Searching for God #4

So, is it reasonable, and contestable, even, to posit that our inner psychic life, as mysterious, ephemeral, uncontained, unconstricted and unconstrained by logic, science, the human senses and reason as it continues to be, is linked with, associated with, even expressions of whatever we might call ‘divine’?

And, by divine, we do not mean holy, perfect, pure, on any level, including morality, ethics, and any guaranteed ticket to an afterlife in heaven. Beyond our senses, our reason, and even beyond our imagination might come closer to a workable set of inferences of ‘divine’. More to come……

The foundational notion of God being separate from humans, so critical to early Christian thought, conception and belief, became embodied in a political theory, the ‘divine right of kings’….

The doctrine that monarchy is God’s chosen form of government, and that rebellion against the monarch is always sin. Where active obedience to an evil ruler is morally impossible, it is held that passive obedience (i.e. the willing acceptance of any penalty imposed for non-compliance) is demanded….

Perhaps under the influence of Neoplatonism, Greek theories of divine kindship became Christianized: the emperor was the earthly image of God’s ruling wisdom. Divine attributes were used to describe kings, and in particular, imperial vocabulary used to describe Christ’s Kingship. Jewish precedents also served: monarchs were to emulate rulership of Moses and David. (From The Oxford Dictionary or the Christian Church, (ed. F.L. Cross, and E.A. Livingstone), p. 491.

In archaic thinking, there is no concept of the supernatural, no huge gulf separating human and divine. If a priest donned the sacred regalia of an animal pelt to impersonate the Animal Master, he became a temporary manifestation of that divine power. These rituals were not the expression of a ‘belief’ that had to be accepted in blind faith….Homo religiousus is pragmatic in this sense only: if a ritual no longer evokes a profound conviction of life’s ultimate value, he simply abandons it…..Religion was not something tacked on to the human condition,, an optional extra imposed on people by unscrupulous priests. The desire to cultivate a sense of the transcendent may be the defining human characteristic. (Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, p. 9)

Like Plato, Aristotle believed that human intelligence was divine and immortal. It linked human beings to the gods and gave them the ability to grasp ultimate truth. Unlike sensual pleasure or purely practical activity, the pleasures of theoria (the contemplation of truth for its own sake) did not wax and wane but were a continuous joy, giving the thinker that self-sufficiency that characterized the highest life of all. ‘We must, therefore, in so far as we can, strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us,’ Aristotle insisted. Theoria was a divine activity, so a man could practice it only ‘in so far as something divine is present to him.’ (Armstrong, op. cit. p. 71)

Origen (c.185-c.253), a Platonist, believed that he could get to know God by contemplating the universe and had seen the Christian life as a Platonic ascent that would continue after death until the soul was fully assimilated to the divine. The Egyptian Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus (c.205-70) believed that the universe emanated from God eternally, like rays from the sun so that the material world was a kind of overflowing of God’s very being; when you meditated on the universe, you, were, therefore, meditating upon God. But by the early fourth century, people felt that the cosmos was separated from God by a vast, almost unbridgeable chasm. The universe was now experienced as so fragile, moribund, and contingent that it could have nothing in common with the God that was being itself. (Armstrong, op. cit. p. 104)

The concept of the universe being created ‘ex nihilo’ emerged from this development of separation. And, from this notion of creation ex nihilo came what is known as the Arius/Athanasian controversy. While both accepted the ‘theory’ they differed significantly in what they saw as its implications.

Arius did not deny that Jesus was God, but suggested that he had merely been promoted to divine status. God had foreseen that when the Logos became a man, he would behave with perfect obedience, and as a reward had raised him to divine status in advance of his mission. The Logos thus became the prototype of the perfected human being; if Christians imitated his wholehearted kenosis*, they too could become ‘sons of God’: they too could become divine. (Armstrong, op. cit. p. 106)

*kenosis: the self-emptying of Jesus Christ in his incarnation. While fully divine, Jesus humbled himself by taking on human form, without diminishing his divine nature.

(For Athanasius) Creation ex nihilo had revealed an utter incompatibility between itself and creatures that came from nothing. The only things that we could know by our natural unaided reason were the objects of our material world, which told us nothing about God. Our brains were equipped to recognize only finite realities created ex nihilo, so we had no idea what the substance (ousia) of the uncreated God was like. God was not like any immense thing in our experience, and Arius ‘should not think of him in (such) terms. (Ibid p. 107)

It was only because we did not regard God as an immense being (as Arius did) that we could say that God could remain the all-powerful God at the same time as assuming the frailty of human flesh, because any mere being of our experience would not be two incompatible things at once. It was only because we did not know what God was that we could say that human beings could in some way share the divine nature. (Ibid. p. 109)

Whatever we consider to be God, with respect to divinity, as well as Jesus, in the Christian heritage, and his divinity/humanity, whether we are conscious of our own perceptions or not, is part of this pursuit for, of and to God. Perceptions too are not necessarily identical with, or even congruent with ‘belief’ and that distinction is not incidental or extraneous to our pilgrimage. It may well be the intersection, interaction, infusing and interweaving of our perceptions (psychological?) and our ‘beliefs’ (religious?) that might help to discern some clarity, even though the differences may be very near to imperceptible.

Contemplating God, along with Christ, however, has continued to be a running stream of tension, as are all words spilled in the process of attempting to discern and to relate to the divine. Similarly, the ‘separation of humans from God’ is rooted in the myth of the Garden of Eden, and its exegesis, while many applications of those views of that story continue to float throughout religious conversations, both formal and academic as well as informal among laity.

Notwithstanding the volumes of debate, creedal design and repetition, the tidal waves of various epistemological perceptions and disciplines about human identity, and the Shakespearean ‘character is destiny’ cornerstone of Western thought, followed much later by the dissection of society, and its impact on both character and faith in the divine, we live in a period of history under the umbrella of scientific, literal, empirical and denotative depictions and conceptions of reality. It is essentially left to artists, poets, playwrights and the creative imaginations of our time to imagine bridges between temporal, finite, literal ‘things’ and a reality that supersedes time, space, and human rationality and sense perception. Even connotation, except for the guttural, has slipped from public discourse, leaving the field of both language and perception to the denotative, as well as from much dialogue about ‘the divine’ and ‘faith’ and a prospective relationship between humans and God. And when any of us attempt to put God into the box of our literal, empirical, scientific vocabulary and perception and cognition, we already know ‘it’ (the concept of God) wont fit any of our boxes. And yet, paradoxically, the image of God cannot be excluded, excised and eliminated from those ‘boxes’.

In the 1960’s with the discovery of the DNA molecule, there was heated debate over whether, for example, Darwin’s evolution eclipsed creation. Much academic work has focused on whether science itself is compatible with religion, and with faith and with the divine. While for many that ‘divide’ is no longer one worthy of contention, neuroscience continues to probe, through scientific process of research leading to theory and more research, and the public consciousness has been virtually stripped of words, sentences, thoughts and perceptions of the infinite, the ephemeral, the ineffable.

It is, however, a conventional, secular convergence of anything about God and divinity with morality, and also with psychological abnormality that raises a spectre of considerable tension, for this scribe, and for others. A wise, if somewhat unorthodox, supervisor of a Clinical Pastoral Education unit in Chaplaincy, way back in 1988, asked his small class of student interns, “Does God have a Shadow?”

At that time, he was referring to the Jungian concept of a human Shadow. And while each student nodded in the affirmative, no further discussion took place on the subject.

In his Man and His Symbols, Conceived and edited by Carl Jung, we read:

Dr. Jung has pointed out that the shadow cast by the conscious mind of the individual contains the hidden, repressed, and unfavorable (or nefarious) aspects of the personality. But this darkness is not just the simple converse of the conscious ego. Just as the ego contains unfavorable and destructive attitudes, so the shadow has good qualities—normal instincts and creative impulses. Ego and shadow, indeed, although separate, are inextricably linked together in much the same way that thought and feeling are related to each other. The ego, nevertheless, is in conflict with the shadow, in what Dr. Jung called ‘the battle for deliverance’. In the struggle of primitive man to achieve consciousness, this conflict is expressed by the contest between the archetypal hero and the cosmic powers of evil, personified by dragons and monsters. In the developing consciousness of the individual the hero figure is the symbolic means by which the emerging ego overcomes the inertia of the unconscious mind, and liberates the mature man from a regressive longing to return to the blissful state of infancy in a world dominated by his mother. (p.110-111)

And from page 174:

When an individual makes an attempt to see his shadow, he becomes aware of (and often ashamed of) those qualities and impulses he denies in himself but can plainly see in other people—such things as egoism, mental laziness, and sloppiness; unreal fantasies, schemes, and plots; carelessness and cowardice; inordinate love of money and possessions- in short, all the little sins about which he might previously have told himself: ‘That doesn’t matter; nobody will notice it, and in any case other people do it too.’

