Rodin – The Thinker
As we live and gain experience, so we start to work out our own meaning. Neville Symington who was a priest and became a psychoanalyst was eventually able to work out why he had clung as an adolescent and young man to what he called the dictator god. When at college, training for the priesthood, he began to understand that God was a God of Love, and when he began his parish work, he began to experience a being ‘who invited me into a free responsive relationship with Him’. However, the dictator who condemned re-appeared, despite being repudiated, and Symington located this dictator in the institutional church:
‘I have come across many people who believe that by repudiating religion and becoming atheists, they thereby rid themselves of this despotic torture. This, of course, is sheer magical nonsense.’
In other words, this particular projection of a dictator god belongs within us, and Symington wonders how much a tyrant god is a substitution for the pain of a terrible loss. Then the projection becomes a way of protecting and defending from past pain.
‘I believe that it had always been in me, right from the time I was a child. The tyrant God before whom I cringed … was ultimately a figure within me of whom I was in terror. …So my entry into the Church had been impelled by some painful fact that I was trying to escape … hence what people were witnessing when they encountered this cassocked figure was a delusion. I had turned myself into a delusional object and somewhere in the depths was a clamouring child, a child who was wounded and injured in his very being.’
Writing after many years of training and working as a psychoanalyst, Symington traces back the wound to an early rejection:
‘I surmise that my birth was a great disappointment to my mother; that she had hoped for a girl and the sight of yet another boy collapsed her spirit so she withdrew emotionally and did not give me what I most needed: an act of contemplative love that would have been a source of confidence in my inner being. And yet this cannot be completely true … there has been in me some resilience, some inner spirit of strength that has enabled me to push through some of these appalling fits of madness.’
The inner process of emotional and spiritual development is continuous – if we allow it. What we look for in others can be found within ourselves. Symington quotes a notice from a monastery in Spain: ‘let us occupy ourselves not with envying others but with finding in ourselves that which we envy.
Our human experience has two parts: the events themselves that we pass through, and the way that we assimilate them into ourselves, so that we possess the experiences rather than being possessed by them. Each contributes to working out the meaning of our lives.