Good morning…
“The Inner Meaning of Jesus’ Parables,” reads the subtitle of a Christian classic published in 1970 by John A. Sanford, who was an American Jungian analyst and Episcopal priest. I am an “inner meaning” girl. I love Jesus. I find his parables fascinatingly fun to ponder, so I am intrigued by Sanford’s work exploring “the inner meaning of Jesus’ sayings; that is, their relevance to the unfolding of the whole personality that is within us all.”
Sanford explains in his preface, “The teachings of Jesus are like a beautifully cut diamond; they can be viewed from many angles, yet each angle points to the same center.” As we read the story below, might we be pointed deeper toward the Center of all abundant life?
******
Excerpt for The Kingdom Within by John A. Sanford
So it was with Marian. She was a sincerely religious woman, but her religious orientation had for years been more formal and external, amounting to an ethic of obedience to more requirements and identification with the prevailing collective attitude of her Church, so that her own creative personality was lost. This identification had also served as a protection against her having to face many painful feelings that grew out of past disappointments in life and love. The result was and outwardly pleasing personality but a separation from her own creativity as well as from her own pain. Finally the dam broke, and the repressed unconscious elements succeeded in disorienting her outer life completely.
At the beginning of this experience she had a dream in which she was on a ship in a violent storm hanging onto a slim pole that was part of the ship’s superstructure. Then she lost her grip and fell tumbling into the turbulent sea. Here was her dilemma. She had fallen into the violently disturbed waters of the unconscious. Here she would either have to drown or learn to swim in the waters of conflict and creativity.
In the ensuing breakdown of her life, with its anxiety and dark depression, there was danger that creative possibilities in the situation might be lost. Viewed only from a clinical perspective, the picture was bleak. Fortunately, she was able to see the meaning of her experience and perceive that it was precisely in her darkness and confusion that God was acting. She realized the truth of the saying “a soul in trouble is near to God.” The meaning of the events that were taking place inside her became clear, and, as she grasped this thread of meaning, she was able to see the creative elements in the midst of her violent upheaval and to move from sickness to health, from obedience to creativity, from formal, outward religion to a religion connected meaningfully to her own inner world. (48-49)
******
He (Jesus) said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has become a disciple of the kingdom of heaven is like the head of a household, who brings out of his treasure things that are new and fresh and things that are old and familiar” (Matthew 13:52, AMP).
…Sue…
