Searching for God # 76

 The matter of a faith and its impact on one’s life, has some many cognitive lenses through which to ‘biopsy’ human decisions. And human decisions, both individual and collective, taken together, form a metaphoric river of collective consciousness and unconsciousness that flows in and through each of us and in which we ourselves ‘flow’ or swim or are buffeted by the various currents, rocks, embankments and seasons. Our intimate participation in that shared collective river is inescapable.

We read psychological depictions of ‘getting into the flow’ a phrase ascribed to highly tuned and trained, dedicated and committed athletes, Olympic athletes, for example. And there are also religious depictions of a similar, although likely different flow. In her introduction to the Benedictine Way of Saint Benedict, Seeking God, Esther de Wall writes:

But first of all we have to tackle what can both ruin our private life and become a corrosive in our relationship with others, namely self-will. It is our self-centredness that St. Benedict means by self-will and it is important to that when he says ‘renounce your will’ this does not mean our free-will. That is one of our greatest gifts. He wants us to free ourselves from the possessive self, concerned with self-interest, which so grasps and clutches that it gets in the way of any free and open relationship with God. So it is the use we make of our will which is the point at issue…..(And in summary, she writes) Knowing my own limitations I have no right to destroy other people for theirs. (p. 45-6-7)

In his insightful work, Peace of Mind, Joshua Liebmann writes, in a section entitled ‘Acceptance of Self’:

Most men have a dual interpretation of themselves—two pictures of their two selves in separate rooms. In one room are hung all of the portraits of their virtues, done in bright, splashing colors but with not shadows and no balance. In the other room hangs the canvas of self-condemnation-a kind of grotesque Dorian Gray caricature—painted equally as unrealistically with dark and morbid greens blacks and no light or relief. Instead of keeping these two pictures isolated from one another, we must look at them together and gradually blend them into one. In our exalted moods we are afraid to admit our guilt, hatred, and shame as elements of our personality; and in our depressed moods we are afraid to credit ourselves with the goodness and the achievement which really are ours. We must begin to now to draw a new portrait and accept and know ourselves for what we are. We are relative, and not absolute, creatures; everything we do is tinged with imperfection. So often people try to become rivals of God and make demands of themselves which only God could make of Himself—rigid demands of absolute perfection. There is a little  tyrant and a touch of the critic and martyr in all of us. There are moments when we want to dominate, to tear down and make others suffer. These traits, however, can be and must be subordinated to the total goodness of the personality. (p. 41)

The last statement begs some unpacking, based as it is, on the premise that we are all created in the image of God, and continue to encounter those voices of the tyrant, the critic and the martyr from within. Perhaps Tolstoy’s little epithet might be helpful, not as another ingredient in a self-help menu, but rather as a light of wisdom. From Tolstoy’s collection entitled, Three Methods of Reform (1900), Everyone thinks of changing the world but no one thinks of changing himself.

Although Saint Benedict had no intentions or illusions of ‘changing the world’ his idea seems quite congruent with Tolstoy’s. And at its core, the search for   seems to have as its parameters, the transformation of one through the transformation of the other. Saving the world, and saving the sinner, are neither antithetical nor mutually exclusive. In his 1846 lecture and later book of the same title, ‘Existentialism is a humanism,’ Jean-Paul Sartre expresses the idea that whatever we wish (or decide) for ourselves, we also wish for the world. (Paraphrasing AI)…Sartre explains that because there is no pre-defined human nature or God to determine our purpose, every individual is entirely free to define their own essence through their actions. (Existence precedes essence). The idea of making a choice, for Sartre, was not about choosing only for oneself but rather choosing to create an image of what one believes a human ought to be, essentially creating a set of values for the whole world. Personal subjective choices have universal significance.

If we bring Jung into our discussion, we find that, while we are constantly making decisions, choices, the ‘motivations’ for those choices are mixed, including not only our conscious discernment of reality and our conscious attempt to ‘discern’ what we would like but also our unconscious, our inner conflicts, fears, repressed emotions and what might seem like ‘fate’ (echoes from the last post). Nudging Sartre’s idea, Jung posits the notion, not of essence, (as a static portrait) but also the dynamic concept of making a choice based on what I choose to become. And, helpful, at least partially, is the cornerstone idea: ‘until we make the unconscious conscious, it will direct our life and we will call it fate.’

What does ‘making the unconscious conscious’ have to do with a search for God? Much if not all of our conversations in the academic, corporate, political, medical and legal fields are based upon a recitation of empirical, literal information. Our senses perceive, our brain interprets and our deliberations ensue. From one perspective, we come to consciousness of ourselves, others, and the universe as if in layers; we know in part, and see and think in part, until we see and think and know further, again only in part. Jung’s (and Freud’s) discernment of those influences in our mind/psyche/soul (from Hillman), include what we can articulate and what remains a mystery.

From Medium.com, in a piece entitled, How Writing makes peace with the baggage we carry, by Jan fortune, November 8, 2018, we read:

Poet, Robert Bly describes the shadow as a ‘long bag we drag behind us’ filled with all that we denigrate and repress:

·      The parts of parents and teachers disapproved of

·      The parts that didn’t fit with peer pressure

·      The parts our culture has labelled ‘disallowed’

It is not a stretch to note inferentially, as each of us lugs our ‘bag’ behind us, that collectively too we share a different bag of what we might call blindnesses, shames, embarrassments, guilts, denials, repressions, disapprovals, and disallowals. Not surprisingly, the collective unconscious has a similar and imperial impact on the social ethos, or the anima mundi, (Hillman) as Jung reminds us it has on our individual lives.

In his penetrating critique of the corporatist society and culture, entitled, ‘The Unconscious Civilization,’  John Ralston Saul writes about knowledge this way:

I am a snake, not an apple.

