He slowly made his way down the stairs inside the hotel, eyes curious, making a few joking remarks. He was tired from travelling, but his small body diffused energy into the larger room where he engaged with us.

And then I noticed his hands.

I met Archbishop Desmond Tutu a few years ago in the lakeside town of Vreeland in the Netherlands. It was a late afternoon in early spring. As he sat down beside me to sign the cover page of my book/ thesis, he was clinging the pen with his left hand, his right hand lying limp, then swiftly he wrote a few words.

Later I wondered how his body influenced his fight for the underdog and oppressed. As a young child he burnt his body lying too close to a coal stove trying to stay warm; polio atrophied his right hand and one leg and later he contracted TB. Our words are intimately connected to our bodies. If language and the body is an ongoing process, then the body and words of Tutu is a witness of this close connection.

The theologian Nancey Murphy refers to the concept of bodily identity to explain that a person’s identity will only be understood in terms of the person’s own body. This opens a parallel line of thought to that of James Nelson (that faith can only be received in dependence of a person’s bodily experiences), namely that a person’s words of theology, and even words of counselling or therapy are closely related to his/her bodily identity.

With a finger wagging, Tutu scolded politicians; with gnarled hands holding his head, he cried after hearing the harrowing stories of torture victims; with his purple cloak trailing behind him, he led marches with other community activists against the brutality of Apartheid.   He and Simeon Nkoane came across a crowd of mourners busy beating and kicking a man suspected of being a police informer. The man was doused with petrol, and as the crowd of youngsters prepared to throw him into the wreck of his burning car, the two of them waded into the crowd, jostling with the people. Reaching the centre of the crowd, the bleeding victim clung to Tutu’s legs and after pleading with the youths, they pulled the man out of the crowd and into a car.

With hands wringing in anguish, he spoke out against the violent attacks on foreigners, the corrective rape of lesbians, reprimanding Ugandan lawmakers that their anti-homosexuality bill is “reminiscent of what we experienced under Apartheid and what Jews experienced at the hands of Nazis”.

This week I sat listening to the eloquent and fiery words of speakers at the 8^th Desmond Tutu International Peace lecture, but his chair was empty, watching the event from hospital. His body is withdrawing, his words are drying up.

But look at those hands.

We catapult our words at each other like stone-missiles. We cowardly launch words into the anonymity of cyberspace in speech bubbles, drifting off like hot-air balloons, not caring where they land and the damage they can cause. Sometimes it’s the quiet violence of words – around a dinner table, while making love, in the work place, in a classroom, driving in the car, when we pray and worship. We act as if our words don’t belong to us, as if we are not responsible for what we say, how we speak, the letters we form on paper. The violence of words.

We decry the violence in our post- Apartheid brutalised society, but we relentlessly incite violence with fists of words. We are amused, sometimes shocked by the mocking tweets of a Trump, the fearmongering of a Malema and Kriel, the jeering of a raped and abused Khwezi by Zuma supporters, the insensitive trampling of a Zille – and recently, the Facebook rant of a Chris van Wyk (minister and leader in the Dutch Reformed Church) compounding sexual orientation with harmful sexual interests like paedophilia and bestiality. The violence of words.

Words are not merely a scramble of vowels and consonants, strung together into language. Words are “bodily lived-experiences” revealing a future of possibilities. The language philosopher and psychologist, Eugene Gendlin reminds us that “the body is intimately implicated in what things mean”. We live meanings and make meaning/ sense through participating in the world in our bodies.  Our words are intimately connected to our bodies. It can also happen that “the language of what things mean changes bodily experience”. Language and lived body is an ongoing process — embodying language; languaging the body. Words and body can change each other.  It is an illusion to think that we can construct new realities or different ways of language, but ignore “how we find ourselves in body, time, interpersonal context, and place”(Les Todres). The violence of words, igniting violence in bodies.

We constantly and eternally remain accountable for our words, even in the anonymity of cyberspace. Perhaps we need to reintroduce the idea of wisdom into public space. The theologian David Kelsey argues that humans have a vocation to be wise in their practices for the well-being of the everyday world they live in and themselves. He describes three types of practices in which humans are called to be wise: the way they interact with other humans, the way they interact with social institutions and the way in which humans interact with nonhuman creatures.

