About Br. Don Bisson
Living into the Dream: Confrontation with the Unconscious
My conception was a bit of a mystery. My parents were in their 40s in 1949; my sister was 15 years old and in boarding school. They were not prepared to be parents again with a new family structure. My mother’s quack doctor thought I was a tumor and administered treatments to block my development. Finally, at six months my mother left the doctor and discovered she was in the last trimester of a pregnancy. The new doctor suggested that six months earlier, when she had fallen down a flight of stairs, she probably unblocked a tube and allowed a pregnancy to take place. I was born with “all the right pieces in the right places” as the family tells the story. But life began wrapped in mystery and fate from conception on…
Raised and doted upon as an only child by my mother, sister (as another surrogate mother) my father and family, I was raised on a rural New England farm which needed constant work and responsibility, all within the challenges of extreme weather. There was little time for long rest periods, vacations or playing of games. There was dedication to family, hard work and religion.
Jung spoke of personality Number One and Number Two in his youth. My youth was comprised of both Reality 1 and Reality 2. I was always aware of being near a thin place between what I experienced (Reality 1) and the spiritual (Reality 2). Simultaneously, I was drilled by the religious language, culture and education of the 1950’s. In this cocoon, faith was not a belief, it was an expression of what I knew intuitively was true. Nature and nurture came together so I evolved into an introverted intuitive with a high feeling function which expressed itself both inwardly and outwardly. Learning to find words for my interior life became my natural desire and compulsion.
The library building in town became a sacred place of silence, reading, reflection, and research. It provided the aura of delving into the mystery behind my Reality 2. I felt guided by the Divine and the structures of Christianity. The interior desire to give myself totally, opened the doorway into religious life. At that time, immediately after Vatican II, the very fabric of religious life was being torn apart just as I was entering. The mystery was swept away, and all seemed to be in disruption. By the time I was twenty-eight, the container of religious life had fallen. There was an eruption of shadow material, instinct and life which seemed totally foreign in my life. My spiritual director did not have a clue what to do with me. By synchronicity, I reached out to a therapist who happened to be a Jungian orientated therapist. I knew nothing of Jung except that in working through my profound dreams both personal and archetypal, I was opened up to his story and language. For the first time, I felt understood and suddenly my path opened before me. A vivid dream still resonates within me from that time. In the dream: I am lost on the streets of Zurich and I need to exchange traveler’s checks for Swiss francs. I am directed to a bank whose sole responsibility is to do this. I approached the door of the bank, and, as I awoke, I saw to my right the name of the bank on a gold plaque to the right of the front door with the inscription, JUNG’S PATH. I can still visualize it in my mind’s eye.
Carl Jung
The dreams both personal and archetypal woke me up every night, persistent, powerful and terrorizing. I needed to pay attention or I could easily slip permanently into the unconscious. Living and working to create a new life in Boston was the tasks of my outer life. This period of trying “to be normal” and leaving behind this obsession with the Numinous in the unconscious was a failure. The deeper the journey, the more disruptions, revolutions, and awakenings. The old container crashed into oblivion and no longer made sense; I could not live without the constant attentiveness and intimacy of desire with the Divine. This liminal space became a way of life. Never to be contained in ‘normalcy,‘ according to societal descriptions, was my fate. I realized I was destined to live a vocation on a bridge - not in a temporary space but as a permanent marginalized call. Dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious would be the redefinition of my vocation.
Leaving the quest for “happy and normal” behind, I left Boston and went to the West Coast, plunging myself into a poverty project, becoming a minority in minority communities through a new relationship to the Marist Brothers. Working in a major American city, I was invited into the collective shadow material of racism, poverty, gangs, Aids, and the crack epidemic. Because of the availability of world-class education in the Bay Area, my desire for future study propelled me to wrestle with the question if I could sustain both full-time work and full-time academics. I again asked my unconscious to direct me in the right direction. I had the following dream: I am in a large church by the name of St. Peter and Paul in Lewiston, Maine. There are thousands of people on scaffolding cleaning and restoring the interiority of the church. I am given the upper dimension of the right side. I am painstakingly working for the restoration. As I put my tool down there was a wooden handle with an inscription, JUNGIAN CONSTRUCTION COMPANY. I woke up with a start and I registered for classes that day. The incredible synchronicity was that at the time the real structure in Lewiston was closed due to falling debris and they were in the process of fund raising for its restoration. Now, in the outer world, that church has been fully restored and reconsecrated as a basilica! This was the birth for me of Jungian Christian Dialogue many years ago.
From these experiences was birthed the dialogue between two languages of the soul, Jungian and Christian. Living on the bridge compelled me into dialogue and not be absorbed by one to the other. Dialogue for me creates not only information but the potential of creating a tertiary experience for transformation. There is an extensive body of literature that has evolved to deepen the conversation. Each of these areas, Jungian and Christian, have dogmas and prejudices which potentially alienate the conversation. Rome and Zurich have their judgements and prejudices. I do not stand outside but hold the conflicts as consciously as possible, as painful as they might be.
There are so many paradoxes in my life: the Jungian experience opened my True Self to my truth which opens me to the Divine; the shadow work redeems even in breaking the rules; the Divine presence happens “called or not called;” the feminine and masculine is ever present within and without; visions of “holiness” without consciousness are actually dangerous etc.
In my 76th year, with the reminders of limitations, aging and finality approaching, I desire to share this dialogue with a larger audience. We live in dangerous times with severe polarities in religion, politics, cultures and families. We need to create an inner dialogue of the soul with new tools for ancient issues which still plague us. Fundamentalism meets secularism in a hopeless projection of mutual evils.
Dialogue demands an atmosphere of poverty and a desire for learning, two desperately needed attitudes in the face of dogmatic arrogance. I have created 108 workshops, retreats, intensives, trainings, etc. This is part of the legacy handed on to the next generation for training spiritual directors, retreat directors, and for the ordinary person seeking meaning in the spiritual life and who lives with the Reality 2. Through mentoring, and continuing to develop new areas of dialogue and new structures, I desire to hand this forward for those who search and suffer a loss of connection. I have lived into the Dream, now I pass it on with great joy that the Dream is bigger than me. We are struggling to create a future. Join us in this adventure which opens us up to new possibilities!
Don Bisson: Academic History
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Bachelor of Arts in Theology, Loyola University, Chicago.
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Master of Art in Theology (Liturgy), University of Notre Dame.
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Master in Christian Spirituality, Ignatian Spirituality, Creighton University.
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Master of Arts, Transpersonal Psychology, I.T.P., Palo Alto, CA.
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Post Graduate Certificate, Pastoral Ministry, University of San Francisco.
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Doctor of Ministry, Analytical Psychology and Spiritual Direction, Pacific School of Religion.
