Emma and Carl jung in their later years 

Two of the most difficult kinds of disasters that can break our spirit in old age is that of illness, and the loss of a loved one. In Carl Jung’s case both spurred him on to greater activity. In 1944 Jung broke his foot, and this was followed by a heart attack.

‘In a state of unconsciousness, I experienced deliriums and visions. … The images were so tremendous that I myself concluded that I was close to death. My nurse afterwards told me, “It was as if you were surrounded by a bright glow.” … I had reached the outermost limit … extremely strange things began to happen to me … ‘

Jung’s near-death experiences were followed by three weeks before he ‘could truly make up my mind to live again …Now I must go back to this drab world.’ As he recovered, Jung’s visions continued at night, and provided the impetus for the fruitful period of writing that then followed: ‘We shy away from the word “eternal”, but I can describe the experience only as the ecstasy of a non-temporal state in which past, present and future are one.’

His illness, and despite dealing with resulting limitations led to:

‘A good many of my principal works were written only then. The insight I had had or the vison of the end of all things, gave me the courage to undertake new formulations. I no longer attempted to put across my own opinion, but surrendered myself to the current of my thoughts …

Something else too, came to me from my illness. I might formulate it as an affirmation of things as they are: an “unconditional “yes” to that which is, without subjective protests – acceptance of the conditions of existence as I see them and understand them, acceptance of my own nature as I happen to be. …I understood how important it is to affirm one’s own destiny’.

Following the death of his wife Emma in 1955, Jung was distraught. He gave himself up to stone carving as a way of coping with his grief, pondering the meaning of why he should have been the one to survive. He felt an even greater pressure to ‘become himself’ and exteriorized this by building an upper storey onto the low central section at Bollingen (not an option available to many of us).

‘[the upper storey] represents myself, or my ego-personality. Earlier I would not have been able to do this, I would have rejected it as presumptuous self-emphasis. Now it signified an extension of consciousness achieved in old age. With that the building was complete’.

He moved his desk and writing materials into the new extension and went back to work. He worked at his individuation until the very end of his life.  At the end of his autobiography, Jung quotes Lao-tsu Chinese philosopher considered to be the author of Tao Te Ching:

‘When Lao-tsu says: “All are clear, I alone am clouded” he is expressing what I now feel in advanced old age … the example of a man with superior insight who has seen and experienced worth and worthlessness, and who at the end of his life desires to return into his own being, into the eternal unknowable meaning. … Yet there is so much that fills me: plants, animals, clouds, day and night, and the eternal … The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things.’

Jung’s stone with inscription

One of the attractive aspects of the Jungian approach is the idea that even in old age we are growing towards realization of our full potential. Most psychological thinking emphasises the decline and disengagement of this life stage, stressing the degenerative changes occurring in the body and the brain, and so the need to keep active and engaged. Whilst Jung didn’t deny elements of decline as we age, he insisted that the goal of this time of life was not senility but rather wisdom. The Jungian Anthony Stevens points out that Jung was not alone with this view as Erik Erikson, child psychoanalyst and writer about psycho-social development – (who incidentally lived until 91) agreed.

Jung’s approach to old age has been criticised as being too influenced by his personal experience, and his great interest in the idea of individuation – becoming the person we are meant to be. Jung saw the task of old age as a time of reflection, for assimilation of the past, a time to search for meaning, and to move towards wholeness. This involves coping with physical and mental limitations, coming to terms with death, and experiencing our co-existence with all of creation. Having said that, Jung continued to work with patients well into his 70s, and worked with people in their sixties and seventies – as indeed many Jungians still do. Jung only closed his practice because it was interfering with his writing. His autobiography he completed at 84.

Jung wrote:

‘From the psychological point of view, life in the hereafter would seem to be a logical continuation of the psychic life of old age. With increasing age, contemplation and reflection, the inner images naturally play an ever-greater part in …life. … In old age one begins to let memories unroll before the mind’s eye and, musing, to recognise oneself in the inner and outer images of the past …’

Jung continues that the inner images keep him from getting lost in personal recollection, where there is a danger of getting too involved in the reconstruction of past events which can imprison us. Rather, reflecting and retrospection can be a way of seeing the path taken in life out into the world, and then out of the world again into life after death.

