Searcing for God # 23

 How to bring force against the evil of retribution?

This was an issue, a couple of posts back, given the orange tyrant has claimed ‘I am your retribution!’ and he foments many of the issues America and the world are facing.

Retribution: defined as punishment for purposes of repayment or revenge for wrong committed.

The implication in the statement, “I am your retribution” is that America has been the victim of a wrong committed, and the then candidate for president is the payment of revenge for that wrong.

Of course, all things Biden, Democratic, and Harris, and any other name associated with the Democratic Party are ‘evil’ according to the source of the original quote: ‘ I am your retribution!

Detailing some of the so-called ‘wrongs’ would have to include the investigation into the Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election, the impeachment trials and convictions, and the multitude of other misdemeanors, according to the current occupant of the Oval Office, all of which have embarrassed and shamed him, in his eyes.

Without ever using the word  ‘victim’ the current occupant of the Oval Office has attempted, by which amounts to a kind of magical disinformation and dissembling to wrap his arms around a shared unconscious archetype, the victim. Considering that such an archetype resides in the collective unconscious of the American people, given that individuals feel persecuted, powerless, and unfairly treated by others, outside of their control, and given the millions of votes he garnered in the 2024 election, that archetype holds considerable influence in that nation.

And given that every utterance, move, decision and executive order is inflated with the steroids of over-compensation, generating a kind of Cecil B. DeMille Hollywood extravaganza, and the ratings game on which the media is dependent, if it is not actually a slave to them, identifying with victimhood, has many sycophantic acolytes. Biologists ‘graft’ one sapling onto another, in order to generate a hybrid; a similar grafting of victimhood to a highly questionable, pretentious and fake Christianity, in order to evoke the sounds and images of holiness and the sacred, and the nation is in danger.

Add to the victim archetype, the dark side of that archetype: the need to perpetuate the archetype onto others through manipulation and bullying and the obvious generation of self-sabotaging social dynamics evident in rising prices, declining job opportunities, eroded national morale and optimism, and isolation among world powers.

The delusion of inflated compensated self-agency and power that accompanies a loud voice, more guns, red hats, and television and media outlets that serve as mouthpieces for the archetypal victim (and the cash cow it generates), threats, law suits, firings, deportations, royal dinners in Windsor Castle, red carpets in Alaska, rich friends/sycophants from the digital oligarchy, and the almost cult-like obeisance and exaggerated loyalty, (effectively sycophancy, a further iteration of the victim, and the spectre of more cash cows), has, like a cloud of swarming moths gasping for their last breath, enveloped the nation to the south of Canada, for the foreseeable future.

A nation of victims, obsessed with wreaking revenge, retribution and punishment on any and all whom that nation perceives as criminal, unjust, unethical, unwanted, of the wrong race, of the wrong religion, speaking the wrong language, (and the search for more targets of the obsessive-compulsive policy and practice of the current agents of the government (all of it signed into Executive Orders with the stroke of a black sharpie) will continue to take down all those who oppose its obsessive-compulsion.

Media outlets and talking head hosts, who complain about all of this treachery, deceit, lies, manipulation, defamation, law-suits, deportations, surveillance, and whatever other nefarious and heinous tactics and strategies that  have yet to be reported, ironically and paradoxically, reinforce the victim archetype. Now they have effectively become the critical parent megaphone whose child, the American democracy, its institutions, traditions, laws and conventions, is being pounded into asphyxiation, in a process designed and executed by the victim/bully whose identity has so “velcroed” itself to the collective unconscious.

Talk about a heavy-weight fight! Arranged, choreographed, manipulated, and sustained by one of the cheapest ‘tricks’ of chicanery imaginable. Deceiving an unsuspecting public into denying its own comprehension and apprehension and grasp, intellectual and emotional, as well as intuitive and experiential of the reality of their lives and their country. Talk about double jeopardy!

