Reading: from The Functioning Transcendent by Ann Belford Ulanov

The sultan in the famous Arabian Nights … would have fulfilled his vow to execute every woman with whom he lay, had it not been for the help of Scheherazade. She stopped him by appealing to his imagination with her thousand tales on a thousand nights. She slowly opened in him a space of interior contemplation. As long as we resist finding such a helper [within] each of us, we will go on reading headlines in newspapers across our world that tell of [sexual violence and] contempt between the sexes. Anima and animus affect our society as well as our spirit and our sexuality.

Sermon:  “Is Your Transcendent Functioning?”      Rev. Paul Beedle

So many of us these days (including me) find the attitudes of so many of our neighbors puzzling – hard to understand because they are hard to square with any values that are centered in love – and even more puzzling is the excitement and energy with which they hold those attitudes, and what they are willing to contemplate and actually do in their enthusiastic commitment to them. 

The sustained intensity and emotional heat of our public discourse – over so many years now – not only disrupts politics, contests cultural assumptions, raises concerns about personal and public safety, and complicates social and even family interactions; it also makes a noticeable impact on our inner lives, and how we tend to ourselves, our loved ones, and our friends and neighbors. 

I offer as a starting place for thinking about all this, and for discerning what to do about it, Ann Ulanov’s framing of the Thousand and One Nights. She makes Scheherazade’s predicament – entertain or die! – into that of the Sultan’s unconscious mind. 

In the original story, the Sultan discovers that – shall we say – he has not met all his wife’s needs. Rather than be curious about that, he laments the unfaithfulness of women, and resolves that he will keep his marriage pure by marrying a new wife every evening and having each one strangled in the morning. Naturally, this policy terrifies everyone under his rule. 

Amid their terror and laments, Scheherazade volunteers to become his next wife. You see, she has a special talent: she remembers everything she reads. And she understands the power of stories. She’s pretty sure that, in time, story by story, she will have “opened in him a space of interior contemplation,” as Dr. Ulanov put it. Psychologically speaking, and using Carl Jung’s terms, Scheherazade receives the projection of the Sultan’s anima and, through her stories, gets his ego and anima talking to each other. It takes her more than two and a half years, but she gets the job done. 

The Sultan’s experience of this listening cure – we can hardly call it a talking cure from his point of view – Dr. Ulanov explains this way: 

“For any of us,” she says, “to connect with what transcends our egos feels numinous. … We feel touched by the beyond, by something big, by a power that we had better pay close attention to and that we come to trust. This attitude is what Jung calls the core of the religious experience. …

“Transcendent … means two things in … Jung’s idea of the transcendent function. It means specifically the spontaneous psychic process where our ego confronts and converses with a counter position in the unconscious, represented by a symbol, or better, a personification … This conversation leads to a third thing arising from the conflict of the two, something that both expresses and transcends the two opposing viewpoints. The arrival of this “third” always impresses us as marvelous, a gift, even though the strenuous work that went before readies us to receive it. In this way, the transcendent function also builds up our ego strength [and] simultaneously negotiates the conflict between our egos and the unconscious, for we must hold to our conscious position in the imaginative dialogue with the opposing position in the unconscious. [In this way], we clarify our position to ourselves as we learn to look beyond it.”

That’s one level of the Sultan’s cure. Another way to think about this transcendent “third” arising from an inner conflict, is the idea that the third thing present with any two people is their relationship: You tend yourself, the other, and the relationship between you. In the process, you also tend the interior relationship between your ego and whatever unconscious things are impacting your relationship with the other. You “own your stuff.”

A theme that runs throughout the Thousand and One Nights is that: no one is completely happy with their life. Everybody has troubles of one sort or another. And the Sultan works hard to receive that insight. In one episode, he interviews every husband and father in his court and capital city, and then, exhausted from the effort, sees the common thread in their stories – learning to live with imperfection and mixed feelings – and he accepts that insight as a gift of truth. On the literary level, that appears to be the “third thing” that arrives out of Scherazade’s stories and transcends the conflict between the Sultan and his anima. This realization allows him to accept his particular troubles, and make peace instead of war with them (and collaterally with everyone in his kingdom). 

