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.

Searching for God # 71

Speaking and thinking about the potency of adjacency, it must not go unnoticed that, for centuries, writers of literature, plays, novels, poems, short stories, etc. have been using a similar approach, with a different name. Their name, contained in a frequented theme, is ‘appearance versus reality’….For as long as there has been fiction, there have been writers attempting to probe the depths between what appears on the surface of the senses, the behaviour,  with what might be going on underneath that surface. Indeed, much of the energy of a narrative emerges from, and also evokes and provokes questions about the mystery behind the scene.

 And that mystery has multiple layers:

   Does this actor know what that actor knows?

   Does the audience know something that or those characters do not know (dramatic irony)?

   Does this actor’s letter hide something from others?

   Does this soliloquy disclose an interior thought, feeling or even a plan of action which, so far, has been secreted from everyone?

   Is that actor even conscious of what his own motives are?

   Is there a play within a play, to which the audience is being treated, behind the backs of one or more characters?

   Is there a piece of the plot that has been omitted deliberately by the author, and if so for what purpose?

Humans are inveterate detectives, attempting to discern whatever evokes a quizzical look, a deep frown, or even a pair of closed eyes while the head is held for reflection time. As a corollary, humans are also, to greater or lessor degrees, actors on a stage, flipping both consciously and unconsciously between ‘playing with an audience’ or ‘shooting straight. Just today, I on encountering a house painter who had been struggling with a gimpy knee, I wondered, ‘Is your knee acting up or feeling better?’ “Yes!” came his comic retort. And when I asked, ‘Are you being sarcastic or not!” he again retorted, “Yes!”

And each of us is daily, hourly, and even minute by minute engaged in a process of ascertaining whether a piece of speech can be understood literally, as if it were a bonafide, provable, agreed-upon fact, or something else. Denmark schools have even gone to the extent of introducing critical perception and interpretation, in speech and in writing, to elementary school students, who need to be prepared for a world drowning in propaganda, another  world for dissembling, lying, misrepresenting the truth.

It may seem to be cliché to ask, to whom it is most easy and most likely that one will lie? Myself! If we are unable to discern if and when we are telling the truth, our truth, to ourselves, how much more likely is it that we are engaged in a process of shift-shaping with others, albeit much of that is unconscious.

Given the deepening cloud of lies, prevarications, dissembling, distracting and outright ‘bullshit’ that is coming out of the White House, as well as the Kremlin, a new attitude and energy are emerging in an attempt to expose such lies. Self-congratulatory exaggeration has always been inherent in the political statements of many politicians. Today’s cable news, (here think MS NOW) is literally fixated on detailed exposure of the lies and deliberate deceptions that spew out of the mouth of the ‘glorious leader’ in the Oval Office. And as the scholars will tell us, the purpose of such a cataract of lies is not to get us to believe them, but to get us to the point where we do not know what is truth any longer. Citizen mind-bending, is the goal of all propaganda.

What does all this have to do with searching for God, you ask?

If we all struggle to come to grips with the reality around and about us, imagine the difficulty in coming to terms with the ineffable, ephemeral, infinite force of energy that is divinity.

Here are some brief notes from an essay by Richard A. Rosengarten, entitled, “The Christian Who Was A Church of One,’ from divinity.uchicage.edu, dated, February 17, 2022:

…Blake’s adopted Christian mantle is not that of the evangelist but the prophet. His is a poetic universe where apocalypse always beckons, precisely because the conventional world---what Blake spat out as ‘the Ratio’- works very hard to convince us that our present state of civilization is axiomatically preferable to our natural state….Blake saw a close relation between the words ‘revelation’ and ‘revolution.’ To be serious about Christianity meant, for Blake, that you were suspicious of any and all authority. Those authorities not incidentally included the Church, or what Blake termed, with decided disparagement, ‘religion.’ He meant by that term not just the Church of England (o of Rome) but those—he had the Deists on is frontal lobe—who were quite certain that what they called ‘the religion of nature’ or ‘the religion of reason’ was the desirable and reassuring entity. Blake did not stop with religion. He was no shrinking violet: he castigated not just bishops and popes but John Locke’s epistemology and Sir Isaac Newton’s physics as full-fledged participants in ‘the Ratio,’ and included for good measure the aesthetics of the most decorated and decorous English painter of his era, Sir Joshua Reynolds, as well as the mystical visions of Emanuel Swedenborg. Blake wanted to stir things up because he thought the Christian revelation was meant to stir things us. The first step in doing so (after the Bible from stem to stern) was to liberate Imagination from the shackles of Reason. For Blake, this could make us fully human again, and  thus much more approximately the creatures of God that we truly are. Another figure who vexed Blake even as he garnered greater sympathy was John Milton; in one of his best formulations, Blake lamented that Milton was of the Devil’s party but did not know it. What Blake meant was that in Paradise Lost Milton fully distinguished life in the Garden of Eden from life in the world after Adam and Eve had eaten the forbidden fruit. Blake thought this folly, unworthy of both God and of God’s creatures that Christian fall was not some ‘fortunate’ event but a necessary part of the divine plan and the wellspring for the  ongoing worldly cycle of creation, sin, and resurrection. Blake saw that cycle everywhere: in history certainly…but also in human beings, in flowers and fruits and vegetables, in night turning into day and day turning into night. Imagination, Blake thought, was far more likely that human reason to make us alive to the ongoing testimony of creation, sin and resurrection.

Here is an example of the poetic imagination at work on the search for God among the creatures whom God has created…using Milton as a foil, as well as Newton, and giving to the process of seeking God the legitimate imprimatur of the human imagination. Today, a similar impetus, guiding light, might serve well in a historic period in which not only reason, but literal, empirical ‘scientific’ facts have become the replacement for religion, for faith, and for a search for God. Hillman notes that we have idolized money, as did Joshua Leibmann before him…today one wonders if it is the ‘totem of all things literal’ that, while including money, has elevated an epistemology of empiricism and positivism into a virtual idol-ology….not ideology.

We have made of our world a landscape of scarred, rusty, defective, and deliberately deposited iron-steel-beams and bridges of materialism into a morgue of our sensibilities. Because it can generate more income than a human, an algorithm is more ‘valuable’ than a human, millions of whom are being dismissed as either replaceable by AI or too costly for government or corporate balance sheets.

While Tolstoy railed against the abuse of power by military and law enforcement officials in his home country of Russia, today, Blakes injunction to oppose authority must be directed to the tech moguls, autonomic behemoths so transfixed with the prospect of mountains of wealth and the political ‘papier maché political cut-outs of legitimate politicians, most of whom have forgotten their ability to perceive and to articulate ‘facts’ and ‘truths.’ And, it is not incidental to include in that ‘round-up’ of complicit sycophants, those ecclesial hierarchical officials whose primary job is to sustain, maintain and uphold the reputation of the church in order to facilitate the flow of cash from those same corporate monsters.