Jung’s solace in old age was solitude, and the peace of spending more time at Bollingen, the house he spent much time in alongside Lake Zurich. This contrasted with his more extrovert life in the city at Kusnacht. At Bollingen he lived very simply, and the place became the main support of his spiritual life. There was no electricity, telephone or central heating. Water had to be fetched from the well, and food was cooked on a stove for which Jung chopped all the wood himself. In the centre of the house there was a room, which no one was allowed to enter, where he wrote and meditated undisturbed.

In 1950, on the occasion of his 75th birthday, Jung set up a stone cube on the lakeshore, just west of the tower, on one side of the stone there is an inscription:

‘Time is a child – playing like a child – playing a board game – the kingdom of the child. This is Telesphoros*, who roams through the dark regions of this cosmos and glows like a star out of the depths. He points the way to the gates of the sun and to the land of dreams.’

The writer Robert Moss has suggested that the message is ‘to play in the spirit of the child, who plays without concern for consequences, because the play is the thing.’  He suggests:      ‘Synchronicity is a child at play, moving pieces on a board. On our side of reality, we see the pieces move, but not the hand that moves them or casts them.’

*Telesphorus – a child-god of healing

Girl Reading at the Window by Gwen John 1911

Following her deepening religious belief, and receiving instruction into the Catholic church, Gwen John began to experiment with how faith could be reflected and brought into her painting. She worked on two paintings of the Annunciation, when the angel Gabriel appears to the young Mary. John places Mary in a Parisian interior reading a book; the angel is conveyed by the movement of a curtain at an open window.

In the second painting John uses herself as a model for the Virgin Mary’s face. One biographer (Alicia Foster) notes that it’s ‘a remarkable act of chutzpah’ to paint yourself as the mother of God, but religion was becoming a central part of John’s life alongside her art.

In this second version of the Annunciation which she called ‘Girl Reading at the Window’ John follows the earlier version by painting the angel as the light that transforms the curtain into a swathe of white:

‘Gwen John painted an everyday physical reality – the sun coming through the window – as a moment of profound religious illumination, her version brings together a two-thousand-year-old story with the utterly modern, retold with no recourse to haloes and angel wings.’

She also painted contemporary Catholic figures, including Pope Benedict XV (taken from as photo in a paper0, her friend the philosopher and theologian Jacques Maritain, and over a number of years many depictions of St Therese of Lisieux to whom John became devoted and who fired her work and also her religious worship. Inspired by the saint, John wrote:

‘Unless you have the will to be great you will fall into mediocrity …

1. 1. God, your Lover, is waiting for you.
   2. Make the step now that will bring you nearer to being a Saint.
   3. Ask God to strengthen your will to be a great Saint.’

Over a number of years, John made St Therese the subject of her art and emulation. John wrote: ‘I must be a saint too. I must be a saint in my work.’ Her repeated sketches of St Therese and Therese’s sister were often done on scraps of paper, and look quite haphazard –not trying to improve by repeatedly drawing the same two figures, or trying to reach a best or complete version, she is rather ‘expressing the experience, the time and the process of their making’. Here it seems she was influenced by the writing of Henri Bergson (as were Jacques and Raissa Maritain), with his thinking on the flow of immediate experience, the importance of intuition, and the creative spirit. The creative spirit is contemplative, spiritual, and free –rather than the rational and mechanistic. There is no end to be reached.

A series of oil paintings of the founder of an order of Dominican nuns – Mere Poussepin – were taken from a black and white prayer card. In these John is, ‘…summoning up a living presence in all its fullness, an entity at once solid and with an evanescent spiritual dimension’. John also painted and drew a number of the nuns in her neighbourhood convent, and people in church.

John wanted her art to elevate and explore her religious belief. Both worked for each other so that John could describe herself as: ‘God’s little artist: a seer of strange beauties, a teller of harmonies. A diligent worker.’ ‘

Gwen John – self-portrait

The artist Gwen John found in her creativity something immense and profound that she could immerse herself in. Unusually for a woman of Gwen John’s time, she combined this artistic vocation with a passionate religious faith. While both model for and lover of the sculptor Auguste Rodin, Gwen John met the poet Rilke – a friendship that hugely mattered to her, and whose belief that it was necessary to give one’s life entirely to one’s work greatly influenced her.

Rilke in his ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’ wrote: ‘Be ahead of all parting, as though it were already behind you’, and the same year John instructed herself: ‘Leave everybody and let them leave you. Then only will you be without fear.’ Losing a much-loved cat John wrote: ‘Now I think I should put all that energy of loving into my drawing.’

