Good Friday light in my closet

Light in my closet

you are tomb for my fears

I head for your string upon whose tail I swing:

you are welcomed day-light shining

 scarring the ghosts of my night

brightening my face, clothing my fright

Light in my closet

artist of shadows moving about:

you are friend to my secrets

coaxing them from the dark

protecting the souls of children

guarding the Child from harm

Light in my closet

announcing safety to my breast:

your faithful, watchful caring

grants freedom under duress

The masks of love that hound me

are excluded from my den

There's freedom under your wattage

and warmth in your caress

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

-The problem with many popular therapies is that they feed our appetites rather than give us a way of experiencing the world.  They promise far more than they can deliver.  It is hard (when you're hurting and unhappy) to distinguish between genuine growth and the development of a mere coping mechanism.  Maybe the shallow therapies are right?  Helping needy and unhappy people cope isn't such a bad thing.  Better the adherence to a "vital lie" than to a painful truth; better to take lots of aspirin rather than find the cause of the pain.  Perhaps it is best not to dig too deeply?  Psychoanalysis is a long, hard road.  The radical therapy of the gospel involves drastic surgery.  Perhaps it is only for those who are not wise in the world's terms, or for believers who stumble into it by "accident".

-As a person deeply committed to the healing and transforming ministry, I find it extremely difficult to allow others to be instruments of healing and transformation to me.  This, in part, is why I do what I do; precisely to keep everyone at a safe distance.  Psychoanalysis is not the only "impossible profession".  As we have seen, much of what is claimed for psychoanalysis was known to the great mystics under such names as apatheia, indifference, emptiness, or detachment.  Freud's most original and radical discovery, the phenomenon of transference, was not unknown to the desert fathers, to St. Ignatius Loyola, and to Mahatma Gandhi.  But where Freud saw despair (or, at best, routine unhappiness), the mystics saw hope.  What Freud called transference was a cleaning operation that made way for hope and love.  It was the second way of "atheism"; the purifying of the concepts of God.  The process of purification frees us from the tyranny of the neurotic and prepared us for an encounter with the numinous.  Morton Kelsey wisely points out that Jung was far more concerned with helping people approach the numinous than with concentrating on their neurosis.   Real therapy lies in this approach to mystery.  Jung believed that insofar as one is in touch with the truly numinous, the more likely one is to be released from the curse of pathology.