Searching for God #5

Two questions climb out of the last piece in this space:

a)    Are the Shadow and the crises of our lives related, and if so how?

b)    Are we more likely to find God, or at least to contemplate God, in moments of ‘extremis’?

These questions do not prompt glib responses. In the first instance, even the existence of a Shadow, for some, is a questionable basis on which to begin. Named by Jung, and borrowed from Jung by Hillman and others, it is an imaginative attempt to help us understand what is essentially beyond our intellect and cognition, as well as our senses. And yet, we do have some ‘apperception’ or apprehension of an energy that begs relationship even if without our full comprehension. Although, for Jung the unconscious was ‘God,’ that direct metaphor may be inappropriate or inadequate for many. A theoretical concept, by its nature, static, as if even metaphorically it has a kind of ‘existence’ tends to fall into our conventional language of perception as a ‘thing’. The notion of both the unconscious and God, as ‘things, or even a single ‘idea’ or concept, has been challenged by others who prefer a metaphor of flow, change, or even ‘work’ as Hillman depicts the psychological notion of ‘soul’ borrowed from the Latin word ‘opus’.

From SimplyPsychology.org, in a piece written by Saul McLead, updated January 25, 2024, reviewed by Olivia Gut-Evans, we read:

Freud (1900, 1905) developed a topographical model of the mind, describing the features of the mind’s structure and function. Freud used the analogy of an iceberg to describe the three levels of the mind: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. The model divides the mind into three primary regions based on the depth and accessibility of information. Freud’s conception of consciousness can be compared to an iceberg because much like an iceberg, the majority of an individual’s mind exists below the surface, hidden from immediate view….According to Freud, (1915) the unconscious mind is the primary source of human behavior. Like an iceberg, the most important part of the mind is the part you cannot see….In psychoanalysis, the unconscious mind refers to that part of the psyche that contains repressed ideas and images, as well as primitive desires and impulses that have never been allowed to enter the conscious mind….Content contained in the unconscious mind is generally deemed too anxiety-provoking to be allowed in consciousness. It is maintained at an unconscious level where, according to Freud, it still influences our behavior.

Jung followed Freud and elaborated on his concept of the unconscious, dividing the unconscious into the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious, for Jung, is similar to Freud’s notion of the unconscious. It is the collective unconscious that marks Jungs unique contribution to the field.

From verywellmind.com,  in a piece by Lisa Fritscher, medically reviewed by Daniel B. Block,, updated on July 08, 2025, we read:

Sometimes referred to as the ‘objective psyche,’ the collective unconscious refers to the idea that a segment of the deepest unconscious mind is genetically inherited and not shaped by personal experience…According to Jung’s teachings, the collective unconscious is common to all human beings. Jung also believed that the collective unconscious is responsible for a number of deep-seated beliefs and instincts, such as spirituality, sexual behavior, and life and death instincts….According to Jung, the collective unconscious is a collection of knowledge and imagery that every person is born with and that is shared by all human beings due to ancestral experience. Though humans may not know what thoughts and images are in their collective unconscious, the psyche is thought to be able to tap into them in moments of crisis.

In any piece entitled ‘search for God’ it seems to be a reasonable, probable and cogent question to ask, ‘What has the human unconscious got to do, if anything with the search for God?’ If humans, as definitively depicted in search of transcendence, (Armstrong), then, how does the unconscious or the soul relate to, imitate, emulate, or even strive to follow God? Of course, we are now rattling along in the world of Plato and Neoplatonism and the notion of ideals, forms, and all of them being outside of literal empirical reality and universe. Does it seem coherent, even speculatively and imaginatively, to connect ‘imagined dots’ linking the notion of God with the theoretical notion of an unconscious, (whether personal or collective, or Hillman’s anima mundi) as integral to any imagined process of transcendence?

For mortal human beings, what possibly is/might be/could be the meaning of, the realization of and identification with transcendence?

