Searching for God # 48

 Having struggled with letting go of the dogmatic traditional exegesis of the Original Sin, I have also to acknowledge another struggle, this time with one of the church’s unshakeable, immutable, and perfectly envisioned foundations, the sanctity of life.

In principle, who could fundamentally disagree, oppose or even contest the notion that life, with all of its beauty and confounding turbulences, is not worth herculean efforts to protect, preserve, enhance and explore its limitless opportunities and challenges. Whether, for Christians, considered a gift of God, and thereby sacred, or for others, a high value to uphold, like all other ‘absolutes,’ it seems to beg a more nuanced, less dogmatic, and more serious and critical examination.

Why?

I have struggled, as previously noted, with the male suicides in my community, by men whose character, reputation, sensitivity and sensibility seemed not even remotely deserving of being written off as medically ill, criminally insane, or even psychologically unbalanced. All lay terms, I acknowledge, and certainly, without professional qualifications and certifications, I have no legitimacy to make such a statement when all around me, only the word of the clinical experts, the psychiatrists, almost exclusively, have rendered a ‘medical judgement’ with which the law and society have concurred, mostly without serious debate.

Notwithstanding the recent ‘Medical Assistance In Dying legislation in some jurisdictions, and the rigorous criteria that more than one professional must concur, I am proposing that we look again, even from the perspective of ‘searching for God’ at this question. There are several foundational, yet still potential and unsubstantiated by the professional or the ecclesial communities, thoughts that have led to this both bold and timid place of probing.

We have created a society, especially the West, in which the individual has become a functional ‘thing’. It is not merely Margaret Atwood who can legitimately claim, following her heroic rise to fame and public ‘adulation,’ that she has become a thing. Funneled into careers that bring with them extremely high demands on the human brain, psyche and intellect, many of them designed with highly ulterior motives, millions of men and women, many of them highly educated, and even more highly sensitive and nuanced in their perceptions and observations and critical judgements of many of the tasks for which they have trained, have taken their own lives.

Stretching individuals to a ‘breaking point’ without regard either to where or why that breaking point has shown its face, the culture could not give a fig about that individual. Of course, there are family cries of despair, loss and shock, even guilt and shame that someone whom they love, found it necessary to terminate their life.

And, the public, too, has and does repeat its own shock, shame and degrees of guilt and confusion that anyone of their acquaintance, or even a stranger, would consider that s/he has been placed in a situation from which there seemed to be no other option but self-inflicted death.

Men and women returning from military combat with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, have, even after months or years of professional therapy, also found it necessary to take their own lives. And yet we continue to perpetuate our ‘love of war’ as another instrument in our insatiable quest for power, control, dominance, superiority and national security and what we persistently and hubristically, and with concurrent impunity, call, ‘national pride, honour and reputation and empire.’

The difference between national security and ‘national honour and reputation,’ however has become so blurred that, for many the two are indistinguishable. We pay little if any attention to the paradox that those most trained in military strategy and tactics, especially among the hierarchy, are those most opposed to the commencement of a military campaign. The (Colin) Powell doctrine, ‘you only can be permitted to start a war provided you have a preplanned and pre-conceived exit strategy’ seems to have suffered its own demise through the hands and policies of Putin, Netanyahu and trump.

Let’s look further at how we have, and increasingly are further deepening the angst, stress, anxiety, frustration and hopelessness of millions of people in so many jurisdictions. We strip environmental regulations away from polluting corporations, so that they can generate more profit and dividends for their share holders. We reduce corporate and income taxes on the very rich for a similar reason, to mollify and pander to the rich, given the faux-glory that money, fame and social insider-ship’ have become the near-religious idol of the very wealthy. We defund social programs, a process that did not start with the latest American administration. After all, from the point of view of ‘fiscally responsible politicians’ how can, for example, a government afford to provide free transportation to those who have neither a vehicle to drive or have a handicap that excludes them from driving, as the former Harris government did when it withdrew funding for Wheel-trans in Toronto shortly after winning its election? Sarcasm notwithstanding, that kind of gutting of social policy is not merely short-sighted and recriminatory, it sucks hope out of the system, not only for those directly deprived, but for all the rest who can understand the fundamental need.

Human rights, the prized by-word of the establishment, comprises much more than whether those in power comply with some specific law. Human rights commit both those writing the legislation and those beyond those charged with enforcement, but a culture generally, to grapple with its responsibility for ensuring that each jurisdiction respect, honours and dignifies everyone. And we are eons away from anything that might resemble that kind of aspiration. Indeed, we are drifting quickly backwards from that. Just this week, the American president told a former Somali refugee, now a member of the United States Congress that she should go back to her home country and was not welcome in America.

From a religious perspective, we have inherited a perspective on ‘sin’ that is private, personal and highly reductionistic, without in any way providing the necessary patience, or the tools or the training for the necessary investigations of the frequency and the manner and methods by which very injured people invariably inflict serious physical, emotional, financial injuries on even those they aspire to care for any love. We have also ‘jiggered’ an economy based on the success/failure quotients of individuals based on the ‘shoulders’ of the individual ego. If the ego is strong enough, then the person ‘succeeds’ while if the ego is weak, naturally the person fails.

Conventional wisdom entraps every single person between the two book-ends of private sin and personal ego as the fulcrums around which each human life is supposed to roll. And, accompanying both of those book-ends, there are many institutional edifices charged with enforcing both of those ‘shares’..private sin and personal ego.

Public debate rarely if ever even wonders about how much ‘pressure’ any single individual can sustain. And the question is absurd, given the capitalist, competitive and zero-sum game that has overtaken both politics and governance, and apparently also many ecclesial institutions. In the United States, the derision under which all forms of therapy struggle, in part has emerged from the Paul Szasz’s work:

From academic.oup.com, in a piece entitled ‘Szasz, suicide and medical ethics, by George J. Annas, January 2019,  we read:

Szasz (a trained professional and practicing psychiatrist) objected to the medicalization of suicide, the legalization  of suicide prevention, and especially the coercive role of psychiatry in this realm. He declared that by medicalizing suicide, we banish the subject from discussion.  What is meant by acceptable suicide and unacceptable ‘suicide’? Who has a right to commit suicide? How does suicide implicate freedom? Does it reflect abortion jurisprudence? How do psychiatrists become suicide’s gatekeepers? Current phenomena (e.g., new physician-assisted suicide legislation) illuminate these and other issues (e.g. euthanasia, informed consent, informed refusal, the ‘right to die’) all suggesting how Szasz would react to each. Suicide is legal, but is almost always considered a result of mental illness. Courts approve psychiatrists who want to commit ‘suicidal’ patients involuntarily. Granting physicians prospective legal immunity for prescribing lethal drugs is, at best, a strange and tangential reaction to our inability to discuss suicide (and dying) rationally. Szasz got it right. (https.//doi.org/10.1093/n\med/97801098813491.003.0006, pages 55-56)

And from madinamerica.com, a website whose subtitle is: Science, psychiatry and Social Justice, in a piece by  Keith Hoeller PhD,  September 17,  2022 entitled, “Thomas Szasz Versus the Mental Health Movement,” we read:

Szasz believed that the concept of ‘mental illness’ was a metaphor that became literalized due to the category error of applying disease to social moral and political behavior. The people who are labelled mentally ill do not in fact have not anything demonstrably wrong with their bodies or brains, and the standards from which they differ from others are not biological, but social norms.

From the same article, quoting from another of the author’s writing, ‘No Proof Mental Illness Rooted in Biology,’ we read: Psychiatrists have yet to conclusively prove that a single mental illness has a biological or physical cause, or a genetic origin. Psychiatry has yet to develop a single test that can determine that an individual actually has a particular mental illness. Indee, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders uses behavior, not physical symptoms to diagnose mental illness, and it lacks both scientific reliability and validity…..

As Szasz stated for many decades, ‘mental illness’ is the ideology used to justify a myriad of crimes against humanity in which people who have been afforded due process and convicted in court of law for specific offense and imprisoned for years, tortured against their will, and released only if they agreed to continue to take ‘chemical straightjackets’ once they are out.

Szasz believed that ‘mental illness’ was not possible, that ‘minds’ cannot be diseased only bodies can. If medicine was to discover that some constellation of symptoms were to be caused by bodily disease, then this would be added to our known compendium; it would no longer be treated by psychiatrists, but by regular doctors.

What we do not understand, and for which we have no empirical explanation, we, historically, assign a god or goddess or, as James Hillman does, an archetype which might ‘have us’ in its grip, and which may be having us reenact a narrative for which today’s cultural norms are both ill-prepared and quite ready to assign some ‘label’…..and for Hillman, those labels have been clustered under the broad title, “abnormal psychology’. Hillman argues that such academic developments are, at least in part, designed to enhance the profession of psychology. Prescribing pharmaceuticals as part of the treatment ‘naturally’ follows.

In a world awash with science, empiricism, positivism, and STEM educational and training models, in order to feed the economic needs of a capitalist, corporate culture and ethos, it hardly seems surprising that the ‘mental health field’ is exploding measured both on ‘aberrant behaviour’ as well as more and more labels and interventions to subdue, medicate, mediate and tolerate such ‘abnornal behaviour.’

As complicity in operating within the norms of the North American culture, the established churches have, for the most part, adopted the ‘mental illness’ model of perceiving and regarding individuals, both laity and clergy.