What does that mean? Well, our civilization—the Judeo-Christian—in its founding myth portrayed the deliverer of knowledge as the source of evil—the devil—and the loss of innocence as a catastrophe. This probably had more to do with religion than with the standard desire of those in authority to control those who are not. And control of the Western species of the human race seems to turn upon language….Those of us who disseminate language are the snake not the apple. What does this mean in a corporatist society where knowledge is power—that is in a society which rewards and admires the control of information in its tiniest strips of specialization by the millions of specialists in their thousands of corporations, public and private? The apple is the game. Power, self-protection, self-advancement are dependent on our ability to control knowledge as if we were the apple itself. I would say that we have now reached an astonishing level of sophistication in our apple-envy psychosis. (p.38-39)

In scribbling in search of my own unconscious, and attempting to bring into congruency (if not always harmony) those duelling pictures of myself (hero and martry/victim and conscious/unconscious), I am conscious that while the last several decades of North American culture have seemed to concentrate on the ‘personal, individual, ego’ aspects of each human, in and through therapy, as Hillman reminds us, ‘We’ve had a hundred years of Psychotherapy and Things are Getting Worse’ (book title, 1992). Both Hillman and Saul are interested in addressing the ‘culture’ as an entity needing to have its blinders removed. Conformity, repression, fitting-in, for the purposes of personal self-aggrandizement both within the corporations, government and also the church, have resulted in a conspiracy of silent repression of many truths on the personal level as well as on the cultural level.

Saul continues:

In this century dominated by mass ideologies, all-inclusive structures and technological revolution, it is as if the Western individual has taken refuge in the search for something that no one can take away—their own unconscious. Therapy, as Hillman puts it, thus becomes yet another ideology—‘a salvation ideology’. (p.103 of We’ve had a hundred years of therapy etc.) But this flight into the unconscious has gone far beyond formal therapy into the general Western myth of what as individual is and –more importantly—what properly should interest an individual. The answer? Himself. Herself. Not society. Not civilization. The particular versus the whole. The narrowly examined life of the passive citizen versus that unexamined life of the twentieth century. (Saul, The Unconscious Civilization, p. 49)

Left off the agenda of what amounts to the consciousness and the dramatic confluences of geopolitical powers in deep tension over their own hegemony, often supported by the churches, are the most profound and legitimate interests of the civilization itself: survival, protection from global warming and climate change, the widening gap between the rich and the poor, the growing public awareness of a tension between mass migration and traditional cultural, religious and social values. Buried in the narcissism of personal interest, (an argument abrogated by the MAGA cult) along with the denial of the needs of civilization, we could be facing an existential crisis of our own making.

MAGA is merely a mirror image of everything it HATES, including D.E.I., international collaboration, shared decision-making and shared international responsibility and the co-operation of at least a form of ‘world order’ that MAGA, in its own narcissistic obsession, deems to be fatally flawed. The corporation, and the pursuit of profit and wealth and self-aggrandizement are now the mantra of the United States. Saul, and Hillman, doubtless, would be neither surprised nor shocked.

Hillman considered ‘money’ the idol at which American worships, while Saul considered ‘corporatism’ the disease under which North America labors and lives.

How complicit is the church in both of these icons, idols, images or archetypes depends on one’s experience, one’s sense of outrage and pursuit of justice? Irrespective of one’s answer to that question, it is a matter not only of  our politics or our economics that demands critical examination. The churches’ both conscious and unconscious ‘fitting-in’ to the politically correct and also psychically and spiritually repressive expectations and demands of the corporation, and its hierarchical, literal, empirical and structural obsession with its own power, and the gigantically shaped rise in its influence has only increased since both Hillman and Saul were attempting to frame its influence on individual and on our shared culture.

Salvation therapy is neither ethical nor effective on either the personal or the societal level, under the shadow of unconsciousness. The Search for God, in these times, can be and perhaps even should and could be open to that exploration. Risky, undoubtedly, yet inescapable too.

Searching for God # 75

 Having breakfast with a prospective supervisor in another life, I heard him assert, clearly, comfortably and surprisingly, ‘I believe in fatalism!’ In a context and conversation of religious faith, belief and his life within such a community, the line struck a note of what I considered dissonance. How did fate have anything to do with a belief in a Christian God?

The next line from the colleague, “I really have no regrets, anxieties or fears!” pushed me further into wondering ‘Was God part of his ‘fatalism?’ Did he either conflate or even equate God with Fate? And was this attitude/perception/conviction a kind of foundational cornerstone to what been a highly engaged, proactive and rather successful back-room life in political circles.

How we ‘see’ ourselves, and the impact of multiple influences, taken sometimes individually and sometimes collectively, is a process that, for many begins with a Christian aphorism, ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven!’ from the Lord’s Prayer. Dante expresses a similar attitude, ‘In His will is our peace.’

Previously the Greek Thanatos and Eros, from Freud, were evoked in this space as forces engaged in the lives of human beings, perhaps imperceptibly, however, unconsciously, nevertheless, ‘pulling’ us in opposite directions, the former to death and destruction, the latter to life and creativity.

Under Fate, in Britannica.com we read:

Fate, in Greek and Roman mythology, any of three goddesses who determine human destinies, and in particular the span of a person’s life and his allotment of misery and suffering….From the time of the poet Hesiod (8^th century BC) on, …the Fates were personified as three very old women who spin the threads of human destiny. Their names were Clotho (Spinner), Lachesis (Allotter), and Atropos (Inflexible). Clotho spun the ‘thread’ of human fate, Lachesis dispensed it, and Atropos cut the thread thus determining the individual’s moment of death.

Under free will, in Britannica.com we read:

Free will, in philosophy and science, the supposed or capacity of humans to make decisions or perform actions independently of any prior event or state of the universe. Arguments for free will have been based on the subjective experience of freedom, on sentiments of guilt, on revealed religion, and on the common assumption of individual moral responsibility that underlies the concepts of law, reward, punishment, and incentive. In theology, the existence of free will must be reconciled with God’s omniscience and benevolence and with divine grace, which allegedly is necessary for any meritorious act. A prominent feature of existentialism is the concept of a radical, perpetual, and frequently agonizing freedom of choice. Jean-Paul Satre (1905-1980) for example, spoke of the individual ‘condemned to be free.’