We are, individually and collectively, so immersed in our daily chores, responsibilities, encounters, projects and careers, whatever our adult roles have turned out to be, that any thought of, acknowledgement of, and discernment of meaning and intent of our unconscious, (as noted in other parts of this space) is effectively orphaned into oblivion. Any overt attempt to retrieve that aspect of our psyche, too, suffers from a public bias under words of judgement such as: inconsequential, unimportant, irrelevant, scary, fantasy, dreams, traumas buried and forgotten forever, ‘leave it to the poets and artists’….

Take an example of a tragedy, a clerical suicide, for a moment. Any congregation subjected to such a reality, finds itself facing an internal tension: Do I want to remember, relive and re-connect with those moments when I discovered the tragedy? Or, would I prefer to encase such thoughts in a kind of vault of forgetfulness, leaving the pain and the ensuing emotions, thoughts, and impacts on my belief in God, outside any energies I might have for reflection? And while wandering back and forth between such contesting energies and provocations, I find the ‘vault’ more comfortable, more detached and detaching, as a place to park my ‘mind’ and hence more ‘emotionally freeing and releasing than ‘clinging’ to those dreadful memories, thoughts, emotions and the gaping hole of questions about God, my belief in God and the meaning of life. Doubtless, the differing responses to these questions, or ones similar in their intent, will animate conversation among those in the pews for a considerable time. Grief, as we all know is neither simple nor brief. And the loss of a clergy, someone previously trusted, ‘known’ in a way unique to the role and relationship of parishioner and priest, qualifies as a loss which inevitably and inescapably prompts personal as well as collective grief.

The divide between ‘re-living’ the memories and the death or sealing them in some mental safety-deposit box, represents the kind of tension that attends many different other kinds of personal, organizational professional tragedies. Divorce, separation, serious accidents, fires, draughts, famines, wars, private home invasions, bankruptcies, job loss, serious illness, these and many more comprise any list of human crises which James Hillman dubs ‘in extremis’ moments.

None of us can or will deny that such events, given a date and time and place, will indelibly imprint themselves on our psyches forever, whether we ‘like’ it or not. Their historic, literal, empirical reality cannot be denied. What the impact on our psyche of those ‘in extremis’ moments might be tends to vary depending on many factors, only some of which we are able to access and articulate. And, those varying impacts themselves will also morph over time, sometimes shifting from deep and unforgiving anger and vengeance, to a more moderate and releasing “letting-go”, perhaps even forgiveness and empathy. Popular psychology advises against holding tight to a single, dark and immutable anger, disappointment and revenge-motive.

In the midst of such crises, few of us are ready to dig into questions of meaning, purpose and background, unless our relationship or our professional role brings expectations of such ‘digging’. However, memory, especially memory of significant events has a way of either implanting deep seeds and images, or erasing our conscious memory, so that the trauma does not overtake our mind. And the public consciousness and vocabulary of such ‘in extremis’ moments have shifted, historically, from a rigid stoicism and burying of emotions displayed in public to a more open, shared and conventional, even if minimal, display of emotions. (Men and women continue to differ in their respective degree of comfort in sharing emotions with others, stereotypically, women are more comfortable, while men are more restrained.)

These peripheral observations are neither foreign nor abstruse for most. Indeed, they are a central component of living in the 21^st century in the West, and likely elsewhere as well. The experiences of ‘in extremis’ moments, indeed, are also core to each and every individual person’s biography, both physically and empirically, as well as psychically and emotionally. Medical case histories, for example, seek out, document, curate and analyse the moments when the person has interacted with the medical profession. Numerical detailing of the body’s pulse, blood pressure, oxygen levels, blood sugar levels, weight and height, all contribute to a beginning grasp, orientation and eventually hopefully a comprehension of the ‘‘presenting problem’ that can and will evoke the appropriate intervention, a treatment plan.

Whether fortunately or not, depending on your perception, attitude and orientation to the universe, the ‘other side’ of our ‘soul history’ is not as easily measured, quantified, and documented, curated and analyzed, in order to determine a specific ‘problem’. It essentially seeks out those ‘in extremis’ moments, and attempts to integrate them, much as we have done, and continue to do, whether that work is conscious and deliberate or unconscious and random or both. There may well be a noted time-line, helping to discern the probable impact on a young child, or adolescent, or adult of these personal crisis moments. Developmental psychology swims in these waters. So too does sociology and social work, as well as criminology and professional athletics. And along with the ‘psychological stability’ and ‘intellectual aptitude’ and physical attributes, there is often something called ‘character’ that is implicit in any investigation, for the purposes of letters of reference, job postings, promotions. And that aspect is often conflated with ‘moral turpitude or a clean record, as well as ‘extra’ notations of altruism, kindness and community attentiveness.

The literal, empirical, scientific perception  and value of all of these ‘attributes’ is considered as given, normal, acceptable and ethical. Adherence to the law, the local traditions and customs, the social expectations of being a ‘team-player’ all constellate into an image, which, itself is then ranked by those ranking, from highly favourable to highly unfavourable. And that process, depending on the literal, empirical perceptions and the accompanying attitudes and values of those data pieces, pwill impact other decisions through employment, marriage, as well as community engagement. It is in and through all of these data-points individually and collectively assimilated, accessed and interpreted that we gather a personal and public reputation. Indeed, for many, these data points comprise what we consider to be our identity.

So, our relationship with the outside world, increasingly finds itself imprinted on some soft-ware program, often for the purposes of marketing products or services, or for those designing public policy or academic research. And, in many cases, we all reckon with the public impressions that we believe others have of us.

And then, as might be expected, we also deploy the same ‘template’ in our private assessment of our relationship to God. As Hélene, a thirty-eight year old breast cancer patient asked, ‘Why is God doing this to me, after I have lived a good life?’

Whether we go to church, or not, whether we consider ourselves members of a religious organization or not, something within continues to prompt such questions as Hélene asked. When tragedy strikes, irrespective of its nature, causes, and impact, we are wont to wonder, “Where is God in all this mess?”

To be continued…… 

Despots, sycophancy and impunity...from their ilk and the rest of us, including state actors

Despots seem to have a fascination with, if not a fixation on, their ‘kind’….almost like dogs who bark feverishly when they see another of their ilk. With dogs, it is both customary and totally innocuous….unless, of course, there is a sense of danger in one or both. A seemingly clashing epithet, about likes-and-likes, comes from the criminal world: ‘there is no honour among thieves’.

A third perspective might read: Despots, being seriously and dangerously weak and blind to their narcissistic spinelessness, need the image of reinforcement in order to continue their heinousness. Their reinforcement might come from sycophantic grovellers, the oligarchs in Russia, for example, or, in America those kneeling at the feet of their ‘God-delivered’ messiah, or in Israel, those in the far right of the Knesset who have determined to block a two-state solution, to perpetuate a war in Gaza (or wherever else they ‘see’ the ‘hand’ of Iran) and also to protect Netanyahu’s hold on power and prevent his being jailed.

Of course, behind both despots and their acolytes, there are a myriad of personal, social, cultural and perhaps even historic and religious motives. Personal self-aggrandizement, the most obvious, is the one the public media focuses on as most reliable and most beyond public dispute. And, such a deeply ingrained and virtually imperceptible and disarming motive, hardly stirs even the most virulent opponents in their quest to unseat those despots, even acknowledging their contempt for them and the serious damage those despots are continue to inflict on their ‘people’. Alexei Navalny’s focus on Putin’s luxurious estate on the Black Sea, at least in western reporting, aroused barely a raised eye-brow of disdain, as if such self-indulgence, where permitted without either public scorn or criminal charge, were not only common, but almost tolerated. After all, weren’t the poisonings and shooting of political enemies much more insidious and dangerous? And wasn’t the illegal, criminal and totally without justification of the invasion of Ukraine not far more reprehensible? And, to be sure, both the killings and the invasion are far more heinous.