And suicide, for both social and theological reasons, qualifies in the church as an especially noxious, nefarious and sinful act, with which and from which the sole response is to ‘disown’ both the act and the perpetrator.

What if, as a consequence, or at least a corollary, to the ‘sanctity of life’ theology and the application of that dogma to ‘abortion,’ suicide has become victim to a distaste, detachment, and disavowal of acceptable  norms within ecclesial circles? And what if the church, and ensuing from that organ, millions of devout and even skeptical adherents learned and were indoctrinated into such a framework of normalcy, now whether overtly or imperceptibly, haloed by God, as another of the legitimate applications of the ‘sanctity of life’ foundations, and perhaps may, or already are foundering on the shoals of that underwater escarpment?

And what if, for hypothetical purposes at least, and for serious consideration at best, we were to listen to some of the words of James Hillman in his elucidation of the notion of the human soul, that ‘aspect’ of the human individual the churches have both laid claim to and have attempted to direct it to an everlasting life in heaven for the ‘saved’?

Taking a soul history means capturing emotions, fantasies, and images by entering the game and dreaming the myth along with the patient. Taking a souls history mean becoming part of the other person’s fate. Where a case history presents a sequence of facts leading to diagnosis, soul history shows rather a concentric helter-skelter pointing always beyond itself. Its facts are symbols and paradoxes….Soul history emerges as one shed case history, or in other words, as one dies to the world as an arena of projection. Soul history is a living obituary, recording life from the point of view of death, giving the uniqueness of a person sub specie aeternitatis. As one builds one’s death, so one writes one’s own obituary in one’s soul history. Case history classifies death by car crash differently from death by overdose of sleeping tablets. Death from disease, death from accident, and from sujicide are called different kinds of death—and so they are, from the outside. Even the more sophisticated classifications (unmeditated, premeditated, and submeditated death) fail to give credit to the involvement of the psyche in every death. These categories do not fully recognize that the soul is always meditating death. In Freud’s sense, Thanatos is ever present: the soul needs death and death resides in the soul permanently. (James Hillman, suicide and the soul, pps. 62-63)

“Building one’s death” seems like a phrase that would be considered heretical even to contemplate, let alone to utter within the confines of a church sanctuary. And yet, what if perhaps unconsciously, we are in some unknown and unmapped ways, envisioning a needed image of our own death, and that energy is so potent, individually and so reprehensible theologically and thereby ethically and morally, that our ego’s and our spirit are stripped of our dark ecentricities, our demons, our personal underworld, which, for Hillman, is the realm of the soul. For Hillman, spirit looks skyward, aspires to heaven, and risks being in danger of detaching from the soul.

Injecting ‘soul’ into the dialogue, discussion and reflection of theological issues, from an archetypal psychological perspective, may to some seem both frivolous and heretical, even an apostasy. Men and woman have been hanged for being heretics and for espousing apostacies……until they weren’t’ either heresies or apostasies.

………….

Next, we will attempt to look at some of the ways suicide might be perceived, assessed and still remain within the domain of Christian theology. And we will do so at our own risk!

Searcing for God # 47

I am usually ‘slow’ to join the party of conventional thought, perception, attitude and belief.

I have resisted as long as I possibly can, denouncing the theology of Original Sin, the belief that all of humanity is cursed with the stain of evil, apparently justified by the Augustinian interpretation, supported by others, that The Fall is the moral, ethical, theological and spiritual starting point of and for humanity.

The thought… ‘how can both the cliché that ‘God don’t make no junk’ and that God created us in his image be congruent with the notion of Original Sin?… has rambled through my cranium for decades. Some, likely mostly men, attempted to square that circle many centuries ago…..a project that, at least finally for this scribe, no longer holds either water or credibility.

Defining sin is one of  the most problematic and enigmatic challenges facing the human race, if it needs a formal, written, proclaimed and punished definition at all. And the implications, repercussions, residual fears, anxieties and self-loathings that have at least a portion of their seeding and gestation in the theology of Original Sin could legitimately been considered to lie at the heart of human history.

Strewn with the blood and bodies, the ink and weaponry of hate, contempt, jealousy, deceit, excess ambition, neurosis and even psychosis, history forms a very dark mirror into which we all have to peer, whether or not we are comfortable with the challenge. Empirical and literal narratives, written primarily by victors in all forms of human conflict, comprise the archives, the tombstones, the museums the libraries and both the human collective conscious and collective unconscious.

We each are awash in blood, shame, infamy, deception of both self and others, and are hourly, daily, monthly and yearly attempting to shed the stain and the shame and the guilt of those wounds in a process that seems only to enhance our need for and even obsession for more ‘self-justification. The number and degree of human conflicts seem only to escalate as our awareness of their nefarious nature is enhanced significantly by the 24-7-365 obsession we all have with the purveyors of what is called ‘news’.

And what if we are ensnared on our own petard: the petard of a theological notion that is both errant, unjustifiable and unsustainable?

OF course, the establishment Christian churches could not and would not accede to anything close to a positive concurrence with that ‘what if’. Traditional Christian theology is steeped in the archetype of the Crucifixion and the salvation from sin in and through the shedding of the blood and life of Jesus. The premise holds as the imprimatur of and for those who ‘believe’ in the historical and the mythical iterations of the New Testament gospels. And the theology, bridging various denominations in the Christian world, has been taught, re-taught,  preached, and re-preached by those who have qualified, been certified and ordained as clergy in the various ecclesial institutions. Belief, the concept of accepting the truth of the story, the implications of being saved from our personal sins, and the testifying to that faith has been the hallmark of both protestant and Roman Catholic religions for centuries.

Supplement that forgiveness with the added commitment to spend eternity in heaven with God and all others who have ‘been saved’ and/or ‘have converted’ to the theology of ‘resurrection, rebirth, transformation and eternal life. The package is a highly radioactive, seductive, provocative and powerful impulsion for many millions who seek to reconcile their lives with God, in and through their faith in Jesus Christ Resurrected.

Having attended hundreds of church services that breathed and sang, nodded and even applauded this story, never once have I been prompted or felt an impulse to take that walk to the front of the sanctuary, or the stadium to identify with those who were demonstrating their ‘conversion.’ Many moments through eight decades, I have wondered if the ‘imposter’ archetype applies to me for my resistance to the theology and the practice and the social blessing that ensues such public conversions.

Now, at the place where the ineffability and unknowability of God, the mystery of God has a prominent place in my thought-feeling-experience-perception of the universe, I am feeling slightly less ‘imposterish’ and am a little more open to the notion that not knowing about the certitude of such a salvation process, linked to a privatized notion of sin, while the world drowns in its/our own self-sabotage, I wonder if we need to take a step back from the urgency of such a dramatic and, for those who have entered and confirmed their ‘conversion’ certainty, and re-think the notion that salvation for the whole world may not have been intended to have a one-person-by-one-person application.

What if a gestalt, a collective conscious and collective unconscious awareness that we indeed are ‘in this together’ and face what can only be described as an existential crisis, (even for those who are not existentialists)? What if rather than Original Sin, we are empowered with, by and from a kind of innate inheritance that rather than claiming to know God, claims rather to know ‘evil’.

The phrase, you will know when the ‘right person comes along’ or  ‘when the house feels right’ or when ‘things are in a flow’ have a ring and a perception that something beyond cognition, intellect and even social confirmation lingers in each situation, if we are open and confident enough to be ready to ‘see’ it and to ‘respond’ to it? Our lives are much more than our answers on examinations, and diseases in our gut, and stipends on our trust accounts, and births, confirmations and marriages on our ancestry pages. There is another ‘phase’ or ‘hidden mystery’ to which we may or may not have conscious ‘access’ to its meaning and/or purpose.

And given that the universe of belief in a deity itself, is a stretch far beyond our cognitive, perceptive, emotive and social consciousness, this ‘otherness’ of some kind of synchronicity, ‘stars-aligning’ or improbable surprises over which we have neither control nor comprehension, seems to have some ‘connection’ or relationship to whatever or whomever of however that deity might be.

The church as leader, followed by a plethora  of public institutions, academic faculties, professional practitioners, and rules and regulations have together formed a formidable phalanx of warriors to combat evil. And, as the cliché asks, ‘How is that monstrous edifice working for you?

Has the Original Sin concept not become a self-fulfilling prophecy? Are we not issuing evidence in torrents and tsunamis that we are capable of such heinous, detestable and hateful evil, some of which is apparently so egregious as to have been both untried and unexpected, and for which we are certainly ill-prepared?

Blaming the other guy, as is our shared complicity, is generating precisely the inverse of what it is intended to generate…more intensity in both the evil and in the self-declared impunity for those embedded in the evils. It emboldens those engaged in the worst evils, and fails to take account of our shared conviction that only ‘others’ can and will commit evil.

We may certainly not have access to the mind of God, although some profess to have ‘insider’ information and credible information as they see it. What we do have, however, and this may cause discomfort, anxiety and even significant distress, is a kind of inner awareness to recognize, to name, to identify, and to confront evil, whether it is originated by us ourselves, or by others.

And that innate certainty, a certainty which knows neither national, nor religious, nor ideological, nor generational, nor cultural nor ethnic boundaries, could just be the common trait, bond, shared identity, and transformative ‘perception’ and awareness that we all share. If we were each and everyone, everywhere, all ages, social and academic and economic and political statuses, all faiths, to acknowledge that inherent metaphoric DNA, cand when we ‘see something say something’ a reductionistic cliché for bumper sticker purposes, we could even shift the playing field from favouring those who are determined to do evil to a field that makes doing evil very difficult.