To sacralize both money and literal, empirical, facts, without question and also without investigating both the motives and the impact of such blatant sacralizing, is essentially to remove both the human imagination and the human being, creatures of God,  from the equation of the anima mundi.

There is a cliché among military leadership that one cannot bring democracy to a place on the bayonet of a rifle….it takes butter and bread…..metaphorically. A parallel epithet might be that you can’t bring Christianity to anyone or any place on the cheque-book of a tech or corporate mogul. Photo-ops of a pseudo-leader carrying a Bible to a church front door in order to appear to have a faith is like telling thousands of duped people in the pews of mega-churches that God wants you to be ‘rich’….it is the same non-theology, attempting to pass as Christian faith.

And, to my surprise and disappointment, few, if any, of the respected church clergy, at whatever level of experience and authority, have come out to defy, to decry and to dessicrate such phoney examples. The prophetic voice of the Christian church, that of a Mandela, or a Tutu, or a Bonhoeffer seems either utterly missing or utterly silenced out of fear of WHAT?....reprisals, recriminations, retributions, or even jail?

If ever there were a time when Christian imagination and courage, faith and discipleship were in desperate need among the world’s leaders, what we watch is who is warming up to whom, over Ukraine, over Greenland, over Taiwan, over Gaza, over Sudan, ……etc. Moralizing about specific lies told by trump and his thugs is, or seems to this scribe, blind to the big picture….that humans are being displaced, shot, dismissed, devalued and devaluated by men who have lost their conscience, their inner life and their soul….and they are doing it with impunity.

The voices of Tolstoy, Blake, Hillman, (and if they were alive, Tutu, Bonhoeffer, and Mandela) and others are pleading, on behalf of every human being, and on God’s behalf, for us to waken to the threat. Not only is that threat existential, but also apocalyptic. And this time, apocalyptic must not be read as exaggeration, as many prefer.

Inferring from the ‘facts’ on the ground’ in the bully pulpits, on the high seas, in the various war-zones, and in climate projections links the search for truth with the search for God, and, perhaps as never before, the struggle for survival.

Searching for God # 70

 “The potency of adjacency” borrowed form Blake, quoted from the last post in this space, evokes questions of the relationship between the literal/empirical world view and the metaphoric/imaginative world view, especially as they relate to theology.

Substituting for the either-or approach of the binary view, this ‘potency of adjacency’ implies, no demands, a ‘both-and’ presumption. Implicit in a ‘both-and’ perspective is the literary and epistemological concept of the paradox. And the cultural comfort with paradox is slim, at best, non-existent at worst. Of course we hear talking heads uttering words like, ‘two different things can be possible at the same time.’ And in traditional Christian theology, we have heard and read much about the potency of the adjacencies of ‘immanence and transcendence’ of God….as God-man in Jesus and transcending all bonds of physics, geography, time and space, the God as a universal force.

It is in the living moments, many of them judged by the absolute ‘morality’ or ‘immorality’ of behaviour that we find a potency of adjacencies to have been eliminated. And, focusing on the behavioural to the exclusion or at least mimimizing of the imaginative, the ‘back-story’ as we often hear it contextualized, we render ourselves constricted by the demands, expectations and definitions of conventional norms, in all aspects of our lives and our perceptions.

The notion of being judged, and of accountability and responsibility for acts that society deems ‘evil’ has evolved as norm to the exclusion of the more expansive, and also exhaustive ‘dig’ into what is going on when ‘that act’ is being committed. The very fact that humans do what we do not wish to do and fail to do what we would wish to do lies at the heart of the human condition and the perplexity of wrestling with ourselves. There is a potency of adjacencies if ever there was one! And, perhaps, from Blake’s perspective,  we might come to know ourselves more clearly if we are to be patient enough to ask the multiple questions about things that we have said and done that we wish we could take back. And not only take back, but even perhaps have a more clear understanding of what lies behind those words and acts. That too is within the frame of our accountability, responsibility, to ourselves, and to God?

The potency of adjacency evokes the most obvious blind-spot of the church’s unbalanced perception, attitudes and effectiveness in offering insight into the human psyche’s darkest, most mysterious and least accessed unconscious. If performative is the adjective that describes a formalized, choreographed, and potentially autonomic behaviour, for many liturgical rituals, repeated oral prayers, genuflecting, and both disciplined regularity and a focus on ‘good’ performances holds a very high place in the value structure of many parishes. The question of the cursory, politically correct, niceness in public about a homily, or even a single sentence from such a sermon, perhaps until there is a ground-swell of disdain, demonstrates a prevalent collective modus operandi within small and medium-sized parishes. The private, secret, and visious gossip about the most innocent and legitimate behaviour, based simply on the secret jealousies, private and judgemental perceptions, projections and biases of one or two especially long-term parishioners is a source of organizational and institutional and serpentine corrosion with which many churches are either unprepared or unwilling to address.

Human behaviour, attitudes, perceptions, biases, prejudices and projections are never left at the door of the sanctuary. They invariably are an intimate, if unexpected, dynamic in any ecclesial setting. And yet, as is the case with so much ‘verbal abuse’ outside the sanctuary or by-the-by discomfort of especially ensconced and traditional parishioners inside, such behaviour is too often glossed over, dismissed as ‘too-hot-to-handle’ or ‘incongruent with the reputation of the church.  Conflict-averse men and women are, apparently, drawn to ecclesial affiliation, as well as the occasional trouble-maker whose need for attention, influence and political power generate much tension and conflict in a micro-culture which is open to serious and especially secretive ambush.

Within those ecclesial settings, too, fervency, urgency, intensity of emotions are frequently considered to be expressions of intense devotion and dedication to God, while they might very well be a need to project whatever ‘demons’ are seeking release in a person’s private psychic life. The social and politically correct repression of emotion, as a sign of reverence to the holy, the sacred and the beauty of the experience, taken together, is a potentially over-heated petri dish of enflamed and deep-seated needs, aspirations and fears. Even in such heated situations, the individuals may well be completely unaware of how or why they are behaving in the manner they are. Long-held, secret grudges never exposed and cauterized, ambitious and neurotic needs for control, previously treated as ‘kind and generous and committed’ to the running and the survival of the parish, rude and abusive attitudes that have been ‘rounded-over’ as ‘without social graces’…the very idea of emotional integrity can evoke generalized observations like T.S. Eliot’s ‘the trouble today is people wanting to be important’ and ‘people cannot stand too much reality’….

The intersection of those pithy epithets, itself, is a recipe for not only discreet and sensitive, and integrous and authentic and delicate leadership, from a pastoral perspective. A clergy may, for example, be aware of the depth of the potential conflict before the ‘combatants’ full grasp of their engagement. Intuition may suggest a private meeting with each, as a ‘red flag’ of caution. And even that kind of intervention has the potential to backfire, to explode and to erupt into a full-blown tempest in a tea-pot.

