In ‘A Different Path, an emotional autobiography’ the psychoanalyst Symington writes that:

‘Our human task is to be lived by Life. Life as a transcendent principle. It seems to me that a reliable test of whether we have lived worthwhile lives is this: is the world a better place for my having lived in it?’

He sees that the absolute in our being calls us to allow its own reality to be the supreme motivating principle in our lives, so then sin is the desire not to allow God to be God. I think this links to the struggle we all have to find the real ‘me’ rather than the false one. Symington sees this as a lifelong struggle:

‘I became a priest; I wore the outer clothing but inside I was not truly a priest. There was a priest-like person but not the priest whom people outside thought I was. I was deeply hurt when people abandoned me when I left the priesthood because I realized that it meant they had never known me – the inner me. … I have had moments of close friendship where the inner me reaches across the barrier to the real person in another and such a meeting has sustained me for long periods.’

For him religion lay in the direction of doing the best one can with what one has, and not trying to be something which one is not. Quoting Paul Tillich: ‘Be what you are- that is the only thing one can ask of any being …[Life] wants to be asked to become what it is and nothing else…. Out of what is given to us we can act.’

Struggling with his own inner emotional collapse and madness, Symington saw meaning in trying to repair past childhood damage, and to ‘erect a building out of the ruins.’ Certainly, he initially found solace in the church where he found a security based on the ethics of compassion, and by the age of 27 had become a priest, working in the east end of London. Struggling over the years with his deeply embedded false idea of a harsh punishing god that he could not disentangle from and that included all the moral directives of Catholicism eventually led Symington into twice a week psychoanalysis.

One of his ways of searching for meaning is the realization that we are all in a state of ‘becoming’, and that this ‘becoming’ is marked by small epiphanies that are about subjectivity being born within oneself: in other words, seeing something for oneself rather than what has been imposed from outside authorities. One step towards ‘becoming’ for him was the realization that he could respond freely to God and so he abandoned the duty of saying the divine office and prayed meditatively instead every day. The search for meaning then became about inner work. He realized that as a priest he had compensated for the lack of inner work by outer God-driven work, partly used as a way of dealing with traumatic happenings. He writes instead about being lived by the Infinite within.

‘If I don’t inflate my own self but live the truth of my own inner nature then I am involved with mankind; I am part and parcel of the world. If there is always the invitation of conscience to become then the demand of this inner call to change is only heard when I know the truth about myself. A hatred of change would then be what makes me puff up and make myself into a delusional figure that does not require change. I am a good person, a saintly person so do not need to change. I am already what I am required to become.’