A year after Rilke’s death, John wrote a note to herself:

‘Rilke, hold my hand! You must hold me by the hand! Teach me, inspire me, make me know what to do. Take care of me when my mind is asleep, you began to help me, you must continue.’

Gwen John’s deep connection with her work needed someone or something that she considered to be of transcendent grandeur in her intimate life. There were friendships and Rodin and Rilke – all of whom fell short, and then there was her later, passionate relationship with God. Becoming an ardent Catholic, John met and made portraits of the theologian and philosopher Jacques Maritain. She also read about Maritain’s thinking that belief in God allowed the penetration to the real and the absolute, that was often hidden by surface appearance.

John drew nuns and churchgoers as a way of attempting to connect with the absolute. In other words, her later work became expressions of spiritual truths; she wanted to capture others who were also involved in the same searching for God. Trying to understand human suffering and make something of it is found in the jottings of her note books.

She writes: ‘Do not despair. Perhaps good will come out of this suffering. You don’t know.’ This alongside a quote: ‘Suffering has always enlarged those who know how to endure it and listen to what it teaches.’ And a verse from a poem by the Comtesse de Noailles [friend of Rilke and Rodin]:

‘Solitude I loved, above all things,

Reason without fear, boredom with the vanities,

The struggle against time and what it takes apart,

Pleasure in nothingness, only eternity.’

Her art became a way of redemption – John wrote: ‘your pictures – the transformation of your sins your faults.’

By 1911 John was establishing a Rule of Life. The first rule was ‘to pray to God incessantly’, and the second, ‘to control your emotions. They are infidelities to God.’ Troubled by her intermittent relationship with Rodin who was trying to put distance between them, John writes:

‘I am better off alone … on this day the 19^th November 1911 in answer to a prayer I see a little how degraded I am, how sensual I am, how strong is my amour-propre, how attached I am to the world, how little faith I have…’

Later adding after finding Rodin had gone to Italy … ‘I tired myself in shops and streets, but I did not feel God far off … If it is only the humiliation …, should I not rejoice in humiliation? Of course, humiliations are a great blessing.’

A caged panther

Solitude, deep reflection, and contemplation bring a quality to creativity that has been called ‘inseeing’ – in other words getting right to the heart of the subject, in touch and with deep empathy. Thomas Merton describes this inseeing as a particular way of looking, and a form of contemplation in itself. Inseeing involves an ‘inner event in the person who sees, and it takes place in this encounter with something else; it’s not just a subjective thing.’

In one talk to the novices, (transcribed by Paul Pearson), Thomas Merton speaks of the way Rilke gets into the very center of the thing he is describing. Taking a dog as an example, he says this inseeing involves getting into:

‘… the dog’s very centre, the point from where it begins to be a dog, the place in which, in it, where God, as it were, would have sat down for a moment when the dog was finished in order to watch it under the influence of its first embarrassments and inspirations and to know that it was good. that nothing was lacking, that it could not have been made better.’

This contact with reality, Merton goes on to say, is essential to the spiritual life as God is mediated through other things in this life, through reality, through creation. ‘This encounter with reality reveals to us our own existence, ourselves and the meaning of our own life and the direction of our own life.’

One of Rilke’s poems that Merton analyses is ‘The Panther’ about a panther trapped behind bars as part of an exhibition in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly—. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

The poem, not conventionally religious, offers much about the deep empathy and inseeing. Rilke has given the creature his complete attention. It’s not just subjective experience about seeing a trapped animal, and not just an objective description, but what Merton describes as ‘a new creation’ reflecting ‘the vital encounter of the poet and the panther.’ Somewhere in it is the essence of the panther. ‘

‘Giving another being our full attention becomes an act of deference and respect to that which we might otherwise seek to objectify and control. It is a first step toward a contemplative relationship with the world.’

Rainer Maria Rilke

One of Thomas Merton’s favourite poets was the Austrian poet Rilke – Rainer Maria Rilke. Merton gave a series of talks to the novice monks at the Abbey of Gethsemani speaking about how poetic experience is closely aligned to the religious experience. Both Rilke and Merton shared a longing to be alone and apart from the world and its busyness, alongside, somewhat paradoxically, an attraction to it that included for both much letter writing.

