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PASTORAL PSYCHOLOGY
continuing growth. A will to unity which is not in
possession of unity is born out of awareness of the contradiction
and the refusal to submit to it. With this will comes power.
In a manner that cannot be explained but can only be
experienced, the will to strive towards an intuited
wholeness simultaneously gives life a new direction and
knowledge that it is eternal. This power is never a standing
possession. It must continually be re-won by a continual
renewal of striving.
Jaspers offers no ready-made theories about life, nor any
formulas for living it. Those who seek advice about how to
order their lives will not find it in his books. His purpose is to
give the means of self-orientation to those who are willing to
accept personal responsibility because the obscurity of life and
its contradictions have brought them to the recognition that
responsibility cannot be avoided.
Within the Sluice Gates
How shall a man become free and receive power? we ask.
Only by his unresisting willingness to be seized and held and
lifted. Then he will experience a release that cannot come
while he is struggling to gain freedom by his own effort. The
important thing is that he becomes quiet, waiting without
resignation. He puts his cause in other and more capable hands.
The door behind him shuts, slowly but as irresistibly as a
sluice gate. The road back is closed. So, as it seems to him, is the
way forward. Like the high walls of the lock, an impassable
barrier rises before him. The way ahead is closed, too.
Now his soul’s salvation is the admission that he has
exhausted all his resources. Here, at the very limit of his own"
powers and possibilities, he sees only the immense distance
between the plane on which he lives and the height to which he
must rise. He is dismayed, for here at last he is confronted with
the truth about himself and his situation.
Then the miracle occurs. A power not his own opens the
sluice gates. A strength not his own raises his little boat. Some-
‘thing has broken through. He has done nothing, but he has
been reached and lifted. Nobody can explain what happens.
Only the fact that something has happened is to be observed, for
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