Apple Farm Community Notes

he Christian story begins with an innocent child in a wooden manger and culminates in that same child, as an adult, disgracefully murdered on a wooden cross, the innocent victim of trumped up charges. Carl Jung suggests that the Western psyche is profoundly Christian. The archetype of the innocent child provides endless possibility for transformation. The innocent one is the source of life and full of possibilities for metanoia. Through the ages this haunts and threatens the representatives of collective power.

2 And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, 3 And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 18

Such innocence connotes vigor and immediacy. The child questions without false modesty or a need to impress; may be timid but rarely full of suspicion. Tears come readily without filters as to propriety or usefulness. The child goes directly to what it wants - a comforting parent, a sweet, or a mud puddle.

At archetypal levels the meaning carries even greater spiritual and psychological weight. “The archetype of the child has to do with the wonder of all beginnings and the wonder of beginning again. We are led by it to imagine being in the world as on the first day of creation, seeing the world for the first time. The child embodies and encourages spontaneity and joy, imagination and celebration.” [1]

Herod and Pilate, steeped in Roman values of collective power, success, wealth and security, are threatened by the innocent one. What is it that is so antagonistic between their worlds and his? Unlike Christ, they each inhabit a fortress mentality -- lives dominated by fear, riddled by suspicion and calling for constant vigilance. The novelist E. M Forster calls this kind of life, the “tragedy of preparedness,” in which we “nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes,” wasting energy by assuming “that preparation against danger is in itself a good, and [we ] are the better for staggering through life fully armed.”[2] No wonder the Christ child worries Harold’s sleep. The values this child articulates are completely antithetical to the very fabric of his world.

Unfortunately Herod persists in the human psyche. How often, in our quite ordinary lives, do we slaughter the innocents of creativity and wonder? We turn our suspicion and hostility against the awkward first steps of the creative child within ourselves and also kill off the possibility of extending trust to others and thus fostering peace on earth and peace within our own psyche. If we bridle at the thought of ourselves as Herod, we might squirm yet harder when we realize that we may be far more like Pilate than Herod. At the other end of Christ’s life stands this figure who rejects the innocent Christ out of expediency and to uphold the public good. Like so many contemporary people, not only politicians, he views spiritual values with irony and skepticism. He is not terrified as is Herod, but despises the folly of the “unworldly” including the folly of the childlike love that “moves the sun and other stars.”(Dante)

Matisse writes, “in order to look at things with an undistorted view, you have to have the courage of a child. If you lose that faculty you cannot express yourself in an original way which is your own personal way.” With such courage and trust we find that we have nothing to lose and no real need to protect ourselves as we become truly ourselves – free human beings breathing free air. Childlike forgetfulness of self in the wonder of play and the wonder of “the other” are captured in an Eastern Orthodox story. “A saint said to a child, ‘Look here, if you were able to play with the Lord, it would be the greatest thing anyone could ever do. All the world takes him so seriously that it has become horribly boring. Play with God, my child. He is the best playmate.’”

The values constellated by the child archetype mean costly changes in the fundamental ways we view things. It’s as if the molecules that constitute our spiritual and mental makeup are transformed. The so-called practical worlds of Herod and Pilate emphasize usefulness, demand rational planning, cost benefit analyses, and clear objectives for the activities they value. The world of emancipated innocence sees freedom from convention, abandonment to the dance, cultivated inefficiency, and idle rumination as essential components of the spiritual life. All the spiritual masters, including Jung, are insistent that our best time and energy (not our spare time and energy) be allotted to contemplation rather than ratiocination. Contemplation is sometimes described as “simple gazing” with radical openness to transcendent realities; so that suspending our logical and linear thought processes are often necessary.

The 17^th century poet Thomas Traherne never lost a sense of the innocence of childhood and wrote many poems and epigrams expressing the exhilarating world of that perspective.

Those pure and virgin apprehensions I had from the womb, and that divine light wherewith I was born, are the best unto this day wherein I can see the universe. By the gift of God they attended me into the world, and by his special favour I remember them till now. Verily they seem the greatest gifts his wisdom could bestow, for without them, al1 other gifts had been dead and vain. Certainly Adam in paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world than I when I was a child. ^{^[3]}

Thus we see the world again from the inside of the regained vision that belongs to conscious innocence. It is, of course, not enough for us to simply decide for the childhood world with an act of the will. We have to go through a long process of putting aside childish things such as resentment at parents, wanting to be at the center of other person’s lives, as well as wanting the more obvious Roman glories of success, wealth and security. We may also have to deal realistically with persistent neuroses and obsessions.

It can be a long journey from the naïve, natural childlike innocence of chronological childhood to the mature, realized emancipated innocence but the way to that which is our true home takes work and time, until as T. S. Eliot says:

[1] Christine Downing, An Encyclopedia of Archetypal Symbolism, (Boston, 1991), p. 232

[2] E. M. Forster, Howards End, (New York, 1987) p. 106-7

[3] Traherne, Thomas, “The Primal Vision” in Landscapes of Glory, (London, 1989), p.6

Today we’re celebrating a feast that I don’t think is easy for a lot of contemporary people. I suppose because so many of us are functional atheists – we don’t really believe in the invisible world or the possibility of radical change within our own lives. We don’t believe it at a social, political or personal psychological level. We don’t believe in resurrection from physical or emotional pain. This is particularly true if we are ill or suffering some of the pangs of old age. We hear it all the time; “after 60 it’s downhill all the way;” “I’m falling apart;” “old age is only decrepitude and then the nursing home and then you die.”