However, this glamour of the ‘rich’ exhibited without shame in Putin’s Black Sea estate, is not without merit as a serious symbol for the Russian people whose history has witnessed millions of conversations about those ‘in the inner circle’ and the majority of the rest. In America, the Mar-a-Logo estate of the current Oval Office tenant, is merely the stage for the trump theatre of the absurd, the dialogue and manuscript of which pours into the screens and onto the front pages hourly. Even, by now, calling Obama treasonous for any ‘non-evident meddling in the 2016, as trump has done, while in itself a treasonous act as Robert Reich notes in his recent Substack piece, stirs only a smirk from main-stream media talking heads, along with the scorn of people like Andrew Weissman’s detailing of the abduction of innocent men, women and children within the building in New York city where they appeared for their court hearing, by the trump gestapo, for deportation, without evidence of any criminal wrongdoing except being in the U.S.A. without documentation.

Inured, and bludgeoned and almost etherized against the savageness of the depots’ terror, including that heartless, immoral, illegitimate, illegal and unconscionable protraction of the war in Gaza by the Israeli military, at the insistence and even the bravado of Netanyahu, millions of us have continued to shake our heads, wring our hands and turn our gaze earthward, in personal, political, national and international despondency, despair, disgust and powerlessness. As Rosie DiManno, in her most recent column in the Toronto Star, puts it, ‘Evan those of us who love Israel cannot abide what it has done, and continues to inflict, upon Palestinians.’

And yet, on the same day, we read that Canada continues to send ‘bullets’ (Really?) in shipments to Israel, in spite of a moratorium to which former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Melody Joly refers, when she reports that she blocked 30 permissions for such shipments of weapons that could be used to kill, during her tenure in that post.

 And along the line of ‘inurement, etherization, of the public and the political correctness of ‘diplomatic-speak’, we read this week of three different poses on the question of recognition of the State of Palestine.

First, France declared that she would commit to such recognition at the UN, this week. Unconditional, unequivocal, unambivalent, and perfectly clear in both public vernacular and diplomatic-speak, as well as in legal-speak! Congratulations to France.

Second, Kier Starmer, Prime Minster of Great Britain, stepping his political toe into the same waters, definitely at the ‘beach’ and not in the deep-end, as it were, declared, that Great Britain would recognize the State of Palestine by September, “unless Israel takes substantive streps” on Gaza… “unless Israel agrees to a ceasefire in Gaza, allows the UN to bring in aid and takes other steps toward long-term peace”…(from the CBC, July 29, 2025). To the layman, reading and cogitating such a statement, it appears meely-mouthed, equivocal, tepid, and definitely anxious about incensing Netanyahu and the Israelis. “Please, Mr. Netanyahu, don’t make Great Britain have to take such a pivotal step as recognizing a Palestinian state, a decision to which you have been unalterably and undeniably and vehemently opposed for all of the years you have been Prime Minister!” is what the Starmer statement sounded and read like to this observer.

And then there is Canada:

From Dyan Robertson, The Canadian Press, in Toronto Star, July 28, 2025:

While Canada is not joining France in recognizing a Palestinian state, it is funding te Palestinian Authority’s preparations to lead a globally recognized country that includes Gaza and the West Bank. Ottawa is also adding $30 million to its humanitarian funding for desperate Palestinians in the Gaza Strip…. “A workable Palestinian state needs legitimate democratic governance that serves all Palestinian people”…(says foreign Minister Anita Anand) …Funding the PLO, by the Canadian government, however, is open to serious question.

From Noria Research, in a piece entitled, “The Palestinian Authority, a plausible post-Gaza solution?” on November 24, 2024, we read:

All indications…suggest that Israel’s destructive campaign will continue on for some time longer. Be that is it may, members of the international community are still devoting much of their energies into planning for ‘the day after’. In these regards, the return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza, a territory that has been out of its control since 2007, is not infrequently put forward as a viable option. For a number of reasons, this strikes as dubious…..Due to the failures of the process begun in Oslo, Palestinians in the Occupied Territories had been living through a succession of political crises well before October 7^th introduced a rather seismic rupture: 2007’s partitioning of the occupied territories and consolidation of dueling government authorities. Elections forever delayed or canceled. Authoritarian upsurges in the West Bank and Gaza. Intensified colonization The blockade of Gaza. And, as commemorated in the Abraham Accords, regional marginalization….The truth is that the so-called ‘Oslo-Accords’ never envisaged the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state. Rather, they institutionalized an arrangement whereby the PA was enlisted as subcontractors for the Israeli military administration—and whereby Palestine’s economic dependence on Israel was quietly deepened. Premised upon security cooperation from the very start, the PA was allowed to hire tens of thousands of policemen and civil servants and to exercise a degree of control over the inhabitants of the Occupied Territories. It was obstructed, however, from opposing Israel’s pursuit of colonial ambitions in any meaningful way. In terms of governance and advancing the Palestinian national project, the PA’s record can only be called woeful. It has consolidated a highly securitized fiefdom, its police and intelligence agents eating up one third of annual budgets and numbering 85,000 as of the last 2010’s (one for every 48 Palestinians, a ratio of nearly nine times higher than that of the United States). Fed by counterparts in Israel, these actors maintain a system of surveillance and control designed to prevent the mobilization of a political opposition. As they do, Israel’s construction of settlements continues apace and prospects of salvaging a two-state solution wither on the vine.

So here we are, caught between the unequivocal declaration from France, the ambivalent British statement, and the ‘funding for both humanitarian aid (of course, needed and warranted) , and the PLO by Canada (Why, fund the PLO?) ….

Meanwhile the IDF (Israel’s military) continues to wage military conflict in Gaza, seemingly unabated either by American (trump)pressure, or by international public of official opinion. Subterfuge, deceit, camouflage, colonialization and quiet ‘immunity’ from the despots of the world who, themselves, would gladly entertain similar forays into the incursion, invasion, domination and impunity business of their own chicanery. And all of this is linked with a pallid and tepid, and only meagerly understood cognition of the complexities of the situation, certainly in the West in both media and political circles, only exacerbates the conundrum. 

Addressing 'big brother' answers to global hate, division, prejudice, wars and human survival

What does no politics in the classroom mean? Ford government’s directive has created fear and confusion, say parents and teachers

 Nathan Bawaan Staff Reporter Toronto Star, July 27, 2025

A temporary ban on students sharing their family’s culture in class. A parent-organized Pride event moved outside school hours. Teachers afraid to answer students’ questions around the Israel-Hamas war.

Over the past academic year, Toronto parents and teachers say activities and discussions that would typically be normal to have in the classroom have suddenly become a source of fear and confusion — and they pin the blame on an edict dropped by the Ontario government last September.

Ahead of the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks, then-education minister Jill Dunlop issued a memo to Ontario school boards to keep “political biases” out of the classroom to ensure these spaces remain “safe, inclusive and welcoming for all students and staff.”

“Nothing is neutral,” said Carl James, a professor and the Jean Augustine Chair in Education, Community & Diaspora at York University. “The curriculum cannot be seen as outside of providing and producing a way of seeing things.”

The Star has previously reported on incidents when the TDSB has used the ministry’s directive to block certain field trips and movie screenings, and censor parts of high school yearbooks.

These cases involved matters related to Palestine — along with activities and discussions around Israel and Tibet — reflecting broader concerns the province’s directive has largely been used to shut down conversations on the topic

A temporary ban on students sharing their family’s culture in class. A parent-organized Pride event moved outside school hours. Teachers afraid to answer students’ questions around the Israel-Hamas war.

Over the past academic year, Toronto parents and teachers say activities and discussions that would typically be normal to have in the classroom have suddenly become a source of fear and confusion — and they pin the blame on an edict dropped by the Ontario government last September.

Ahead of the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks, then-education minister Jill Dunlop issued a memo to Ontario school boards to keep “political biases” out  of the classroom to ensure these spaces remain “safe, inclusive and welcoming for all students and staff.”

-

So far, this piece has been lifted without editing from today’s edition of the Toronto Star.

