When I was a child I carefully printed onto an unlined white piece of paper the words of Paul from 1 Corinthians 13. For years I kept that paper on my bureau between framed pictures of my uncle and my father. “Love bears all things… endures all things.”
At the age of twenty-two I discovered in Jung’s autobiography that same verse to which he’d added, “In my medical experience as well as in my own life I have again and again been faced with the mystery of love…. Here is the greatest and the smallest, …the highest and lowest…. Whatever we can say, no words express the whole. To speak of partial aspects is always too much or too little, for only the whole is meaningful.”
I particularly like reading Jung’s thoughts recorded from the later part of his life. In these “Late Thoughts” on love, he tells us that he is not talking about desire and preference, but about God. He says that when man names love by the name of God it “is a confession of his subjection, his imperfection, and his dependence; but at the same time a testimony to his freedom to choose between truth and error.”
At times it can be no small thing to name the difference between truth and error, particularly when one is called to violate ideological and collective truths by choosing the truth of love.
More than anything, Jung’s vision of love and truth was and is what makes me call myself a Jungian.
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