From Britannica.com under Determinism we read:

Determinism entails that, in a situation in which people make a certain decision or perform a certain action, it is impossible that they could have made any other decision or performed any other action. In other words, it is never true that people could have decided or acted otherwise than they actually did.

The concept, prospect and even the feasibility of aligning human will with God’s will are all daunting at best and impossibly retching at worst. Indeed, the human preference when thinking and acting about, for, with and by God, too often leads one to aspire to and to attempt to embody ‘perfection.’ Here is another of many intersections of psychology and theology.

Reflect on the words of Marion Woodman, Jungian Analyst, in her profound work, Addiction to Perfection, The Still Unravaged Bride (p. 15):

The I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, recognizes the continual shifts that go on within the individual. The Yang power, the creative masculine, moves ahead with steadfast perseverance toward a goal until it becomes too strong, begins to break—and then the Yin, the receptive feminine, enters from below and gradually moves toward the top. Life is a continual attempt to balance these two forces. With growing maturity the individual is able to avoid the extreme of either polarity so that the pendulum does not gain too much momentum by swinging too far to the right only to come crashing back to the left in a relentless cycle of action and reaction, inflation and depression. Rather one recognizes that these poles are the  domain of the gods, the extremes of black and white. To identify with one or the other can only lead to plunging into its opposite. The ratio is cruelly exact. The further I move into the white radiance on one side, the blacker the energy that is unconsciously constellated behind my back: the more I force myself to perfect my ideal image of myself, the more overflowing toilet bowls I’m going to have in my dreams. The man who identifies with his own ideal becomes like Swift’s adoring lover who cries,           Nor wonder how I lost my Wits;

                                    Oh! Caelia, Caelia, Caelia shits!

He cannot accept that the radiance of his beloved can be stained by the humanity of her excremental functions.

As human creatures, not gods, we must go for the grey, the steady solid line that makes its serpentine way only slightly to left and right down the middle course between the opposites.

Developing her argument Woodman continues in a prescient and insightful examination of North American culture.

This sense of finality (the end of the world) is partly why compulsions, particularly those having to do with the body, are constellating so forcibly in our culture. In every newscast we are confronted with destruction-wars, airplane crashes, rape, murder, Books, movies, theatre—from every side we are bombarded with the possibility of our imminent annihilation. At the same time, the structures which once would have supported us are crumbling; the nuclear family, the community, the Church. Rituals which were once the cornerstone of living are now hollow and rosaries are worn as adornments. Coupled with this dread of extinction is the natural propensity of compulsives to live in the future. Often intuitive by nature, they don’t clasp the here-and-now reality with which they cannot cope: rather than dream about what could be, should be, were meant to be in the future. The gap between reality and dream is often filled by the obsession. (Op. cit. p 25)

Furthermore, the technological age is propelling us into a space quite unrelated to our instincts. We have forgotten how to listen to our bodies; we pop pills for everything that goes wrong with us; we can have an intestinal bypass or we can have our stomach stapled. We can turn ourselves over to medicine without ever questioning what the body is trying to tell us. To our peril, we assume it has no wisdom of its own and we attempt to right our physical ills without making the necessary psychic corrections. (Op. cit. p. 30)

Although primarily written for modern women (published in 1982) Woodman’s insights have application and implications for men as well as for both the culture and the Church. Is the compulsive-obsessive drive for instant gratification a psychological issue? OR is it also a theological, spiritual issue? And how do we separate our decisions and behaviour from our psyche and our religious instincts? Or, indeed, can we?

I recently listened on line to an aspiring and apparently neophyte clergy deliver a homily on the Sunday appointed as Peter’s Confession, when, as Matthew records, Jesus is reported to have asked his disciples,

Who do you say the Son of Man is? The replied, ‘Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and still others, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets. ‘But what about you?’ he asked, ‘Who do you say that I am?’ Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.’ Jesus replied, ‘ Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in Heaven. (Matthew 16:13-17)

After delving into the use of different languages, Roman, Hebrew and Aramaic the homilist then exhorted,( approximately), the congregation to go forth into the world to speak as Jesus spoke with integrity, authenticity, humility, grace and clarity. The notion I gathered was for the congregation to emulate Jesus in the manner in which they spoke of their faith and their life as Christians. So far, so good.

The notion that words, embodying concepts, attitudes, tones, intentions, beliefs, emotions, as well as the Jesus model, and the ‘ethos’ and ‘soul’ of the moment carries considerable freight. That is not to say or even to suggest that everyone must be a linguist, or a grammarian, or a psychic shaman, or an intuitive permitting and enabling  verbal expressions that equate with the values contained and implicit in the words of Jesus, as reported by Matthew.

The repeated question, ‘Who do you say that I am?’ echoes both the curiosity of the one asking, Jesus, as well as the nature of the response which is inevitably also an indication or sign of the relationship of the one answering. Given the rise and preponderance of existentialism, ‘Who do you say that I am?’ is at the heart of both our social integration as well as our honest perceptions of ourselves, if and when we ask it of ourselves. The various possibilities proferred by the apostles suggest an ambivalence and a speculation about who this one is as well as an inference of someone ‘different,’ for example, John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.

It is not surprising that the group of scholars who call themselves, “The Jesus Seminar,” created to ascertain the authenticity of Jesus sayings, would have found these words of Jesus to be non-historical or fiction. For example, Jesus did not claim to be the Messiah. The seminar deemed Jesus’ affirmation of being the Son of the living God’ to be a post-Easter utterance by the early church rather than a statement uttered historically and literally by Jesus.

Those notes are not included here to throw aspersions on the homily or the homilist. They are inserted to demonstrate that we are all working in an exploratory, discovering, and interpreting method and purpose in our search for God. The manner in which we perceive, conceive, imagine, interpret and aspire in this realm of our personal lives will impact our perception of God and our aspiring relationship with God. Each of us lives in a post-Easter world, with perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs that may have preceded that epic event and some that may have followed.

