Searching for God #7

 Editor’s note:

Wow, what a drop in readership over the last few days!

I recognize that these topics are far from the front of mind of many people, and that is precisely why I am spending time and energy writing about them.

Digging into our unconscious as even a remote prospect is only necessary if and when many of us are confronted with a serious crisis in our personal lives. Not only do we not anticipate such moments, we studiously avoid, deny, run away from such potential pain as if such a dig were analogous to a disease itself and, we think, would only lead to more and, at the moment, unnecessary and unwanted additional pain. “Leave the past buried the past, where it can be forgotten and wiped clean from the slate of my life,” is a very frequent way of expression our resistance. “Bad memories and trauma can only generate more bad memories and more trauma, if I were even to think of returning to ‘dig’ them up again.” Not only is this a cultural, societal, and conventional perception of reality; it is not necessarily founded in reality.

We have almost stripped the word paradox from our vernacular, while we frenetically pursue the immediate goals of making a living, driving the kids to soccer, ballet, hockey, swimming or whatever activity has grabbed their interest. The irony that such digs can only shed real light on any of those ‘traps’ that might be sabotaging us, from within. Facing an appetite for approval, for instance, in my own life, was both painful and freeing simultaneously. Accessing that dependence, rather than generate increased dependence, has only lifted what appeared previously unconsciously ‘held’ me in its grip into a new perception: ‘Do I need to do this, for myself, or is this another ‘public performance’ for the applause I once devoured?’

There is another reason to detail some of the learnings that became evident on a path to active ministry, as well as those that flagged themselves in that practice. The private life of any individual cannot be disentangled from the cultural, organizational, familial, and community energies, myths, traditions and expectations. So, this idea of keeping our private lives, (those internal psychic aspects) not which bank or which doctor or which diagnosis is our’s, from any view including our own, is another of the many self-sabotages many of us are engaged in our search to ‘get to know’ who we really are.

The sheer domination of the empirical, the literal, the observable in our lives, has drowned out many of those inner, silent, almost imperceptible an inaudible voices that seek to offer a different perspective. And that perspective could have any of a number of titles: a spiritual life, an imaginative life, an emotional life, a soul life, an artistic life, Marry that dichotomy to the dichotomy, from a religious image perspective, (Good Samaritan v Jew taken for dead in the ditch), and we see also the triumph of the ‘care-giver,’ ‘rescuer,’ archetype, as the image at the top of the cultural, ethical, ethnic and social totem pole of images, over the willing sacrificial victim to the violence of the society and the culture, that can define a deep and inspired and inspiring ‘other’ from within.

As in so many other aspects of our lives, we are obsessed with instant gratification from the outside, and if and when we see a ‘need’ that we consider within our purview to meet, we try to meet it. And as the Canadian Blood Services television advertisement reminds us, ‘it is life-giving to give’, not only for the recipient but also for the donor. The template for meeting the needs of others, ranges from private, confidential acts of altruism, to service clubs, to philanthropic ventures like War Child, or Free the Children, or the Heart and Stroke association. Churches too, have their respective causes, including bridging refugees and immigrants new to a nation, or potentially even hiding and protecting refugees and undocumented immigrants from the public authorities.

There is legitimacy to these initiatives; there is also veracity and demonstrated evidence that each of the persons engaged in public service grow from that service experience. Nothing that we undertake in good faith in our lives is empty of personal growth opportunities.

Recently, in Ontario, there is mounting evidence that Chaplain services are being eliminated or curtailed in many urban hospitals. Given the stereotypical perception of Chaplain as ‘comforter’ (again imitative of the Good Samaritan image and archetype), such ‘comforting services, it is argued by the accountants and administrators, and politicians, all of whom are seeking to slash their budgets and reduce the costs of health care, can be provided, without any religious conversion intrusions, by social workers and significantly reduce our costs. It is not only that ‘religion’ has become a deeply dividing wedge issue in our politics and our culture; it is true that it is. However, the whole enterprise of deep and personal encounters, potentially between Chaplain and hospital patient/staff/ medical practitioners, on the initiative of the patient or staff member, is being surgically removed. Humans, in this highly charged, emotional, transformative living laboratory of the hospital, are being reduced even further to function. The concept of ‘comforter’ excludes in the mere initial expression, any supplementary, complementary, and even challenging potential to the dialogue between a Chaplain and a patient or client.

We disclose to fewer and fewer people; we listen closely to fewer and fewer people. The sociological evidence of loneliness mounts hourly, while we whittle away (carve out) those opportunities for deep and private conversations between a confidential, caring, listening chaplain and a struggling patient, irrespective of whether the struggle is physical, emotional, relational, spiritual or financial. Each of these struggles, as we all know, is intimately connected to each of the other spheres in our lives. And, behaviour modification, whether it is cognitive, relational, emotional, situational, is very different from a non-specific, wholistic, professionally trained and experienced Chaplain’s potential. Chaplains do not engage in psychotherapy; they do not engage in psychiatric interventions; Chaplains do not broach religious sectarianism, denominationalism, or even  proselytizing…Of course, there is usually a personal life history beginning with  faith community for each Chaplain.