Developmentally, literally, scientifically adults transcend youth, in matters of perception, attitude, belief, size, depth of experience and wisdom, as conventionally conceived and integrated into the social fabric, the anima mundi. And then, on various other literal, empirical scales, performances of those we consider to be elite, transcend those of more amateur, or journeyman accomplishment. An eclipse of the sun (or moon) transcends the normal pattern of solar activity. Going beyond whatever it is that we ‘know’ or comprehend, or can demonstrate or prove, seems to capture the essence of transcendence.

And here is another concept, ‘going beyond,’ that likely has as many interpretations and images as there are people to generate them. For many, the path to ‘exceed expectations’ is to exercise the human will, the ego….given our fascination of championing of human ‘excellence.’ And yet, ask any highly trained professional or amateur athlete and they will respond that ‘in the zone’ is a state beyond the will, beyond the ego, beyond the senses and beyond the hours of rigorous training and care of their body. That ‘in the zone’ state is another iteration of and a form of transcendence, within a given sphere of human activity.

There are a couple of other iterations of transcendence, in secular terms and perspective. One comprises what the philosophers call Being. The other, perhaps a smaller step onward from Jung’s personal and collective unconscious, is Hillman’s anima mundi, and the individual human ‘soul’…not a thing, but rather a process that works at seeking and potentially finding a mythic voice between two opposing archetypes, as one way of refusing to succumb to either polarity.

In order to begin any discussion of either, we have to take a peek behind the curtain, not only of literalism, empiricism and the scientific, to the core of those perceptions and attitudes: reason. The intersection of reason with any search for God, by its very assertion, is not only a paradox but a journey without an arrival at a destination. The dichotomized perception of the human as embodied in the tension between reason and emotion, is another of the hurdles that we have to surmount. And, that hurdle has been jumped long ago by minds far superior to this scribe. Hegel, in his Philosophy of religion, including lectures on the proof of the existence of God. “On the one hand, he turned his weapons against the rationalistic school which reduced religion to the modicum compatible with the human mind. On the other hand, he criticized the school of Friedrich Schleiermacher, who elevated feeling to a place in religion above systematic theology. In his middle way, Hegel attempted to show that the dogmatic creed is the rational development of what was implicit in religious feeling. To do so, of course, philosophy must be made the interpreter and the superior discipline.” (From Britannica.com)

Jung and Hegel and Plato….and Hillman….some will be asking themselves, “What does all of this have to do with a search for God?” I have my own idea of what God is, and I certainly do not need any of this psychological of philosophical “bumpf" to cloud my vision. I go to church regularly, (or not) and I give what I can afford to the church, and I try to live a ‘good life’ just like Hélene, the young breast-cancer patient. And, while there are times when I occasionally wonder about what kind of God would permit the wars and famines and fires and droughts and pandemics, if, as we were told in Sunday School, He is all powerful, and all knowing and all seeing, I am not about to go off on some wild goose chase for a God I cannot understand.”

And, true be told, it is precisely the ‘Sunday school’ version of God and religion that, from the perspective and experience of this scribe, is begging for review.

This scribe, for the first and only time in print, begs the indulgence of my readers to tell a personal anecdote about this ‘turning point’ in my own path, as a potential illustration of a private stirring that prompted a deep dive into my own life and psyche.