Tempests in tea-pots, however, are often the most conducive and fertile ‘pots’ where decades of resentments have smoldered, where change is considered evil, where new ideas and approaches are considered foreign, alien and illegitimate, even a choice of hymns, traditional versus more modern, can be so upsetting as to trigger deeper sensations of discomfort with which individuals have little to no insight as to how to discern the meaning of those ‘perturbations’ and resist any public acknowledgement, even confidentially, of their potency. Church laity are unable and unwilling, in general, to discern, discuss and reflect on the intersection of local culture with the mission and ministry of the parish church. What is considered normal from a cultural point of view is also both highly valued in ecclesial activities, as well as valued as a moat keeping ‘other’ and ‘different’ and ‘challenging’ ideas out of reach.

And yet, this potency of adjacency, local culture and theological insight and creativity, can prove radioactive. And such a reaction is often, if not always, very difficult to either discuss fully or to moderate into a harmonious new manuscript to be shared by new and old. One glaring issue over which this dynamic prevails is the stereotype of rising numbers in both pews and collection plates.

If the numbers of both have been relatively high, then any decrease is considered cause for worry. On the other hand, if the numbers are rising, irrespective of why and how such a demographic shift is occurring, that is invariably a matter for celebration, especially in the hierarchy of the ecclesial organization. Churches and clergy are too often measured, valued and esteemed by the numbers they either generate or dissipate. The collision of cultural images, one from the corporate world, with another in what might very well be a highly devoted, disciplined, reflective, prayerful and reserved small parish community where conflicts are addressed quietly, discreetly, openly and invariably seeking resolution and compromise, where individuals are growing significantly and meaningfully in their spiritual lives, where most if not all men and women and children feel and believe they are cared for and supported remains unspoken in most institutional cultures and board rooms. Big, wealthy, highly popular and highly visible, and deeply immersed in public activities are some of the benchmarks of successful churches and clergy. The small, reserved, quiet, respectful and almost inconspicuous model is rarely given its due in terms of organizational respect, when such a clergy-laity-model may prove to be the most instrumental and life-giving and God-fearing.

It is, nevertheless, the open, public and deliberate separation of good and evil, God and man, God and nature, and the churchs’ preference or even expectation of or requirement for moral dominance as if the parent-child relationship between God and laity is the one with which most are familiar and thereby qualifies as the one  least likely to arouse contention. And arousing contention of any kind is a deliberate and determining no-no given the ecclesial model of ‘patience, tolerance, and kindness.’

‘Everything will be alright, because God is going to see to it that it will,’ is a kind of placebo for whatever might befall a person or family. And while such a placebo carries the authentic hope of the one uttering it, the timing and the situation for the recipient may be completely incongruous with that of the care-giver. Such a placebo also discloses the unrecognized and unacknowledged ‘anxiety’ of the care-giver who really does not know what to say or how to be present in empathy with the suffering other. Pastoral care, unlike medical care, is unlikely to bring surgical removal of a tumor, or to kill the pain of an arthritic knee or hip. It is more likely to sit quietly, patiently and serenely and actively listening to the suffering other, if that other wishes even to engage verbally.

And it is the potency of adjacencies of life and death, the latter of which is almost totally avoided, denied and disavowed in and by the culture, that, along with several others, needs the scrutiny of Blake’s prophetic, if challenging, counsel. We are not hiding anything from a God who sees and knows it all. Why do we think we can? And why do we think we can chose which methods and which issues are appropriate for ‘church’ discussion and address? Much has been written and spoken about the bartering that accompanies prayer, as if negotiating with God is like ‘asking for an extended curfew from our parents in adolescence. And it is the child-like, even adolescent theology than offers the opportunity to morph into a more mature, open, fearless, courageous and life-giving theology that is neither afraid nor ashamed to bring before God all of the secrets of both ourselves and our churches.

Blakes’ seeking the universe in a grain of sand remains one of the most potent and pregnant utterances in English type. And churches and the people who operate them can embrace the breadth and depth of his insight  as integral to the search for God.

Searching for God # 69

 In what was a provocative piece of insight, back in the 1940’s and through several reprints up until 1961, D. Joshua Liebman’s book, ‘Peace of Mind’ attempted to marry the insights of early psychology and psychiatry with theology. As a Jewish rabbi, he postulated that religion, especially fundamentalist religion that started with the original sin as the defining, and thereby constricting primary characteristic of all human beings, (as the Christians saw it), could and would bring considerable insight and new ways of both seeing and thinking if religion especially could open to the new insights of both psychiatry and psychology.

Primarily through ‘verbalizing our worst thoughts, our deepest fears’ by bringing them to consciousness,  Liebmann  believed that one could and would gain new insights about oneself, that could help men and women move in the direction of that proverbial universal goal, the good life. During the decade-plus of my intense association with theology study and practical ministry, several therapies including Gestalt, Roger’s mirroring, psychodrama, neurolinguistic programming and others were being deployed through the therapeutic community, along with an explosion of pharmaceuticals that were being prescribed by psychiatrists.

The 21^st century has witnessed more research as well as more theory about the relationship between religion and psychology. In fact one of those theorists, James Hillman studied under Carl Jung, who advanced the work of Freud into the unconscious,  and Hillman nudged Jung’s work even further by essentially democratizing all talk and thought and perceptions about the ‘in extremis’ moments into a language of the imagination, complete with mythic characters, voices, gods and goddesses, that he claims could be at play in those moments, as a window into our own self-understanding.

His contention that abnormal psychology, as a clinical study, has done more to enhance the reputation of the academic study of psychology and the reputation of the profession with its exclusive focus on the literal, empirical, scientific modality, methodology and diagnoses that issue therefrom. A poetic basis of mind, (his phrase) using the imagination as a first ‘entry’ into the ‘scene’ of our worst ‘in extremis’ moments could temper the binary ‘triage of what are called abnormal psychological ‘cases’  into either medical sickness or criminality or both. The heavy influence of morality and ethics that pervades the work of abnormal psychology is both implicit and explicit in both theology and medicine.

By risking a startling premise that each of us, with or without clinical psychological/psychiatric training and credentials, can be available to others in our circle, as listeners without bringing to the situation a bias for or against the ‘narrative’ of the symptoms which ‘another’ is experiencing. Just letting the story of the symptoms, all of those symptoms, become the flags or guideposts that might lead to speculative, imaginative conjecturing about what archetype might be ‘having the person in its thrall’…as dreams have us all in their thrall. This business of dreams, the underworld, the Jungian Shadow into which, as Robert Bly puts it approximately, is imaged as: we shove our traumas, troublesome memories guilt, shame and embarrassments into a packet we metaphorically trundle around on our back, waiting for their re-emergence at some later date, some of their choosing and some of our accidental tripping over.

