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….