I was looking at an old copy of The Sun magazine the other day. The Sun is a journal that explores spirituality, life, and meaning through short stories, poetry, autobiographical pieces, interviews, and photography. In this particular issue there was a beautiful black and white photo spread. It presented a portrait of the last months and days of a very old woman's life, as she approached death and moved more and more deeply into a state of forgetting and unknowing. In her last days she no longer knew who she or anyone else was.
The last photograph showed her curled up peacefully in fetal position, sleeping, and a caption noted that, toward the end, she seemed to need, and was most at ease in, the dark silence of sleep, that she seemed to be inwardly focusing, in her own way, on the inner work that her being must do as she prepared for death.
I was struck by the way that a person enters and exits the world in a very similar state. The newborn has just come through the door into life, and the dying elder is about to pass through the door at the other end of life; both float in an oceanic unknowing, self and not-self undifferentiated. Both are intensely concentrated, doing some mysterious interior work of transformation, like a caterpillar in a cocoon. Both are best cared for by being wrapped in a cocoon of quietness, warmth, and dim light, protected from the stimulating demands of the outer world, not required to respond to anything but the simplest tender touch and attention to the basic needs of their body.
Thinking of birth and death as matching bookends, I found myself wanting to explore the arc between these two states in a series of sermons. In particular, I hope to pose and explore questions about what inner work of transformation a person is compelled to accomplish as he or she moves through the archetypal stages in life. One way to pose this is, "What is the changing, progressive work of the human soul as it journeys through this earthly landscape in the vessel of the body and in the context of relationship?"
What are some of the main spiritual tasks of each stage of life? For the newborn and young infant, for the child, for the adolescent, for the young adult, for the maturing and middle-aged adult, for the elder, and for the one who is facing the exit at the end of the last stage.
In order to explore such questions, I have to presume, straight out, a fairly normal arc, if there is such a thing, meaning one not powerfully shaped or altered by disability or shattered by extreme trauma. I also have to presume that the context for the journey is western culture, perhaps even especially American culture, as there are differences across cultures as to how various stages of life are understood and tackled.
Finally, as I launch into this daunting task, I have to acknowledge that I am no expert in the study of human development. In the case of our subject today, which is the forming self-hood that occurs during the first couple of years of life, I am not an expert either by academic knowledge or by virtue of being a parent, since I have neither form of expertise. My only semblance of expertise is that of being a human being, and at my age of 45, either having passed through or being in the process of passing through more than half of the life passages that I'll be exploring.
Beyond that, I am relying on my experiences as a nanny for an infant during her first year of life, and my experiences as a teacher, and as a friend to others who are raising or teaching children, and as observer of people and life. And, of course, I am relying on those ever-helpful friends and teachers: books.
So let us turn to the very beginning. What is the work of the soul in the first period of its incarnated existence? At birth, the child is cast out from the body of its mother and begins to have its first experiences of physical, emotional, and spiritual separation from its origins in the Ocean of Being. As the child develops, it will also begin to have the experience of wonderment and awe, as it encounters all experiences with bewildering newness.
A friend of mine is home on leave from her work with a newborn, who is just about two months old. I visited the other day, and her baby son, when he isn't absorbed in nursing or crying from some strange discomfort, has that wide-eyed look of perpetual astonishment at everything that passes into his field of vision.
The newborn will also know the terrors of physical helplessness, and the shock of perpetual strangeness. From constant waves of sensory experience, unburdened by language or thought, gradually the world, the faces of others, and a semblance of self will begin to be differentiated and organized.
I once had an extremely strange experience of coming out of anesthesia after surgery. I imagine that this experience recapitulated, in about a half-hour, what that first stage of life is like if we could remember it—that moving from no self to rudimentary selfhood.
At first, there was only dim awareness, and a dull, thick, awful sensation. But there was no word or meaning connected to the sensation, nor was it located anywhere in particular, nor was there any personality to understand any of it. Just sensation, and there was a noise and motion, and other noises, voices, utterances that were incomprehensible, touches that were uninterpretable. All was dim and strange—no language, no thought, no me or not me, no there, there.
Very, very gradually, in stages, the mind reorganized itself. Very gradually the pieces came together and comprehension slowly dawned. That dull awful sensation found a word to name it—"pain"—and it was somewhere in particular: it was over there, and where was that? Oh that was my leg, because very gradually, there was a me emerging from the gray sea of nowhere. And what was that sound? Oh, wow, that sound was me, yelling. But who was me? I didn't have a name or personality or history yet. And that motion was me thrashing around, and the other sounds were people responding and touching me. Eventually, it all came back: I was in the hospital, and I was waking up from surgery …. I had a name ….
For the baby, it is a slow emergence from the sea of non-local experience, and a gradual differentiation, a gradual possession of the awareness of the body as one's own body, different from objects and different from other bodies belonging to other beings.
