Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

No noble, well-grown tree ever disowned its dark roots,for it grows not only upwards but downwards as well.
      Carl Jung

My friend Barbara Gordon framed these words to hang on her living room wall, a reminder that to mount to heaven with Jesus, we must descend into hell with him, too -- that personal hell that is different for each of us. That hell where he also went to become our Way.

For me, the time came when my unhappiness could no longer simply be toughed out. I was in my mid-twenties with a husband, two little boys, and a third child on the way -- all the good things Daddy pointed out -- when the void inside me became immobilizing, driving me to an attic room with a locked door and drawn shades.

Clearly the "dark roots" of this distress had gone too long unacknowledged. A psychiatrist, Dr. Avraam Kazan, guided the uncovering process. Our sessions, three times a week at the beginning, lasted on and off for twenty years. It was Dr. Kazan who gave a name to the shapeless sadness I could never shake. He called it grieving.

As soon as he said the word, I knew it was the right one. That was what it felt like -- some ancient, inconsolable loss. Some immense, inexpressible bereavement. But for whom?

"No one close to me had died," I said.

"No one had died," he agreed. "But at ten months old, you didn't know that."

The event we were talking about happened long before I could remember. I knew only what I'd picked up over the years from casual references by my parents to a European trip.

Daddy's investigations sometimes took him overseas. The case he was working on in January 1929 involved a counterfeiting ring centered in Paris and would require his staying there several months. It was his long-awaited chance to take Mother, who had never been abroad, along with him. Her parents agreed to come north from Florida to care for me-an ideal arrangement for all concerned.

"Except," Dr. Kazan pointed out, "for the ten-month-old baby that was you."

My parents simply disappeared one day, he interpreted my experience, and never, as far as I knew, came back. "Four months later, when they returned, they would have