From another point of view, that might to some seem relevant here, there is no evidence that Jesus wrote any books, nor established any churches. Most of that latter work was the result of a converted, passionate and determined convert named Paul. Borrowing again from the Jesus Seminar, the notion of Peter as the “rock” on which the church is built is also not considered a historical statement of Jesus. Even the idea of Jesus founding an organized church is anachronistic, a later development that they did not consider to be attributable to the historic Jesus.

These notes are not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. This is not a dismissal of Christian theology, nor it is a condemnation of the Christian church. What it is an attempt to do is to question the priorities of both the identity and the relative purpose of the ecclesial institution, especially at a time when all traditional institutions are apparently and allegedly, crumbling before our eyes. Building edifices, whether they are idols, icons, or even bone fragments sold as tickets to salvation, can be a testament to a theology that has lost its focus. Glorifying God, as did Johann Sebastian Bach on his manuscripts, by signing many with the initials, S.D.G. (Soli Deo Gloria-To God alone the glory) is a personal, private declaration of a personal faith, believe and a form of worship. He often began his manuscripts with the initials, J.J. (Jesu Juva-Jesus, help me).

The most recent decision and act by those in charge, including Bishop Barbara Budde, at the Washington National Cathedral to inter the ashes of Matthew Shephard within the cathedral vault was an act of reverence for a gay man who was severely beaten and left to die tied to a fence for 18 hours near Laramie Wyoming. He died five days later. He was then a 21-year-old college student when he was murdered in 1998. He was also an acolyte in his local Episcopal church, and when Bishop V. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop consecrated in the Episcopal Church suggested the National Cathedral as a fitting resting place for Matthew’s ashes, his family agreed. Bishop Robinson delivered the homily at the service, at times overcome with emotion..saying, ‘I have three things to say to Matt,’ he said through tears. ‘Gently rest in this place. You are safe now. And Matt, welcome home. (with notes from abc.net.au, in a piece entitled, Matthew Shepherd is laid to rest 20 years after his brutal murder)

Decisions, amid personal internal and public external turbulences, taken as acts of reverence, worship, gratitude and humility, and even perhaps in revenge, can best be evaluated, learned from and integrated into our world view, after they occur. And then concepts like fate, free will, determinism, perfectionism and concepts like projections can be teased out of the narrative. And that is where the faith-supported courage enables a deeper, more intense and perhaps even more authentic discernment is accessible…and that kind of process can be best done with a trusted ‘other’.

Searching for God # 74

A New Hampshire Episcopal bishop's stark warning to his clergy is resonating across the nation, drawing fervent praise from some and rebukes from others.

Bishop Rob Hirschfeld was one of several community and faith leaders gathered in Concord, N.H., for a vigil for Renee Macklin Good just days after she was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in

Hirschfeld called out the "cruelty, the injustice and the horror … unleashed in Minneapolis," and warned his clergy to prepare for "a new era of martyrdom."

"I've asked them to get their affairs in order to make sure they have their wills written," he said, "because it may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable." (From NPR, January 18, 2026, in a piece entitled, ‘Amid ICE clashes, New Hampshire bishop urges clergy to prepare their wills’ by Tovia Smith)

From merton.bellarmine.edu, quoting the preface to ‘The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer,’ we read:

‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘ Reinhold Neibuhr,’ in his preface, was one of the truly creative spirits of the Church. In Nazi Germany he carried his Christian loyalty to the actual point of taking up his cross and going to his own Golgoltha….(Bonhoeffer) sets forth what the doctrine of the grace of Christ really means, in distinction from the formalisms of thought which have often obscured its searching truth’’ and semi-mystical interpretation he treats at length the Sermon on the Mount and he concludes with a rapt and semi-mystical interpretation of ‘The Church of Jesus Christ and the Life of Discipleship.’ Here are convictions wrought in the fires of magnificent self-sacrifice and a courage which went all the way to a martyr’s death.

First published in 1937, Bonhoeffer was answering the call to return home to face the Third Reich. First published in 1894, and also in response to the Sermon on the Mount, Leo Tolstoy’s epic work, ‘The Kingdom of God is Within You,’ includes these words:

This is the case with all men in authority, who occupy positions more profitable than they could occupy except for the present regime, from the lowest police officer to the Tsar. All of them are more or less convinced that the existing order is immutable, because—the chief consideration—it is to their advantage. But the peasants, the soldiers, who are at the bottom of the social scale, who have no kind of advantage from the existing order, who are in the very lowest position of subjection and humiliation, what forces them to believe that the existing order in which they are in their humble and disadvantageous position in the order which ought to exist, and which they ought to support even at the cost of evil actions contrary to their conscience? (p. 300)

Bishop Herschfield’s ‘call’ to his clergy to ‘get their affairs in order to prepare for a possible and feasible martyrdom’ echoes both Bonhoeffer and Tolstoy, and while some may, and likely will, call his rhetoric catastrophizing, it is the most clear-headed, authentic, responsible, and encouraging ‘call’ to come from the ecclesial hierarchy in this turbulent period in United States history. Statements have to give way to bodies in the streets, on the roads, in the Home Depots and the Walmart parking lots. And with bodies in the streets, with or without a clerical collar, those bodies, just like Rene Good’s, will suffer the ignominy of bullets from the terrorists who themselves have been recruited and serve at the pleasure of the single-most dangerous terrorist, the occupant of the Oval Office.

Millions of ordinary citizens have already, for months, been putting their bodies and their whistles, and their cell phones and cameras in the streets whenever the ‘jack-booting thugs’ invade their cities and neighbourhoods.

Once again, theology collides with political history in a most dramatic stage setting. There are, of course, are other equally violent, deplorable scenes playing out in other theatres of conflict outside the U.S. borders where thousands are dying, being displaced, starving, suffering from disease and the stress and anxiety of when and where the next missile, bomb or drone will attack.