We are now more conscious of the universality of our shared ‘in extremis’ moments; some call them transformational, some call them revelatory and/or rebirths, some call them ‘maturational points of the soul’ picking up on John Keats image of human life as a ‘vale of tears’ that are essential for these ‘turning points’ in our psyche to occur in the ‘development of our soul.’ Hillman calls this process the ‘making of soul’ which he articulates as the ‘non-thing’ space or ‘tendency’ that exists between two polar opposites, such as puer (youth) and senex (old age).

Traditionally, at least the Christian religion has been focused on the promise of ‘eternal life’ as the reward for surrendering to Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord, whose death on the Cross was atonement for the sins of the world, and the grace of that atonement is the reward for ‘conversion’ to a disciple of Jesus Christ Resurrected. The spirit is lifted upward toward God and Heaven, as one’s thoughts, attitudes and actions begin to the focused on worship and thanksgiving to God and living to and for God.

The ‘vale of tears’ and the soul’s need for that vale (different as it is for each of us) open the gates of our individual and anxiety-generating ‘dark side’, in Hillman’s perspective, through a window of a repeating archetype, before the moment is diagnoses either as a psychic illness or a legal matter, prior to the morality police get their hands on it. This perspective is not an attempt  to disavow whatever harm might have been done to others. Nor is it a disavowal of any potential psychological intervention that might be needed. Hillman’s attitude is that we have had a half-century of therapy and we are no further ahead, in that the emotional crises, the social crises, and the geopolitical crises continue unabated. His professional intuitive, and imaginative counsel is to invite participation of all of us in those ‘in extremis’ moments of those who permit and invite us to walk with their psychic pain.

There is no worship of gods or goddesses, as there is in religion, merely an attempt to imagine an identification of the ‘voice’ or identity of the god or goddesses in the current moment of crisis. Nevertheless, this ‘archetypal psychology’ approach offers opportunities for active and sensitive imaginations to ‘speculate’ on the possibilities offered in and through the classical mythical world, for our insight, and our self-understanding and awareness as part and participant of a universal, timeless and repeating jumble of patterns.

The opening the door of our consciousness, both individual and shared, to our individual and shared collective unconscious, also has the merit of attributing ‘souls’ to everything, including plants, animals, buildings, cities, towns, families schools, colleges, in a manner of ‘getting us to go beyond and behind the superficial and the literal in all of our perceptions. And the attitudes and perceptions that are engendered in and through such a process enhance our openness and perception of our shared human value, our shared, yet unique, embodiment of an archetype of which we were likely unaware.

Heightened sensibilities, enhanced deployment of the imagination, democratized listening and listeners, and enhanced perceptions of our shared ‘human psyche’ seeks to re-orient our culture from positivism, from empiricism and from the scientific method and approach, by supplementing that approach, which engulfs even the church, with a less morally and ethical judgemental approach and relationship both to our worst moments and to others. Rather than focusing on judgemental doomsday fear and terror, shame and guilt, one is lead to healing and transforming, the attested and longed-for goal and purpose of theology and faith.

Of course, there will continue to be those among both the psychology and the theology fraternities who strenuously object to any ‘new’ intervention from the ‘secular’ world into the world of sacred theology, and for any portentous links between God and the psychological sciences. Irrespective of the basic fact that the bridge between science and theology has been both crossed and accommodated decades ago, this more recent iteration of the multiple links between science and theology from an imaginative and somewhat courageous and even intemperate and impulsive ‘explosion’ of a highly trained, disciplined and creative mind.

Nothing here claims that archetypal psychology is either ordained or sanctioned by God of any formal religion. Nothing here seeks to defame or decry the faith of those whose lives have been and will continue to be positively impacted by traditional images, traditionally defined and interpreted. This space explores what might be considered some new ‘lenses’ through which the spectre of faith and worship, and belief and both morality and ethics might be envisioned. Without attempting to ordain those lenses as “God formally approved” or dismissing them as “Godless” “heretical,” and “atheistic,” new thoughts, perceptions, attitudes and deployment of the imagination pays tribute to a tradition of William Blake the seeker.

…Blake’s insistence at the end of his piece, There is no Formal Religion, that God ‘becomes as we are, that we may be as he is,’ is surely an incarnational reflection, as much as his earlier observation that ‘He who sees the infinite in all things sees God’ (op.cit.) is mystical. Each can find their rightful place within thoughtful Christian writing…..For Blake, holding together what he called ‘contraries’ was important—even fiercely and protectively held contrary experiences, and opposite views, I heard echoes of a Blakean insistence that ‘without contraries there is no progression’ in a recent study by the University of York’s Centre for the Study of Christianity and Culture. In  three-year project with four sample cathedrals, one of the principles in the life of a contemporary cathedral on which they reflected was ‘the potency of adjacency.’ (Lucy Winkett, William Blake: A Prophet for our time, September 2018, from churchtimes.co.uk)

Searching for God # 68

 It seems much easier to discern the culprits in this maddening, frenetic and obsessive-compulsive drive to billions and trillions by those who have already creamed off their first several millions, than it does to find the 21^st century echoes of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron.

In an  essay entitled, “Romantic Poetry and the Culture of Modernity, by James Engells, 2001, from the Harvard Library, whose URL is:

http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.lustRepos:2689348

we read:

Now we are on the verge of altering our own natures genetically. If we do it well, it will be worthwhile, but the flow of knowledge and its implications for what we mean by human nature continue to accelerate. Romantic poets answer the challenge of humanizing the knowledge we gain, of remaining human in the face of the new powers and new sorrows such knowledge brings. Their obstinate questionings, their poems, are therefore friends to us, but the challenge persists. We hope for great spirits now on earth. Los admonishes us. We stand, like Keats's dreamer--or poet-- in The Fall of Hyperion, at the bottom of the steps, and we are admonished.

“Romantic poets answer the challenge of humanizing the knowledge we gain, or remaining human in the face of the new power and new sorrows such knowledge brings. We hope for great spirits now on earth”…..

What inspiration can the ‘great spirits now on earth draw from the Romantics? And what impact can such inspiration have on the theology of the last three quarters of the 21^st century and beyond?