All of those Sunday school classes, church choirs, church picnics, revival meetings and memorized Bible verses, such as the 23^rd Psalm, had left me,  as an adolescent, determined to read the Bible, and then, one Sunday, when I was sixteen I heard unequivocal bigotry, religious hate coming out of the mouth of the Balleymena Northern Ireland evangelist who had come to ‘save’ our church and our town from Roman Catholicism. I continued to read, and stopped attending, defying my parents’ preference, without evoking their wrath or even their derision. Engagement as a teacher in an Ontario private school, with Anglican traditions, chapel, daily prayers and mandatory attendance for the all-male student body to attend Sunday services in the church of their choice, put me in a position where ‘religious ritual’ and whatever accompanying values and attitudes that applied to the various situations were part of the campus culture, including grace in the dining room at all meals. As the headmaster was a retired Anglican clergy, and a retired Army veteran, the school enrollees were also mandated to parade as part of the cadet aspect of the school program. Also, all students, irrespective of their size, talent and skill, were expected to engage in team sports, varying, of course with the calendar and seasons. No fire-and-brim-stone sermons, a chaplain whose task was to listen empathically to any homesickness, or family crisis among the staff and student body, as well as conduct ceremonies of baptism for a new arrival to a staff family, or to conduct funeral or Confirmation services as appropriate and as requested….and a daily ‘dose’ of ‘religion,’ very different from that ‘born-again’ stuff back home.

Some twenty years on, after becoming a part of an Anglican church in the town where I taught, and enlisting two daughters as servers on the altar of that church, and fostering the confirmation of those two daughters, I withdrew from the classroom and took a position in a community college in administration, specifically in marketing, public relations and information. I thoroughly loved the work, different every moment, requiring both elementary writing in newsletters, and copy for advertisements, as well as facilitating various projects with graphic artists and printing technicians. As a high-metabolic-rate type ‘A’, I began to work back at the office after dinner, partly as a way of securing my professional reputation, in new culture as well as a way of developing new skills.

Two thoughts seemed to converge in this personal environment: the first was, ‘why am I so driven?’ and what were the rewards, all of them extrinsic, of all of this public performance? The second seemed to hit me, from outside my body:

If God don’t make no junk, (as the cliché puts it) and there is even a modicum of truth in the notion that the Crucifixion was at least in part a way of alleviating guilt and shame, and offering for sin, for everyone, might that also include me? Somewhat synchronistically, as viewed from decades on, the diminutive female clergy, a widow and former kindgergarten teacher from England, visited my office for lunch one noon-hour. She offered a suggestion, ‘out of the blue’ by way of a question, ‘Had I even considered theology school?’ And I told her the following story.

It is not incidental to note that while these thoughts were tumbling in and through my mind and consciousness, I was also acutely aware that, some fourteen years previously, I had ventured into the registrar’s offices of both Emmanual College and Knox College at the University of Toronto, with the intent of enrolling in one for the purpose of pursuing a Master of Divinity with the intent of following in my grandfather’s footsteps as a clergy. After those two brief and welcoming meetings with respective registrars, I informed my then spouse of where I had been and that I intended to enroll in one of the colleges, in pursuit of an M.Div.

Her instant, unequivocal, and non-appealable response, I remember it as if were yesterday, “If you go into theology, I will divorce you on the spot!”

Stopped cold, in a moment of paralysis; I did not conceive of divorce as either the response to my proposal, nor as a way forward for my life. And, after the ‘college moments’ of what I considered clarity, and a long walk through the forest of the campus, I decided that, rather than an academic doctoral program, in which I would be invested in reading and writing theses, and staying in my head, I needed to uncover whatever it was that was driving me into a kind of emotional and psychological oblivion….compulsive work, for public acclaim and endorsement.

I needed to ‘go inside’ rather than continue this ‘outside’ life of appearances, performances, and interior psychic hollowness. A performer I had become…in the classroom, the gymnasium as coach, the editorialist on radio and the television host on public affairs local television as well as columnist from city hall in a weekly newspaper. Essentially, I had sacrificed my family for my career. And, there was little doubt that, if I intended to enroll in theology, my marriage would not survive.

Never in all of this psychic, emotional, and professional and personal turbulence did I even think of either the word evangelist, nor did I envision ‘saving the world’ for Jesus. I seemed to need to ‘save myself’ both from the obsessive-compulsive drive for public acclaim, and the obvious neglect and hypocrisy of my own marriage.

Enrol in an Anglican theology faculty, graduate and then out into the life of ministry….

To be continued…….