Instead of the occasional ‘whistle-blower’ for whom we have to institute laws for protection from the revenge of the establishment whose evil they have and will continue to expose, we could all accept the challenge, and the opportunity to engage in a different, certainly unconventional by the last two thousand years of history, way of seeing ourselves, and the evils that surround us and threaten to take us down, every day.

This vision is not a political movement! It is not a denominational conversion call! It is not an ideological deposition for the ‘plaintiff’ or a counter-argument for the defence. It is not an academically certified, credentialled and verified degree project for which one must pass through the academic institutional hoops. None of us is ‘unqualified,’ ‘inadequate,’ ‘uncertified,’ or either inappropriate or incompetent to open our own eyes to a very different way of seeing and appreciating our identity. And that identity has for millions been hidden behind a cloud of ‘fear of embarrassment, fear of reprisals, fear of revenge and outright ‘lethal retaliation’ for opening our mouths.

Writing more laws in more law books, following exhaustive debate in political circles and governments will only challenge those committed to doing evil to enhance the use of their imagination to prove that they are ‘smarter’ than the rest of us. It is not laws we need, especially as we can all see that many if not all of the important ones are being abrogated by the hour.

Intervening non-violently to counter evil by force does not mean taking up military arms, waging war, or even imposing tariffs or sanctions on our enemies. It does not and need not result in arms production and sales that put a weapon in the hands of millions, ‘as false protection’…..the only shield and spear we need is already in our minds, our hearts and our imaginations….the truth.

If Tolstoy’s reading and rendering of the Sermon on the Mount has any relevance, significance and potency, the time for that relevance, significance and potency is now!

It is not a matter of converting bad people to being Good’ before God! It is not a matter of some new intellectual or scientific research project! It is not a program of ‘food aid for the starving’ from the United Nations! It is not a new economic fiscal or monetary policy from the Federal Reserve, or the European Bank, or the Bric Bank. It is not a matter of the supremacy of the Chinese over the Americans, or of the Russians over the Ukrainians, or the Jews over the Palestinians.

There is a levelling aspect to a universally inherited imaginative DNA that finds the muscle it needs to begin to express itself. There are already thousands of especially young people who, like Greta Sundberg, and Malala Yousafzai, and thousands of others who, upon seeing an evil have chosen to confront it non-violently with force.

Before them, Mandela and Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were all moved to articulate the relevance, significant and potency of the Tolstoy homily to their people in their time. Of course, each of these men and young women have their circles of influence, all of which need to be highlighted. We need to begin the process of identifying those who have already crossed the line between complicit silence in the face of evil, evil that no one can dispute stares us in the face, and start championing them, rather than muddying the waters further by micro-reporting on the evils of those who are intent on gaining complete control of the world stage.

Perhaps it is in our silence and complicity and blindness to our own inherent consciousness and unconsciousness of evil, more than in our overt revenge and hatred, bigotries and exclusions, our defamations and our pettiness that bespeaks our own self-sabotage and evil.

We are blessed with a different vision, and the courage to enact and embody its promise.

Searching for God # 46

In the last post words like agency, intervention, action, birthed and nurtured under several banners such as ‘purpose, meaning, training, ambition, imagination, commitment, and occasionally prevention.’ The church, too, has a vocabulary and a mind-set to ‘intervene’ and to ‘save’ and to ‘comfort’ and to ‘accompany’ and to ‘support’ and to ‘remember’ and also ‘to prevent’….

Institutional growth, however it might be measured, is presumed to be a matter of designed plans, processes, training, interventions and hard work. Similarly personal growth, whether it be of a psychic or spiritual or intellectual nature, is premised on ‘doing the work’ as if we are each expected to consider ourselves our own special ‘project’ as an indication, perhaps to God, that we take ourselves seriously and operate under the belief that God also  takes each of us very seriously. High standards, high criticisms and retribution and reformation and rehabilitation programs abound for all of us, depending on our specific lists of ‘deficiencies’.

And we have trained and mentored and supervised millions of professionals in many fields to assist with our ‘remediation,’ ‘reformation,’ ‘rehabilitation,’ and ‘development’….as if each of our lives were a design piece on a continuum of normality. Age stages, imagined and researched by various academics, like Erikson, and Piaget, Montessorie, have helped ‘define’ norms by which we attempt to ‘gauge’ the relative development of many young boys and girls.

And, normalcy, like some kind of ‘mannah’ from heaven, both physically, emotionally, psychically, and intellectually has become a kind of ‘obsession’ especially for those who have either been told, or have observed that a particular child is ‘different’…..almost like the Green Witch of the West. Her archetype is so familiar to so many that one is tempted and even prompted to ask, ‘Who among us has not felt ‘different’ depending on the perception, attitude and insensitivity of others?’ I recall, in my sixties walking up a street near the downtown core of a modern middle-sized city, when  I heard a male voice, that I thought I recognized, cough briefly and then exclaim, ‘There is an ass I would recognize anywhere!’ as he passed me. It was a colleague of some two decades from a previous life, who, one supposes, was attempting to crack a joke about an obese body, as his way of ‘greeting’.

As a mid-adolescent, at fifteen and sixteen I was 5’9” and weighed 195 pounds. I knew that ours of piano practice had contributed to my ‘body image’ and a menu of home cooking that would rival a castle for richness and tastiness only added to the issue. As if by some ‘accident’ or some other ‘blip’ in the universe, I had an accident while driving my father’s half-ton pick-up, after which the now-disposable vehicle was parked, it seemed for weeks, (perhaps only a few days) on the lot of a prominent car dealership, complete with his name printed in bold letters on the side of the box. For the next three weeks, while working a summer job in a Dominion Store (now they have all disappeared), I lost 25 pounds and was then able to enter the school track meet in the fall.

Prior to that accident, given a likely longer list of objections to date than I can conceivably imagine, my ‘dating life’ was non-existent. Who would have wanted to go out with an obese kid whose only hobby or interest seemed to be the piano? I recall standing against the wall at a teen-town dance in the Oddfellows Hall, in the summer of grade nine, wearing the brown flecked sport jacket and open-necked seersucker shirt over the jacket collar (a wardrobe insisted on by my mother), neither approaching a young girl of my acquaintance to dance, or certainly even being asked to dance by anyone else. In that same grade nine school year, while taking part in dancing classes at noon in the high school, I also recall the female PE teacher asking me to dance, presumably as part of her designed purpose to integrate everyone into the program. Testing dance students on their grasp of the dance steps was likely another of her purposes in asking.

Being ‘different’ in body shape and size was also supplemented by my not joining other young males in their hunting and/or fishing adventures. Oh, I was also among the small few, until sixteen, who were regular church attenders, ‘courtesy’ of my parents’ requirements. So in one calendar year, I publicly ‘left’ the church, has the truck accident, lost 25 pounds and was determined to begin some kind of athletic activity, starting with track and then with basketball, all of in my graduating year.

Private hours, however, during adolescence, were filled with popular hit tunes primarily aired over radio station CKEY out of Toronto. Hosts with names like Stu Kenny, Russ Thompson, Carl Bannis, were as familiar to me as the local mayor, or the local law fraternity. Voice modulation of those hosts, tone, tempo, and resonance, although none of those words were familiar, was something to which I was drawn, and would compare inside my own imagination…trying to ascertain what each of the hosts ‘looked like’ and what kind of person they might be.

At the same time, of course, I was following, apparently somewhat assiduously, the various solo singers and their rotating entries into the pop charts. I even sent away an order for a special magazine featuring and comparing Pat Boone and Perry Como. I had ‘graduated’ from Toronto Maple Leaf players photos and photo rings of players like Harry Watson and Sid Smith and Teeter Kennedy and Max Bentley to popular vocalists.

Imaginary ‘relationships’ with mere visions of men I admired, emulated and wanted to know more about comprised a ‘social life’ long before social media was a glint in anyone’s eye or imagination. I did not think about it then, being different was an almost imperceptible way for one to have more than one ‘path’ of life simultaneously. I was a radio ‘geek’ (in today’s parlance, secretly) and a hockey fan publicly, and a private piano student as a ‘performer’.

Apparently, I was also growing a muscle that was completely unfamiliar, whether because it was unconscious or whether it did not want to be ‘known’ to its human. That muscle was ‘critic’, that jumped out in my rebellion to the specific bigoted homily from the church pulpit. It jumped out when I heard my dad tell me, ‘You are being raised by Hitler and Chamberlain,’ a moment that clarified so many things that had puzzled me.  It had started to climb out of its ‘womb’ when I silently protested about ‘that drunken hockey player’ observation from my mother, to which I silently retorted, ‘what do you know about him and his pain?’

It was growing in both strength and clarity when I opposed the termination of the Arrow jet by the Diefenbaker government, an engine production facility with British engineers had already been operating only about 7 miles from town. It gathered some more resilience when I asked my mother to stop smoking DuMauriers, in our family kitchen. It gathered some confidence when, in a conversation with a visiting African clergy on the deck of my aunts’ cottage, I asked him about the possible relevance of the American ‘separation of church and state’ to which he affirmed it was impossible to separate. In grade thirteen, I asked the history teacher a ‘why’ question about the United Nations, and received a blunt and unappealable reply, ‘We do not have time for that question; we have to prepare for the final examination!’