Language, legitimate language that depicts truth and reality in terms we can all agree are authentic, has evaporated into the sound-bites of propaganda, lies, deceptions and dissembling. The pursuit of personal power has replaced any vestige of political ideology, or even the modicum of human decency, threatening not only the ‘existing order’ of the previous 80 years but the actual lives of what to the thugs in power call, the collateral damage of war, human casualties. Vocabularies, text-books curricula and even college-admission requirements have been overtaken by the MAGA scorched earth campaign, as well as appointed positions and elected positions been filled with MAGA loyalists. Courts have been defied, mass communications behemoths have been secured through the financial assets of sycophantic friends of the chief executive, who is reported to have enhanced his personal wealth by $1 BILLION in the first year of his second term.

Some readers may not have thought specifically about those clergy in New Hampshire and elsewhere, who might consider Bishop Herschfield’s exhortation to  be more than they ‘signed up for’ when they completed the protracted process for ordination. “Get your wills and affairs in order” has not been the predictable and predominant homily of Bishops in ordination ceremonies. Rather, it might have been something akin to, ‘there are serious hidden risks in this business, and some will attempt to betray or to pillory or to exhaust or even to remove you in their excessive need for control.’ And the risks in that context would have been exclusively considered as members of and/or adherents to the church, certainly not enemies without, but still within the nation.

To those whose theology tends to avoid the political, the prophetic and the nature of discipleship that we have witnessed in Latin America, with Bishop Oscar Romero. Here is a brief description of Saint Oscar Romero from Britannica.com:

     

    St. Oscar Romero…was a Salvadoran Roman Catholic archbishop who was a vocal critic of the violent activities of government armed forces, right-wing groups and leftist guerillas in El Salvador’s civil conflict. Although Romero had been considered a conservative before his appointment as archbishop in 1977, he denounced the regime of Ge. Carlos Humberto Romero (no relation). The archbishop also refused to support the right-wing military-civilian junta that replaced the deposed dictator. Further his outspoken defense of the poor-who were powerless victims of widespread violence-brought repeated threats to his life. Romero declared his readiness to sacrifice his life for the ‘redemption and resurrection’ of El Salvador. His unreserved advocacy for human rights made him a hero to many, and he was nominated for the 1979 Nobel Prize for Peace by a number of U.S. congressmen and 118 members of the British Parliament. The following year Romero was assassinated at the hands of an unknown assailant while saying mass.

The tragic irony of Bishop Herschfield’s exhortation to his New Hampshire clergy echoing the martyrdom of the assassinated El Salvadoran Roman Catholic Bishop while he was saying mass in 1980 and the current highly complex and heinous and nefarious relationship between the United States government and the government of El Salvador with its cruel and inhuman(e) prison for deportees (Terrorism Confinement Centre CECOT) from the United States cannot be lost.

Alevo Airlines has stopped flying deportees for the administration after public protests ; Apple, Ben & Jerry’s and Costco have resisted the administration’s attempt to trash all DEI programs. Millions of Americans have repeatedly gathered on the streets of American cities and towns and villages in protest of this administration’s gross violation of human rights, something no American ever thought or conceived s/he would ever have to do in his or her own country.

Mark Carney’s historic line at Davos to middle powers in the new world, Middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu, signals a kind of refined, dining room law-of-the-jungle where the powerful ‘eat the weak.’ And the other table, the communion table over which the Eucharist is celebrated and when and when sacrifice and atonement are worshipped and revered is being evoked indirectly by Bishop Herschfield. Denominations no longer matter; even religious sects and faith communities must all join together, just as must all middle powers, in a phalanx of opposition to the inhumane, unjust sinister, evil, tyrannical and apparently unstoppable American administration. Just as Romero opposed the violence of both the right and the left, and the legal and financial impoverishment of the poor, so today we must not be deferred, distracted, dispirited or detained in our collaborative, non-violent, confrontation of evil by force.

Decision time has arrived for the priests in New Hampshire, as well as for the rest of the citizenry in America, in NATO countries, and in all nations that support democracy, human rights, the pursuit of equality and equity, the protection of the environment and the reduction of military armaments and military conflicts as ‘normal.’

As Carney also reminded us, ‘Nostalgia is not a strategy,’ and the church is renowned for having clung to many ‘sacred’ nostalgic perceptions, icons and attitudes, especially the one that has enmeshed the mainline churches with the establishment of both corporate and government America and the West generally. That complicity has been shattered, at least by the current administration of the United States, and the clergy and the public have really no choice but to acknowledge that umbilical cord, like many others, has been ripped up. The glimpse of silver lining, perhaps here, is that the power and wealth structures that have embossed the reputation of mainline churches through their cheques and their public reputations, and filled their pews with others seeking to ‘be affirmed’ by the ‘establishment’ no longer can rely on such a platinum spin-off, given that the establishment is proving that, like the emperor, it has no clothes.

Dis-membering the ecclesial establishment from the political and social and corporate hierarchies and their ‘faux-star-imprimatur’ may yet be one of the most fortuitous outcomes from this stormy decade. How ironic to envision that a tyrant obsessed with the pursuit of his own personal self-aggrandisement might actually nudge or even shove the churches back to being the voice of the voiceless, the arms and legs of the amputees, and the Good Samaritan for all those forgotten and taken for dead in the ditch, across the world.

Not only a Samaritan for the hated Jew, but a Samaritan all the dispossessed! And at the same time, a forceful, cognizant, sentient and committed enemy of the tyrant and the abuse of power.

Can Pope Pius XII possibly, from the grave, hear the plea and the prayer from Bishop Herschfield and weep for having maintained his policy of strict neutrality and public silence regarding the Nazi extermination of Jews? Can the church, generally, hear the voice of this Bishop, who, through both courage and faith, seems to be prepared to move beyond statements into the bodily activity of physical and sacrificial protest? Can the church continue to redeem itself, however painfully, in and through the active listening to new voices of agape, compassion, courage, and fearless faith?

Searching for God # 73

 I am beginning to wonder if, in my depiction of the Thanatos/Eros Freudian metaphor of forces in human lives and culture, I was not conflating the relationship articulated in Chinese thought, between Yin and Yang: as one increases, the other decreases and vice versa. Reading about the Freudian duality of Thanatos and Eros, indicates more of a conflict between the two forces, rather than a symbiotic inter-dependent relationship.