Readers of this space will already know where the next few sentences and paragraphs are likely to point. There are so many levels on which this scribe is incensed. Fortunately, I submitted my formal resignation from the Ontario school board for which I worked for some 14 years, plus four additional years while I was on a requested leave of absence, while I worked in a community college and then attended graduate school. I would in this climate be unable, unwilling even to sign another contract with any school board in Ontario. If I did, I would be living on very thin ice if I were subjected to the political constraints of any memo from the provincial government that attempted to police the language, attitudes, even the biases and prejudices that I encountered from my students. Notwithstanding the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as well as the horrendous terrorist attack of October 7, and the ensuring genocide on the part of Israel, not to mention the deployment of food and water and health care as weapons of war by Israel, and also notwithstanding the tidal wave of white religious supremacy and nationalism that has driven across the United States, to the exclusion of anything hinting of D.E.I., I think there are a few basic considerations for teachers, parents, and especially politicians that might be worth considering in this moment,

·      First, teachers, principals and school boards should never be asking the provincial government for guidance in the manner in which conversations are ‘permitted in their classrooms. of the classroom to ensure these spaces remain “safe, inclusive and welcoming for all students and staff.”

 

·      Second, teachers, themselves, are expected to maintain an environment of personal respect, dignity, and tolerance, even in the face of intense differences of opinion, about whatever subject that emerges. And should that test beg for outside ‘help,’ then the teaching moment that test contains has already been lost

 

·      Third, as in the matter of ‘banning books,’ censorship is, as history has proven repeatedly for centuries, the quickest and most assured path to make radioactive, and thereby even more seductive, dangerous, explosive and magnetic, whatever is considered worthy or, and worse, demanding to be banned.

 

·      Fourth, those parents who are concerned about racism, bigotry, prejudice and hate, and their concern is anything but frivolous, whether Arab/Palestinian or Jewish, whether Tibetan or Chinese, whether Pakistani or Indian, whether Canadian indigenous/ Metis or Inuit, or Caucasian, whether Roman Catholic or Muslim, Protestant or Muslim, Protestant or Roman Catholic, Ukrainian or Russian…the moment at which such sparks of hate erupt, it is clearly the moment for a ‘time-out’ and some very strict and disciplined, controlled and professional maturity…’

Here is a hypothetical piece of pedagogical rhetoric:

this is where the conversation has to take the same turn in the road as we expect of those leaders who are unable or unwilling to make such a turn….to see, to listen, to seriously consider, both the specific words you ae using, as well as the direct import those words are having in this very moment on your classmates. I am no geopolitical political scientist, nor am I the therapist for your families nor for your ethnicity. I am not the armed police who have the dreaded role of breaking up the violent protests on campuses like Columbia, Harvard, and even the University of Toronto and Concordia in Montreal. And even my layman’s grasp of history does not entitle me to hate any single group. I am only an (English) teacher, and I have no intention of putting my physical safety in danger simply in order to continue to do my job. The conflicts that are raging every hour on every screen around the world have roots that reach back centuries. And the tsunami of hate, in which we are all now anonymously able to indulge on social media, is no excuse for what we are witnessing on the battlefields.

The wars that are raging, on so many fronts, including those primarily based on racism, religious and sexual bigotry are going to continue, likely until they spend themselves into exhaustion….and none of us in here have any idea when that might be.

Let’s agree that this island of ‘sanity’ and civility and personal respect and tolerance, and even perhaps learning about the depth of righteous indignity of various victims of history, (and to some degree aren’t we all?) so that we come to better understand not only with our brains, but with our hearts, and with the sun-setting of some of our biased fears, an understanding of what it is going to take for us all to survive on this planet…..and currently leaders, irrespective of which ‘side’ you might be on, have no respect for, consideration of and policies to enhance the protection of this planet…..and that is not a statement from any kind of specialist in environmental policy or practice.

Let’s spend less time echoing the hate of the almost exclusively male leaders and more time listening to the voices of people like Greta Thunberg, and Malala Yousufzai….and to men like Garry Kasparov, and Vladimir Kara-Murza, Boris Nemtsov, and Alexei Navalny….

That last sentence will sound like propaganda to some of your parents: however, please, for me, explain, that those names are names of people who care about freedom, human rights, protection of the shared global environment, and the many threats to us all.

If some of those names are unfamiliar to you, perhaps it is time for you to make their acquaintance…..in the interests of a different kind of conversation to which I am committed in here, and to which I invite and even implore each of you to join.

Enough with big brother, asked to rescue those whose biases themselves are seeking legal and government protection and then pretending, unsuccessfully (how else could they be?) to answer to questions that need to be addressed in each classroom.

There is no single issue, on the planet, that disturbs everyone, for which everyone on the planet does not have a share of responsibility in alleviating, ameliorating and our time is very short. 

Searching for God...#3

 Literalism begets for and begs the binary…especially in a culture dumbed down to a right or a wrong answer for each and every problem. Crises, such as 9/11, when George W. tells the world, ‘You are either for us or against us!” and the current Oval Office occupant demonizes all those who, in any major or minor degree disagree with his personal, narcissistic, and despotic need exemplify the reduction. Not only are alternative ‘thoughts,’ as opposed to and compared with ‘alternative facts,’ not permitted in a culture hygienically and militarily, obsessively and compulsively stripped of people, ideas, institutions (think both government agencies and universities, public media) that are all considered enemies, on the whim of a single tin-pot dictator, who parades as the ‘God-sent saviour’ to the American people, but this dynamic did not spring up only in the last decade.

In the third century AD, Manicheanism, founded by the prophet Mani, held as its fundamental principle that there existed an external conflict between absolute good and absolute evil.

Manicheanism was based on a supposed primeval conflict between light and darkness. It taught that the object of the practice of religion was to release the particles of light which Satan had stolen from the world of Light and imprisoned in man’s brain and that Jesus, Buddha, the Prophets and Mani had been sent to help in this task.  For the Manichean believer, the whole physical universe was mobilized to create this release. The Gnostic myth of salvation has seldom been presented on so grandiose a cosmic scale, worked out in rigorous detail; every phase of the movements of the sun, moon and stars was a stage in the deliverance of the believer’s soul and every ritual act of the individual had resonance among the heavenly bodies. (From the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, edited by F.L. Cross and E. A Livington, p.1027)

While the religion of Manicheanism was eventually driven underground by the Romans, in his youth and early adulthood, Augustine was a practicing Manichean, ‘because it taught the harsh but strangely comforting doctrine that sex was synonymous with darkness and bore the marks of the evil creator.’ (From Augnet.org,  Life of Augustine, 1031 the manichee)

From pmc.ncbi.nih.gov, written by Gregory A Petsko, May, 2008, in a piece entitled, The new Manicheans, we read:

The idea that the world can be divided into two opposing, and opposite sides is called dualism. It has perhaps its ultimate expression in a religion that thrived between the third and seventh centuries but was still practiced in the sixteenth century. It was called Manicheanism, after its prophet Mani, who was martyred in Persia around AD 277….No doubt (Augustine) would be appalled to learn that there is still a strong Manichean streak in many modern religions today, especially in their fundamentalist forms. When the religious right calls scientists agents of evil or claims that those who believe in evolution are in league with the Devil, they are adopting an essentially Manichean world view. To see things in black and white without realizing there can be shades of gray, or that everything is part of a moral dichotomy, is what philosophers call the Manichean fallacy.

When it comes to foreign policy, Western policy makers today suffer from a Manichean worldview, a caustic mindset crystallized during the decades-running Cold War with the Soviet Union.

(From the Abstract) In this…piece for the American conservative, the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy’s Research Director, September 9, 2020, Dr. Arta Moeini, argues that the persistence of the Blob- the North Atlantic foreign policy establishment-and their relentless support for primacy can be explained using a psychosociological and generational analysis. Shaped by the dualistic paradigm of the international system during the Cold War, this Baby Boomer Generation of elites suffers from a Manichean psychology and ideological fixation crystallized through decades-running US-Soviet rivalry.

