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CHAPTER IV
MAN AT THE FRONTIER
DURING the International Psycho-therapeutic Congress at
Oxford in 1938 an excursion on the Thames was arranged for
the delegates. It was a Sunday and the river was thronged with
craft. The procession of motor boats carrying the Congress
party on their journey up-river came to the last lock. They
entered it and the heavy lock gates closed slowly behind them.
What then happened was for many of the party an everyday
occurrence. The upper sluices were opened, water poured into
the lock and raised the boats steadily to a higher level. The
water that lifted them came from that level.
Commonplace to some, an experience of that kind can be for
others a symbol of a movement occurring in the innermost part of
the soul. Soit was with the writer. The incident was for him a
parable that threw great light on the central problem of spiritual
healing and counsel. Man comes at times to places in his journey where
his own efforts can take him no further. Something must happen
to him. He must wait for the moving of the waters; for the power,
the unforeseen event which changes his situation.
At times in the course of his life every man reaches the end of
his own possibilities; but to see that he is at an end, to
acknowledge his own powerlessness, this is his salvation, if with this
knowledge there is also the faith that something can still happen.
When this grace is given the journey can continue.
Among psychologists no one has perhaps more clearly or
penetratingly expressed this truth than Karl Jaspers.! Man is from
time to time put in situations, he writes, beyond which his vision
cannot reach. They are decisive and important because they
reveal his creaturelinesss; they are given in and through the
finitude of his existence. We call these ‘boundary-situations’. They
have in common only one thing—that in them we cannot find our
bearings. We look in vain for any of the familiar landmarks that
would reassure us and put our minds at rest. Everything is in flux,
moving, changing. Everything is relative and contradictory.
We lack the sense of the whole, the absolute, the essential.
1 Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, Berlin, 1925.
219
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