Both men write about trying to find the best place to be alone: Rilke in striving to find the best place where he could write and how this required solitude. He also needed help from patrons and friends to achieve this.

In a letter written in 1903 Rilke writes:

‘What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours – that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grownups walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important because they looked so busy and because you didn’t understand a thing about what they were doing.’

For Rilke creativity seemed to thrive on silence and time alone. Out of the contemplative silence poetry might emerge from a timeless reality. It’s been suggested that when we engage with a poem that arises from such contemplation then the reader, too, has access to this same reality and this can be spiritually transformative – evoking awareness in the reader. Poetry is then a contemplative art that has the capacity to create peace in the heart of the responsive individual, which is a precondition for peace in the world.

Rilke turned against organized religion in response to his times at the start of the twentieth century; also affected by his rather negative experiences of Catholicism as a child. Yet he saw himself as deeply religious, writing:

‘Religion is something infinitely simple, ingenuous. It is not knowledge, not content of feeling (for all content is admitted from the start, where a man comes to terms with life), it is not duty and not renunciation, it is not restriction: but in the infinite extent of the universe it is a direction of the heart.’

A decade after Rilke had begun his initial work on the Duino Elegies when he perceived the whole outline of them, he set out again to try and achieve the right conditions to work further on them: ‘the heart-work for all the images imprisoned’ within him. Moments of brief inspiration were not enough; he had to find the right place, practice through letters, translations, and making notes from his reading, and he neded hope.  Finding a little ‘Chateau’ set in a garden in the region of Valais his supporters helped sort the place out, and found a discreet and suitable housekeeper who would know not to disturb Rilke while at work. Even then:

‘Concentration is terribly hard’ he complained, ‘even eating is a distraction, and the hours between meals seem too short for anything whole to be done … if only one could eat for half a year, then spend the other half meditating, so that there did not have to be this constant shift of focus …’

Unexpectedly the inspiration came, and the day after writing this letter Rilke composed over three days a cycle of Sonnets closely followed by more work on the Elegies. Rilke could then write in a letter:

‘Though I can scarcely hold the pen after days of overwhelming obedience in the spirit … I must give the news:

I am over the mountain!

At last! The Elegies are there … I never knew that such a storm of spirit and heart could break over one! And that it could be survived!

This post initially went onto the website a couple of weeks ago, but due to technical issues it wasn’t sent out to subscribers, so am posting it again with a slightly changed title.

John R. Schlapobersky is a group analyst and psychotherapist – someone who is accustomed to ‘hearing thunder, getting close to people who have suffered nightmares at other’s hands,’ and who has had his own therapy. He’s also a writer, and in 2021 published a memoir of his traumatic arrest and torture for opposing apartheid in South Africa. This detention took place in 1969 when he was a student.

Schlapobersky writes how we can be ambushed by our history in ‘an unguarded moment from the past’ – a particularly powerful flashback took place for him at a visit to the Apollo centre in Housten, Texas, fifty years after the trauma. At the visitor’s centre, memorable statements from Apollo 11 and the moon landing transported him immediately back to his time in prison. He writes that 20 July 1969 – the date of the moon landing also marked the turning point in his imprisonment towards survival. Taken aback by the depth of his emotion decades later, Schlapobersky decided to write and bring ‘light to a dark chapter that still casts shadows’. Apartheid ‘had its own coordinates of time and place but threats to human rights are perennial … even the rule of law was used as a vehicle for tyranny’.

Picked up at the university just before the start of a lecture, the police took him back to his apartment to search it:

‘Everything was numbered and catalogued, and when it came to diaries and address books they took everything they could find. I understood from all this they must have thought me a key figure in an underground intrigue, so I could not wait to get to Pretoria where – they assured me- I would be able to see a lawyer. Then I would be able to tell them the truth and come home again. I convinced myself that I would be away for only a few hours …

When one of them found my old high school Bible on my bookshelf, he took it down and put it into my hand. He need never have bothered, and at the time I wondered why he was giving it to me, but it proved to be a life-saving gift, an unexpected act of improbable kindness. In response to my puzzlement, he said simply and quietly, “Where you’re going, you may need something to read. Keep it close to you and look after it.”

That Bible became not only a source of reading and a calendar, but also where he made entries of significant Bible passages [the Bible is now on permanent loan to the Jewish Museum in London].