University ‘questions’ were more about ‘what do I need to know’ and ‘will memory work ‘do’ here, especially memory work to regurgitate the professors’ notes? And why is there not more ‘challenging intellectual’ opportunity inside the classroom? It seems to be a repeat, at a more condensed level, of the pedagogy of that history teacher. Learn, memorize, write papers, something I fully engaged in, although not often with high grades, and then how to fill out a need to be engaged with the campus.

Fraternity membership was a Christmas gift from my parents, and minor responsibilities, like organizing a weekend conference, and then, helping to plan and organize a campus-formal were at the centre of my years as an undergrad.

Learning to teach, coach and supervise residents in a private school took time and energy, as a finished my degree with a correspondence course in Canadian History. Challenging the local clergy in a public debate on the subject: ‘Is the Christian faith relevant today?’ as part of a Lenten Study program, organized by the local clergy, stretched my ‘pushing the envelope’ muscle’ as did a Rotary classification ‘talk’ on education in which I invited two high school students, a vocalist and a guitarist, to perform ‘Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They are a’Changin’ and Gordon Lighfoot’s ‘In the Early Morning Rain’ as bookends to my little offering.

Now engaged in the teaching profession, I was determined to resist a path detailed by ‘salary incentives’ to complete a ‘specialist’ qualifications, in a specific subject. I chose instead, to the dismay of colleagues, to enroll and complete a master’s degree in administration. I had no idea that there even was such a program at that time in Counselling. I simply wanted more ‘education’ and more opportunity to learn, and I somehow thought broadening was more important than specializing. I had this nagging voice in my head saying, ‘you teach kids’ not ‘you teach English, or History’…

And then, surprise, I had an opportunity to ask questions as a requirement in a free-lance television journalism job covering local city hall. Wow! I was, without a single minute of formal training, asking local politicians why they were voting ‘this way’ or ‘that way’ on local issues. My Walter Mitty had found a playground for my curiosity! And then, I was invited to write a weekly opinion column from city hall, and also some radio editorials on public issues. And, to some it likely seemed that I was more interested and engaged in my ‘Walter Mitty’ life than I was in my profession as an English teacher.

In the vortex of deadlines, issues, personalities and trying to find my own voice, I found many opportunities to object to a decision, or to question a non-decision, through more than a dozen years of this Walter Mitty free-lance escapade.

Throughout these various ‘chapters’ (certainly not stages!) I was also exploring my curiosity about God, faith, religion, and questions about the meaning and purpose of death. These subjects were at the centre of much of the literature that was included in the curriculum of senior English students. And, as any teacher knows, the teacher needs to learn what s/he is teaching as much as the students might wish to learn. Indeed, we teach best what we need to know….and we also learn, likely more than some students who seem merely to attend class is their maximum commitment to their learning.

I bought into the cultural, and intellectual concept of ‘activity, intervention, agency,’ as it seemed integral and inherent to the process of ‘teaching’ and then ‘reporting’ as a freelancer. The world is  fast-moving kaleidoscope of colours, faces, words, sounds, ideas, and even prayers petitions to God…..and the human ‘separation’ as observer, curator, consumer,  reporter, interpreter and even gardener seemed to be the primary ‘lens’ through which I and many others perceived the world and attempted to find a place of ‘agency’ within that world.

And as I began to ‘experience’ a sense of hollowness in my own commitment to that process of being both an agent and an employee in a world dominated and tyrannized by economics, by amount of dollars as the primary criterion for so many decisions, both personal and public, I wanted to withdraw, to step back and to reflect both on my obsessive needs for ‘gratification and applause’ and how  I might live my life by peering through a different lens.

And as the years have flown, I have watched a changing horizon on both my perceptions and on the horizon itself. And those changes have some over-laping common characteristics. Although I was appalled with I heard a post-secondary educator-executive ponder that many issues, if left alone without especially urgent intervention, would probably resolve themselves, without much turbulence or disturbance.

And that whole ‘lens’ of ‘non-intervention’ has been taking more and more prominence in my perceptions for several decades.

To be continued……

Searching for God # 45

 Here is a tentative, speculative, and modest proposal of a theory…..

It may take a few minutes to set up the background, how it emerged, and why it might make some sense.

In the West, especially, where Christianity has established a firm foothold in the culture, the binary divide between good and evil, in both personal, private terms as well as on a macro, perhaps even global stage has taken hold. We have built a system of both rewards and punishments for those seeking ‘integration’ and acceptance and affiliation within the social and political structures of the society. Primarily, we encourage, foster, reward and sustain those who have chosen to ‘fight’ for the good, or fight against an enemy.

At the centre of our mindset is ‘conflict’ with the aim and goal of either championing a victory or slaying an enemy. And while, for example, the model of conflict and combat is more deeply embedded in the United States than it is in Canada, and perhaps also in some Scandinavian countries, competition and combat lie at the heart of both our economic and political/national security/global security thinking. We train warriors as athletes, as soldiers as scholars, as political leaders, as corporate executives and even as clergy.

Hillman’s “love of war” applies as much to the corporate and political boardroom as to the scientific research lab, as well to the medical/legal/finance/science/technology schools applications for admission. There is a fascinating, captivating and even seductive aspect to this mental and social archetype of ‘winning’ some various kinds of conflicts. Some fight against disease, some fight against social injustice, some fight against political or ideological opponents, some fight against cultural enemies, some fight against crime, some fight against lies, some fight against racism, sexism ageism.

Historically roots for these respective ‘fights’ or battles, it seems can be found in the heroic history of the battles of the Greek heroes, the Roman heroes, and the various intellectual thought pioneers, many of whose perceptions and observations have evolved into the foundations of western thought, attitude, perception and even to some degree belief.

On the fight for compassion, empathy, care and social sensibility, there is an archetypal model in the Good Samaritan parable in which the hated Samaritan finds and rescues the Jew taken for dead in the ditch, and raises him up, and finds him a room and support. The Good Samaritan can be considered the character foil for the military officer who is fighting for national pride, national security, national supremacy, national protection….the list of these goals and purposes continues.

The Jew in the ditch is an obvious ‘victim’ of some form of abuse and his immediate rescue and recovery beg immediate action. A disease, plague, or fatal accident or a natural disaster all demand immediate, urgent and emergent responses. And a kind of military discipline attends to the efficiency and effectiveness of all formal responses to these crises. Many of us come from families that wretched from crisis to crisis, in a pattern of crisis management that demanded immediate and urgent attention to some specific perceived crisis. There is a broad extant, informally trained brigade of ‘crisis management’ survivors even before they/we consider ‘what to do’ with our lives/careers/ finding purpose or meaning. Indeed, history is among other things, a testament to the urgent, heroic, emergent, decisive and creative responses to various forms of threat, many of them potentially lethal.

There is a kind of urgent perspective that is integral to the training of professional response practitioners whereby time as in very quick decisions require an insightful perception and apperception of the situation in order to determine a diagnosis as well as the ‘plan’ to address the situation. There is a required ‘hierarchy’ of both seniority and skill-set that almost ‘involuntarily’ falls into place, depending on the shared perception of the moment. Clichés such as ‘saving lives is our first priority’ are often chanted as both directives and ethical principles.

Empirical evidence is both critical and dominant in the assessment of such crisis situations. There is little if any time for reflection, until later when things like motives and backgrounds, character and relationships can begin to be the focus of investigators. These conditions are integral also to military engagements, although considerable planning based on ‘precedents’ can be and is conducted in combat training institutions. A similar model for both training and execution can be found in law schools, medical schools and in some religious/ministry development programs.

Attacking, disabling, destabilizing, ameliorating, or even eradicating some form of enemy, or evil, lies at the base of all of these social, political, academic and professional models of training and execution. And, too often, because of our conditioning as crisis managers, we either prefer or defer to some degree of procrastination before taking action in any incipient yet not full blown, crisis. It is a well-known cliché that doctors have been trained in the perception that at least 65-75% of all physical complaints that greet them in their general practitioner offices have a psycho-somatic basis. Naturally, such a piece of data could and does have an impact on the degree of urgency with which the doctor views the illness, as compared with the perceive urgency of the patient.

Front line professionals, in all fields, including fire, police, criminal investigation, military firsts to encounter the enemy all have a status as brace, courageous, essential and highly familiar and tolerant of profound risk. These are the ‘marines’ archetype of military service, or the ‘special ops’ and there are ‘special ops’ in almost all areas of human activity.

Even ‘warriors for God’ have been inculcated into the fold of society’s war class, only they are allegedly fighting to convert those considered ‘unsaved’ or ‘unbelievers’ prior to the intervention of the evangelist. Crisis management here often includes a hot drink, perhaps a blanket for those living on the street, and basic medical attention, and perhaps a hospital or clinic referral. Follow-up could often include additional counselling, perhaps finding shelter, job training, and preparation for re-entry into the mainstream of the society.

Just as there is no time for reflection in a case like an urban shooting patient admitted to the Emergency Department, and immediate attention and diagnosis and treatment are required, so too, such timing and appropriate interventions are required and expected on the street.