Of course, these aren’t simply the whines of aging but fundamentally immature folks. These complaints are ancient and real and occur in hymns and even psalms:

DEATH, like an overflowing stream, Sweeps us away; our life's a dream, An empty tale, a morning flow'r, Cut down and wither'd in an hour. -Early American hymn

Psalm 71 sings

⁹Cast me not off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength faileth.
¹⁸Now also when I am old and greyheaded, O God, forsake me not;

²⁰Thou, which hast shewed me great and sore troubles, shalt quicken me again, and shalt bring me up again from the depths of the earth.

Today’s feast challenges all that. It says that resurrection occurs through and out of death and pain – even the most extreme. Our problem often is not recognizing the level at which resurrection is possible. St. Paul says:

¹⁶For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.
¹⁷For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory;
¹⁸While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal. 2 Corinthians 4:16-18

I don’t think we have to even believe in an afterlife to recognize that “renewal” – outer and inner is possible at any age. I’ve come upon one striking example recently and that is the poet W. B. Yeats. In his late 60’s, Yeats was feeling keenly a total impotency – it was physical and psychological and for him, perhaps most devastatingly it meant what felt like the death of all his poetic skills. He struggled to access again the vitality of his early poetic powers where images came rapidly and vividly. It didn’t work but something else did. He struggled through to a new kind of poetry. He describes where he had to go to find the new powers – the new life, his resurrected life in a poem named The Circus Animals' Desertion. I’ll just read the first few lines that describe how hard it was to write at all; the old images and powers, what he sarcastically calls “my circus animals” were once available, “on show” but now have deserted him.

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

In the rest of the poem he traces his career in poetry and the losses he experiences but then at the end he describes a new realization of where he must go for this poetry. It involves a kind of death but also ushers in new life and creative vitality.

Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Yeats searched the innermost reaches of his heart and soul and, out of a new simplicity and acceptance of the loss of the kind of powers he’d once had, a new period of great productivity emerged and he wrote the greatest poems he had ever accomplished. His “inward man” was “renewed day by day.” And his poetry carried the “weight of glory.”

One of the most startling things Christ said about his crucifixion was “I have a baptism to undergo and how I long for it to be accomplished.” Luke 12:50

It is pretty hard to see emotional pain, or the anxieties and losses of old age, as baptisms but it seems that is the pattern for renewal. The renewal may not produce any outer artifact, like poetry. It may be the discovery of a love of God, the excitement of realizing that one is emotionally alive even if older, that one is in love, perhaps without lust, for the first time in one's life, etc. Helen Luke said it very clearly in Dark Wood to White Rose, describing Dante’s story of descent into hell and journey to paradise as a comedy.

Why did Dante call his great story of the inner journey a comedy—… The Comedy? … as opposed to tragedy, it means a work that has a happy ending. In a great comedy we are always made aware of the darkness in life, but the ending must be happy or it is not a comedy. A man's journey to wholeness is therefore most rightly named The Comedy, for the end is the final awareness of that love which is the joy of the universe. … and the man who finally refuses validity to the "happy ending" is outside the human community and has chosen to live in the monotony and meaninglessness of Hell.

In the interior world there can be no conscious life, no true awareness whatever without a continual dying—without repeated deaths of old attitudes, of superficial desires, and finally of every claim of the ego to dominance. The fact is that life after death, or rather life out of death, is the truth of the universe, natural as well as psychological and spiritual, outwardly as well as inwardly. It would seem unlikely, to say the least of it, that the death of a man's individual psyche should be the one exception to this universal law.

So let us celebrate comedy today – the comedy of renewal, rebirth out of all our pains, and folly, our blunders and our joys. We too can put up “our ladders” and journey to the resurrection that begins in knowing and accepting “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

In our moments of choice how do we /know/ that we are obeying the voice of truth? We can only do our best to discriminate our motives, free ourselves from conventional opinions, watch our dreams, use our intelligence, together with our intuition, weigh the values involved and the effects on other people, and then act wholeheartedly from the deepest level we know. If our choice proves to be a mistake, it will be a creative mistake – a mistake leading to consciousness. If it is a question of a big change in our lives, something almost always comes from without to meet the urge from within, and we have a chance to /recognize/ our way – either by resisting a temptation or by accepting a new attitude. If our commitment to our ‘fate,’ to the will of God, includes the willingness to pay the full price, we will not go astray – we will relate to the Spirit within, not succumb to possession by it. There is no rule to tell us whether this or that is the right attitude, the right way to behave in all circumstances.

» POSTED JANUARY, 2008: Apple Farm Community Christmas Party; December 22, 2007; Christmas Talk from Don Raiche. PDF » "Fear Not"

Respect old things. Experience those old things.
But take the old outer shell away and create something new from it.
This is the true nature of "tradition."
—Takuo Kato, Japan, current "Living National Treasure"

The phrase, "extending the tradition," is making it's way into the language of Apple Farm Community. It stems from an August 2007 Thursday group guided by Joan Yoder Miller in which two examples of extending the tradition were offered.

First, a summary of an address heard in Chautauqua, New York by Peter Gelb, new General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Gelb is working to enhance/extend the tradition of opera so that it's appeal continues in a new generation.

Second, an article on Japanese potters written by Dick Lehman which can be found at www.dicklehman.com. Follow the "writings" link to: 1997 Ceramics Monthly (USA), Summer Issue, Cover Photo and Feature Article: "Shiho Kanzaki: Extending The Tradition" or go directly to: http://www.dicklehman.com/html/writing/kanzaki.html

» POSTED OCTOBER, 2007: Don L. Troyer, M.D., led a recent group at Apple Farm using the book The Matrix and Meaning of Character; An Archetypal and Developmental Approach. Don is a Jungian Analyst and has been associated with Apple Farm for many years. The response to his presentation was so favorable that Don has consented to write a review of the book for us.