Taken in for interrogation Schlapobersky passed a street where he’d been on a peaceful student demonstration to protest against the termination of teaching contracts for black staff. Driving by he noted how ordinary it all looked, realising that no one outside knew what was happening to him. At the interrogation centre he was shouted at, threatened, and beaten and mocked for being Jewish:

‘… there were fists in my face, and they tore at my beard and long hair. To this day I am reluctant to allow anyone to touch my face. There were so many of them. The violence was at its most intense as they drove me onto the brick at my feet … and so I stood on it. What a strange thing I thought, balancing on this brick in front of a raging mob of Special branch. … The brick I was standing on was a red South African face-brick 81/2 inches long, 4 inches wide and 3 inches deep.’

Punished for falling off the brick – the torture began.

[Some subscribers may not have received posts over the last few week – many apologies,but if you want to see what you’ve missed then they’re all available on the actual website]

For 5 days John Schlapobersky stood on the brick – with meal and toilet breaks while a team of six men working in pairs interrogated him in four-hour shifts.

‘I talked to them in an open voice, but in another inner voice I talked to the brick without revealing it, and the brick and I continued the ordeal together. … The brick and I would discuss how they were abusing us … and I imagined the brick talking back to me saying, “Don’t worry they’ll pay for this!”

As the sleep deprivation accumulated so Schlapobersky became increasingly confused, unable to understand what was being said, dozing on his feet before falling off the brick and walking into the wall –

‘… there were roars of laughter from somewhere, but I could not get my eyes to focus and see who was laughing. … Sleep deprivation made me psychotic – I saw and heard things that were not there. … I was unable to tell the difference between a mad present and a threatening past [his time at boarding school].’

After 5 days, he was stretchered out, and sent to a prison where he slept.

‘Then I began to read the Bible … I had been at a Church of England school [and] had had a religious upbringing as a Jew … Because concentration was difficult and because I later found the amount of violence in the Old Testament difficult to tolerate, I chose to read only from the New Testament in the morning when I was at my worst. In some of the Gospels I found a benevolent spirit uplifting, but was unsettled by accounts of Christ in front of Caiphas … I was brought face to face here with my own experience. I kept the Old Testament for the afternoon, and was again unsettled by its more punitive passages.’

Writing on a piece of toilet paper to his girlfriend – a letter that couldn’t be sent, but parts of which survived. Schlapobersky wrote:

‘This place is so horrifying that the sensitive parts of one’s self close up to shut it out, like certain flowers do at night. If one remained here for long enough, these parts would never be able to open again. But there are birds singing in the trees outside. Their songs penetrate even the heavy locks and unmitigated gloom of captivity.’

With no sense of any future, he found on day 11 some consolation in Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8 ‘To everything there is a season’. ‘.. I could even pray if I were religious. Ecclesiastes blew me away and I withdrew into a state of reverie’. Pressure from his parents enabled a visit and this became a turning point and Schlapobersky found a passage in Chronicles to mark this first sign of hope.

‘David: “For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners … Our days on earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding” (Chronicles 29:15). This became ‘a touchstone through my life’.

And calling on this and Psalm 39: 4,5, 12 became something that Schlapobersky turned to years later when teaching others about therapeutic work with refugees and victims of torture.

John Schlapobersky

John R. Schlapobersky is a group analyst and psychotherapist – someone who is accustomed to ‘hearing thunder, getting close to people who have suffered nightmares at other’s hands,’ and who has had his own therapy. He’s also a writer, and in 2021 published a memoir of his traumatic arrest and torture for opposing apartheid in South Africa; he also spoke at a meeting I attended based on the book. This detention took place in 1969 when he was a student.

Schlapobersky writes how we can be ambushed by our history in ‘an unguarded moment from the past’ – a particularly powerful flashback took place for him at a visit to the Apollo centre in Housten, Texas, fifty years after the trauma. At the visitor’s centre, memorable statements from Apollo 11 and the moon landing transported him immediately back to his time in prison. He writes that 20 July 1969 – the date of the moon landing also marked the turning point in his imprisonment towards survival. Taken aback by the strength of his emotion so many years later, Schlapobersky decided to write and bring ‘light to a dark chapter that still casts shadows’. Apartheid ‘had its own coordinates of time and place but threats to human rights are perennial … even the rule of law was used as a vehicle for tyranny.’