Darkness and Lightness, absolute Evil and Absolute Goodness, as archetypes, continue to hold considerable influence among those pew-dwellers  who remain in Christian church pews. It is even a central tenet for some preachers of the ‘Christian’ faith. Satan and God, epitomize the two absolute poles of religion and directly confront the psychological polytheism posited by James Hillman in archetypal psychology. Monotheism, as one of those poles, the other being Satan, continues, for many, to uphold the binary, either-or perspective especially of the morality of human behaviour. From a psychological perspective that seeks to perceive ‘differently’ from the ‘soul’ Hillman urges his readers to consider a different imaginative perspective that, perhaps some god or goddess (not of Christian or another faith) buy rather from Greek mythology) may be reenacted. And with this lens, we might acquire a different and more nuanced, subtle, and perhaps even more complex exegesis of our most extreme moments. Hillman posits that the ‘soul’ looks ‘downward’ into the darkness and the pain and the trauma of our lives, while for him the ‘spirit’ looks upward into the light of promise and hope. For him, the soul seeks the space between, without turning a blind eye or deaf ear toward the darkness. As a bridge between the extremes, not only or our morality but also of our psyche’s perceptions, soul has the potential to moderate the absolutes, of both monotheism and literalism.

The absoluteness of this dichotomy of absolute good and absolute evil is troublesome for Hillman although his argument is not with religion, per se, but with the manner in which psychological pain and evil have become conflated. Fo Hillman, God is neither blind to our dark side, nor contemptuous of our actions. Indeed, his attempt to bridge psychology and religion, while subtle and nuanced, warrants much more study. Is it too presumptuous to suggest that for humans to probe the roots and influences and voices of our most extreme and challenging moments, including those aspects that can be considered to emerge from our unconscious, is to potential find, uncover, discern or even learn about a sympathetic,  congruent and perhaps even empathic relationship and connection to our search for God and the potential of our relationship to God? Transformation, at the core of the religious experience, is certainly also the core of the imaginative perspective laid onto our extreme moments. And, for Hillman, this approach is not a glib excuse to escape guilt, but rather to ameliorate whatever guilt and shame might have already become fused to those moments of trauma and darkness. His perspective is not an alternative to accountability and responsibility; rather it is a path that includes both, without piling on additional moments of trauma. Our failures, then, are not definitions of absolute evil just as our psychological ‘highs’ are not definitions of absolute goodness. And, in that light, emotions, too, given their temporality and changeability, are more likely to ‘fit’ into that lens, with less psychic and behaviour influence.

The moral implications of our actions, words and attitudes, too, have become the primary and first lens through which human behaviour is perceived, and this is especially noticeable in a culture dependent on literal, empirical, scientific apprehension of reality. Religion, over the centuries, has claimed this ‘field’ as its own, without also owning the application of this lens to its own atttitudes, beliefs and practices.

Any attempt to shift a culture’s mindset and perspective, attitudes and operating principles from first, absolutes to alternatives, and second from moral failures to psychological voices and images that, Hillman argues, can be found echoing and repeating multiple gods and goddesses from mythology, is fraught with the hurdles of the human mind’s proclivity both for instant judgements of right and wrong, and also for some deterministic path to compliance with God. The intersection of psychology and religion, or between the psyche and the spirit, is one requiring both sensitive and nuanced discernment, as well as tolerance and patience from and for any volunteer practitioners and from and for their readers. Hillman proposes that the psyche/soul dwells with those stories of down and darkness, while those of the human spirit dwell on the stories of ‘light and up’….He also differentiates between a biographic ‘case history’ and a ‘soul history’ which differs in that the latter details the emotional peaks and valleys of a human existence, while the former details the accomplishments, degrees, awards, titles and public associations. And while the Hillman dichotomy continues to echo the ‘divide’ between light and dark, he is attempting to bring a new and different lens to our misfortunes and our screw-ups. They are not, for him, first and foremost (at least psychically) a moral or ethical failure, and we can learn much about how we are ‘hardwired’ psychically, from a novel perspective. Also, Hillman contends that we have overloaded excessive responsibilities and expectations on the human ego, thereby crippling it in many instances, and flooded the diagnostic, clinical psychological assessment of too many human behaviours as diagnostically abnormal, unnecessarily and unwarrantedly. Hillman’s view is that such a template serves the professional interests of the psychological fraternity, itself deeply embedded in the literal, empirical, scientific, and consequently dismissive of the imagination which rejects both absolutes and reductionisms per se. He is attempting to ‘care for the soul’ as epitomized by the title of one of his books, The Soul’s Code.

The Christian protagonist, Paul, writing profusely in the New Testament, as he planted churches, made his own attempt to differentiate spirit and soul. From richardmiddleton.com, in  piece entitled Paul on the ‘Soul’-Not What You Might Think, October 23, 2014, we read:

Many Christians throughout history have thought that the ‘soul’ was an immaterial part of the person, and of more importance that the body. Moreover, the ‘soul’ has often been regarded as the immortal or eternal part of the person…We have come to understand that this view of the ‘soul’ ultimately goes back to Plato. In Plato’s anthropological dualism, the human person is constituted by body (partaking of mortality, change, and impermanence) and the soul, (the higher eternal part of the person; in some sense the true person). Plato understood soul (psyche) as essentially mind and regarded it as divine (he called it ‘the god within’)…..

(W)hen Paul uses ‘flesh’ in the negative sense (note that he sometimes uses it positively) he means the power of corruption in the world and in human life, and does not mean the body per se. Likewise ‘Spirit’ refers to the power of God to transform our lives, including our bodies in the resurrection. So ‘flesh’ and ‘Spirit’ are contrasted as two powers that can affect every dimension of life; they are not two realms or two parts of the human person. And they lead to two different ways of life.

Essentially, Hillman has adopted this neoplatonic view in his archetypal psychology. And while some might consider his views antagonistic to a specific faith or religion (Hillman himself was born and raised in the Jewish faith), his work seems more of a supplement, perhaps a critique, and not an attack on either specific religions or the faith experience.

Now, a question for us is whether or not our unconscious (the inner life) is in some mystical, metaphorical and psychological way related to, connected to, the divine.

To be continued……

Searching for God....#2

 Before going any further, the title ‘search for God’ is not based on a premise that God is deliberately hiding, out of range of connection….although beyond sight, sound, smell, taste and touch….not able to be connected exclusively through the senses…..and, paradoxically, also not reachable through thought, feeling, dogma or ritual, necessarily. The unique, indescribable, relationship is like no other, although we are almost obsessively determined (compulsively also?) to search and to describe our search, and any ‘sparks’ of connection in metaphoric, and often anthropomorphic terms, as if God were another person, even embracing the Jesus of the New Testament.

Some have used the word ‘relationship’ as a synonym for God; while others have suggested that God is not a noun but a verb….while others have depicted prayer to God in the metaphor of a tennis game….volleying back a forth whatever balls and strokes emerge in the process. You may have already discerned your most appropriate word, activity, or metaphor for your relationship….my search for no final destination of a depiction, but rather an endless pilgrimage toward, without having the expectation of ‘arriving’ ensconced in the arms of God, as many of our ‘chest-nut’ hymns would have us imagine.

Western culture is fixated on action, on causes and effects, on words perceived, denoting the literal the empirical, and especially on end results, goals, objectives, destinations, cures, fixes, remedies, interventions (the means) to achieve those ends. Add to that the design and creation of increasingly complex, nuanced, ubiquitous and even pervasive (and drowning) inventions as interventions, all of it (the process and the inventions) calculated to ‘improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our lives’ so we are told. Our inner lives, however, have been left, as orphans, both to ourselves and certainly as subjects for open discussion, respect and value, unless one designates ‘values’ as the distorted depiction of our unconscious lives. However, family values, for example, seems like little more than a secular aphorism for the 5^th commandment, to honour your father and your mother, to be then enacted in some feverish attachment to ‘helicopter parenting’…as if such a model were the most responsible model available.

The orphanage for the unconscious, the interior life, the anxieties, fears, dreams, fantasies and buried traumas, is filled to over-flowing, not metaphorically dissimilar to Guantanamo Bay’s detention camp, with Al-Quaeda prisoners whom we desperately wished to bury from our lives. Trouble is, our ‘little interior voice,’ that one each of us has heard upon memorable, even unforgettable, occasions does not equate to Al-Quaeda terrorist prisoners although we may have a similar fear and resistance to encountering them in the same way. Our interior voice, rather, bears the deepest thoughts feelings, ambitions, fears, anxieties, traumatic memories, all of them secret until we are ready to disentomb them, unlock them from memory cells, fantasy cages, ego-denial ropes, identity-constricting perceptions and beliefs.

