In John Le Carre’s The Little Drummer Girl (1983), Charmian “Charlie” is a young actress who gets recruited for a secret mission by a team of Mossad agents led by Marty Kurtz. Before she can officially join the operation they conduct a long “interview” —something between an audition and an interrogation.
In the midst of this interview we get down to what one of my teachers, David Field, has dubbed “the DeepReal” —the honest pit of longing and desire at the center of the human person. The DeepReal is that place Freud and Jung were fond of making their targets; the Desert Fathers too. In that place is identity, affection, cravings, habits, idols, problems with Mom, issues with Dad, that-terrible-thing-i-did-that-day-that-ill-never-tell-anyone-about-ever, etc., and, importantly, God. Indeed, it is the very place to which the Lord descends in his salvation of us. He does not just apply gospel like a coat of exterior paint, or goatskin on Jacob’s arms. He goes all the way down to the DeepReal place.
Reading Drummer Girl I felt as if suddenly Marty Kurtz had begun to channel David Field. What Charlie reveals about her own DeepReal is, I think profound and seriously illuminating:
“So what’s the bottom line here, Charlie?” Kurtz enquired kindly. “Regarding that whole early period of your life until what we may call the Fall—”
“The age of innocence, Mart?” she suggested helpfully.
“Precisely. Your age of innocence. Define it for me.”
“It was hell.”
“ Want to name some reasons end quotes
“It was suburbia. Isn't that enough?”
“No it's not.”
“O Mart, —you're so—” Her slack mouthed voice. Her tone of fond despair. Limp gestures with the hands. How could she ever explain? “It's all right for you, you're a Jew, don't you see? You've got these fantastic traditions, the security. Even when you're persecuted, you know who you are, and why.”
Kurtz ruefully acknowledged the point.
“But for us —rich English suburban kids from Nowheresville— forget it. We had no traditions, no faith, no self-awareness, no nothing.”
Let us leave aside the question of whether or not Kurtz and his team of Israeli agents have as anchored and healthy of an identity as Charlie believes. What the interview has achieved, what Kurtz has gotten down into, what Charlie pours-out, is a key part of the DeepReal: identity, or the lack thereof, and the longing for it —to know who we are and why even under persecution.
Christian life-together, with pastors or spouses or friends or fellow parishioners, is about journeying alongside one another into that place. Be careful! It’s not about being one another’s therapist. It is instead about being a fellow disciple who walks into the DeepReal with one’s brother or sister and in those moments of proclaiming the Word of the Lord to them. Of telling them who God says they are: his beloved. It is about encouraging them to stand in who they are in Christ.
Go! walk with one another into that DeepReal and, once there, allow the Living God to speak.