The Christian concepts of God and Satan, clearly working in direct and open conflict with each other, it seems on reflection, may be one of the ‘petards’ with which the Christian ‘ship’ has been, is, and continues to be hoisted. The divide between aspirational impulses to ‘do good’ and the self-sabotaging impulses to ‘do evil’ may not be so discreetly separated as was once envisioned. There is so much in human experience, history, philosophy and religion that embraces the notion, again borrowed from John Keats, of human life as a vale of tears. Keat’s insight that those tears are essential for one’s experience to deepen, enrich, and to evolve the ‘soul’ rendering the process of what he and Hillman call ‘making soul’.

Although it may be somewhat incomplete or somewhat cloudy, the ‘either-or’ of being a ‘saved’ person, in and through the grace of God, or being a ‘damned person’ who has not been ‘saved’ at the core of Christian fundamental theology, seems, to Keats and to this scribe, reductionistic of both God and human beings. The template does, however, correspond to the Pauline exhortation to ‘go and preach the gospel to all the nations.’ It offers a succinct, comprehensible, bumper-sticker aphorism as a compelling and somewhat threatening, fear-inspired, motivation for both the evangelist and the ‘unwashed’ who might be listening. For starters, that model shifts the meaning of the Greek word for ‘fear’ as in “fear the Lord.

From Biblehub.com, Fear is either expressive of reverence or terror. Fear as terror is generally expressed by the Hebrew words magor, and pacadh, and by the Greek word phobos. Fear as being reverences is dominated in Hebrew as yirah, and in Greek as elulabela.

Perhaps it is as a sign of the culture that we have lost reverence for almost everything and everyone, and that as part of a child-like religious and theological proposition, fear frequently, if not invariably, connotes ‘terror’ rather than awe and reverence. The juxtaposition of a threatened life in Hell, for those who are not saved, might have the synchronistic influence of terror in the phrase, “fear of the Lord’.  

Furthermore, there is the notion of the reductionism of both God and human beings that, given the level and degree of knowledge, research and the experiences of patterns in the human story, might seem tolerable and even commendable. In the 21^st century, however, where, as one scribe put it recently anonymously, ‘Perhaps the loneliest place in each and every community today is the church.’

Fear of the Lord may not be the most significant or relevant impetus for that loneliness; fear of the way the world is unravelling just might have something to do with the motivation to withdraw from everything and from everyone. We have now been living with the spectre of human, planetary, global annihilation given the existence of the atomic bombs (using nuclear fission, splitting atoms for energy) and  nuclear bombs (using both fission and fusion  fusing hydrogen isotopes) for three-quarters of a century.

The public images of those whose titles and roles put them with their ‘finger on the button’ to detonate one or more of such lethal weapons does not inspire confidence or assurance that they will desist from releasing such a weapon. And, as James Hillman points out, all of psychology has to be perceived through the lens of the cloud of extinction from the bomb that hangs over everyone. Indeed, it can be argued that theology, too, has to embrace the reality, not only of global warming and climate change, but also of the nuclear threat.

Individual personal ‘salvation’ as depicted by men like Franklin Graham and others, seems almost detached from the existential threats facing the human race. Saving the whole world, on the other hand, offers a starting place for theological reflection that opens more complexity and also offers more opportunity for challenging and expansive prophetic voices.

From religion-online.org, in a piece entitled Christian Conscience and Nuclear Escapism, by Robert Bachelder, after detailing the various arguments against the production of nuclear weapons and the proponents of deterrence as legitimate foil, writes:

It is correct to say, as Robert McAfee Brown does that the possession and   of nuclear weapons are immoral. But if the alternatives are also immoral, as the bishops suggest, it hardy follows that Christians should say an ‘unequivocal no’ to participation in nuclear weapons development. Brown believes that such an unequivocal stance is ‘risky.’ Granted it carries the risks of job loss and accusations of disloyalty. These risks are significant, but they pale before an ever greater risk which they reduce. This is the risk of unfettered thinking whereby the human mind, as Augustine said, is stretched and stretched until eventually it encounters something that transcends it, judges it, which is Truth. We try to avoid divine judgement and the anxiety it brings by refusing to think, by permitting our prepossessions to prevent the emergence of new insights, as the late Bernard Lonergan wrote. This is part of the appeal of unequivocal stances. Because they are unambiguous and devoid of any irony and paradox, they allow us to suppose that we are righteous. The result is that on the peace issue, we come to sound like those fundamentalist churches that call people out of a sinful world to a holy place of painless, personal salvation. If, however resist what Flaubert called ‘the mania to conclude,’ we are bound to fathom finally that for the moral problem of deterrence, there is no sanctified ground on which to stand. We learn instead, as London’s G.R. Dunstan writes, that there is only a choice between evils and ‘everlasting mercy for those who in good faith are driven to choose.’…..Today, living with nuclear deterrence is the greatest tragedy in the world, only excepting what might result from its alternatives. Since there is not handy exit from this tragedy, we may be forced to learn the wisdom of another generation—that Christian ethics is not a deus ex machina to extricate us from our predicaments. Instead, in the words of neo-orthodoxy’s most systematic thinker (Lonergan?) ethics exists ‘to remind us of our confrontation with God who is the light illuminating all actions.’ In a nuclear age, we confront a sorrowful God whose righteous anger boils over in the face of our folly. The miracle is that this weeping, angry God still graces us to hope and to labor for peace. But hoping and peacemaking, we must see, are very different things from indulging in one form or another of nuclear escapism.