And just because Chaplains, like churches and church leaders, are woefully inadequate, or inept, at blowing their/our own horn, their voices too often get lost in a tsunami of budget strain, public consciousness of ‘delivering measureables’ and demonstrating value, all of it determined on a literal, empirical and scientific scale.

The church hierarchies also demonstrate their ‘woeful silence in the face of a public ethos that has become subsumed into the personal, private, narcissistic will of despots, lies, manipulations, all of it funded by those oligarchs who stand to benefit most from their self-serving contributions.

Where are the church leaders in contemporary North America who are standing behind their pulpits, or in op-ed pieces in the New York Times or the Globe and Mail, echoing the words of Deitrich Bonhoeffer:

Your ‘yes to God requires your ‘no’ to all injustice, to all evil, to al lies, to an oppression and violation of the weak and poor.

Of course, those words, and the actions that incarnate and embody them, are always going to cost dearly. They cost Bonhoeffer his life by hanging in the Flossenburg concentration camp, April 9, 1945.

Any human assertion of absolutes can only fail, both in the literal empirical world as well as in the imaginary world and yet that the search can, will and even must never end.

We are seriously at risk of imposing a template on the human relationship to each other and to the universe (and to God) per se, whatever deity we might worship or even imagine, that reduces that relationship to whatever our cognition and perception can abide. Man without God is neither sustainable nor supportable….as someone once said, if there were no god, man would have to invent one by imagining such a concept.

So, removing Chaplains from Ontario hospitals is another of the decisions that illustrates a capitulation not only to the public budgeting requirements, but more importantly to the view of the human being that defies our very complexity, unknowingness, and our unlimited and inveterate search to belong to, relate to, something ‘outside’ our capacity to perceive, to understand and to know.

Perhaps a visit with Paul Tillich’s words and thought might begin to open up some discussion of the degree to which positivism, literalism, empiricism and, for some, science in general have clouded some basic human realities, and thereby distorted both religion and science, in a pursuit of cardboard pictures of people, God and a universe sprinkled with other objects, our intimate knowledge of which which remain beyond our reach,

Paul Tillich (1868-1965) was convinced that the personal God of traditional Western theism must go, but he also believed that religion was necessary for mankind. A deep-rooted anxiety is part of the human condition: this is not neurotic because it is ineradicable and no therapy can take it away. We constantly fear loss and the terror of extinction, as we watch our bodies gradually but inexorably decay. Tillich agreed with Nietzsche that the personal God was a harmful idea and deserved to die:

The concept of a ‘Personal God’ interfering with natural events, or being ‘an independent cause of natural events,’ makes God a natural object beside others, an object among others, a being among beings, maybe the highest, but nevertheless a being. This indeed is not the destruction of the physical system but even more the destruction of any meaningful idea of God (Paul Tillich, Theology and Culture, p. 129) in Karen Armstrong, The History of God, p.382)…

Tillich preferred the definition of God as the Ground of being. Participation in such a God above ‘God’ does not alienate us from the world but immerses us in reality. It returns us to ourselves. Human beings have to use symbols when they talk about Being-itself: to speak literally or realistically about it is inaccurate and untrue. For centuries the symbols ‘God,’ providence’ and ‘immortality’ have enabled people to bear the terror of life and the horror of death, but when these symbols lose their power there is fear and doubt. People who experience this dread and anxiety should seek the God above the discredited ‘God’ of theism which has lost its symbolic force. (Armstrong, ibid, p. 383)

Perhaps Heidigger’s notion of Being, would help us to put the Tillich use of the word into some context.

In Being and Time, (1927) Martin Heidigger (1890-1976)  saw Being in rather the same way as Tillich, though he would have denied that it was ‘God’ in the Christian sense: it was distinct from particular beings and quite separate from the normal categories of thought…..Since Being is ‘Wholly Other,’ it is in fact Nothing—no thing, neither an object nor a particular being. Yet it is what makes all other existence possible.(Armstrong, ibid, p. 388)

We can all hear and feel the presence of Plato and the neoplatonists, (think ideals, forms, beyond the literal, empiricial forms) in Heidigger’s rejection of the personal God, and in his improvisation of Being, beyond the beings we call humans. Given that ‘no thing is neither an object nor a particulate being,’ offers an imaginative “conceptual space’ for our own ‘imagination to roam,’ imaging what might be in order to cope with and to survive the horrendous and predictable and inevitable realities of extrinsic human life.

And perhaps religions, (irrespective of their location, history, dogma, mythology, rituals, and expectations) per se, have been conceived as an imaginative antidote to the world’s impending pain. Remembering stories and myths about the first indication of life, (each and every culture has its own myths of the origin of life) and other stories that capture the essential pillars of a tradition of both faith and culture, (often inseparable), and sharing those stories, the glue which binds all communities in various degrees of cohesion, belonging, and support, is kind of the ‘way’ religions have operated.

And the question of whether or not various religions have recognized, tolerated, accepted and indulged in any form or degree of self-critical analysis, as a leading mentor and model for its adherents, (If God is separate from nature, are churches then also separate from nature and immune from and free of self-critical discernment…is worth our consideration next.

To be continued…….