And another trouble is that, unless we can predict with some confidence, that such an unearthing, as it were, will not be so incapacitating and discombobulating as to turn our lives upside down, we are resistant to ‘go there’. At the core of these meanderings is another ‘cultural image’ of self-sabotage’….that we have to strong, invulnerable to the vagaries and assaults that life throws at us, and never ever to share those assaults that seemingly brought us to our knees, with anyone, not a single person. The image of the Stoic pervades the unconscious of the anima mundi. Men, especially, and women in the more recent past, have clung to the heroic, stoic, invulnerable, invincible, and dominating image of masculinity (Alpha male), that is, without doubt, killing millions of both men and women.

Accomplish, reward, accomplish, reward….repeat and accomplish, reward!....and then dictate the definition of the appropriate and most useful ‘accomplishment’ and direct armies to chase after that current metaphor for accomplishment….irrespective of the field of human endeavour. And, if the ‘outside world’ of parent, teacher, clergy, boss, professor, executive, doctor, lawyer, is not defining the objective/accomplishment/goal, for us, then we undertake to design and execute it for ourselves believing that we are ‘fitting in’ to the fabric of our culture, in the neighbourhood, the school, the corporation, the church, the nation….etc. Classical conditioning, as social engineering, has filled volumes both in archives and in digital clouds.

And it is all conducted on a literal, empirical, competitive and zero-sum basis, (especially in the last decade)…..without even paying attention to basic linguistic distinctions between denotation and connotation. This basic difference in language, is one of the core principles that were (is it still?) taught to elementary school students, so that they could discern a difference in meaning and message from the writers they are reading, the friends they are interacting with and the parents and adults in their circle. Every word is layered with different meanings, appropriate for different contexts, moods, themes and especially rituals. Losing the discernment, and more appropriately the recognition and acceptance of a difference in the meaning of words, is like removing all the gas from the shock absorbers in the under-carriage of our cars and trucks. They run as flat, bumpy, disrespectful of riders, and even dangerous vehicles….and so does our current public discourse. So it is not only an exclusive deployment of literalisms, empiricism, and scientific definitions of words, and a collective and shared perception that the world ‘includes and stops’ at a literal, denotative naming or reality…..itself a proposition based in self-deception, even lies, from the perspective that we all ‘know’ there is more to us that our bodies, our minds, our bones, our organs etc.

And in a frenetic frenzy to ‘accomplish’ and to ‘drink the rewards’ whether they are externally presented at the awards banquet for athletes and scholars, or whether the reward of ‘public applause’ silently confirmed through our ‘appetite’ (often insatiable) for recognition, in  a competitive world where many would prefer to ‘cut the other down’ in order to burst the bubble of a projected inflated ego, we stay on the treadmill of both habit and social conformity.

Into this ‘psychic machine’ of productivity and relativity-goals-attainment-rewards, all of it based on a human ego that is then judged as ‘successful’ or ‘loser’ we pour an hourly menu of human disasters, both individual and collective.

How could it even be possible to exclude God from this machine?

The ultimate connection for humans, with God, has become inextricably entwined in a classical conditioning kind of barter-theology…both at the ecclesial and the individual level. If I do this, then God will reward me this way….both the initial act and the reward may have different denotations and connotations for each person, yet the template is similar if not identical. And this conditioned template, of ethics, productivity, competitive advantage, accomplishment and the concomitant identity (with accomplishment) pervades our very existence, as well as our definitions of meaning, purpose, success and failure.

Comparatively, this pattern, while essential for generating income, and formal learning, and for crossing busy intersections, or driving on freeways, is incomplete without being balanced by a search for, and a growing consciousness of the unconscious. Nevertheless, all the while these ‘actions’ are happening, so too, whether we realize or acknowledge it or not, there is another ‘stream of unconsciousness’ that is playing on instruments of our imagination, our intuition, our self-talk, the drum beat of our fears and anxieties, traumas, painful memories of loss, abandonment, and indifference. And it is this interior pulse, energy, generator or even our personal film, often buried, deeply throbbing often in tears and screams, in times when we are thrust deeply into either or both paroxysms of fear or parabolas of ecstasy that writers writer about, painters throw their paint on canvas to explore and/or explode, that composers frenetically ‘score’ the notes of their manuscript…And for our purposes, it can also be that realm of unknowing thrusting itself in our face, to become more recognized, that, at  least from one perspective, might just align with a life more closely connected (not necessarily aligned) with God. It is this locus where our mystery and God’s mystery have the possibility of a synapse of insight, an aha moment, a sudden realization, a memory becoming unlocked to shed a very different light on the original lens or script we placed on it, or others helped us to explain. And those interpretations were not always either complete or even relevant.

Others, with or without our compliance, drip their adjectives on our psyches, with gay abandon and with full impunity, often without our even knowing the depth of the ‘cut’ those adjectives leave. Depending on our ‘value’ and ‘respect’ for the author of such depictions, we ‘believe’ or integrate those judgements into our gestalt of what we consider our identity. Often, ironically, and paradoxically, those judgements are borrowed from some piece of scripture, or some conventional perception of how people should (or must) live. Embued with sacrality, and some panache of perfection, the wounding of those judgements, for many of us, is received often as more of the kind of rejection that often accompanies jealous and envious and insecure purveyors of those judgements without actually realizing that such ‘epithets’ say more about the issuer than the subject of the epithet.

The search for who we are is far more nuanced, complex and mysterious than our biographies might disclose. There are no formal courses for the discovery of who we are, excepting of course, some politically hot-button epithets, that, like those branding irons that declare ownership of cattle, seem to stick to us forever. We not only perceive and behave in a world dominated by literal, empirical, almost cardboard cut-outs of others, thereby enabling us to categorize and be categorized with mutually shared impunity. In everyone is doing it, it must be accepted even in the most polite company.

Reducing the scarring on our psyche of these ‘brandings,’ however, is not amenable to Javex, nor hydrogen peroxide. Nor is the branding a permanent sentence to whatever projected judgements were inflicted on us by others who were inflicting those judgements without any conscious awareness of their own projection.

And, for Christians, or those who have been raised in a so-called Christian ambience, the cloud of judgement issues from the peeling bell towers with their carillon chiming of hymn tunes every day at five o’clock in the afternoon. Separated from God, and inadequate in relationship to God, humans hearing those daily chimes are reminded of God’s inescapable presence with both love-and-forgiveness for the chosen, and damnation for those who doubt. The divide is proclaimed in hymnody, irrespective of one’s musical aptitude or interest.

Of course, the divide between God’s unequivocal love and grace, for those ‘born again, and God’s eternal damnation for those not chosen, is also a projection of everyone within earshot of those bells. Very early on, one is confronted by the spectre of a schizoid deity, and rarely, except for total surrender, is the polarity reconciled by the church and its theology and clergy. In part, this dynamic emerges from the church’s dumbing-down, reductionistic either-or packaging of both God and a healthy and vibrant relationship with God. In this case, as in many, the packaging betrays the depth, complexity and wonder of the ineffable, unknowable God and the complexity and wonder of the audience.

Is the church aware of the bias of its theology, while it purports to celebrate a balanced and loving deity? The conservative voices within the sanctuary would seem to be both in the main and also sustaining the judgement side of the non-existent equation, as if to silently and complicitly and dogmatically declare that tradition trumps hope, and Calvary eclipses the eschaton….

To be continued….

Searching for God ...introduction

Searching for God

The Jesuit Karl Rahner has developed a more transcendental theology, which sees God as the supreme mystery and Jesus as the decisive manifestation of what humanity can become. Bernard Lonergan also emphasized the importance of transcendence and of thought as opposed to experience. The unaided intellect cannot reach the vision it seeks; it is continually coming up against barriers to understanding that demand that we change our attitudes. In all cultures, human beings have been driven by the same imperatives: to be intelligent, responsible, reasonable, loving and, if necessary, to change. The very nature of humanity, therefore, demands that we transcend ourselves and our current perceptions, and this principle indicates the presence of what has been called the divine in the very nature of serious human inquiry. (Karen Armstrong, A History of God, p. 385)

The tension among theologs between experience and thought, as pathways to transcendence has been and continues to be protracted and the burden of the discussion has been picked up by theologians of various stripes. More recently, too, the image of the convergence of the unconscious with the divine has slipped into the public discussion, perhaps and presumably in the apprehension that, first, nothing escapes the purview of a divine anything, and second, that what exceeds our conscious, sensate, literal, empirical perceptions and attitudes is both more difficult to access and more mysterious if for no other reason than its previously being enshrouded in clouds of unknowing. Indeed, the very state of unknowing, along with the Greek notion of kenosis, (emptying) has been linked in various ways to a human search for non-empirical, non-literal, non-scientific answers to both our highest aspirations and imaginings as well as our deepest and most threatening fears and anxieties. For most, God is neither fully accessible by thought or by experience. (Isn’t thought also part of our experience? so why the separation, except that thought is subjective, ethereal, effemeral, while experience is considered as physical, literal, and sensate.)