Hoping and peacemaking may seem, to some, as merely ineffectual and insignificant in a world tipping over backwards towards anger, hate, lies and infamy with impunity and immunity. ICAN is the international campaign to stigmatise, prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons. Their website indicates:

Canada has not yet signed or ratified the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Canada has consistently votes against an annual General Assembly resolution since 2018 that welcomes the adoption of the TPNW and calls upon all states to sign, ratify, or acede to it ‘at the earliest possible date.’ It has described the treaty as ‘well intentioned’ but ‘premature.’ Canada supports the retention and potential use of nuclear weapons on its behalf, as indicated by its endorsement of various alliance statements of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) of which it is a member. In 2023, in rresponse to a parliamentary petition urging Canada to ‘sign and commit to ratifying the TPNW,’ Canada’s then-minister of foreign affairs, Mélanie Joly said: ‘Canada recognizes that the entry into force of the TPNW reflects well-founded concerns about the slow pace of nuclear disarmament-concerns that Canada very much shares. While not a party to the TPNW, Canada has common ground with treaty states and shares the ultimate goal of a world free from nuclear weapons.

 Since the existence and threatened deployment of nuclear weapons poses a serious existential threat to the whole world, taken to its logical and reasonable extension, a mass suicide, one is prompted to ask, and not merely rhetorically, is our shared, religiously and theologically-supported declaration of suicide as ‘evil’ and thereby relegating it out of the conversation as a potential, legitimate and reasonable human decision (not as a political or threatening statement, or one by a psycho-or-sociopath) potentially leave us somewhat conventionally blind to the prospect of our own demise.

Is our black-and-white, either-or theology demonstrating itself as another of the blocks to ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking, thereby rendering a perpetuation and even a propagation of what is essentially a child-like theology? The ‘absolute’ perfection of a deity and the manifold human incompleteness and state of being an amalgam of both Thanatos and Eros, poses a series of penetrating questions for all those seeking God in these turbulent and challenging times. We cannot and must not give way to the simplistic ‘deus ex machina’ (God will rescue and fix this for us)….indeed such a perspective would demonstrate an insult to both God and man.

Christianity, too, cannot and must not presume that all ethnicities and religions will or should succumb to the theological dogma of its faith premises. Perhaps, faced with such a serious and inescapable and existential threat, it might be an appropriate time for all faith communities to begin to talk frankly, not about how to collaborate as theologies, but how to collaborate in pursuit of a universal curtailment of all catastrophic treats, including global warming and climate change and nuclear proliferation and deployment.

Fixated on the individual morality and ethics of individual men and women, with the presumption that ‘we’ (whoever is telling the story) is morally superior and therefore competent to judge and to sentence, and then projecting that conversation onto the countries they each represent, seems to this scribe as a ‘trap’ in an ever-revolving door of a kind of escapism to which Bachelder (and Lonergan) are referring. Such a process is also a denial of the very necessary and legitimate search for how we might, given a commitment to our theological roots, seek to find, not only new and different ways of  ‘doing’ but also different and new way of both ‘thinking and perceiving’ as an integral part of that theological endeavour.

Searching for God # 72

 Thanatos and Eros, Freud’s two inescapable, universal, penetrating and highly operative ‘forces’ in life, the former indicative of and demanding death, destruction, deformation, destitution, the latter definitive of love, life, energy, creativity, and imagination…..Yet, what if these two ‘metaphoric, imaginative forces are, by definition identity and operational manifestation, radioactive. Too much of either or too little, is life-denying. And what if God, the universal, ubiquitous, ineffable, ephemeral force is an embrace of both and the human blindness and growth scale is about adapting to the truth both of our individual being in the thrall of Tanatos and Eros, while deferring, preferring, and adulating only one side, Eros.

The Christian slogan, “God is Love’ is one of the most obvious and prevalent of such blindnesses….the inference is that God is NOT Thanatos….And yet, what if God is and embraces the totality of both Thanatos and Eros and what if the Christian theology is a valiant attempt to bridge the two by posing God and Satan as representatives, symbols of each respectively….and over the centuries, we have burdened Satan with a massive list of everything every successive generation considered to be ‘morally and ethically wrong. The absolute separation of God and Satan, as a theological method of attempting to ‘elevate’ God to the sacred, and to denigrate Satan to the evil, along with the further accoutrements of Purgatory, The Penitential, and the Promise of Eternal Life for those who have been ‘saved’ deeply embed the notion of separation of good from evil in the minds, hearts, perceptions and beliefs of millions.

And then, theologically as well as legalistically, pedagogically and sociologically we have turned Thanatos on its head as the ‘instrument’ of our detestation of its very identity and axiomatically pitted Eros as the great Saviour through such poignant and penetrating images as the Good Samaritan and the Jesus stories of healing and wisdom. What if, for example, each of us has, psychologically, a death-wish, which perhaps Hillman captures in his ‘love of war’ insight, and with which each of us can identify, from moments of our own destructive self-sabotage, not to mention the havoc we have wreaked on others? And then, what if that pattern can be traced back to the imbalance we have “posited” on both humans and the universe, similar to the separation of man and nature which has also plagued both human psychology and Chrisitan theology, along with the notion of the blindness that we ignore, deny or disavow, the epithet that God made us in His image, might we not be engaged, whether consciously or unconsciously or both, in a game of double-jeopardy.

Identifying evil with the individual human whose salvation is the stated purpose of Christian faith, we have ignored the ‘salvation of the whole world’ and perhaps innocently, yet recklessly tortured millions while remaining blind to the power and influence of both Thanatos and Eros, equally in our personal as well as our shared global and planetary survival.

We cannot, and never have been able to ‘solve’ what we consider to be our worst ‘social enemies’ such as tyranny, or the absence of human rights by waging war on the perpetrators, or perceived perpetrators of such evils. We cannot and never will eliminate or even dissipate war by waging war just as we can and never will be able to reduce or eliminate drug wars and drug addictions by attacking either drug gangs and warlords or individual street addictions through however compassionate and comprehensive medical interventions. We cannot and never will resolve our dependence on clean air, water, land and nutrition by competing, using the methods and the psychology and the instruments of war to ‘punish’ the perpetrators’ of pollution, whether the pollution comes from individual negligence or corporate and government malfeasance.