We are a culture, with avowed Christian roots, that spends an inordinate amount of time, money, personnel and public policy and research in ‘crisis management’….while at the same time, allotting considerable resources to the longer-term research, reflection and strategic planning, ‘for the next crisis’ whatever and wherever it may erupt. And while nature is one of the more ‘engaged’ characters in our having to attend to crises, especially given our ignoring and denying and defying the evidence of global warming and climate change for decades, we are still, as a culture, not fully engaged in the depth and meaning of this crisis.

Denial of death, at the core of our many denials, plays its own role in our procrastination, as well as in our perception that death itself is the most tragic of all of the threats we face. This, too, has a religious and Christian basis for which the church, having adopted the ‘sacred gift of life’ approach to human existence, has exaggerated the concept of death beyond the natural, whereas it is as natural an aspect of nature as is birth. Again, the crisis archetype frames the public and religious debate over abortion and ‘warriors’ have evolved and been formally and informally trained to fight for each ‘side’.

Enter Leo Tolstoy, again in this space, with his exhortation from the Sermon on the Mount to ‘non-violently resist evil with force,’ a critique which he claims is deeply inherent in each of us. Let’s look at this exhortation from the perspective of the crisis-management’ heroic and urgent, immediate, dramatic and high-risk intervention perspective with which we seem to approach many of what we consider our enemies, or evil.

Discernment of evil, unlike the ‘rush to judgement’ that prevails in tabloids as well as in high-profile criminal cases, and unlike the urgent and immediate assessment of a crisis, demands considerable reflection; it is not as quickly or as clearly determined as an ‘instant-gratification’ culture demands. A child is being abused, physically and/or emotionally, and needs to be rescued. Social policy requires an assessment, and as rapid a removal of that child from the abusive situation as is feasible or removal of the offending adult. It is a reported crisis, and the conventional wisdom is almost predictably and invariably compassionate identification with the abused child. Discernment of all options, including the potential transformation of the abusing parent is very low, if it exists at all, in the list of options on the template of the visiting social worker. We have made a ‘crisis’ of our ‘failure to protect the child’ as the behaviour driving the policy and practice of those intervening. Diagnosis, the parent is a criminal for having administered the abuse. Few if any cases represent a variant on this model.

Our investigations, because there are so many and so few trained professional social workers, are constricted in their options, again because we have labelled, framed and complicitly agreed that the situation cannot fall outside our statistical template. Immediate, urgent, emergent intervention by those trained in such ‘models of intervention’ is once again the model for the professionals. Relying on the empirical, literal, legal/medical model of crisis intervention, we have relegated much human behaviour to more crisis-management.

Hillman refers to this approach in his disdain of clinical psychology’s approach to abnormal psychology. Not only is the model dependent on pharmaceuticals, and diagnosis and the enhancement of the clinical psychological professional, based on the medical model, but it also excludes his proposed deployment of the imagination, in search of the archetypal gods and goddesses that might be impelling the individuals in any situation. One example that comes to mind is the ‘crucifixion’ as an archetypal model for the ‘instant, urgent, immediate and highly conflicted intervention of a congregation with what they all agree is a non-compliant clergy. Given that politics of power and money rules the church, the hierarchy, as in Morley Callaghan’s ‘Such is my Beloved’ dismiss a priest who has befriended two street prostitutes, without ever engaging in sexual activity with either of them.

Infamy, shame, scorn and excommunication are the chosen and the preferred ‘diagnostic and treatment plans for the Callaghan clergy who may be naïve and somewhat irreverent, especially of the mores of the congregation, and of course those ingredients are the essence of social fear and embarrassment. They provoke especially the established members of the cheque-writing elite whose cash is essential to keep the church doors open and the heating bills paid.

What is the evil is that situation, the priest’s naivety and physical friendship with the call-girls or the church’s hierarchical and establishment’s shame and reputation of hubris? Perhaps if the church, and each of the clergy and laity within its borders were to take to heart the exhortation of Tolstoy to non-violently resist evil, with force, a more creative, thoughtful, pensive and even patient approach, as an integral component of the theology of those engaged in the ecclesial and faith community could and would emerge.

What would/could be the impact of such a shift in perception, definition of evil and the plethora of options that would accompany an imaginative, non-judgemental, and non-interventionist urgency which seems to define many of our shared threats.

As the inverse of this proposition, it would also be helpful if we could remove the blinders and the defiers and the ‘hoax’ advocates on global warming and climate change, in order to being about the needed shared, collaborative, collegial and effective interventionist set of suites of programs to detain this existential crisis.

We have the potential to discern with a far more nuanced set of eyes, ears and imaginations, just where ‘evil’ lies and what part we each play in both its existence and its potential non-violent resistance, with force. Failing to deploy our imaginations, whether on the battle field, or on the atmosphere, or on the daily conflicts and tensions and threats that erupt daily if not hourly, seems like a self-sabotaging approach to public policy and practice as well as a negation or perhaps even a defiance of our Christian theology as people like Hillman, Moltmann and Tolstoy are urging. I include Moltmann’s concept of hope that never recedes even when there is no empirical evidence to support it. It is that degree of hope that undergirds this and all other pieces in this space.

Searching for God # 44

What might showing up ‘for’ or ‘to’ or ‘with’ God mean? The search for God, the core focus of these pieces, is one filled with both anticipation and trial and error….as are most, if not all of our human exploits, adventures and escapades. Is it Moltmann’s hope in what is beyond probable that drives us? Is it a search for some connection, relation to the beyond reason and imagination or even ‘imagined fantasy’ that drives many of us? Whether called the search for The Good, as Plato termed it, or whether it has a more personal, intuitive, beyond-cognitive and beyond the literal, empirical ‘experience’ that for some reason, again inexplicable, draws us forth, no one is certain. Nevertheless, the search continues as if fueled by its own energy.

Religion was not something tacked on to the human condition, an optional extra imposed on people by unscrupulous priests. The desire to cultivate a sense of the transcendent may be the defining human characteristic. (Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, p. 9)

During the tenth century, the Brahmin priests developed the Brahmodya competition, which would become a model of authentic religious discourse. The contestants began by going on a retreat in the forest, where they performed spiritual exercises, such as fasting and breath control, that concentrated their minds and induced a different type of consciousness. Then the contest would begin. Its goal was to find a verbal formula to define the Brahmin, in the process pushing language as far as it could go, until it finally broke down and people became vividly aware of the ineffable, the other. The challenger asked an enigmatic question, and his opponent had to reply in a way that was apt but equally inscrutable. The winner was the contestant who reduced his opponents to silence—and in that moment of silence, when language revealed its inadequacy, the Brahmin was present; it became manifest only in the stunning realization of the impotence of speech.

The ultimate reality was not personalized god, therefore, but a transcendent mystery that could never be plumbed. The Chinese called it the Dao, the fundamental “Way” of the cosmos. Because it comprised the whole of reality, the Dao had no qualities, no form; it could be experienced but never seen; it was not a god; it predated heaven and earth, and was beyond divinity. (Armstrong, op. cit. p. 13)

Gallons of ink have been spilled, arranged in alphabetic signs, attempting to describe, picture, envision, imagine God….and the biblical stories from both Old and New Testaments have been among those attempts. Armstrong even titles her first chapter, ‘Homo religiosus’ as if to announce her purpose and the root of her intent to make the case ‘for’ God.

Those who prefer a ‘positive’ approach, attempting to delineate what, who God is, have chosen what is known as a cataphatic. An example is, ‘God is love’ or God is omnipotent, or wise or good. Using anthropomorphic attributions to God, describing God as a divine person with a personality and qualities such as love, mercy, justice, wrath is a cataphatic approach. Another approach to the divine, apophatic, approaches the divine by negating or denying what God is not. It recognizes that God is beyond human concepts, language and understanding.

From a website entitled religionsdepths.com, by Dan Tilreath, we read,

Kataphatic theology is indispensable. Without it, no religion or spirituality would be possible. We all need specific symbols-whether verbal or otherwise- to resonate with us if we’re to begin our journey toward the divine. Otherwise we’d have effectively no sense of where we’re going on that journey….

But there’s an all-important difference between a symbol and what it symbolizes. It’s the difference between saying the words, ‘Mount Everest’ and actually climbing Mount Everest, or in this case, the difference between saying the word ‘God’ or ‘Aphrodite’ and actually experiencing the divine. And that point where kataphatic theology falls flat is the point where negativity or apophatic theology comes in.

Apophatic theology uses human language and concepts to make us aware of hos far beyond human language and concepts the divine is. It does this by systematically negating those words and concepts-hence why apophatic theology is sometimes called ‘negative theology.’

(A)famous Christian mystic, Saint John of the Cross, writes, ‘to reach union with the wisdom of God a person must advance by unknowing rather than by knowing.’ The knowledge of, and devotion to, particular symbols of the divine is necessary to get us to a certain point, but past that point, those symbols become more of a hindrance than a help. If one stops at them rather than moving on beyond them to experience the divine itself-if one mistakes those symbolic relative truths for literal absolute truths-then one is worshipping an idol rather than the divine. Apophatic theology exists to prevent us from falling into that trap….