We find hints of answers from Karen Armstrong in The Case for God p. 231:

Wordsworth’s younger contemporary John Keats (1795-1821) used the term ‘Negative , Capability’ to describe the ekstatic attitude that was essential to poetic insight. It occurred ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Instead of seeking to control the world by aggressive reasoning, Keats was ready to plunge into the dark night of unknowing: ‘I am however young writing at random- straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness—without knowing the bearing of any one assertion, of any one opinion. He claimed gleefully that he had no opinions at all, because he had no self. A poet, he believed, was ‘the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity. True poetry had no time for ‘the egotistical sublime,’ which forced itself on the reader:

We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hands in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject,--How beautiful are the retired flowers! How they would lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out ‘admire me I am a violet! Dote on me I am a primrose. (Keats to J, H, Reynolds, February 3, 1818)

Where the philosophers had been wary of the imagination, Keats saw it as a sacred faculty that brought new truth into the world. ‘I am certain of nothing but of the loneliness of the heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the Imagination sees as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their Sublime creative of essential beauty.’ (Keats to Benjamin Bailey, November 22, 1817)

Keats, the poet was more than ‘ready’ to enter into the dark night of unknowing. His notion of ‘Negative Capability’ describes the ekstatic attitude of poetic insight when one is capable of being in, with and even under uncertainties.

Through a history of scientific/military advancements, and through two world wars while science seemed destined to demonstrate its dominance over human thought, there were glimpses of a different point of view.

For example, ‘(i)n or about December 1910, human nature changed,’ wrote the British novelist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) after visiting the startling exhibition of French impressionist painters. Artists deliberately flouted their viewers’ expectations, tacitly proclaiming the need for a new vision in a new world. Old certainties were evaporating….People wanted to break the pat asunder split the tom to make something new Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) either dismembered his subjects of viewed them simultaneously from different perspectives. The novels of Woolf and James Joyce (1882-1941) abandoned the traditional narratives of cause and effect, throwing their readers into the chaotic stream of their characters’ consciousness, so that they were uncertain about what was actually happening or how they should judge the action. (Karen Armstrong, op. cit. p 262)

Later, “in his seminal book, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934),
the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, upheld the rationality of science and its commitment to rigorous testing and principled neutrality, but argued that it did not, as commonly thought, proceed by the systematic and cumulative collection of empirically verified facts. It moved forward when scientists came up with bold, imaginative guesses that could never be perfectly verified and were no more reliable than any other ‘belief’, because testing could show only that a hypothesis was not false. Popper was often heard to say: ‘We don’t know anything.’ (Highlighting mine) According to British philosopher Bryan Magee, he believed that this was the ‘most important philosophical insight there is, which ought to inform all our philosophical activity’. (Ibid, p. 267)

The central thread of the imagination, for poets, for scientists and I would once again suggest, for James Hillman, at the core of his archetypal psychology, brings us to a nexus where two phrases intersect: ‘soul saving’ and ‘soul making’.

Britannica.com says this about soul:

The immaterial aspect or essence of a human being, that which confers individuality and humanity, often considered to be synonymous with the mind or the self. In theology, the soul is further defined as that part of the individual which partakes of divinity and often is considered to survive the death of the body…Among ancient peoples, both the Egyptians and the Chinese conceived of a dual soul. The Egyptian ka (breath) survived death but remained near the body, while the spiritual ba proceeded to the region of the dead. The Chinese distinguished between a lower, sensitive soul, which disappears with death, and a rational principle, the hun, which survives the grave and is the object of ancestor worship….To Rene Descartes, man was a union of the body and soul, each a distinct substance acting on the other; the soul was equivalent to the mind. To Benedict de Spinoza, body and soul formed two aspects of a single reality. Immanuel Kant concluded that the soul was not demonstrable through reason, although the mind inevitably must reach the conclusion that the soul exists because such a conclusion was necessary for the development of ethics and religion. To William James at the beginning of the 20^th century, the soul as such did not exist at all but was merely a collection of psychic phenomena….In Hinduism, the atman (breath or soul) is the universal, eternal self, of which each individual soul (jiva or jiva-atman) partakes….Buddhism negates the concept not only of the individual self but of the atman as well, asserting that any sense of having an individual eternal sol or of partaking in a persistent universal self is illusory.

The London Magazine (thelondonmagazine.org) in a piece focusing on two letters from John Keats, to J.H. Reynolds, 22 November 1817, and to J.A. Hessey, 8^th October 1818, reports:

In  long letter, written in early 1819, Keats recorded his commitment to individuation with characteristic eloquence:

The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is a ‘vale of tears’ from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven—What a little circumscribed straightened notion! Cal the world if you please ‘The Vale of Soul-making.’ Then you will find out the use of the world…Do you not see how necessary a world of Pain and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

London Magazine interjects: Tellingly, Kets characterized his insight as a faint sketch of a system of salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity. The Christian vale of tears becomes the Romantic vale of self-creation. In the story of the self it is a paradigmatic moment of linguistic and philosophical sublation.*

(*Sublation: translates the German ‘aufhebung, to cancel, to keep, and ‘to lift up, the philosophical concept meaning to cancel or negate something while simultaneously preserving of lifting it up to a higher level.)

In addition to borrowing Keat’s “vale of tears for soul making,” Hillman pay homage to the Italian philosopher, Ficino:

….(F)or Ficino the soul was ‘all things together’…the center of the universe, the middle term in all things. Psyche, not man, was the center and measure. ‘The fascination of Ficino’s work lies precisely here: in the invitation to look beyond the opaque surfaces of reality… in seeing not the body but the soul…as only the one who sees this soul sees man, as all things have their truth and this is their soul, whether they be plants or stones or stars in heaven.’ Ficinian philosophizing is in essence only an invitation to see with the eyes of the soul, the soul of things, an incentive to plumb the depths of one’s own soul so that the whole world may become clearer in he inner light. (James Hillman, Revisioning Psychology,  p. 201)

Hillman continues:

Events are related (in this modality)first and foremost to soul rather than to theology of God, science of nature, or humanistic disciplines of language, poetics and history. The question asks what bearing this even has jupon soul sees through and interiorizes, and so Ficino’s thought has been called a ‘philosophy of immanence.’ It is also a psychologizing The immanence of soul in all things and areas of study dissolves the borders between faculties and deliteralizes their contents When we turn to the psychology in a philosophy, theology or science, we no longer study the field literally fir this psychological activity educates away from the literal content and the literal notion of separate fields and departments…Ficino’s ‘triumph of decompartmentalization’ (from various subject-matter perspectives, and back to the basic events)was opposed by every vested interest in science, traditional academic philosophy and theology. Neoplatonism dangerously relativized the absolute superiority of Christian revelation, which became of Neoplatonic psychology became one perspective among many. (Ibid, p.201-202)

If, in this modality, ‘soul’ studies ‘soul’ then an attempt is implicit that not academic, clinical, or scientific ‘classifications are the starting point for any interpretation of events. The event, the story, is the first and primary evidence. And, when considered from this perspective, academic disciplines are neither discarded, nor abrogated, only set aside until after a ‘new and different’ perspective has been deployed…that of the imagination….and from the imagination, that of which achetype, metaphor, pattern is playing out in this ‘in extremis’ moment.

And example, sadly repeated, might be the insurrectional removal of a clergy, as a metaphoric reenactment of the Crucifixion.

To be continued…….