Wisdom literature puts extraordinary focus on the correct use of language. There is a normative connection between the ways language is used in complex practices. When language is used as an integral part of wise practices, it entails the use of language in a manner which is true to the persons cooperating in the practice, corresponding to the “realities of the larger public context”. Language is then not used in a deceitful, false and violent way. Through the violence of words we can deform creation. We deform each other.

I had the sense of imploding, a silent inward collapsing without great fanfare, as if I was folding into myself. Perhaps it was plain tiredness from trying to make or force a situation with many dead ends to work. Perhaps it was the onset of some kind of depression, something very unfamiliar to me.

Blame it on the book. It was one year after Eva gave me the book of Viktor Frankl and Pinchas Lapide about their conversations on the search for meaning [see previous blogs]. Re-reading the book now after more than a decade, many of the parts I underlined in black ink centred on having a purpose in life and the actualisation of self.  A person only has the ability to actualise him/ herself to the degree in which he / she does not aim at their own actualisation, happiness or desires, but finds it by way of something else. You cannot aim at self-actualisation and fulfilling human potential. Meaning cannot be given. It can only be found by living life, by way of daily, often mundane encounters with people, things and experiences in concrete situations. Frankl quotes Abraham Maslow – “My experience agrees with Frankl’s that people who seek self-actualisation directly, dichotomized away from a mission in life, don’t in fact, achieve it”. You must have a reason, a ground to actualise yourself, to fulfil your potential, albeit a person or a thing.

I went to see a psychologist in a beautiful wooden house overlooking an apple orchard (the sheer beauty of it helped as well). We had a few conversations, and at some stage we started working with images and metaphors …… a horse trapped in a stable, his hoofs rotting in the mud, tired from trying to scale the high wooden fence of the stable without success. That’s where I encountered the force of a metaphor and the power of imagination. This is integral to the narrative process of re-authoring alternative outcomes to problem-saturated stories, and identifying a purpose in life and imagining the outcome in Frankl’s logotherapy.

At the end the only way out of that dark and muddy stable, was for the horse to break through the thick wooden fence – to go through it even if it caused injury. I had to leave a country, friends and an intimate relationship that was a safe haven for nine years. But the horse was free…

I wish Leonard Cohen could have been in the same room in Vienna where Viktor Frankl and Pinchas Lapide had their conversations in 1984 around the search for meaning [see previous two blogs]. It sounds like the beginning of a joke in poor taste …three Jews – a singer, a psychiatrist and a philosopher walk into a bar, sit down at one of the small oak tables and orders a round of schnapps…

Except that their lives were no joke. Two of them survived the terrors of the holocaust, the other survived life. Lapide escaped to England from a concentration camp, soon after watching his father being forced to clean the streets of Vienna with a toothbrush. He took a ship to Palestine, joined the Jewish – English brigade and fought in Italy against the Germans. He pursued a career as diplomat in Italy, and finished his studies at a late age on the philosophy of religion – focussing on  the New Testament as a Jewish manuscript and trying to understand how Nazi’s who called themselves Christians, the followers of a Jew, could exterminate millions of Jews. At the same time he acknowledged that it was “Christians that brought me to a concentration camp, it was Christians that helped me to flee“. Through dialogue he focussed on forgiveness and reconciliation.

Viktor Frankl worked as a neurologist and psychiatrist in Vienna. With an expired American visa in his pocket working in the Rothschild hospital, he saved many Jews from exportation by giving false diagnosis around their mental health. Eventually the hospital was closed down in 1941 and together with his wife, brother and parents he was deported to a concentration camp. Sewn into the seams of his jacket was the text for his book on logotherapy. He was the only one of his family to walk out of these camps, forced to leave the notes for his book behind in Auschwitz in October 1944. He returned to Vienna and worked frantically to recover the text he lost. His famous book, Man’s search for meaning was published two years later in 1946. The first part is an analysis of his experiences in the concentration camps, the second part an exposition of his theory on logotherapy, a psychotherapeutic method involving the identification of a purpose in life and imagining the outcome. The library of Congress listed it as one of the ten most influential books in its collection.

Leonard Cohen was the descendant of Orthodox Jewish rabbis from Lithuania and Poland who emigrated to Montreal, Canada in 1927. On being a Kohen, he said “I had a very Messianic childhood. I was told I was the descendant of Aaron, the high priest.” As singer-songwriter he explored politics, personal relationships, isolation, sexuality and death.

Three eldery men walk into a Viennese café, sit down at one of the small oak tables and as is their habit, order coffee with schnapps….each one in his own way tried to make sense of life, of experiences deeply sensed in their bodies.