James Hillman in many of this writings points to the various cultural pathologies for which what he calls the anima mundi would be well served to be open to some form of therapy. Whether through family systems, or archetypal psychology, or even gestalt psychology, or even mirroring (Rogers) or even psych-drama, even a lay person can see and discern how, if there were motivation, need, urgency, and even commitment, a move out of perceived victimhood, and the ravages of its steroidal infusion into the collective psyche, would have to include a transformative shift to what, as parents, and teachers, and mentors and coaches might term, in general, a new maturity. This would necessitate an enhancement of personal and national self-esteem, taking and accepting responsibility for one’s self-and-other deceptions and manipulations, both of which as first steps would/could enable boundaries to be set, not only on a personal level but also on an organizational (thing government and media especially, as well as academia, and the churches). Airwaves would be cleared of the second-by-second twittering rambling of a deluded chief executive, legislators would defy, through such simple tactics as sit-ins, phone-deluges, advertising, lectures, editorials, and a relevant set of both policies and practices, including both tangible and intangible affective and cognitive deliverables.

The critical parent would give way to a health adult archetype, that dismisses the need for the victim, dismisses the need for lies and deceptions, the need for guns and fake religion, the need for tariffs and taxes and the sycophancy to the oligarchical new tech-titans. Of course, it would take time for this house of cards to fall, but fall it must. And it will never fall if we keep hitting it with snowballs on glass windows of office buildings or even bullets into the CDC, or even rifel shots into the neck of one of its acolytes.

To say such a prospect is unable to be either mandated or imposed from above is an understatement. It has to come from the bottom up; and as that is a pre-requisite,  it requires, demands, expects and promises a transformational shift in the national psyche, the anima mundi, from immature, dependent, hero-and-saviour-seeking-and-desperately-needing pettiness, petulance, vengeance, retribution and self-sabotage.

The shadow side of the victim, having emerged from the darkness of the underbelly of the national psyche, an underbelly we all have to both recognize and ‘tickle’ into consciousness personally, familially and even organizationally including especially the churches, (unleashing it suddenly and precipitously might be too catastrophic and undoing) has found its time to be brought into consciousness. The national psyche, both its collective consciousness and its collective unconsciousness, are ripe for a significant moment. And it will not arrive, as do no other significant transformational, metanoic moments, from the harping of a critical parent, no matter how seemingly judicious, ethical, moral, honest and self-righteous it considers itself to be.

Indeed, the critical parent, another embedded archetype in a nation believing its foundational archetypes are the inheritances of the Christian religion, (think Original Sin, and in America that is always categorized as slavery) may well be the precise opposite of what the nation cries out for. Force, especially in this case, is not appropriately delivered in self-righteous, legal, moral, ethical codes, or even in street or worse violent protests and assassinations.

A grown-up, self-respecting, sentient, optimistic and hopeful nation, looking forward to enhanced brotherhood, equality, justice, fairness, opportunity and the chance for everyone to find a legitimate place in that landscape not only does not need those deceptions, those lies and manipulations, armaments, and zero-sum games in its politics or its culture, or its education or social programs, nor in its judicial system….indeed such approaches, based firmly and falsely on the foundation of the victim on steroids, is inherently self-defeating, self-sabotaging, and self-asphixiating.

There is no oxygen there; no one can breath there; there is no blue shy there; there is no hope there; there is no humour or fun or even smiles and winks there (except those of the salacious and lecherous kind). And the editors and mangers of the major public media outlets, as well as the thinkers who guide and mentor influential thought leaders all know that the current divide, stale-mate, and about to be worse: conflagration, is no way to run a railroad….or a family or a nation, or a church….of any faith.

Searching for God # 22

 Anyone who has been following along in this space will not be surprised to learn that Tolstoy’s explication of the divide between what in theology we call the secular society’s conventions and practices and the religious exhortations. Tolstoy’s framing comes from the ‘state’ and Christ’s Christians taking seriously the Sermon on the Mount.

It is  not only the hypocrisy in which many of us are caught, that interests him, but the devastating impact on personal lives for many caught in a divide between what we all know to be good and healthy for mankind and how we are continuing to ignore, deny, suppress, or even dismiss our ‘better angels’ in favour of conventions that we know are both wrong and dangerously unhealthy.

