Secret Strength

When we are alert to its promptings, the unconscious mind can reach us through various means. Blake had his waking visions; many of us have dreams. They may clothe themselves in a jumble of recent experiences, yet contain latent messages ready for decoding, which may open our eyes to things our well-controlled consciousness has kept hidden.

Usually I don’t remember dreams but receive words or phrases in waking life that I like to call “angel-whisperings”. These too are ready for decoding and are always worth brooding over. The latest came to me at 3am as part of a tangled train of thought. I would love to report it as a golden string to lead me in at Heaven’s gate, in Blake’s terms, but it wasn’t so. What use are night thoughts stirring to action, when one’s only half awake, reluctant to move a muscle, let alone reach for a notebook? I picked on a key phrase, “secret strength”, as a shorthand to help remember all the rest. Next morning I woke with the phrase intact but nothing else—all blank.

Later in the day, Karleen and I were taking our “shortcut to everywhere”, she to go and have her nails done in iridescent kingfisher blue, I to keep company on the way, kiss the sky and wander aimlessly. I asked her what “secret strength” might mean. We both thought the same: a latent ability unknown to its possessor until called upon—perhaps in a crisis or deadly peril. In short, when “that which is unchosen” befalls us from a blue sky, we may rise to the occasion, if we have a secret strength; failing which, we won’t. This accords with the drama of my own life, in which some characters I’ve known closely went to pieces and never recovered. It’s overcome or succumb. I can’t tell those stories here. For myself, I respond badly to minor annoyances, but when things get serious, I’m coolly focused, clear-thinking and energized. As to extreme circumstances, I don’t know how I’ll react.

I shall assume that “secret strength” is a stripped-down message from the unconscious, a dream with no drama, the answer to a question which lay begging. For in my last I spoke of the unchosen as a gift which might, by means of a process not unlike the smelting of ore, be revealed as a blessing. Natalie responded thus:

Any hardships we’ve endured are nothing in comparison to what so many face every day—not only hunger, poverty, oppression, cruelty, but also severe disability, illness, pain—the list is endless. Certainly these are unchosen afflictions/circumstances and I find it hard to see how they could be turned into blessings by those who are suffering.

Could “secret strength” point to an answer? I reflect that civilization has spoilt us with its comforts and security. How can we know how others feel, besieged in war zones or fleeing from them, or in any of those circumstances Natalie lists? Do we have it in us to endure such things? Do we feel enough affinity with those who are faced with those challenges? Can we summon true empathy, as opposed to vague commiseration? Like an actor drawing on inner resources to play his role, I can only use material from my own life, as lived in reality, or in imagination through literature and music, say, which pluck at my heartstrings and deeper understanding. Endurance is an obvious strength. Empathy too, I suspect. If my enemy and I can see one another with masks off, unarmed, eyeball-to-eyeball (or some virtual equivalent) a spark may pass between us to make us no longer enemies, even when we are compelled to act true to our assigned roles.

Thus endurance and empathy may be among our secret strengths, but we cannot tell till the occasion comes. Does this answer the question, how dire circumstances can turn into a blessing? Not yet. We must look at examples. Having ruled out any from my own life, I shall quote from Viktor Frankl’s experiences in World War II concentration camps. He describes how prisoners are being marched by brutal guards in the dark and cold, awaiting kicks and blows for the smallest infringement:

Hiding his coat behind his upturned collar, the man next to me whispered suddenly: “If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us!”

That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way—an honourable way—in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfilment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”

As Viktor Frankl summarizes it:

In spite of all the enforced physical and mental primitiveness of the life in a concentration camp, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen.

The whole book contains many examples to illustrate this point, though he makes it clear that some of the inmates were stretched far beyond their endurance, and went to pieces irredeemably.

. . . the young woman whose death I witnessed in a concentration camp. It is a simple story. There is little to tell and it may sound as if I had invented it; but to me it seems like a poem.
This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. “I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,” she told me. “In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.” Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, “This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.” Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. “I often talk to this tree,” she said to me. I was startled and didn’t quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. “Yes.” What did it say to her? She answered, “It said to me, ‘I am here—I am here—I am life, eternal life.’”