And from Cambridge.org, we read:

Human beings have always affirmed something of God, either as a result of speculation about the divine or as an affirmation of revelation about God-the Hebrew scriptures contain records claiming to be God’s self-revelation, and followers of other religious traditions have both claimed similar revelations and celebrated the divine in hymnic aretologies, that is lists of divine virtues. But this affirmation of the divine has always been hedged about by a sense of the mysteriousness of the divine, leading to the negating of any affirmations about God, thereby bearing testimony to the inadequacy of any human conception of God. So a Hebrew prophet exclaims in God’s name, ‘To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like him?’ says the Holy One’ (Isaiah 40:25) and even the revelation of God’s name to Moses- ‘I am that I am’ (Exodus 3:14)- is an affirmation about God inviting or even requiring an apophatic interpretation. Similarly, within the Greek philosophical tradition, we find Plato asserting in Timaeus that ‘to discover the Father and Maker of the universe would be some task, and it would be impossible to declare what one had found to everyone,’ and in The Republic that the idea of the Good, for Plato the highest reality, is ‘beyond being.’

Is the search for God equal to, or identical with the search for the moral, ethical absolute that lies at the centre of much of religious debate?

Is the search for God equal to or identical with the search for the inner, unconscious in the human psyche, that uncovers truths different from what we call obvious motivations?

Is the search for God about a search for a community of men and women and children who believe some of the same ‘things’ and wish to search for God together?

Is the search for God analogous to the search for harmony with nature and the universe, as described in poetic detail by men like Wordsworth?

Is the search for God in any way analogous to the fable of the turtle born far from the ocean, and after many hurdles, hardships, risks and pain, finally reaches that ocean?

Is the search for God what we are all ‘left with’ when no other answer, proposition, theory, or even scene or sound or memory have all dissipated or disappeared, and Moltmann’s concept of hope remains?

That church ‘in the East’ from Rilke’s poem, was for me, not a building or a denomination, or a set of dogmatic dissertations or creeds, but a vision of what, like the turtle seeking the sea, to which I somehow seemed to be ‘being directed’….It was not a dream, nor a specific picture, nor a segment of a counselling or therapy session; it was not a direct urging of a colleague. On reflection, years decades later, I recall a scene in the hall of an urban high school in which I was walking and talking with a student when I heard, from across the hall, over the din of the commotion of between-class movements, these words from the iconic and unique and eccentric, art teacher, the victim of a house fire that destroyed his family and left him scarred for life, “There goes Atkins dishing out soul food!?

I had no idea what he meant, then, and I can only speculate all these four-plus decades later. The student and I were presumably talking about some piece of literature, a poem or novel, and whatever it was that I was saying was certainly not some intellectual literary theory, nor some nugget of psychological research, nor some historical vignette about the author. None of those academic, intellectual nuggets were ever at ‘top-of-mind’ for me. It was more likely some way to ‘connect’ the student with the character(s) in the piece, as well as for me to relate to the situation, then and with the literature. ‘Connection’ between characters in fiction, as well as between humans, and also between a human and ‘God’ has blinked like an unconscious (sometimes conscious) guide throughout my meandering life.

And, after that brief list of hypothetical questions above, perhaps for me, the question of where is God in any and all of the various situations we each encounter…or, and then this is the most challenging and riveting one, ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’

The question is founded on the premise that ‘not being forsaken’ is the promise and the ‘beyond-reality’ certainty, about something holding, sustaining, supporting, or even guiding a timid, tempestuous, curious, eccentric and solitary over-weight young boy in a small town in rural Ontario. Of all the many ‘forbiddens’ that the church and clergy detailed, none specifically resonated, even at a very early age. What did resonate, however, was a deeply inescapable urgent sense that pain and judgement and alienation and separation and isolation were often imposed on people often, if not always, without any justification. I have ‘protested’ such injustice, silently, privately and discretely from a very early age.

That drunken former NHL hockey player, whom my mother disdained, although he had graduated from dentistry school, was never permitted to ‘tell his story’ and I wondered, for decades what it might have been. The land-surveyor who left his marriage and moved out of town with a local nurse, and, course, caused a gossip field-day….made me wonder (to myself) what was behind that decision. Similarly, the medical doctor known for his medical brilliance, reputed to have, again, consumed too much alcohol at his cottage and swam naked to the bar at a nearby summer hotel….what was it that prompted such a dramatic moment? And then there was the at least half-dozen all men who, when I was an adolescent, each took their own lives, all of them gentle, reasonable, kind and well-reputed members of the community….what was going on in those lives that remained secret and silent and accompanied them into the unknown?

The purveyance of a born-again theology of fundamental evangelism that separated the ‘saved’ from the ‘unsaved’ (and condemned to Hell) that was floating through the community, having issued from the church where my parents were members, did nothing to help to understand, or certainly not to empathize with the more troublesome evidence that was emerging before our eyes, for all those seeking to find some meaning, purpose, or explanation.

Separation, alienation, isolation, and ‘a hierarchy’ of the value and respect for different people, starting with what seemed to be a kind of royal status of doctors, lawyers, and clergy. And immediately following them, were the business elites, whose successful operation of their enterprise evoked considerable public acclaim and respect…the Pepsi bottler, the local transport company that became known across the province, the construction companies, land surveyors, and then there were the first wave of university students returning home for summer break, hailed as ‘student heroes’ throughout the town, most, if not all of them, first-time entrants in their families.

Among the ‘saved’ there was an air of attempted purity and perfection, stretching as far as imitating the clothing of the local clergy, presumably as a sign of ‘loyalty’ to the new evangelist. I interpreted this picture as sycophancy in the extreme, especially as a foil to my father’s observation of four new ‘converts’ as ‘the four just men’ all of them, including my father, members of the church session.

I was never, at least in my mind, trying to ‘fix, or to ‘heal’ any of these issues, merely interested in and attempting to understand. And the question of a God, in the midst of this local cauldron of human tragedies, along side human ‘trophy’ successes, seemed to have some deep roots which begged pursuit.

And, when, as a mid-forties-educator driven to work too many hours each day, for what seemed like public acknowledgement, acclaim and applause, I knew something very incompatible with a healthy balanced life was my responsibility to ‘investigate’….and, naively perhaps, I thought perhaps studying and reflecting and entering a community of others who might also be seeking God, I enrolled in theology.

And the search and the story continues……

Searching for God # 43

Sometimes a man stands up during supper

And walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,

Because of a church that stands somewhere in the East,

And his children say blessing on him as if he were dead.

And another man, who remains inside his own house,

dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,

so that his children have to go far out into the world

toward that same church which he forgot. (Rilke) (Reprinted in James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code, p. 81-82)

Rilke’s attempt to describe a man’s absence, in the Hillman context of millions of men who have ‘abandoned,’ departed,’ deserted,’ or simply left what is considered to be one of, if not the most virulent fault a man can  commit, leaving their family, is a page I encountered some thirty years after I was that ‘first man’ in Rilke’s poem.

I had described a kind of emotional desert, to a therapist before leaving, without having read the lines, ‘dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses’……and when I first read the lines, I wept. Tears for seeing myself in the Rilke mirror, and tears for abandoning my three daughters. And the experience of revisiting those lines and those tears has become one that reverberates, without losing either their sting or their relief.

Decades after I left that family and that marriage, I learned that my then spouse had uttered prophetic words to my mother, her mother-in-law, “I thought I would be rejected if I showed up, and in the end I was rejected for not showing up!”

Showing up, or not showing up, are two of the most radioactive phrases in human relationships. That sentence reads like a trite cliché; nevertheless, clichés are only cliché because they are often the epitome of a kernel of truth, solid as a rock, deep as the earth, and the very antithesis of fantasy.

How does one even ‘know’ if or when another  is ‘showing up’? While there are no absolute assurances, I have a few petre dishes of experimental curiosity that have developed over a quarter-century of teaching, and another quarter-century of church exploration. These experiments have no clinical or research validation; they have no authority’s recommendation or validation. They are a kind of ‘intuitive’ tentative, and highly suspect ‘process of getting to sense’ another’s presence.

Perhaps others, too, have their own tried and proven experimental and imaginative methods of discerning whether another is ‘showing up’.

I often start with the eyes; if they are wandering while we are talking, I sense that the mind and especially the emotional heart might have ‘departed’ from the scene. It may be only a guess at first, and certainly the instinct risks falling into a stereotype of my own imagination. Thirty students sitting within a short range of the front of a classroom, with six classes each day, and decades of those classes (with different actors) are a significant part of my own laboratory. Eyes that are wandering, even if they are doing so unconsciously, are precisely the eyes and ears that I might wish to ‘check’ by posing a question with the name of that person at the end of the question. I, too, have been that student in my own grade twelve English class, when Ken Fulford asked a question while I was in the middle of a mind-wander into a very different picture from the one Fulford was attempting to explore with his students. His smile and his bemused, ‘No John!’ at my totally incoherent, ‘dumb’ and disconnected response are forever imprinted on my mind’s screen. What I remember is that I confused Jonah and Job, both Old Testament characters, although I do not recall his specific question. And he was and remains my most memorable and favourite instructor from high school. Not incidentally, his eyes literally and metaphorically sparkled with wit, impish humour, penetrating thought, and disappointment at a student’s failure to complete an assignment. And, like a recurring rhythmic beat, on each and every first greeting in the hall on his way to class, his eyes seemed to be smiling, demonstrating his deep joy at both the beginning of the day and the opportunity to ‘educate’ young minds as his obvious calling.