I intend to build a word-and-thought link between a 1987 piece of writing by James Hillman and the renowned and historic treatise from Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You, first published in 1894.

In 1987, James Hillman published the essay, ‘Mars, Arms, Rams, Wars: On  the Love of War’ as part of the collection Facing Apocalypse, edited by V.Andrews, R. Bosnak, and K.W. Goodwin.

Here are some of the words we find in that essay, published again in A Blue Fire, Introduced and Edited by Thomas Moore, 1989:

I believe we can never speak sensibly of peace or disarmament unless we enter into this love of war. Unless we enter into the martial state of soul, we cannot comprehend its pull. This special state must be ritualistically entered. We must be ‘inducted,’ and war much be ‘declared’ –as one is declared insane, declared married or bankrupt….

My method of heading right in, of penetrating rather than circumambulating or reflecting, is itself martial. So we shall be invoking the god of the topic by this approach to the topic….

In our most elevated works of thought-Hindu and Platonic philosophy- a warrior class is imagined as necessary to the wellbeing of mankind. The class finds its counterpart in nature, in the heart, as virtues of courage, nobility, honour, loyalty, steadfastness of principle, comradely love, so that war is given location not only in class of persons but in a level of human personality organically necessary to the justice of the whole….Love and war have traditionally been coupled in the figures of Venus and Mars, Aphrodite and Ares. This usual allegory is expressed in usual slogans- make love not war, all’s fair in love and war—and in usual oscillating behaviours—rest, recreation and rehabilitation in the whorehouse behind the lines, then return to the all-male  barracks. Instead of these couplings which actually separate Mars and Venus into alternatives, there is a Venusian experience within Mars itself. It occurs in the sensate love of life in the midst of battle, in the care for concrete details built into all martial regulations, in the sprucing, prancing and dandying of the cavalliers (now called boys) on leave. Ar they sons of Mars or of Venus?...

Compared with our background in Europe, Americans are idealistic: war has no place, It should not be. War is not glorious, triumphal, creative as to a warrior class in Europe from Rome and the Normans through the Crusades even to the Battle of Britain. We may be a more violent people but not a warlike people---and our hatred of war makes us use violence against even war itself….’The object of war,’ oy says on General Sherman’s statue in Washington, is a more perfect peace,’ Our so-called double-speak about armaments as ‘peacemakers’ reflect truly how we think. War is bad, exterminate war and keep peace violently: primitive expeditions, preemptive strikes, send in the Marines. More firepower means surer peace. We enact he blind God’s blindness. (Mars Caecus as the Romans called him and Mars insanus, furibundus, omnipotens) like General Grant in the wilderness, like the bombing of Dresden, overkill as a way to end war. (A Blue Fire, pps.180-181-182)

Those are the words and thoughts of a twentieth century Jewish scholar, the founder of archetypal psychology, who considers the atomic bomb and the nuclear age as a tectonic shift in world consciousness given that we all are, now and forever, living under that shadow of nuclear annhiliation.

Tolstoy, whose conception of Christianity is not mystical, but almost generic and inherent in the consensus to which he believes all humans are endowed, as epithets depicting the Christian theology.

Here are some of Tolstoy’s prophetic, poetic and deeply Christian words:

Not to speak of all the other contradictions between modern life and the conscience, the permanently armed condition of Europe together with its profession of Christianity is alone enough to drive any man to despair, to doubt the sanity of mankind and to terminate an existence in this senseless and brutal world. This contradiction, which is a quintessence of all the other contradictions, is so terrible that to life and to take part in it is only possible if one does not think of it—if one is able to forget it.