Now, continuing to Dr. Ulanov’s next point: “The second meaning of transcendent implied in Jung’s [idea] of the transcendent function is the Transcendent itself [with a capital T] – that which exists beyond our whole psyche, conscious and unconscious, and is not just our egos – for the symbol or insight or new attitude that arrives through the workings of the transcendent function exerts a numinous effect upon us. Through it, we feel that we glimpse something of the heart of being, or of life itself.” I would say this second meaning of transcendent is what Joseph Campbell called “a sense of awe and gratitude before what remains the mystery of the universe and the mystery of being.” That mystery is beyond you, the other, and your relationship.

The Sultan transcended his marital troubles, that was one level. Now we have the level of being at peace with the mystery of being. How does one transcend at this level?

Transcendence here, I think, is about transcending the feeling of needing to know, needing to have charge and be responsible for what is beyond our knowing and power. To me, this is one of the big spiritual questions: knowing and accepting and being at peace with our limitations. My colleague of blessed memory, the Rev. Forest Church, used to say, “religion is the human response to being alive and having to die.” That’s almost right. It’s not death, but the kind of thing death is, that we are responding to in our human capacity. Death becomes the symbol of it because death is the ultimate limit. But what we’re talking about is not death, but whatever transcends our power. So the question is, what insight or “third thing” can help us live with and transcend our feelings of vulnerability? (Or, it might be felt as inadequacy.)

Jung posited both a conscious ego and a center in the unconscious part of the psyche that he called the Self, where one’s sense and feeling of wholeness resides.    When you find a teacher who not only makes you feel excited about learning but also seems to show you your own true path, to awaken a sense of calling or purpose in you, it might be that you are experiencing through them that unconscious center of wholeness. For your conscious ego to connect with that center, something (a story or an experience) or somebody (like that teacher) becomes (to your conscious mind) a symbol or image that carries messages from that unconscious center of wholeness to your conscious ego in dreams or daydreams or creative imagination. An emotional tone or physical sensation might be part of those messages. It takes a few passes for a person to register and gradually come to understand such unconscious messages – we have to work to connect our conscious, waking ego to their source. 

Jung also wrote of social roles or identities available to us – he called them personas, or “masks.” These, of course, we receive consciously from our culture. On the other side of the line, opposite the conscious roles of personas, are unconscious roles of the anima or animus. In a sense, these opposites represent the difference between what you might do and what you are. Employing the traditional binary notion of gender – assigning men a feminine anima and women a masculine animus – Jung posited an unconscious part of the psyche where you feel a sense of the otherness of the gender that is different from yours. This would include roles and ways of moving and being in the world that are not available to persons of the gender you claim. With both social and gender roles and identities, we face a challenge to decide how much of these roles just belongs to the role (something we do) and what (if anything) about them also has that numinous quality of calling or purpose or wholeness for us (something we are). 

In that enticing title, Goethe’s Allegories of Identity, literary historian Jane K. Brown notes an interesting motif in Goethe’s Faust that helps illustrate the difference between the challenge posed by the conscious persona or social role, and that posed by the unconscious roles offered by the anima or animus. Goethe has different kinds of objects in his story in which his characters can see themselves: artificial ones (such as hand-crafted mirrors) and natural ones (such as the smooth surface of calm water). The artificial ones feature in scenes where characters are intentionally dressing for a certain social role – trying on its costume or uniform. The natural ones feature where the character is surprised by the self-image they see: the reflection shows them their spontaneous self-presentation (or we might say their unconscious or un-self-conscious performance of self).

Jung imagined a masculine animus for women and a feminine anima for men. But Dr. Ulanov seems to say that it’s about the gender you identify with – it comes from your inner life, not your birth certificate. She writes:

“Sexual responses … have a spiritual function as well as a bodily one. They act to pull us through into another center, bigger and more en- compassing than the ego, … the Self. But this anima/animus region where sex and spirit tangle and conjoin can also be the place where heart and soul get broken, become addicted, and become compelled to do things against their best interests. We fear this place. There, we can be hurt. There, betrayal can strike us down. In defense, we make steely vows of revenge against betrayers and against ourselves for opening so far.” 

