Just as there are transitional times in the life of the world — dark periods of disorientation between two world systems, periods in which humanity loses the ability to comprehend itself and collapses into chaos in order to rebuild itself around a new organizing principle — there are such times in every human life, times when the entire system seems to cave in and curl up into a catatonia of anguish and confusion, difficult yet necessary for our growth.
In such times, the most courageous thing we can do is surrender to the process that is the pause, trust the still dark place to kindle the torchlight for a new path and vitalize our forward motion toward a new system of being. The poet May Sarton knew this when she observed in her poignant reckoning with despair that "sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands." James Baldwin knew it when he contemplated how to live through your darkest hour, insisting that such times can "force a reconciliation between oneself and all one's pain and error," on the other side of which is a life more alive.
Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.)
This shift from suffering to surrender can never be willed — it can only be achieved through the willingness we call humility. That is what the influential British ethnologist and cultural anthropologist Robert Ranulph Marett (June 13, 1866–February 18, 1943) — a pioneer in the study of the evolutionary origins of religion — addressed in his inaugural Oxford University lecture, delivered on October 27, 1910 under the title The Birth of Humility (public domain).
Marett considers the spiritual value of such periods of suffering:
There is at work in every phase of [life] a spiritual force of alternating current; the energy flowing not only from the positive pole, but likewise from the negative pole in turn… At times, however, a vital spurt dies out, and the outlook is flat and dreary. It is at such times that there is apt to occur a counter-movement, which begins, paradoxically, in a sort of artificial prolongation and intensification of the natural despondency. Somehow the despondency thus treated becomes pregnant with an access to new vitality.
Echoing William James's insistence that "a purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity" — a radical refutation of Cartesian dualism, which science has since confirmed by revealing psychological trauma as physiological trauma and illuminating how the body and the mind converge in the healing of trauma — Marett observes that every such crisis of the spirit is a "psycho-physical crisis," marked by "heart-sinking" and "loss of tone" in body and mind alike, and rooted in an evolutionary adaptation of our biology:
The organism needs to lie dormant whilst its latent energies are gathering strength for activity on a fresh plane. It is important, moreover, to observe that, so long as there is growth, the fresh plane is likewise a higher plane. Regeneration, in fact, typically spells advance, the pauses in the rhythm of life helping successively to swell its harmony.
Marett notes that both the sacred rituals of tribal cultures and the theological doctrines of so-called civilized societies invite that painful yet regenerative pause between the poles of the spirit as a way of redirecting the current from the negative to the positive — a pause riven by fear, for the paradox of transformation is that we are always terrified of even the most propitious change, yet a pause capable of turning fear into a "spiritual lever" for reaching the next stage of spiritual development.
Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.)
With an eye to the "widespread human capacity to profit by the pauses in secular life which Religion seems to have sanctioned and even enforced in all periods of its history," Marett writes:
Pause is the necessary condition of the development of all those higher purposes which make up the rational being.
[…]
Not until the days of this period of chrysalis life have been painfully accomplished can he emerge a new and glorified creature, who, by spiritual transformation, is invested alike with the dignities and the duties of [being human].
Complement with Ursula K. Le Guin on suffering and getting to the other side of pain and Oliver Sacks on despair and the meaning of life, then revisit Alexis de Tocqueville on stillness as a form of action and cataclysm as a catalyst for growth.
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