—in theory. Now I had a year to live on the island of Oahu, surrounded by those waters and scared of those fishes! If that weren’t enough, here I was dreaming of them.

René asked, In the dream, what part of you is trying to be born? What part of yourself are you having to kill off to keep the world safe? I said, I don’t know. That’s why I’m here. René could dive into the depths of those unconscious waters in ways that terrified me. I am forever grateful for his deep chuckle of delight and his robust belief in the goodness of what would emerge in our work from the unconscious in general and my psyche in particular. I’ll say more about this dream and the journey it launched in the next chapter. For now, let’s just say that at that moment, like Moses stepping down toward Egypt, René and I stepped out together on my path of transformative change.

An Invitation to Adventure and to Wholeness

The story of Exodus as a transformative journey is not just an interesting idea contained in a dusty old religious book. It belongs to a class of powerful, deeply true stories—stories that may contain but absolutely transcend historicity and verifiable fact. Such stories could be called parables or myths. In a fascinating set of interviews on National Public Radio, Bill Moyers discussed the meaning and value of these sorts of stories with Joseph Campbell, scholar of comparative mythology. ⁹ Moyers asked a question arising from our common everyday use of the word myth:

Bill Moyers said, But people ask, isn’t a myth a lie?

Joseph Campbell replied, No, mythology is not a lie; mythology is poetry. It is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth—penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words, beyond images … Mythology pitches the mind … to what can be known but not told. So this is the penultimate truth.¹⁰

Poetry, story, and metaphor are the right vehicles for truths that can be touched but not grasped. Campbell calls such truths penultimate: next to the last, the closest we can come before the truths are so large that our vision cannot take them in, our minds cannot encompass them. As we live