The question of some kind of change has at least two foundational roots: first the Christian archetypal fall into sin that renders the rest of us needing to climb back to ‘respectability’ and ‘acceptability’ to God, as it has been articulated; second, the social and psychological flow of pain, anxiety, loss, and suffering that characterizes the human life story, individually and collectively, from the beginning. These two perceived, experienced and theorized impulses, irrespective of the degree of ‘hold’ each may have on a single psyche, continue, like some sort of radioactive rock, emit ripples of self-doubt, self-criticism, self-sabotage and even self-denial.

Caught in the midst of a flow of time, (no time for speculation on whether it is real or imaginary here), we have a perceptive bi-focal lens on both the past and the future, and oscillate between those, while attempting to remain focused on the present moment. And the ‘river’ of time includes our DNA, our family and cultural history and tradition, the moments of crisis and alienation of the black sheep within our family circle, as well as some fantasy of what we dream of, both in our unconscious (e.g. sleep) and in our day-dreaming and imagination. The aggregate or gestalt of such fantasies could be embraced by a word and notion such as hope.

As some well-known Christian clerics have often said, ‘We are in the business of hope!’ And it is not only each individual, at least among Christians, who, with and/or without a skiff, or a paddle, or a life-saving vest, or a kayak or canoe, is plunged into this proverbial river, so too is the institutional church, as well as all other institutions and organizations in a culture. And within the process of our navigating still waters, eddies, white water rapids, and even life-defying cataracts we are inevitably reaching out to mentors, to books, to parents, coaches, clerics and to whatever even gossamer spider webs of silk, ideas, principles, beliefs, convictions, and, often like moths to a bulb, rushing to whatever offers ‘light’ and ‘promise’ and ‘relief’ and ‘surrender’ and hope.

Any mysterious, foggy and even clouded search for some kind of clarity amidst the fright, or the darkness will inevitably evoke simultaneously, a sense of inadequacy as well as an emotional/psychic adrenalin surge for something to cling to, however ethereal, ephemeral and even imaginary. Such a moment has both psychic as well as spiritual implications, components if you like, that, try as we might, seem inextricably interwoven into a vision that each person’s imagination generates.

Whether we consider ourselves prisoners of both the original sin complex, and/or the perpetrators of our own self-sabotage, in such moments of extremis, our vulnerability invades whatever self-confidence we have attained, acquired and evolved. Those of us who champion human ‘will’ and ‘will power’ will attempt through various heroic, personal, both strategic and tactical acts to ‘climb out of our swamp.’ Those of us who envision some ‘other’ force or energy, will turn our psychic gaze both inward and upward….looking both for some kind of image that helps us see our moment clearly as well as some image of a future freed from this darkness. It is not that other darknesses will never crop up; we know they will. It is how we move through this one, layered onto previous moments of extremis, as patterns for future impending, if unknown and unseen future moments, that matters in this moment.

Traditionally, the Christian church has offered a path of repentance, forgiveness, redemption, atonement and a new life ‘in Christ’ as such a path. Anatomizing evil, in a personal life, and then propagating the collection of such sins as a way of offering leadership, mentorship and spiritual guidance for parishioners, has deep roots into the theological reflections of men like Augustine, for whom original sin was carried over to every succeeding person in the act of sexuality. Immediately, one of the most intrinsic, essential, biological and psychological needs, appetites and aspirations is linked, like iron, perhaps forever, with the Fall of Man, original sin. And, for many, that link is completely resistant to molting. No acetylene torch exists to break that dogmatic link. And it is part of the heritage of the Christian West forever. Injected with the radioactivity of ‘forbidden-ness’ sex hereafter is both more invested with expectations and fears and anxieties than it warrants. Thank you Augustine! And all those who have succumbed to his ‘dogmatic,’ self-sabotaging, denial of any God worthy of the name.

Another aspect of this ‘heritage’ link to the past, is that the church itself, reveres the past and frames the present and future with that fixation on the ‘rear-view mirror’ as it were. Releasing the potential cleaving to the holy writ, and the dogmatic theology of past ungodly and inhuman and inhumane notions, however, is essential for both each individual as well as the church itself. Having married its dogma, its rituals and its praxis to the past, the church has impaled itself with at least a degree of either blindness or avoidance of a comparable concentration on the future.

Jurgen Moltmann, courageously, faithfully, and somewhat iconoclastically, from a Christian perspective, offers a different perspective.

James Butler, on christianmissionsociety.org, writes:

(Jurgen) Moltmann’s key claim (in his book The Theology of Hope) is that we must have a theology of eschatology; a theology that pulls us out of the mechanistic closed universe of modern thinking, and to realise that the kind of hope Jesus promises is not one in continuity with the way the world is but radical change. He is critical of what he calls ‘a theology of the eternal present,’ where God becomes linked to the revelation of God in place. Moltmann argues that God’s presence, for Israel and in the life, death and revelation of Jesus is about promise. The point of God’s presence is always in relation to the promise of the future that is yet to come to pass. This means that Christian theology must have the future in sight, it must be about the future that God promises to bring about, rather than about bringing the present into line with God’s eternity. In this way it unsettles followers of God to ‘strike out in hope towards the promised new future.’ (p. 89)

Transcendence (defined by Cambridge.org) is experience that goes past normal limits, or the ability to achieve this…e.g.. She felt a blissful sense of transcendence and freedom from pain and fear.

In Armstrong’s, A History of God, p. 41) we read:

The apparition of Yahweh on Mount Sinai had emphasized the immense gulf that had suddenly yawned between man and the divine world. Now the seraphs were crying: Yahweh is other! Other! Other!. Isaiah had experienced that sense of the numinous which has periodically descended upon men and women and filled them with fascination and dread. In his classic book, The Idea of the Holy, Rudolph Otto described this fearful experience of transcendent reality as mysterium terrible et fascinans: it is terrible because it comes from a profound shock that severs us from the consolations of normality and fascinans because, paradoxically,  it exerts an irresistible attraction. There is nothing rational about this overpowering experience, which Otto compares to that of music or the erotic: the emotions it engenders cannot adequately be expressed in words or concepts. (Armstrong, A History of God, p. 41)

What does it mean to ‘transcend’ ourselves, to imitate God, to enter into what Otto calls mysterium terrible et fascinans…and how does Moltmann’s theology of hope keep the Christian focus on this promise of this mysterium? Or does it?

We live in what Moltmann calls a time of mechanistic thought, a time which Hillman characterizes as ‘literal, empirical, statistical, diagnostic, scientific.’ Hillman urges the re-introduction of the imagination, in his search for caring of the human soul. Now, there is a word that has effectively been appropriated by religion, including the Christian religion.  It is Hillman’s intuitive, and perhaps unique perspective of soul that might serve as an antidote to the religious ‘soul needing to be saved’ of Christian theology. There is an instant, and seemingly indelible link between the word soul and the word transcendence, along with an implicit perception of “God in heaven,’ the implied direction of all transcendence, as well as hope and eschatology. The Book of Revelation offers a poetic, and mythic image of a heavenly afterlife, reinforcing the image of ‘up’ and ‘above’ and reaching for the holy.

Here is Hillman, borrowing from the Dalai Lama on the difference between ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’ from his archetypal psychological perspective:

(In a letter to Peter Goullart) the fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet writes:

The relation of height to spirituality is not merely metaphorical. It is physical reality.  The most spiritual people on this planet live in the highest places. So do the most flowers….I call the high and light aspects of my being spirit and the dark and heavy aspect soul.

Soul is at home in the deep shaded valleys. Heavy torpid flowers saturated wit black grow there. The rivers flow like warm syrup. They empty into huge oceans of soul.

Spirit is a land of high, white peaks and glittering jewel-like lakes and flowers. Life is sparse and sounds travel great distances.

There is soul music, soul food, soul dancing and soul love….

