Story of a Rose
In the early hours of Good Friday 2002, I dreamt of a gold coin dropping from a height into a bowl. The clattering of the coin as it bounced and spun around before settling, startled me awake. As I puzzled over it, an image of a rose appeared in my inner vision. It was a perfect, single, deep red rose bud with two sets of leaves. The image was crystal clear and lingered as I drifted off to sleep.
When I woke in the morning, I remembered the images and recognised the similarity of the bowl to the donation bowl at a labyrinth walk I had attended the previous night but the rose was a complete mystery. My interest was in Australian native plants and I had no particular attraction to roses. Intrigued, I found an image on the internet like the one in the vision and printed it off hoping it would trigger something. All that came to me is that I should go to the walk being held that night, which I hadn’t intended to. The friend who had been with me the previous night was happy to go again, so with that, the decision was made.
I told her of the dreams and showed her the printed image and as I sat waiting with closed eyes for the walk to start, she nudged me and said ‘There’s your rose.’ I looked up and a woman came in carrying a rose, a slightly different shade of red but identical in shape. The entrance to the walk had been set up with a selection of nails, prickly branches and candles to take into the centre but she had brought her own offering. I asked if I could have it after the walk. At first she refused, saying it was for Jesus but I explained what happened and she relented, as long as I put it with a cross.
I fashioned a cross out of a Grevillea branch and put it with the rose in a bud vase. I imagined it was trying to tell me something but I was clueless as to what it could be. On Easter Monday I decided to photograph it before it faded away. I dragged the cat tower under the skylight and positioned the vase underneath. Just as I was about to press the shutter, the cat leapt up and knocked the vase flying, shattering it into pieces on the hard floor. I grabbed the cat before she jumped down among the shards, shut her in the bedroom and with a sense of foreboding cleaned up the mess.
Although I never made sense of the chain of events at the time, it convinced me to start paying more attention to my dreams. I had been recording the copious dreams of the last five years and attending the Jung Society, hoping to learn how to make sense of them but hadn’t made much progress. Soon I found a subscription based, password protected internet forum run by Jane Teresa Anderson. Not long after that, my second marriage ended and I was left feeling shattered, just like the vase. The dreams and the forum became my lifeline and I had the sense that what had unfolded at Easter had been a kind of preparation for what lay ahead. The dreams proliferated as I paid more attention to them and the nightly dramas were interspersed with profound healing and guidance that were clearly coming from somewhere other than my personal unconscious. Slowly, Jung’s concepts of synchronicity, archetypes, the collective unconscious and individuation began to make sense and gave me hope that I could find meaning in the chaos.
Two years later another series of events, where I kept encountering twins in one way or another, brought me full circle back to the rose.
The initial incident was when a friend rang to tell me that her brother-in-law, himself a twin, had gone to see about a car for sale and the sellers turned out to be two elderly single ladies – identical twins – who had been his neighbours in another state many years before. Two days later I went to see another friend who asked if I wanted some movie tickets she’d won and couldn’t use. The movie was called ‘Twin Sisters.’ Another time I was in the supermarket when a young girl, who had been playing around with another child, crashed into me. When the little girl looked up and locked eyes with me, time seemed to slow down. I then noticed the child she had been wrestling with and saw her double.
Another time I was waiting in the stationers to use the photocopier and the woman using it apologised for taking so long. She was doing a poster made up of a compilation of photos for an 18th birthday party for the daughter who was with her and showed it to me as it came out of the machine. It was of two girls at various stages of their lives, clearly identical twins, which the mother confirmed, saying that the other daughter was at home. When I went to see the movie, there was an early scene where one of the twins, who had been separated from her sister, grabbed a bunch of roses from a vase in front of a statue of Mary in a grotto and threw them into the river in her rage at the situation.
This went on for a few weeks, I would either see twins, somebody would mention twins in conversation, or I would see media reports of twins. One day in mid June 2004, a friend rang to tell me about a TV series she had been watching and thought I might be interested in it. I turned on the television in order to set up the VCR and the first thing that came up on the screen was a show featuring identical twin girls. I then sat down to breakfast with the book I was reading at the time, which I had randomly picked up at a bargain table, called It’s a Miracle. It was a selection of stories from a US TV show of the same name, which I had never heard of. As I finished the story I was on, I turned the page in readiness for when I sat down again and the title of the next one stopped me in my tracks. It was called St Thérèse’s Twins. I had to read it then and there.
The story was of a woman pregnant with twins and at 6½ months learned that one of the twins was dying in the womb and not expected to survive. Coming from a Catholic family they prayed fervently to one St Thérèse of Lisieux who had promised to bestow a rose in an unusual manner if God allowed her to intercede. On Palm Sunday, a priest visited the mother in the hospital and offered to weave something out of the palm leaves her husband had brought from a church for her. Instead of the expected cross, the Priest wove two rosebuds which overnight loosened and gave the appearance of blooming. To the astonishment of the doctor, the malnourished baby from then on began to grow and the twins were delivered prematurely but successfully and thrived after delivery.
As I read the story, I wondered if there were a connection to my Easter rose and it piqued my curiosity. I found a trailer for a new film about this saint and as I watched, I burst into tears. To this day I don’t fully understand my reaction but it compelled me to do more research and I found that she had written an autobiography, available online. My plans for the day took a backseat and I finished the book in short order. I was captivated by Thérèse’s story, which had all the elements of a good drama but it was the authenticity of her internal struggles and her way of dealing with her emotionality through her strong faith that I found most inspiring. I did not have that kind of faith but I definitely had the emotionality and it had been a source of great distress my entire life. Not being Catholic, I had little idea of the significance of saints but my encounter with Thérèse led me to take more seriously the spiritual life I had been toying with sporadically over the previous few years. I eventually learned that her relics had been on tour in Australia at the time of the bowl and rose visions and had passed through Adelaide 6 weeks before. Was this merely coincidence?