And after the eyes, there is that thing called ‘body posture’….not of the military erection in frozen entombment, but of the kind that says, ‘OK, I’m willing to listen, and to think about what is being said, (not only my this teacher, but by others in the classroom).’ And while, that body ‘sign’ is no guarantee of a brilliant mind, or even an imaginative answer to a question, it is a public indication of the beginning of ‘presence’ in the situation. And while the culture makes little of body posture, in terms of discerning the mood, attitude, or ‘state of mind’ of another, it does have relevance as a portion or the clues available.

Similarly, attire, not only the specific kind but also the manner in which it is worn, ranging from button-down, to relaxed casual, to more disjointed and care-free (or careless) can speak to the mood and attitude, the emotional state of another, as well as of the self.

And then there is that inescapable human voice that resonates with its unique timbre, pitch, volume, intensity, lyrical quality, velocity and depth. How one responds in a conversation can be as important as whatever the ‘content’ of the response might be. Speaking while looking away, or uttering sounds of detachment, disinterest and dispassion are also indicators of attitude, mood, emotion and state of mind, although the risk is much higher of misinterpretation, given that we can all mask how we feel, given hundreds of opportunities to rehearse our mask.

So, with all of those virtually immeasureable (except with AI, and even imitation and detection of identity may not reach discernment of mood or attitude) pieces of information, over time, and in and through the vagaries of one’s own mood alternations and interpretations, one generally can discern some of the at least typical patterns.

And with all of the extrinsic variables, there is another potent variable that underscores them all, and that is silence. Short, clipped, ‘flat’ responses in a conversation, while somewhat puzzling, are and never can be as enigmatic as silence. However, as one who almost literally ‘cataracts’ words and thoughts and impressions and observations, the risk in encountering silence is that I would exaggerate it especially if it follows some lengthy or even ponderous utterance on my part. Even unconscious comparisons can and do lead to mis-interpretations. Another, in my presence, might feel intimidated by sheer intensity of my verbosity both in number of words as well as in volume and pitch, depending on the level of excitement I might ascribe to any subject. My total blindness to that potential has kept me in my own darkness for decades.

Teachers are only playing by a professional model that involves engaging students in verbal exchanges of both oral and written kinds. As a non-teacher, outside the classroom, however, as a parent and a spouse, as well as a son, I really never consciously drew a line around my ‘verbiage’ in respect to what others might be experiencing. If they were interested, great; if they were not, I withdrew. And my own withdrawal, whether as a legitimate assessment of the ‘presence’ and participation of the other, might well have painted my own picture of a dry desert, as far as reciprocal conversation was concerned. In a classroom, I have been able to tease out a student’s shyness, lack of confidence, unpreparedness, or even temporary illness. And, based on such interpretations, I also adjusted my expectations. With adults, however, I rarely if ever was as discerning, or as adjustable. In coffee-shop conversations, the proximity of the other makes it quiet easy to discern reciprocity. Similiarly, when conducting radio or television interviews, as host, the guest is most often and most likely appearing on behalf of some issue or cause in which s/he has an interest.

If, however, one’s personal interests include public affairs, sports, movies and entertainment, religion and psychology, and books and ideas, and one’s occupation is basic engagement with adolescents on curricular topics, social engagement with adults takes on more prominence than if one were a dentist or doctor. In such cases, the patient would be listening to the diagnosis, and the treatment plans, and then the specific steps of that treatment. Personal conversations about a wide-range of subjects would be both infrequent and highly unexpected.

English teachers, from my experience, are so heavily burdened with grading papers, preparing classes, extracurricular activities, and restoring energy in quiet time, that they (and I) are not ideal participants in general conversation. Politicians, as public figures are circumspect about their utterances, lest they embroil themselves in a public spat. In short, after several years, I announced at home that I needed more than sixteen-year-olds with whom to associate and dialogue, and without  a horizon even dotted with invitations to adults to dinner, not over-flowing, I was going ‘to sell suits’. In my mind’s eye, I imagined having conversations with other men about their desire to acquire a part of their wardrobe to which I might be able to introduce them. And for a couple of years, that Friday evening and Saturday schedule provided a social ‘outlet’.

Selling is a different kind of showing up, highly dependent on being fully attentive to the customer’s mood, attitude and description of the desired and envisioned suit, sweater, shirt, or especially a tie or hat. Wrapping the mind around the current attire, mood, and demeanour of the client, one could usually have a glimpse of where to begin the conversation, and where one might suggest ‘we’ together begin to look at merchandise. Again, the inter-action intensifies the closer we come to the decision time. Does this ‘fit’ his image of himself? Does this comport with what his spouse would approve? Does this seem too loud or too old or too young for this client? Hints of hesitation morph into ‘road-signs’ for the retail sales clerk, whose imagination is acutely attuned to what he is hearing, and what might be a ‘next option’. This exchange, depending on its inherent and natural flow, either brings both client and clerk closer or leaves them merely detached, or perhaps even separating from each other, if not physically, certainly emotionally. Showing up need not necessarily generate a sale; partially showing up will usually decrease the likelihood of a sale. Disinterest, on either part, will likely devolve into what the car-dealers call another ‘tire-kicker’ who departs quickly.

Showing up as interviewer, however, is highly dependent on the degree of preparation one has done, prior to the moment the camera light goes on. Understanding not only the literal but the broader ideational meaning of the subject to be discussed, can only enrich the host’s engagement with the issue and the interview subject. The Inverse is also true. And, whether or not the dialogue is worth airing and also worth the host’s and the client’s time and effort, will depend, to a large extent, on the level of ‘presence’ of both.

And then there is showing up as chaplain-intern, or as pastoral counsellor intern, or even as deacon or priest…..all of them taking for granted a relatively high commitment to the presence of the professional. The client-patient-parishioner’s personal demeanour, however, will be the beacon of the lighthouse that guides, shapes and tempers whatever dialogue ensues. And, in all of these situations, when speaking about ‘showing up’ what is really being discerned (or not) is the level of trust between two (or more) people.

Showing up is the human interactive currency for building trust in relationships and from the last few paragraphs, it would appear that this scribe might have been either ‘too’ present’ or totally absent. Navigating between those two poles, and discerning where on a continuum a person or situation might ‘expect’ or ‘require’ has been part of the seasoning process which continues after all these years.

Literal, empirical, discernment, recovery of images, and discerning the import of those images, however, is only a small part of the process. There is also another layer to this ‘presence’ which goes beyond words that depict the literal.

We each have a different kind of lens in ‘perceiving’ a situation or a person. And that lens resides in, or comes from, or ‘metaphoric ‘gut’ as it were. Something deep inside us speaks to us about how we ‘feel’ (and feelings in this instance go far beyond ‘emotions’..in this case ‘feelings’ about another person tend to get at deeper questions like, ‘Would I like to have this person in my life?’ Would this person and I be able to ‘collaborate’? ‘Would this person and I rip each other apart?’ Is this person and I on the same page about those things that matter to each of us? Are this person’s values compatible, or counter-intuitive to my values? Is this person someone I can (or have already) ‘get to know’ intimately, in trust and in confidence?’ ‘Does this person even ‘know’ who I am?’ ‘How would I come to any kind of reasonable, credible and trustworthy answer to these questions?’

Would therapy bring two people who seem to be on a different wave-length, in spite of the fact that all public appearances, wardrobe, social and professional status, as well as the absence of addiction or even desire for alternatives?

And, perhaps it comes down to a different level of need, aspiration, expectation and purpose and meaning in life. If one’s needs and aspirations focus on the pragmatic, the fiscal, the empirical, and the public images of success, and are essentially met by those benchmarks, then, one can hope that they are in a deep relationship with another of similar needs, expectations, values and aspirations.

On the other hand, if the abstract, and the ideational, and the imaginative, and even the religious impulses are non-essential, for one, and profoundly necessary for another, there is a kind of impasse for which the courts use words like ‘irreconcilable differences’ to depict a cause of divorce.

Although these words were uttered some fifteen years prior to that ‘trip to the church in the East,’ I discerned, yet buried my latent desire, until finally, it was time. And those words, uttered in parking garage at Mount Sinai hospital, after a day in which I had checked out enrolling in theology in either Emmanuel or Knox Colleges, and had informed my then spouse, were:

If you go into theology, I will divorce you on the spot….and that is non-negotiable.

That ‘church in the East’ is not going away from some, and those words have had a life-changing impact on the lives of at least five people, a mother, father and three daughters. 

Searching for God # 42

Moltmann's theology of hope, in the face of no favourable evidence, as well as Hillman's nudge away from an exclusive literal, empirical appreception of the universe and Tolstoy's reading of the "Sermon" and dedicating the whole of humanity to that inherent vision, taken together, could not be more timely in their application than contemporarily.

The imagination lies ready, eager and able to be 'recruited, resurrected and re-applied' for all to reclaim. (From the last post)

I would like to recount a vignette from the early nineties, in central Ontario, where I had been assigned first as vicar and later as priest. It was a small village and the parish had been served previously by an evangelical, fundamentalist cleric who had encountered some conflict prior to his departure. That cleric had nurtured a small group of folk who subscribed to his literal interpretation of scripture, and were engaged in presenting the David C. Cook curriculum out of Waco Texas to children in the church school. I have mentioned this aspect previously; the curriculum directed instructors on what vocabulary to deploy when speaking with 5-and 6-year-olds who were ‘saved’ and a different vocabulary for those of the same age who ‘were not saved’. The moment I learned of this heinous division, I requested a different curriculum, what turned out to be ‘The Whole People of God’ designed in part by a former Toronto female cleric of my acquaintance. ‘Salvation’ had meant nothing to me at twelve, what could it possibly mean to a 5-or-6-year-old?