Serching for God # 67

The Romantic movement had already started to rebel against Enlightenment rationalism. The English poet, mystic, and engraver William Blake (1757-1827) believed that human beings had been damaged during the Age of Reason. Even religion had gone over to the side of a science that alienated people from nature and from themselves. Newtonian science had been exploited by the establishment, wo used it to support a social hierarchy that suppressed the ‘lower orders,’ and in Blake’s poetry, Newton, albeit unfairly, became a symbol of the oppression, aggressive capitalism, industrialization and exploitation of the modern state. The true prophet of the industrial age was the poet, not the scientist. He alone could recall human beings to values that had been lost during the scientific age, which had tried to master and control the whole of reality…(Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, p. 228-229)

From the previous post.

And although the point was introduced in the last piece that this moment in time, at the critical confluence of STEM, digital technology, and Remi Girard’s influence on imitation, and the rise of obsessive-compulsive tyrants riding a new wave of social imitation (thanks to Peter Thiel et al) who might be the comparable Newton or Newton’s for use as a symbol of oppression, aggressive capitalism, industrialization and exploitation of the modern state? Names like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer, Larry Ellison, Jensen Huang, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page and Sergey Brin and, of course, Elon Musk with the sycophantic elephant, Donald Trump as patron.

Who cannot be amazed at the relevance, parallel, radioactivity and timeliness of that phrase from the description of the 18^th century to the first quarter of the twenty-first century’s conundrum?

The tech-entrepreneur is the latest icon/archetype of capitalism, in a world whose rules of trade, institutional traditions norms and regulations, democracy and human rights protections are all atrophying, and being dismantled deliberately by politically and militarily emboldened alpha males. Foreign aid and social justice programs are considered too empathic, too compassionate and wasteful, while military build-up, as well as cyber and national security apparatcheks are deemed essential. We are being confronted hourly by headlines that announce another attack on Gaza, after a thread-bare peace has been allegedly negotiated, attacks on Ukraine and most recently the abduction of an allegedly ‘elected’ leader of Venezuela, Maduro, by the Trump departments of war and the C.I.A. At the same time, the surge of refugees, immigrant, and people living on the edge of starvation and death is, at 250,000,000, the largest number since World War II. As Richard Haas put it, approximately, on GPS with Fareed Zakaria on Sunday January 4, 2025, Trump’s move into Venezuela signals a shift from a world order of the last three-quarters of a century to a tri-polar world of regional circles of influence, one for Putin in Europe, one for Xi Jinping in south-east Asia and the third for Trump in the Western hemisphere, where each will be enabled to do whatever it is they want to do.

Separation from nature, separation from each other, and separation from the circles of power, not mere ‘degrees of separation’ but all-out, full-frontal, and beyond appeal are these isolations, effectively abandonments, all of them together calculated to line the pockets of the oligarchs who pave the way for the wannabe tyrants to first obtain power and then, as payback, are rewarded commercially, financially, and luxuriously. A uroborus snake’s circle of pay-to-play-reap-to-reward-to-continue-to-play…and then face excommunication by varying degrees including imprisonment, poisoning and death, if somehow these sycophants dare to criticize their ‘dear leader’. The snake image also applies to the manner in which the tyrants themselves operate, as snakes, jettisoning all vestiges of truth, all hints of care and concern for the people in their realm, all human rights, all legitimate laws and the governance agents who pass and then enforce them.

The python of political and military and cyber power, it seems, has begun its willful, strategically planned, co-ordinated and lethal design to ‘wrap itself around the neck’ of the democracies, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, the United Nations, NATO, The International Refugee Committee, and any and all collaborative, co-operative alliances, in favour of ‘strong-man tyrannies.’ Suffocation by concerted squeezing, by and through headlines that defy human rights, human decency, human sensitivity, compassion, empathy and respect, human ethics, human morality, human aspiration for truth, beauty and love those old chestnut Platonic ideals only begins to describe the malignancy of manipulation into whose vortex we have been plunged.

And it is not without considerable participation, whether conscious or unconscious or both, that the world finds itself on this precipice. The painter listened as the woman intoned, “I think I like the new paint colour,” and then blurted, “If you only like it, I will get a gallon and try it. You need to love it!” The analogy applies to the detachment from full-out-commitment that plagues us all. There is a valid and substantive argument that we are in this mess because through disinterest, detachment, indifference, apathy and lethargy we have allowed those whose desperate need for power is their obsessive undoing to climb their snivelling, snake-squirming, slippery sliding onto the front pages, through whatever form of infamy they chose, seduced a few and then a few more, and then a mountain of mostly men until finally they reached the apex of their respective political ladders. And the grease that made their slipping and sliding feasible is our collective fear of engaging with the snakes.

I rejected a kind and challenging offer of a political nomination back in 1977 for the simple reason that I refused to get into a mud-fight with a political snake who would be the opponent, whose respect for truth, dignity, decency and honour had already dissipated into lust for power. It is true that I might not have won the election; but the risk of having mud all over me and my family was too high.

Now that the snakes have overtaken the global zoo, the rest of us untrained in the ways of animal husbandry, as well as taming the snakes, are left wondering, ‘What are we to do?’ No longer do arguments about political ideology, or economic rules and regulations of free trade, or ententes to contain the use and spread of nuclear weapons, or covenants to curtail emissions of carbon dioxide and methane and other lethal gases into the atmosphere have any relevance, space in the daily press or time on the various television networks. The culture is obsessively-compulsively consumed with the minutiae of the last text, speech, social media post or even photo-op of the loudest voices in the global room. We no longer simply look down the telescope the wrong way, we have thrown away the telescope and replaced it with an electron microscope through which each syllable of text, or turn of an eye-brow is as significant as a new microbe in the eye of the research scientist looking for a cure for cancer.

We have lost our perspective, our long-sought and pursued, reinforced and sustained measure of engagement and participation in those aspects of the shared global public square over which we have some limited measure of influence. We have almost literally stopped writing and reading letters to the editor; we have watched the demise of the local press in virtually every small and medium-sized town and city in North American and with that the rise of behemoth media organizations whose interest is ultimately and exclusively, profit, in order to insure and to assure the dividends of their investors.

We are measured by our financial assets, our investment portfolios, our social and political status, along with those in elected office whose ambition is primarily, if not exclusively, self-interest, certainly ahead of the public interest.

Indeed, the public interest has, like the innumerable extinctions of various species of animals, birds, oceanic and wild-life, ceased to breath, and like the millions of divorces, suffers from no formal funeral. As T.S. Eliot wrote in the last lines of J. Alfred Profrock,

This is the way the world ends,

This is the way the world ends,

This is the way the world ends,

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Humbly and reverently and respectfully, I join in the words of Thomas Merton, speaking to monastics on the last day of his life: From       dailymeditationswithmatthewfox.org, in piece entitled, Merton and the Via Transformativa, by Gianluigi Gugliermetto, May 30, 2025, Prophetic Action, Thomas Merton, Via Transformativa:

Are the monks and hippies and poets relevant? No we are deliberately irrelevant. We live with an ingrained irrelevance which is proper to every human being. The marginal man accepts the basic irrelevance of the human condition, an irrelevance which is manifested above all by the fact of death. The marginal person, the monk, the displaced person, the prisoner, all these people live in the presence of death which calls into question the meaning of life.