And so we arrive at the big spiritual question of vulnerability. Through the vulnerability of intimacy, we find a transcendent answer to our imperfect power. Dr. Ulanov articulates it in Jungian terms:

“Anima or animus forms a bridge across which the contents of the Self come to address the ego, to put questions to our very existence. These questions seem to issue from an other — personified as an anima or animus figure — who says, in effect: You must deal with me, confront me, respond to me, even if it is to reject me, but here I am and you cannot escape.” In other words, it’s a compelling experience.

“These Self experiences,” she continues, “make us feel that life is worth living. They color our perceptions with excitement and awe at the very fact of being. It makes no difference whatever our age or sexuality is, or whether we are single or married, celibate or divorced. We all must face and answer the other who confronts us from a sexual departure point opposite to our conscious gender identity. We all share the task of putting these parts of ourselves together to make an identity for ourselves, with its possibilities and tribulations. …”

The insight or “third thing” that can help us live with and transcend our feelings of vulnerability (or, perhaps for some, inadequacy) is the feeling that life is worth living. Just as the Sultan could find his way back to a sane sort of marriage, so we limited beings can find our way to living the full life that is within our power to live. We can’t be perfectly happy, and we can’t be all-powerful; nevertheless, it’s worth our effort and commitment to live these limited, vulnerable lives of ours to the full. 

That puzzling emotional charge in so many of our neighbors’ views about sexuality and gender; about diversity, equity, and inclusion; about healthcare; about limiting the federal government’s power; about taxation; about schools; and about so much more – I think it arises from psychological depths and big questions like these. I think it’s a complex web of unconscious energies that makes these public issues so magnetic and electric to so many. 

And as we continue to work to liberate ourselves and our most vulnerable and marginalized neighbors from the patriarchy and heteronormativity and racism that saturates all our institutions, I think that to some folks that liberation looks like destruction. It’s hard enough for folks openly aligned with liberation to separate the legitimate authority of democratic institutions from their oppressive misuse of power; how much more difficult must it be for those openly committed to and aligned with the reigning systemic oppressions? 

Then consider how those public issues can connect to conjured threats of pain: broken hearts and souls, fear, hurt, addiction, power, betrayal, revenge. Are not we all vulnerable? Of course. Are not those aligned with oppression being marginalized? You bet they are. No wonder those hard-to-understand folks are so puzzlingly acting out to assert control and arrest change. 

I’ll readily admit, I don’t know how to reach all those aligned with systemic oppression as we respond to the real and present threats to the vulnerable and marginalized already manifesting around us. But in a functioning democracy, we don’t need to reach all, we only need to reach enough.

One of the keys to finding our feet in this tense and stressful social climate, and to taking firm but loving action in response, is – I believe – to be found within each of us. Each of us has at least one way that the election result and the behavior of the incoming administration can and does “hook” us. We need to be conscious enough of those “hooks” to at least take a breath and calm ourselves when we feel that happening. And if we can figure out what they’re about, we can work on liberating ourselves from them in the ways Dr. Ulanov describes as the workings of the transcendent function in us.

Another key is for as many of us as possible to develop our skills for dialogue with those people we disagree with who we can reach. Even if the skills we have are pretty good, it’s always useful to sharpen them. But we must also take care not to waste them on folks who behave in ways that, let us just say, do not invite dialogue. 

We’re dealing with deep currents, all of us; that’s why they’re so puzzling and so charged. The deeper key to responding in love is to recognize that our most hard-to-understand neighbors are afraid and in pain. That insight can help us steer a steady compassionate course through this storm.

Collectively, with those Sultans who will listen, we must offer our particular gifts to envision a course toward liberation, dismantling rather than rebuilding past regimes of madness and violence, and furthering our work toward a more perfect Union – not perfect; perfect it will never be – rather, a Union whose imperfection we may learn to live with as we labor on for fuller and more inclusive liberation, a Union that makes ever more of us feel that life is worth living. So may it be. Amen.