With the formation of a sense of self and other, there emerges the essential matrix of that being's emotional and spiritual relationship to the world. How one is held during this time by parents, extended family, and community will help or hinder the formation of a basic sense of trust and faith—in life, in self, and in others, and potentially trust in a greater being that ultimately holds one and will not let one fall. Psychologist Eric Erickson saw in this process the formation of the capacity for hope.
Felicity Kelcourse, in her book Human Development and Faith, writes about the relationship between this early formation, the effects of nurture or the failure of nurture upon us, and how these experiences shape the soul's capacity to trust the goodness of life. She writes:
Our fears of helplessness are well-founded. Our need for loving protection very real. [Throughout our lives] we do long at the deepest levels of our being for the everlasting arms that can keep us from falling. Some of us were blessed with loving parents whose tender physical and emotional attention to us as infants came as close as any love in this world can to [an] enfolding, inexhaustible love.... Others were not so fortunate.
Freud believed that religion, which he called the universal neurosis, was nothing more than a perpetual longing to experience again the oceanic oneness that we once knew in the womb, or in the arms and at the breast of our mothers. But Kelcourse believes that we are more than what we are made by the care and conditioning of others. She says:
Even those of us who suffered various degrees of physical and emotional deprivation from birth somehow knew that we were missing something and found ways to actively look for it. If … our physical and mental experience of life were all we had to go on, how would we know, on some deep level, that loving care is our human birthright? That we were wronged when that birthright was damaged or withheld? We know because our souls tell us that there is more to life than neglect and abuse. If we hold fast to this knowing, we can hold on to life and hope….
Eric Erickson saw the first of the soul's learnings to be the formation of essential trust. (He would not call it soul, but I am going to.) He saw the next adventure unfolding as the baby gradually gains control of its body and becomes mobile. With this development comes the formation of a sense of autonomy.
I found an interesting interpretation of the thrust upward to an upright stance in Joan Salter's book, The Incarnating Child. She describes the baby recapitulating the stages of evolution in its journey to an upright posture, and describes this process as a series of gestures:
The "plant gesture" is primarily a passive one, but as in the life of a plant, the baby lifts its two arms upward, like the first two leaves of every seedling, which are called the "cotyledons."
Next comes the "fish gesture" at about three months. The baby is still very horizontal, but on its belly will lift its head a bit and the feet simultaneously, arching its back, and lift legs, bent and with the heels together, like a fish tail. The baby wriggles and swishes the legs about, and makes swimming motions with its arms.
In the bath, the baby will make frog-like motions—the amphibian gesture!
From three months onward there is a strong urge to push upright, but other stages must come first before this can be achieved.
Next comes the "bird gesture." On the belly, the head will come up and the arms will extend out to the side and off the ground, flapping around.
In the "reptile gesture," the baby is able to use its arms to push its torso up from the waist and look around more fully. The baby can wriggle along the ground in a snake-like action, creeping but not yet crawling.
Then comes the "quadruped gesture"—crawling on all fours. This new body freedom gives the opportunity for the baby's energy, curiosity, and initiative to flow out freely into life in an unrestricted way. This growing capacity for autonomous motion is of enormous importance and brings feelings of ecstasy to the growing soul. Through it we experience ourselves as free beings.
Finally comes the "human gesture." Salter writes:
… in this long drama, the body, in its gestures, has recapitulated all the previous [evolutionary] stages. The human spirit has been active all the way through, urging the body on to the next stage, knowing it must reach its consummation in the vertical. Only then, will it be a fitting habitation for the [human being].
The "human gesture" initiates the opportunity to explore, to investigate, to learn about the world. The toddler is an adventurer, seeking out every new area of experience. All unknown things and places fascinate. Everything has to be investigated. The world is a playground of wonder, awe, sometimes terrifying awe, and discovery.
Can we imagine, or remember, for a moment, what it was like to have the myriad textures, sounds, the endless variety of the physical world presented to our senses for the very first time? Can we recall what it was like to be alive in such a way as to feel continuous fascination and curiosity?
Robert Bly wrote a poem that asks us to imagine this startling newness. Rather than moving and thinking in jaded habit, what if we could know, again, a world utterly surprising and fantastic. He writes:
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you've ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.
Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you've never seen.
When someone knocks on the door,
Think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you are forgiven…
We have had only a few short moments to imagine the fantastic adventure of the new human being, incarnating into the world—the cognitive and sensory struggle to organize a sense of self that is distinct from its surroundings and other beings; the challenge of gaining control and mastery of its limbs and muscles; the incredible thrust toward the upright stance, with the feet planted on earth and the head pointing toward heaven; the ecstasy of first gaining freedom of motion, the pride of first steps and the claiming of the birthright of freedom. The toddler is an adventurer, who seizes every moment to learn and know more about the world.
Would that we could recall the power of our determination, the intensity of our hunger for knowledge, and the boundless capacity for wonderment that we all knew at this stage of our lives.
May it be so.