If the description of the current North American cultural ethos, the anima mundi, in  this space sounds apocalyptic or existentially threatening, it is intended to sound like that. I recognize and respect that environmentalists in the late 1970’s and 1980’s painted a bleak and apocalyptic picture of environmental disaster, and found that the image was so frightening and off-putting as to be dismissed. And, given the history of the Second Coming that has been among us for two-thousand years plus, without it actually occurring, these two words, apocalyptic and existential threat have lost some of their pregnancy.

Nevertheless, there is no less truthful and impelling a way to depict what we are all facing than to link it by comparison to the period of the Romantic poets and their deferral to unified man-with-nature as well as their championing of the ephemeral, the abstract, the occult, and the unconscious, although they did not have the benefit of either Freud Jung or Hillman and others.

Not only do we, and can we, unshackle the culture from the snake constrictions but we can also refresh our former relationship with the Romantics, and the scholars and theorists of the unconscious.

Let’s begin that process by looking at the word pistis.

The word translated as ‘faith’ in the New Testament is the Greek pistis (verbal form: pisteuo) which means ‘trust; loyalty; engagement; commitment. Jesus was not asking people to ‘believe’ in his divinity, because he was making no such claim. He was asking for commitment. He wanted disciples who would engage with his mission, give all they had to the poor, feed the hungry, refuse to be hampered by family ties, abandon their pride, lay aside their self-importance and sense of entitlement, live like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. And trust in the God who was their father.

When the New Testament was translated from Greek into Latin by Saint Jerome (C.342-420) pistis became fides (‘loyalty’). Fides had no verbal form so for pisteuo Jerome used the Latin very credo, a word that derived from cor do,’ I give my heart.’ He did not think of using opinor (‘I hold an opinion’). When the Bible was translated into English, credo, and pisteuo became ‘I believe’, in the King James version (1611). But the word ‘belief’ has since changed its meaning. In Middle English, beleven meant ‘to prize; to value; to hold dear.’ It was related to the German belieben (‘to love’), liebe (‘beloved’), and the Latin libido. So belief originally meant loyalty to a person to whom one is bound in promise or duty. When Chaucer’s knight begged his patron to ‘’accept my bileve,’ he meant ‘accept my fealty, my loyalty.’ In Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, which was probably written around 1603, shortly before the publication of the King James Bible, the young nobleman Bertram is urger to ‘believe not thy disdain’: he must not entertain his contempt for lowborn Helena and allow it to take deep root in his heart. During the late seventeenth century, however, as our concept of knowledge became more theoretical, the word ‘belief’ started to be used to describe an intellectual assent to a hypothetical—and often dubious—proposition. Scientists and philosophers were the first to use it in this sense, but in religious contexts the Latin credere and the English ‘belief’ both retained their original connotations well into the nineteenth century. (Karen Amstrong, The Case for God, p. 87-88)

Language morphs, changes, and translations also part a significant role in what today has become a literal almost legal connotation of the word ‘believe’….and for some fundamentalists, it is reinforced by social sanctions often of considerable insult and pain. To attempt to release some of the linguistic and cultural constrictions and meanings that have been grafted onto the words we use, however, is a process demanding more time and research than this space and time permit.

To be continued…… 

Searching for God # 66

 Can we pin the responsibility for declaring the female gender, “the weaker sex,” on the history of the alpha male? And if we can, does that also enable us to release our cultural archetypes from the collective, conscious and apparently indomitable alpha males’ controlling influence on North American culture, perhaps others as well? Of course, not all males are or even aspire to be ‘alpha’ males; however, much of history has been carried out, written about and then dispensed, taught and championed by men. And the ‘weaker sex’ has, with few exceptions, been defined by house and family management, gathering, cooking and essentially, informally, holding the community together. The men, nevertheless, made the laws, regulations, wars and conducted whatever trade was appropriate to the region and time frame.

This world’s culture for centuries held the view that what they could  appreciate with their senses, was ‘their’ world, while beyond the sensate was other-worldly, and generated various myths, depending on the tribe and time. God and solar system remained, along with nature as ‘separate’ from human ‘reality’ and for many years the separation was considered inviolate.

It is only within the last century and the work of Freud, Jung and later Hillman that the notion of a human unconscious came into play, as theoretical concept and/or archetype that, different from and separate from the consciousness and the senses, cognition and imagination, nevertheless, was deemed to play an active role in the events, perceptions attitudes in our lives. Dreams, visions, hallucinations, traumas, memories and even actions and words that blurted out from beyond our conscious minds took on a significance for those researchers, the impacts of which continue to ripple through our culture in the twenty-first century.

However, the “academic” subject (for formal academic/scientific study) of the unconscious, both personal and collective, has escaped critical scrutiny from many quarters, not least of which is the STEM-focused-and-driven university and college community in North America. “Escaped” could well be a euphemism for ‘buried’ and ‘ignored,’ ‘denied’ and ‘dismissed.’ Whether naturally, or unconsciously from a deeply seated fear of being obliterated by the mainstream of the culture if they divert from and disdain the tidal wave, the churches, too, have fallen in lock-step with STEM-attitudes as well as the collective thinking, demonstrable and provable reality and its verity. Literal, empirical perceptions and measurements comprise the reality in which we live, and our many comparisons, observations, and judgements are based on those levels of perception, thought and even belief.

Behaviorism, ‘we behave our way out of our emotional troubles” as Dr. Phil has put it so often, dominates the landscape of therapies too. Married to and intimate with a behavioral measure of evil, morality and ethics are also measured, assessed, discerned and judged by and through one’s behavior.  Motivations for actions, however, remain a matter of deep, perplexing and confounding professional research and discernment. Omissions are considered from the lens of ‘what is expected as good and moral and ethical and conventional behavior’ and left to be ‘seen’ as gaps in what otherwise ‘should’ or ‘could’ or ‘would’ have been. Emotions are considered, in many quarters, as fickle and transitory and therefore untrustworthy experiences and expressions of psychic states that, like gnats on a pond, flit here and there and disappear. Lapses in judgement, too, are often considered mere ‘gaps’ of civil and polite society. It is far easier to perceive, and then to judge, with little to no injury, those gaps in polite and considerate and gracious behavior than it is to judge what might have been a malicious intent. Social conformity, too, plays an integral role in our minimizing, deflecting, deferring or even denying malicious intent on the part of another whether that malicious intent is conscious or even unconscious.