Picked up at the university just before the start of a lecture, the police took Schlapobersky back to his apartment to search it:

‘Everything was numbered and catalogued, and when it came to diaries and address books they took everything they could find. I understood from all this they must have thought me a key figure in an underground intrigue, so I could not wait to get to Pretoria where – they assured me- I would be able to see a lawyer. Then I would be able to tell them the truth and come home again. I convinced myself that I would be away for only a few hours …

When one of them found my old high school Bible on my bookshelf, he took it down and put it into my hand. He need never have bothered, and at the time I wondered why he was giving it to me, but it proved to be a life-saving gift, an unexpected act of improbable kindness. In response to my puzzlement, he said simply and quietly, “Where you’re going, you may need something to read. Keep it close to you and look after it.”

That Bible became not only a source of reading and a calendar, but also where he made entries of significant Bible passages [the Bible is now on permanent loan to the Jewish Museum in London].

Taken in for interrogation, Schlapobersky passed a street where he’d been on a peaceful student demonstration to protest against the termination of teaching contracts for black staff. Driving by he noted how ordinary it all looked, realising that no one outside knew what was happening to him. At the interrogation centre he was shouted at, threatened, and beaten and mocked for being Jewish:

‘… there were fists in my face, and they tore at my beard and long hair. To this day I am reluctant to allow anyone to touch my face. There were so many of them. The violence was at its most intense as they drove me onto the brick at my feet … and so I stood on it. What a strange thing I thought, balancing on this brick in front of a raging mob of Special Branch. … The brick I was standing on was a red South African face-brick 81/2 inches long, 4 inches wide and 3 inches deep.’

Punished if he fell off the brick – the torture began.

Karen Armstrong

A fact sheet from 2024 on monasticism in the UK reports that ‘the decline in numbers of people entering the religious life has been close to terminal.’ In 2000 there were 710 nuns and 230 monks in Anglican religious orders, and this dropped by a third by 2008. On the Catholic side, monks and nuns numbered into the thousands but numbers of new members were dropping. In 2007, only 13 men and 16 women entered religious life. As the earlier posts have noted there are lots of reasons for this, including the general lack of interest in attending church, the changing status of women, and the abuse scandals all played a part. One sister is quoted as saying:

‘The idea of sending at least one child into the religious orders has died out, and women have more choice in terms of education and careers, meaning most don’t have to enter the convent to get an education.’

Whilst the way of forming nuns that Karen Armstrong experienced in the 1960s have changed, accounts are still emerging about the damage done to those who were under strict and punishing regimes and the damage they inflicted on those in their care – and all apparently in the name of the God of love. Different child abuse enquiries have documented the extensive evidence of women religious inflicting various abuses and humiliations on vulnerable children in their care, and situations where being physically hit, sexually abused, and emotionally deprived was a fact of daily life. The Scottish Inquiry in 2018 noted institutions where children who were bed-wetters were physically beaten and humiliated with name calling; where force feeding was commonplace, and where children were often forced to bath publicly and share bath water; where girls were not educated about menstruation and were punished for blood on bedsheets and many other unfair practices. How can this cruelty be understood?

The research suggests that where there was a strict order, and the religious sisters lived themselves under a strict order, then it was this way of life that was transferred to the children. The women religious had been spiritually formed by breaking down their humanity and previous ways of behaving to conform to some idealised life of poverty, chastity, and obedience. The nuns were usually subordinate to male clerical power in the wider church, and in some instances as well as being perpetrators of abuse were also themselves victims. The vow of obedience to superiors was the route ‘to experience God as the ultimate authority’ with emphasis on conformity and abandonment of a sense of self, and where the glorification of suffering seems also to have contributed to abusing others – whether children or young women entering the convent.

Karen Armstrong asks a kindly superior Mother Katherine:

‘“what’s happened to make people like Mother Praeterita [a particularly cold and vindictive superior] the way they are? Uncertain with their minds, not seeing things they don’t want to see. People like Mother Imelda, who seem starved inside …”

She paused and looked straight at me. “They’ve failed in courage somewhere. They’ve let themselves get enslaved by the training, by the letter of the Rule and not its spirit … By clinging to the rules as to the rail of a swimming-pool. Not being willing ever to go out of their depth and trust that God will hold them up …

Of course, we have to love God more than anyone else … the hard thing is to hang onto the inner lights that God sends you. To use your mind and your heart …”’