COP26 is over. Have a few tiny positive steps been taken (is there any possibility whatsoever that that might be an underestimate?): most people throughout the world would probably characterise present progress as “too little, too late”.
Yet – we’re looking in the wrong direction if we measure change only by government commitments, technological progress, support for hard hit underdeveloped nations or of indigenous people – nor even the eventual phasing out coal and oil and gas.
Something more fundamental is necessary – we need to recognise that we are grappling here with issues of life and death, not of humanity, biodiversity or, still less, the planet but our own very individual existences. Our fears, even our hopes, are at the root of the destructions we see all around us. The rot begins within ourselves.
There is nothing new here. Wisdom of the ages, mindfulness, Buddhism & Sikhism all have much to contribute. Change begins with ourselves, with how we value our lives = but the deepest changes occur through discussion amongst friends, making commitments (within ourselves) and learning with and from one another.
David Holt was a highly unusual Jungian analyst, who died on Easter Sunday 2002 – unusual because independent, critical, polymath and christian (with, deliberately, a small ‘c’). His final book, The Clermont Story, is subtitled ‘arguing christian responsability’ (there’s that deliberate mis-spelling again).
The intention of the book’, wrote Holt, ‘is to start fresh argument between christian and non christian.
http://davidholtonline.com/
‘According to my story,’ writes Holt again, about a story which he wrote long ago and which has reverberated throughout his life, ‘something has gone missing between christian and non christian… It is about time. To take it up christian and non christian have to enquire together into their differences’.
So, he asked me, Jeffrey Newman, a rabbi, to write an Introduction.
Symbols and meaningful coincidences – synchronicities, to use the neologism Jung coined – reverberate throughout Holt’s work, though he seldom uses the word. It was on September 11th 2001, that the proofs arrived, about 9.00 a.m. I left them untouched, as my wife, Bracha, and I went to see our financial advisor. As we returned, about 1.00, we turned on the radio and heard how a plane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers. We arrived home early enough to watch the second plane crash into the other.
Why ‘The Clermont Story?’
The Clermont story’ writes Holt, ‘originates in a dream which I had in the early spring of 1948. Clermont is a town in central France, where I had spent a week in the previous summer. The love affair which took me there had subsequently ended, and the ending precipitated my going into analysis. I was also reading history at the university at the time, and my imagination was caught by the fact that the first crusade had been preached by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in 1095. My story originated in this coincidence of place.
Holt’s short book is divided into two parts – the first, entitled Caught Between Nature and History, is an autobiographical retrospective introducing the Six Papers of the second half, what they are about, how their themes changed and developed.
Why is all this worth studying and discussing? Holt’s conclusion, at the age of seventy-five is that:
The Clermont story has left me with the thought that I have seen, and am therefore in some way responsible for, an epochal development in the history of christianity which is not spoken of in the history books. I have witnessed, and in some sense taken part in, the killing of the Third Person of the christian Trinity, and the ingestion of its blood into the life of humanity.
What kind of a thought is this?
It is inflated, a madness, it isolates.
Of all this, Holt writes as he asks us to join him in a new understanding of the words ‘responsible, responsibility – to get them turning on (not in) time. Onto past, onto future’.
He explains:
We say “You are responsible for it”, meaning that it is your doing, perhaps with a sense of fault, perhaps with a sense of achievement. And we say “You are responsible for it”, meaning that you have to do something about it, it is up to you to respond, to make a response, with a hint that it had better be effective or you’ll be in trouble. I want to keep reminding us of both timings.Which is why I shall occasionally spell the word with an ‘a’, as in my subtitle. Spelt as responsibility, the word tends to emphasise the past. Spelt as responsability it emphasises more the future, an ability to respond to what’s now.
That is our task, our respons-ability, to take upon ourselves the future.
Nothing less is called for than a complete reorientation – a re-birth.
In this play on responsibility I am trying to make what I believe to be a very important point about time: that the present is when beginning and ending come together. The present is constantly a beginning as well as an ending, an ending as well as a beginning. Now is all the time we ever have. Without it, there is no future, no past. ‘Now’ is time making itself felt as responsibility.
Or, should that be respons-ability? With a strong sense that it is all too much, too big, that is where we must begin.