Nevertheless, social media is replete with malicious words and acts, for which no one is, at least ostensibly, held accountable. Transparency having evaporated, responsibility and accountability were thrown out with the bathwater. The degrees of consciousness and unconsciousness that are playing out on social media is a subject for considerable highly warranted research.

What has all of this to do with any conceivable, credible, responsible and authentic ‘search for God?’

Well, for starters, if our physical reality is permitted to trump, minimize or even represent our psychic and emotional and spiritual reality, then, of course no one can argue that men have more body mass, more physical muscle than women. A literal and fleeting glance on the part of a space alien could only conclude that men are bigger and  stronger, in general, than women. Nevertheless, there are many other variables on which women score as much stronger than men. Let’s start with the endurance of pain, and move to the statistical life expectancy, and the capacity to endure heavier and more complex emotional distress, not to mention the collective strength of their ‘circles’ from which many women take and resupply emotional, psychic and narrative energy. Indeed the paradox of their literal weakness is matched by their fundamental strength, as compared directly with the male species. Even with these conceded strengths of women by many men, the stereotype of the weaker gender prevails, to the detriment, socially, politically, culturally, psychologically and certainly theologically of both men and women.

Why is it a detriment to women? First, it sets up a negative starting position for women to consider their identity alongside of their male counterparts, a presumption that is not borne out by the full composite and detailed and nuanced picture of their gender. The psychic role of ‘size,’ ‘dimension,’ ‘power,’ ‘status,’ ‘influence,’ is another of the male-propagated myths that, some of us considered might have been de-bunked as long ago as the story of David and Goliath. Nevertheless, the prowess of ‘big’ over ‘small’ is a foundational element in many of the distortions, conflicts and tensions with which the world is currently grappling, and not only on the gender-war front.

Indeed, so insidious and nefarious is that simple reductionism that skepticism from all  quarters is needed in order to discern if and when the prototypical even applies. The identity of the Sumo wrestler, for example, is defined by his body size and shape, as is the ballerina’s. Fitting ‘size’ into ‘roles’ is a task for which considerable experience, training, judgement and sensitivity are required.

And size, physical and literal size, while it plays a significant role in many of our life decisions, is also a metaphor for much of our individual and collective perceptions, thoughts, observations, judgements and decisions. “What you see is what you get” is an adage that captures the mind-set, the culture, even the authenticity of reality, including the character of others. And to posit a different perspective, that there is a deep well (metaphorically) of memories, traumas, dreams, visions, hallucinations and voices (think mythic gods and goddesses) that also have considerable influence on our lives, our perceptions, projections, atttitudes, beliefs, calling it the unconscious, (that is both personal and individual as well as shared and collective) to some may seem like ‘gobble-de-gook’!

“Psycho-babble” is another disdainful attempt to describe the subject. “Out of sight, out of mind” is a posture chosen deliberately by many men and women, given the already highly complex, subtle and nuanced and confusing aspects of our lives. And, if we can make a substantial living through the formal learning of mathematics, science, engineering and technology, who needs to dig into a realm about which there is so much mystery, uncertainty, confusion, and speculation. Medicine, law, accounting, engineering, astronomy, physics, chemistry, bio-chemistry, biology, neuroscience, economics, social sciences and even psychology are all operating, highly successfully it would seem, under the guidelines of the literal, empirical, and the scientific.

Why would theology have any interest in the unconscious? The theology schools, churches, seminaries and even the liberal arts programs where comparative theology is taught are all using methods and protocols borrowed from and emulating and imitating the scientific, academic world of perception, cognition, behaviour and even morality and ethics.

Let’s try a tentative hypothesis. The very nature of God is a mystery, beyond the grasp of the human intellect, beyond the empirical evidence needed by science, depicted and preserved in narratives which, themselves, defy the literal, empirical demands of history, the law and medicine. Is there just some possible bridge, link or even a potential connection between the psychic unconscious and the divine? To the extent that our unconscious is a mystery for most humans, and subject to imaginative depiction metaphorically as voices of mythic gods and goddesses, and/or of archetypes, which control our psyche even beyond our conscious control, is it just a feasible possibility that God, the deity, the divine, might be ‘in touch’ with that realm of our existence, waiting for our acknowledgement and unburying it from our psychic vaults? Put another way, it is past of our spiritual journey to become conscious of the energies, meanings and influences of the unconscious as a way of ‘becoming a person before God’….a phrase borrowed from Rev. Dr. Romney Moseley’s theological book of that title.

The inordinate influence of science in the 21^st century has a similar historic development from which to learn. And, theology too, has a significant opportunity to reclaim its legitimate place in the academy, in the culture, and in the anima mundi.

The Romantic movement had already started to rebel against Enlightenment rationalism. The English poet, mystic, and engraver William Blake (1757-1827) believed that human beings had been damaged during the Age of Reason. Even religion had gone over to the side of a science that alienated people from nature and from themselves. Newtonian science had been exploited by the establishment, wo used it to support a social hierarchy that suppressed the ‘lower orders,’ and in Blake’s poetry, Newton, albeit unfairly, became a symbol of the oppression, aggressive capitalism, industrialization and exploitation of the modern state. The true prophet of the industrial age was the poet, not the scientist. He alone could recall human beings to values that had been lost during the scientific age, which had tried to master and control the whole of reality:

Calling the lapsed soul

And weeping in the evening dew

That might control

The starry pole

And fallen, fallen light renew. (William Blake Songs of Experience, Introduction)

The Enlightenment had created a God of ‘fearful symmetry,’ like the Tyger, remote from the world in ‘distant deeps and skies. The God of Newton must undergo a kenosis, return to earth, die a symbolic death in the person of Jesus, and become one with humanity.(Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, p.228-229)…

Unlike the philosophes, The Romantics were not averse to the mysterious and indefinable. Nature was not an object to be tested, manipulated, and dominated but should be approached with reverence as a source of revelation. Far from being inactive, the material world was imbued with a spiritual power that could instruct and guide us.

Since childhood, Wordsworth had been aware of a ‘Spirit’ in nature. He was careful not to call it ‘God’ because it was quite different from the God of the natural scientists and theologians; it was rather

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply intrerfused

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought

And rolls through all things   (William Wordsworth, Lines Composed a Few Miles from Tintern Abbey) (Armstrong, op, cit. p. 229)

No doubt others have articulated more fully and likely with more clarity the obvious connection between the negative impact of rationalism and the Enlightenment on humans, and a similar negative impact of the prevalent STEM literalism, empiricism, and scientific positivism of the 21 century. (Hillman for one!)

The advocacy of a link between this ‘spirit’ and the ‘soul’ of the unconscious that includes light and dark, could follow, in this highly tentative, speculative and meandering ‘search for God’ in the 21^st century.

To be continued…….