 

So how do we make meaning of live, if live always holds the possibility of pain? How do we make sense of suffering, if life ebbs from light to dark…dark to light…light to dark…? How do we keep the lights burning?

Leonard Cohen surely was a singer of darkness. He died at age 82 shortly after the release of his last album. Before that he wrote a last letter to his muse and former girlfriend Marianne Ihlen, who died in July 2016 – “Well Marianne it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.”

A song, You want it darker on his last album, imitates the lyrics of the kaddish, a prayer traditionally recited in the memory of the dead. Each chorus ends with the eerie chant “Hineni, hineni; I’m ready, my lord.” Hineni is Hebrew for “here I am”. The kaddish lyrics in this song reads:

 

Magnified, sanctified be thy holy name

Vilified, crucified in the human frame

A million candles burning for a help that never came

You want it darker, we kill the flame

 

But the same Leonard Cohen’s also wrote this stanza in 1992  – there is a crack, a crack in everything, it’s how the light gets in…

Perhaps meaning making also has to do with the cracks.

Perhaps therapy and theology should pay more attention to what happens in the cracks, to let light in through the cracks of our vulnerability. Perhaps we should listen to the unsaid of the body and mind the gap between human experience and language.

I had a house in the Karoo. In my late twenties, we renovated a beautiful old stone house from 1857, and turned it into a coffee shop and guesthouse in that bone-dry and devilishly warm town. As I was packing away tables and chairs on the stoep late on a Saturday afternoon, tired after a hectic day, this tall German woman showed up and asked if it was still possible to have something to eat. Her business card was this plain white card, only with her name, Eva printed on the one side and her telephone number on the other side. We ended up talking for hours. In the years following, we met up in the Tsitsikamma, Montreux, Paris, Barcelona, Schaffhausen, Zürich, Cologne, Karlsrühe, Basel and Amsterdam, often ending up talking for hours. We became witnesses to each other’s lives. We talked about finding our career paths, spirituality (she followed the path of shamanism), our bodies and ailments, literature and art, the relationships with our parents, the trauma of muggings, the upheaval in intimate relationships….how to make sense of these worlds we live in.

Once we met in Adelboden, high up in the Swiss Alpes. She gave me a book by the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl and the philosopher of religion, Pinchas Lapide, both survivors of the holocaust. This book was based on recordings of conversations between these two friends from 1984 that for years lay hidden in the Frankl archives until it was discovered in 2004. It was only published in German under the title, “Gottsuche und Sinnfrage” [the search for God and questions around meaning]. On the inside Eva simply wrote – “for Jacob, who wants to find meaning”. Don’t we all?

What lies on the other side of pain?

A short answer could be – “more life”. More living. Even if it includes death.

On a visit to South Africa in April last year, the 92 year old liberation theologian, Jürgen Moltmann answered one of those awkward questions from the audience: The secret of life, is living it.

If life is “a thing that consists in bursting open, thrusting forward, in constantly going beyond what is…”(see last week’s blog), it also entails moving beyond pain and the embodied experience of suffering. And as narrative therapist and theologian, I’m very curious in the process of “moving beyond”. How do we move beyond the things and people that hurt us? For me, this connects to the question – How do we make meaning of the things that threaten our living of life? My take on this question, is that our bodies, our daily experiences in the specific worlds we live in, the way we use language (as well as the words we don’t say), the place and space we move in, and an openness to that which lies beyond the boundaries of the skin – are involved in the intricate interplay of making meaning. I ended up calling this the embodied sensing of meaning.

But I’m not that original all on my own. Along the way, I discovered Eugene Gendlin’s notion of “life forward direction”, which I carried into my way of doing narrative therapy. Listen how the health psychologist, Les Todres (another influence) describes this concept as “a leaning towards the life that is not yet, and the ‘newness’ of being touched by an aliveness that always included the possibility of pain”. It is a hunger for the freshness that life presents.

The suffering of pain – the physical, psychological, social, emotional and spiritual experience of it in one’s body – is so often an incomplete narrative of a person’s life. I enjoy reading stories since the good novelists have the knack to capture everyday human experiences in words that shine a certain light; a texture of life that is mostly missing in academic articles and books.