Soon after my arrival, almost unconsciously, I blurted out that the story in Genesis of the Garden of Eden was a myth. I understood myth as a word that described, not a lie, as the conventional secular culture deems it to mean, but rather a story, larger than history that has significance because it is often repeated. My understanding came from a literary perspective, specifically myths written and orally transmitted by the Greeks to help them explain processes they observed for which they lacked understanding. The Oxford Languages website says this about myth:

A traditional story especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events.

Instantly, and publicly, I was branded a heretic, and some even went so far as to label me the ‘antichrist’! If that sound beyond belief, it is a true story. I was both shocked and somewhat bemused. “How could I say such a horrible thing, when everyone knows that the Garden of Eden story is an important part of the holy word of God, and therefore is truth, absolute truth?” was one of the pathways through which I learned of my ‘theological blunder.’ The stated and whispered implication was that some were incredulous that such a statement could come from one who was assigned to their church as a clergy. Shortly after this incident, some plotted to show a video prepared under the auspices of the Dobson group, Focus on the Family. James Clayton Dobson was an American evangelical Christian author. I first learned of the plan when a lay reader who was about to read the announcements, whispered in my ear that this was planned. Although I did not know the source or the content of the video, I had my suspicions, and abruptly vetoed the announcement. As this was a three-point parish, and the announcement was to have been made in the first of the three Sunday services, I wondered what I would meet in the second of the three services.

Sure enough, the Warden rose, during the announcements, to inform the congregation that he was planning to show a video on Tuesday evening of the upcoming week. I had no opportunity to veto his announcement, until, immediately following the service, I met the then Warden in the sanctuary and informed him that until I had viewed the video and determined whether or not I was in agreement  that it be shown, it was not going to be shown.

His comment to the congregation, as justification for the proposal was ‘to demonstrate how the homilies of this man are heretical’….I had barely been ordained deacon in this obviously fractured parish, whose full history was never shared with me prior to my assignment. Needless to say, the video was not shown, and within the week, I asked for and received the resignation of the Warden.

However, the story does end there. The divide between born-again and some other kind of Christian lingered, very close to the surface of all conversations. Some were pleased that the literal, evangelical, fundamentalist regime was receding, if not being replaced. As the labelled ‘anti-Christ’ I nevertheless never regained a footing of either confidence or calm.

Was it brash and bullying of me to exert such pressure on those who were determined to derail my first assignment? In reflection, some thirty years on, I sometimes wonder if I might have shown more diplomacy, tact and political acumen. Nervous, anxious to establish myself in such a parish, and somewhat arbitrarily resistant to the whole evangelical, fundamental movement, from my childhood, as I have continued to be for decades, I was highly skeptical of the motives and methods of my adversaries, all of whom had been members for decades, and considered themselves ‘in charge’ of the affairs of that parish. I was an uninvited, unwelcome and pirated interloper, just out of theology school, and as I learned not much later that our paths, the parish’s and mine, were going to go our separate ways, in part because of my intransigence, and in part because of the incompatibility of the predominant theology of the parish and my own.

Analogously to the Democrat-Republican difference in perception and methods, the Democrats are generally less combative, and less strident in their opinions than the Republicans. In this case, compare the clergy with the Democrats and the power structure to the Republicans. And, like oil and water, there is little likelihood of a compatible blend.

Another personal anecdote, shortly after  the death of my father, when I learned that my father did not ‘hit it off’ with his father-in-law, my mother’s father. After spending a morning in a coffee shop reading a piece of research done by American scholars on the difference in thought processes between ‘conservatives and ‘liberals,’ I wondered out loud, while preparing brunch from my recently widowed mother, if this research might shed light on the tension between the two men in her life. I knew rather confidently that my father would call himself a ‘small-l’ liberal, and I suspected that my long deceased grandfather would have considered himself a small and a large ‘C’ Conservative.

Erupting, I now discern partly in grief and partly in release of repression, my mother blurted, “The only reason your father and my father did not get along was that your father was ‘no good’!” Shocked and surprised, I noted that it would be difficult to continue the discussion, following that remark….which prompted another outburst, “Shut up!” to which I objected, now on both scores, that my father was ‘no good’ and that at 54 I was being told to ‘shut up.’ After I threw the frying pan with semi-cooked eggs into the kitchen sink, protesting both issues, I heard, ‘Pack your things and get out of this house immediately!” I did, sadly, although the break had been decades in the making.

How and why do these anecdotes merge in this page, today, when I intend to explore the relevance of the imagination in my search for God?

It is the adamant, absolute convictions of some, from my experience mostly of political and religious ‘conservatives’ that has shaped my thinking and indeed, many of the conflicts in which I have been engaged throughout my life.

My imagination refuses to acquiesce when a clergy confines God to a box of rules including, ‘if you are a Roman Catholic you are going to Hell; if you wear makeup or go to dances, or the movies, or prepare meals on Sunday, you are going to Hell!’ that was at sixteen, when I refused to attend that church with that clergy.

And those memories, those encounters with the absolutes and the absolute convictions of the literal words of scripture as well as the moral codes that have been birthed from various period of Christian church history and debate.  Absolutism, as defined by colllinsdictionary.com, is:

A political system in which a monarch or dictator has unrestricted power, the triumphal reassertion of royal absolutism.

Of course, reading the bible literally as an historic account of empirical events, is not absolutism. Believing in the accuracy and inerrancy of the literal truth contained in these stories, whether from the Old or New Testament, is however, to deny both the degree of knowledge we have about who and when the Old Testament was committed to papyrus, and then translated multiple times, as was the New Testament a product of more than a single writing or a single translation. Church history, as well as biblical history, not to mention the various genres of writing, psalms, poems, battle and lineage accounts, visions, and decades-later repeated stories about the birth, ministry, crucifixion and Resurrection of one Jesus of Nazareth have all been enwrapped in holy writ, as much a political and historical document as a theological blueprint.

This is not intended as a screed against those who see ‘absolute truth’ in every word in the Bible. It is merely to say that such a view is anathema to everything I think, conceptualize, visualize and imagine about God. Indeed, so far outside my ‘capacity to know’ are the literal details of much of scripture, that, for continuing to search, I need and perhaps have conceived some kind of implicit alliance of God with my questioning and imagining mind….indeed questions about God are more important to me that ‘hard facts’ about God’s life, purpose, meaning and relevance to my life.

I have had to assuage young boys and girls about to take part in their confirmation ceremony, after answering various questions from their bishop. And finally I had to assure one young twelve-year-old, ‘I really don’t believe the bishop is driving four hours to conduct this celebration of your Confirmation in order to reject your name and application!’ Her response, a high sigh, with the words, “Oh that feels much better!”

The absolutism of conviction that ‘his homilies are heretical’ and ‘your father was no good’ perhaps have taken root in the manner by which the decalogue has been considered to be absolute. Ten Commandments, the standard to which all must aspire? or attain?  or be judged by?

And it is not only the Decalogue that helps establish such authority. The church, too, has adopted multiple ‘absolute’ dictums from scripture that, for example, prohibit abortion, prohibit female ordination, prohibit divorce among Roman Catholics, and without annulment renders a remarriage as adultery and prevents remarriage within the church. The whole abrogation of human sexuality under the umbrella and the rule of the church would be considered appalling to many, if they were to become familiar with the origins of that doctrine with Augustine. Indeed, for any church to consider it either has or needs to rule on the sexual relationships between humans seems, on its face, to be a self-sabotaging theological proposition.

While there are many theories about the basis of ethics, Lionel Tiger, the American anthropologist posits a biological basis. In his penetrating and challenging work, The Manufacture of Evil, (1987), he writes the following:

It is possible we have been systematically misled about our morality from the beginning. Why should God have interfered with Eden as he did, evidently for the dual offenses of sexual awareness…and empirical skepticism, that forbidden fruit? And why blame poor Adam, whom after all God made? And why was what happened in Eden the ‘Fall’? And why were Adam and Eve so harshly and disproportionately ridiculed for their sexual frisson? Were not those perplexingly pleasurable nerve endings in their genitalia there for a purpose? Was orgasm an accidental spasm, which happened to be so mightily pleasing that (later on when churches got going) its occurrence or not could be held up as a measure of obedience to God?

This is mad. No wonder practitioners of the morality trades have so enthusiastically separated man from animal, culture from nature, devotion from innocence. If morality is natural, then you don’t need priests as much as you’re likely to enjoy being informed by scientists. If morality is a biological phenomenon, then it is merely insulting to harass mankind for its current condition because of an historic Fall in the past and a putative Heaven in the future. When spirituality became a special flavor and ceased being fun, when mystical congregation and speculation became instead   a matter of bare knees on cold stone and varying renunciations: when involvement with the seasons and the other subtle rhythms of nature became formalized into arbitrary rituals governed by functionaries, then the classical impulse for moral affiliation became translated into something else: into a calculation of ethical profit and loss supervised by an accountant Church and a demanding God. A new tax was born. The Tithe. Ten percent for the first agents. (Tiger, op. cit. p. 32-33)

Talk about absolutism!....it never seems to end!

To be continued……..