No spirit broods over lofty desolation, for desolation is of the depths as is brooding. At these heights spirit leaves soul far behind.

People need to climb to the mountain top not simply because it is there but because the soulful divinity needs to be mated with the spirit (From A Blue Fire, James Hillman, introduced and edited by Thomas Moore, p.15-116)

To be continued….. 

Speculating on the willing victim withdrawing from violence and the ideology of non-violent resistance

 

René Girard, French-American scholar of literature and religion, died in 2015.

René Girard built his reputation on a sweeping theory of human behaviour that traced the roots of desire violence, and religion to a single source: imitation. We don’t desire objects because of their intrinsic value, he argued- we want them because others want them. Desire is memetic: we imitate what others fund desirable, especially those we admire….But, what happens when the person we imitate is close enough to us to become a rival? When two people covet the same scarce good- status, love, land, attention- they turn on each other. Dr. Girard called this memetic rivalry. Its most famous expression is the love triangle, but it also plays out in office politics, athletic competition, Wall Street hysteria, and the endless quest to keep up with the Joneses. This insight leads to a darker one; human beings don’t fight because they’re different, but because they’re alike, locked in rivalry over the same thing. Ancient societies, Dr. Girard believed, were haunted by this tendency. To stave off chaos. They developed the scapegoat mechanism; projecting blame onto a single individual or group, then purging them through expulsion or sacrifice. It’s a primal pattern that persists in pogroms, witch trials, and, more recently, cancel culture and internet mobs.

Dr. Girard’s other great insight concerns religion. Far from being the cause of violence, religion, he argued as a means of containing it. Sacrificial rituals diffused mimetic tensions. These tensions held – until biblical religion began unravelling them from within. Scripture, Dr. Girard noted, repeatedly, sides with the victim: Joseph betrayed his brothers, the Suffering Servant in Isaiah, and most of all, the crucified Christ. As Christianity spread, it undermined the scapegoat mechanism and implanted a new moral reflex: concern for victims.

But this moral breakthrough came with a paradox. Once victimhood conferred moral authority, people began to compete for it. Mimetic desire now played out as a race to be more oppressed, more offended, more righteous in defence of others. A new rivalry was born—this time over who suffers most. Dr. Girard, on the other hand, urged us to renounce rivalry and practise forgiveness. (How an obscure scholar is shaping the most powerful country on Earth, by George A. Dunn, Special to the Globe and Mail, July 3, 2025)

Peter Thiel, as a student at Stanford when Girard taught there has become a frenzied apostle of Girard’s and, adapting the mimetic theory to the internet, such as Facebook, where everyone ‘wants to imitate’ what everyone else has, has poured millions into internet investments. And that has fueled his political funding of the Vice-president, and other ‘like-minded’ (or equally dependent aspiring politicians). There is real danger in the application of Girard’s serious theory to the machinations of a digital and especially an artificial-intelligence-saturated internet.

No theory can be tilted so far as to be either all ‘utopian’ or all ‘dystopian’….and Jay Alison in his book, The Joy of Being Wrong, has cast a very different interpretation and application of the Girard memetic theory to theology.

If I am reading Alison (and Girard) reasonably appropriately, then, the violence of the society that without cause or justification crucifies Jesus on Calvary, and especially the blindness to its evil and nefariousness, especially when set in concert with the willing victim, can carry a model of imitation that moves beyond rivalry and violence and into compassion and forgiveness, and thereby into relationality. Rather than competing for the highest rung of victimhood, martyrdom, and a perverse iteration of the hero, especially the alpha male hero, the withdrawal from unjust, illegitimate violence, even if and when such a withdrawal might smack to the outside world as ‘weakness, spinelessness, excessive fear, and a perverse search for and ambition to heroism, is and can be a model of the willing victim of the Crucifixion.

The mystery of this apparent paradox continues. It is not necessarily a rational, even consciousness and conscientious and deliberate decision to withdraw. Sometimes it might be as simple as a child withdrawing from a voice or a look that, for that child, embodies what s/he ‘knows’ as dangerous, threatening, intimidating and unfair….even if all of those words are unfamiliar to that child. At the ‘other end’ of such a withdrawal from violence, as an imitation of the willing, relational victim of Calvary, we might consider Nelson Mandela, who rejected violence in favour of peaceful, yet forceful, resistance, (inspired and even modelled by Gandhi). Only after years of unsuccessful legal, public, physical and verbal argument, protests, and non-violent resistances of various forms did Mandela finally relent and accede to some his more impatient compatriots, submit to military (militia) training, and succumb to his aversion for violence.

From Britannica.com, we read:

Satyagraha, concept introduced in the early 20^th century by Mahatma Gandhi to designate a determined but nonviolent resistance to evil. Gandhi’s satyagraha became a major too in the Indian struggle against British imperialism and has since been adopted by protest groups in other countries. According to this philosophy, satyagrahis—practitioners of satyagraha—achieve correct insight into the real nature of an evil situation by observing a nonviolence of the mind, by seeking truth in a spirit of peace and love and by undergoing a rigorous process of self-scrutiny. In so doing, the satyagrahi encounters truth in the absolute. By refusing to submit to the wrong or to cooperate with it in any way, the satyagrahi asserts that truth. Throughout the confrontation with evil, the satyagrahi must adhere to nonviolence, for to employ violence would be to lose correct insight. Satyagrahis always warn their opponents of their intentions; satyagraha forbids any tactic suggesting the use of secrecy to one’s advantage. Satyagraha includes more than civil disobedience. Its full range of application extends from the details of correct daily living to the construction of alternative political and economic institutions. Satyagraha seeks to conquer through conversion: in the end there is neither defeat nor victory but rather a new harmony.

This is not an argument to identify Alison’s willing victim who withdraws from unjust violence (the Jesus figure of the Crucifixion) as identical to the Satyagrahi of Gandhi or vice versa. It is, however, a seemingly inescapable and compelling connecting of the dots that link (at least by analogy, comparison, implication and praxis) the two images. And while we in the West seem, at least on the surface and in both rhetoric and attitude of our better angels, to revere men such as Mandela and Gandhi, for their accomplishments, and while Satyagraha is considered, in the eWest, a ‘philosophy’ rather than a religion, not a discipleship to and emulation and imitation of a willing victim to unjust violence (on which the world seems unduly dependent, if not actually obsessed with, consumed by, and even perhaps addicted to) the discernment between a philosophy and a religious principle and image may be a search for a difference where little, if any, really exists.

What jumps out from these thoughts, linking Gerard, Alison, Mandela, Gandhi, and whomever else might be lurking in the shadows of these words and sentences, is a cosmos of  theological and historic and philosophic images, incarnations, disciplines and ideals to which, for which and in which humans might find meaning, purpose, direction and both relief and some contentment.

Of course, suffering, the sine qua non of all foundational premises of both theology and philosophy, is never absent from any attempt to live a full life as a human being. And, God is not reducible to a single image, nor a single principle, irrespective of which name and identity each God is imaged. Individual human choices, especially when confronting the most extreme moments, (Hillman’s in extremis) matter to both the person facing the choice, and, it says here unapologetically) that it also matters to the universe. It is not enough to repeat, as does that man throwing the clam back into the sea, when asked why, ‘Well, it matters to that one clam!” It is not only each clam tossed back into its habitat, but each human choosing his or her habitat, where life can flourish. And life flourishing is an image irreducible to the literal, the empirical, the scientific.

Life-flourishing is, to borrow and mix metaphors, analogous to the salmon swimming upstream to spawn, to flourish, to propagate. It is confronting the rushing white water in the face, joyously, vigorously, courageously and unrelentingly, as if impelled by an instinct to and for life that will not be either sedated or denied or avoided.

And, whether such an instinct of the willing victim submitting to unjust violence, or the satyagrahi embracing the discipline of his highest instincts and ideals, or some other ‘path’ to resisting the over-wheening, unjustified, illegitimate and tragic obsession with, addiction to, violence, in whatever of its many faces and forms, it seems that we have intellectual, political, as well as deeply spiritual models from which to glean inspiration, motivation, discipline and hope.

We know that there is a kernel of both truth and wisdom in much of the legacy of each of these mentors. How we curate, interpret, espouse and apply their gifts remains an individual enterprise, not in order to achieve some heroic status, but almost perhaps the inverse, given that the world is highly unlikely to shed its dependence on violence, especially illegitimate and unjust violence.