I wasn’t used to praying but I learned of a special kind of prayer done over 9 days called a novena and getting a sign of roses sounded like an interesting experiment to try. It worked the very first time. I don’t recall who or what the prayer was for but in my journal I wrote that my sister came around with a bunch of roses the day after I finished it, saying she had got them from a neighbour because she thought it would cheer me up. She had no idea about the novena, as I felt somewhat sheepish about the idea and also didn’t want to jinx it. I have made several novenas over the years and though I have long surpassed the need for a sign, they come regardless and I am always delighted. I have also had some extraordinary ‘coincidences’ of roses at times when Thérèse has come into my awareness for some reason.
I thought with my discovery of Thérèse, the twin incidents would stop but they didn’t. I went to see the movie Twin Sisters a second time and enjoyed it as much but it still didn’t give me any further clues. One day I was out walking and from a distance I saw two young girls messing about with each other and one of them called out ‘Hello!’ I called ‘hello’ back. When I got closer, I could see they weren’t twins but I asked if they were sisters. ‘No,’ came the reply, ‘we’re best friends!’ With that, they laughingly threw their arms around each other and went on with their game. With that, the twin sightings came to an abrupt end but I couldn’t help feeling there was something I wasn’t getting. In the meantime, I kept up the dreamwork and eventually, prompted by a dream I wrote about here, returned to church and was baptised and confirmed in the Anglican faith. The period of church attendance eventually came to an end too, as my spiritual explorations took me into other areas.
Earlier this year I did an online course with Jason E Smith on Edward Edinger’s book Ego and Archetype through the Jung Archademy and I finally found the answer to the mystery of the twin saga. The core of Jung’s psychology is what he calls individuation, a lifelong process of becoming one’s authentic self. It is deep work, necessitating an engagement with not only the personal unconscious but what Jung called the collective unconscious – the transpersonal realm of archetypes that interpenetrates the personal. It is a constant process of engaging with the unconscious aspects of one’s personality and integrating them into consciousness, informed and guided by what Jung termed the Self, the archetype of wholeness.
Edinger’s book is a wonderful elucidation of this process and though I had read it several times, I had never got the whole gestalt of it. In one class Jason mentioned that in the Jungian literature when things are doubled, e.g. in dreams or in fairy tales, it signifies that something is becoming conscious. The penny (the coin?) dropped. It hadn’t occurred to me to view the external events of the twin sightings as the projection of an internal process because at the time I lacked the symbolic sensibility to recognise it. The twins reflected the split nature of my besieged psyche but as I realise now, it was also the beginning of true healing. All I wanted was a way out of the suffering and the work with dreams, the church attendance and other spiritual seeking, along with the intense study was driven by a desire for inner peace. Christianity calls this salvation, eastern systems call it liberation or moksha, Jung calls it individuation but it all comes back to the same thing – realising one’s authentic self and how it relates to the whole. Life crises are often initiatory events.
With this insight, I watched the movie Twin Sisters again and halfway through it, realised that it is precisely about this process. The orphaned twins were separated at 6 years of age, Anna going to a life of child labour on a farm in Germany and Lotte to a life of privilege in Holland. As adults, they were able to reconnect but their first meeting coincided with the start of the war and they were separated again. This time their physical separation was marred by ideological differences. Anna had become a Nazi sympathiser and Lotte betrothed to a Jew. Although Anna was eventually disillusioned by her own experiences of the war, Lotte could not accept her change of heart and refused to let her back in her life again. The theme of separating and coming together again, only to separate again played out in various ways throughout their lives until a chance meeting in their old age enabled Anna an opportunity to confront Lotte and they were able to reconcile their differences. At this point, Anna died peacefully in her sleep, curled up with her sister in a bed of leaves on the ground, where they ended up after becoming lost together when Lotte tried to evade her sister’s pursuit of her. The movie portrays exactly what happens in the psyche as it seeks to find its authentic self among the mass of conflicting influences from within and without.
Jung understood the vital role of what he called a religious attitude in this process and his psychology provides a way to navigate the void left when institutional religion doesn’t satisfy the inner yearning. In Psychology and Religion: West and East, he said:
I do not expect any believing Christian to pursue these thoughts of mine any further, for they will probably seem to him absurd. I am not, however, addressing myself to the happy possessors of faith, but to those many people for whom the light has gone out, the mystery has faded, and God is dead… It is certainly a difficult undertaking to discover connecting links between dogma and immediate experience of psychological archetypes, but a study of the natural symbols of the unconscious gives us the necessary raw material.
As I learned, the rose, the bowl and the gold coin are perfect examples of these ‘natural symbols of the unconscious.’ The bowl symbolises receptivity and gold symbolises immortality. The gold coin dropping into the bowl can be interpreted as the integration of spirit and matter, masculine and feminine, or union of sun and moon in alchemical symbolism. The rose has long been associated with Mary and considered the equivalent of the lotus in Eastern traditions as a symbol of the unfolding of higher consciousness. The thorns of the rose are associated with the crown of thorns Jesus bore when he was crucified.
It’s just as well I didn’t understand any of this at the time, it would have scared me to death but trust in the process has grown along with my capacity to assimilate what was presented and I have come to appreciate the essence of Thérèse’s message in Story of a Soul – what she calls ‘the way of trust and surrender.’