In her 2018 Man Booker prize- winning book “Flights”, the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk writes this about pain: “A thing reaches completion, an internal process is finalized, eliminating all that is unnecessary. That’s why it hurts, but it’s just the pain of purging.” That’s one dimension of pain as merely pain, something we have to pass through. About life she writes this: “life on this planet gets developed by some powerful force contained in every atom of organic matter. It’s a force there is no physical evidence of…It’s a thing that consists in bursting open, thrusting forward, in constantly going beyond what is…This lives, has a million traits and qualities, so that everything is contained within it, and there is nothing that might lie outside of it, all death is part of life, and in some sense there is no death. There are no errors.”

This week’s blog is dedicated to the memory and life of Adam, son of Marlene, brother of Aimée. He died a year ago in the early hours of Friday, 25 August 2017 shortly before his sixteenth birthday, in the final grips of cerebral palsy. The photo is of the painting, “Pietà” by Manfred Zylla, with Adam lying on the lap of Marlene, who lives with the effects of post-polio. He experienced life and love, sensed meaning with his brittle bones and tired tendons. He was no error.

In 1948 Cecily Saunders fell in love. Her amour was a Polish- Jewish refugee, who escaped from the Warsaw ghetto, worked as a waiter and was now dying of cancer. She was nursing him, while training as a social worker. He bequeathed her ₤500 which germinated into the idea of the modern hospice movement. Cecily eventually became a medical doctor, and forged the term “total pain”. She recognised that pain has physical, psychological, social, emotional and spiritual components. Pain enters all our lives, permeates our bodies.

I had a bit of a tough year in 2008, probably the nearest I sat to the fire of total pain. What I did most of the time then, was to sit quietly in the dark “rondavel” shaped chapel of Sediba Mountain Retreat, and reading the book Inviting silence by Gunilla Noris…

“Through the practice of silence we become aware

of our pain. The pain is always there – in our minds and in our bodies.

Silence allows us to see it, face it, release it.

 

We constantly judge ourselves.

Our minds decide

What our experience should be

Or should not be

–               relentlessly labeling things good or bad –

demanding that our lives conform to our labels.

Then, when pain comes into our lives

–               and it does to every life – we do not only suffer it,

but we suffer our suffering as well.

We add the mind’s harsh judgment of pain

To our actual experience of it.

 

By practicing silence, we may discover the ways

In which we intensify our pain by judging it.

Then we have a chance to become less harsh,

more forgiving.

 

The pain created by our minds is stored in our bodies,

Creating rigid patterns of behavior, blocking the flow

of energy  within us, cramping our being.

Our harshness and our fears are embodied in our flesh.

 

In silence, we can feel these tendencies congeal –

And allow them to be as they are. They may then

uncramp and release, for anything that is not resisted

tends of its own accord to unfold and change.

 

By cultivating silence, we can find and release

deeper and deeper levels of pain and so discover

once again what is beneath the pain:

the natural joy that is already inside us,

free to rise and flow into expression.”

James Nelson died on an ordinary Thursday three years ago. He was 85. I wish I could say his work had a deep and far-reaching impact in theology. His ideas reverberated, and the tremors can still be felt, carried forward by feminist theologians like Lisa Isherwoord and Elizabeth Steward. But the wider impact was made by the “theology of the body” of Cardinal Wojtyla, bringing the typescript in Polish (1979 – 1984) for his book, Man and Women He created them to Rome when he became Pope John Paul II. A theology about the body. Definitely not a theology from the body.

James was an activist who took part in the civil rights and anti-war movements in the 1960s and championed LGBTIQ rights, beginning in the 1970’s. For me, he was a liberator, freeing me from hate and guilt and shame and helping me to accept myself as my body. He was a wounded healer. I can imagine a tombstone with an inscription – A giant lies here.

Brian Wren composed the hymn, Good is the Flesh (1989) in dedication to James Nelson. I just wish someone would compose a descent melody:

Good is the flesh that the Word has become,

good is the birthing, the milk in the breast,

good is the feeding, caressing and rest,

good is the body for knowing the world,

Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

 

Good is the body for knowing the world,

sensing the sunlight, the tug of the ground,

feeling, perceiving, within and around,

good is the body, from cradle to grave

Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

 

Good is the body, from cradle to grave,

growing and aging, arousing, impaired,

happy in clothing, or lovingly bared,

good is the pleasure of God in our flesh,

Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

 

Good is the pleasure of God in our flesh,

longing in all, as in Jesus to dwell,

glad of embracing, and tasting, and smell,

good is the body, for good and for God,

Good is the flesh that the Word has become.