Identifying enemies, on the basic premise that ‘those identifying the enemies and holding the weapons of war (including the militarized instruments of law enforcement) believe that they are themselves wholly pure and pristine without any of the barnacles of the very ‘evil’ they are attempting to ‘stamp out’ is another obvious game of ‘social, political, ethical and moral insanity’….doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.

While Jung and Hillman extended and differed the work of Freud, primarily by delving into the individual personal psychic forces they intuited and theorized in and through intense psychoanalysis, and while Hillman did attempt to bring the ‘anima mundi’ (the social, cultural mileau) into the frame of his thinking, personalizing it as if it were another ‘psyche’ in need of therapy, Freud may still have something significant to say to us.

If, for example, we are simply, by dint of our hardwiring, unable to escape the clutches of both Thanatos and Eros, forces indemically embedded in each human psyche, and still part of the imago dei premise of Chrsitian theology, then our separation of their impact into moral and ethical imperatives, separately representing only one force, without the complementary influence of the other, we are caught in what Hillman describes as the human dissociation….impaled on the extremes, or the polarity of these two forces, both individually and culturally.

We know that life and especially abundant life is available on the side of Eros, and history, literature, theology and psychology have all demonstrated the efficacy and the trustworthiness of that proposition. We also know that ‘death’ and all of the many other images of wantonness, devastation, depression, hopelessness, depravity can be assured by falling into the arms and charms of Thanatos. What we may not ‘know’ or appreciate or apprehend, or grasp, or integrate into our needed paradoxical proposition of opposites, middle grounds between extremes, is that Thanatos and Eros are themselves NOT enemies, but rather contain influences of each other, just as anima and animus, from Jung, represent the female instincts in the male psyche, and the male instincts in the female psyche, respectively. Androgyny, so despised and ignored thought both ignorance and fear, primarily by men, is neither foreign to nature nor to God.

And the model of the paradoxical impact of what on the surface especially to our literal, empirical, scientific perception and understanding seem to be opposing opposites, uncontaminated each with the other, could help to unpack that other self-righteously declared and imposed blindness, the Thanatos and Eros are at war within both human individual psyches, as well as on the collective world psychc stage.

We have all been, and continue to be, complicit, in our ignoring the implications of the ‘anima mundi’ in our psychic distress. Yet, in fact, we have created a culture in the West at least, that is diametrically opposed and also virulently and destructively opposed to the deepest and most innate needs and aspirations of each human on the planet. We focus on the image of the reputation of each individual ego, as either heroic or villain, and all of the shades of grey between those ‘white and black’ extremes, and constructing, renewing, reinforcing and dispersing the mind-bending pedagogy of competition, perfection, production, profit. And then we also  undermine all of those potentially honourable values with equally and opposite nefarious methods from Thanatos, as the instruments and methods of those who are going to ‘win’ in a zero-sum’ game. The combination of the two absolute extremes constitute a Western lie and deception for which no single entity, person, agency,  organization, university, or church can be, or is, held responsible and accountable.

To say that we are all in this together is a truism almost unworthy of having to be typed. It is, however, possible, that the Christian church with its acknowledgement of its confounding separation obsessive-compulsion in what has to have been a organizational psychic conundrum for many, might begin to shed some light on its own perhaps unconscious, and perhaps not, putting Thanatos and Eros on a ‘war-footing’ for its own purposes. If God is on the side only of Eros, then, from that proposition Satan must be on the side of Thanatos. Whereas, it is not only feasible and believable that Thanatos and Eros themselves, when recognized and respected for their unique and inherent strengths and weaknesses, are allies in the dramatic and tense and biographic and spiritual and psychic lives of each of us.

The two archetypes of Carol Pearson’s The Hero Within, the Warrior and the Victim, as male and female have already been identified as the two prominent archetypes in American film and literature. And there is a highly respectable and dignified aspect to each waiting to be discovered, deployed and referred to when and if the personal situation requires. If Thanatos and Eros were two archetypes operating within and among all of us, then it is our opportunity to seize their strengths, and to become apprised of their seductive potential to bring us to our knees.

Too much Thanatos lies death; also, paradoxically, too much Eros is slavery and another form of death. So. it might be described as a potential uroborus snake circle leading from one extreme to another, both of which are the excess of each archetype. It likely feels like a monstrous rush of testosterone to wreak havoc on another, on another state or another corporation, or another academic or political rival. Similarly, it has to feel like a monumental moment of psychic, physiological, sexual and emotional ecstasy, beyond the limits of an LSD hit to fall headlong into the arms of Eros. And, as we all sit back and reflect, have we not all been engaged in variations of such moments, incidents, events, campaigns, or even life-long dramas from which there seemed no escape.

And, while sitting back, who can be blind to the many melodramas sponsored by one or both of the psychic tyrants Thanatos and Eros on the current world stage. Indeed, it could be argued that an absence of Eros, both of self and of others, would likely contribute to a psychic deferral to the death-wish and to the apparent, however fleeting, rush of testosterone that its deployment would generate. Call that deferral compensation if you like; from a lay perspective, there is an obvious imbalance. The absence of the personal psychic warrior archetype, too, leaves one vulnerable to the ravages of unsuspecting and seductive charms of Eros. And that absence could be seen as abandonment by a parent, generating a metaphoric vacuum of self-love that, unconsciously seeks ‘love in all the wrong places’ for years. The confluence of a weak or denied Thanatos and a weak or denied Eros leaves one, one can only speculate, prostrate psychically, and needing support, lots of it, without being disrespected.

And, if these two forces, unconscious and they may be, continue to dispense their respective radioactivity (metaphorically) in the face of our shared, universal collective unconscious, we face a continual loop that relies and depends on our participation.

From a psychic and a theological perspective, we can become both conscious of such a predicament, as well as, with the supportive and reflective engagement of a friend or trusted colleague, help to unpack out shared dependence on this oscillation.

Tolystoy, Blake, Hillman, Jame Alison, and especially, the God who is being sought and imagined here might rejoice in such a ‘revelation’ and revolution.’ Some individual lives and cultures might also start to breathe deeply again.