What! All of us, Christians, not only profess to love one another, but do actually life one common life; we whose social existence beats with one common pulse-we aid one another, learn from one another, draw ever closer to one another to our mutual happiness and find in this closeness the meaning of life!---and tomorrow some crazy rule will say some stupidity, and another with answer in the same spirit, and then I must to expose myself to being murdered, and murder men—who have done me no harm—and more than that, whom I love. And this is not a remote

contingency, but the very thing we are all preparing for, which is not only probable but an inevitably certainty. To recognize this clearly is enough to drive a man our of his senses or to make him shoot himself. And this is just what does happen, and especially often among military men. A man need only come to himself for an instant to be impelled inevitably to such an end….(TKOGIWY, p.131- 132)

And as reinforcement to his argument, we read these words:

People are astonished that every year there are sixty thousand cases of suicide in Europe, and those only the recognized and recorded cases—and excluding Russia and Turkey; but one ought to be surprised  that there are so few. Every man of the present day, if we go deep enough into the contradiction between his conscience and his life, is in a state of despair. (Ibid, p.131)*

Originally written in 1894,  they could just as easily and justifiably be included on the editorial pages of major newspapers around the globe today.

The world, and certainly the Western so-called Christian, world hardly needs another anti-war screed, at a time when wars are killing thousands, wounding and leaving millions more homeless and hopeless and the so-called Christian leaders are justifying the closing of borders to the same people that suffer, innocently and without having in any way caused those wars.

In his deplorable speech to the United Nations, the American president claimed that some 53-4% of all prisoners in German prisons are foreign nationals. Using that as a reason for his outright, illegal, unjustified deportation of immigrants, refugees and the undocumented from America, the president would be on more solid ground if he were to examine the causes of the displacement of millions.

War, high among those causes, poverty, disease, lack of education, health care, clean water and terror comprise only a partial list. And the determined exploits of leaders bent on the accomplishment of their military murderings, none of which are amenable to any kind of negotiated settlement add significantly to the causes.

Any discussion of addressing the root causes of war, however, is unlikely to include the notions expressed courageously by Hillman. And so, the pleadings of those who cry for peace, as if it were an ideal justified by its own existence, will continue to go unheeded, even unheard, and certainly considered irrelevant.

While Tolstoy promotes the developmental notion that the Christian path of and to brotherhood of all mankind, as we ‘transition’ (recall he wrote in 1894) from what he calls the ‘social’ stage, following the individual stage of human development, and his ‘stages’ have both demographic and intellectual merit, many will be despondent that it takes so long to transition.

Indeed, given the tidal wave of information about the immediate situation, 24-7-365, we are drowning in data points often failing to see the forest for the trees.

Both Hillman, from a psychological and Tolstoy from a Christian perspective, have hit upon one of the world’s most heinous hypocrisies, contradictions and what amounts to a shared ‘psychic pathology’ of the anima mundi.

If we were each to sit in front of our personal private mirror, and to face the question of how and why we have been inoculated into the social, secular and war mentality, that has, in so many different variations and iterations commandeered leaders a citizens alike, would we not likely come to the conclusion that to shift our personal loyalties from war, murder, killing, weapons, revenge, retribution, lies and the ignominious motivations and actions, words and policies of the leaders of various war machines, we might enhance our chances of protecting and preserving the civilization and the planet we need to keep it alive?

Anyone in doubt?

*In 2019 the VA released it national Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report, which stated that the suicide rate for veterans was 1.5 times the rate of non-veteran adults, and between 2008 and 2017 6000 or more veterans committed suicide. (Wikipedia)

Searcing for God # 21

 In this space in the last post, the difference between philanthropy/good works, from discipleship in Christ was noted.

Tolstoy in, The Kingdom of God is Within You, writes, much more explicitly about this notion. At the end of the 19^th century, before the explosion of sociology, and before the work of Northrop Frye in The Educated Imagination, Tolstoy writes:

The faculty of foreseeing the path along which humanity must move, is common to a greater or less degree to all men. But in all times there have been men in which  his faculty was especially strong, and these men have given clear and definite expression to what all men felt vaguely, and formed a new philosophy of life from which new lines of action followed for hundreds and thousands of years.

Of such philosophies of life we know three: two have already been passed through by humanity, and the third is that we ae passing through now in Christianity. These philosophies of life are three in number, and only three, not because we have arbitrarily brought the various theories of life together under these three heads, but because all men’s actions are aways based on one of these three views of life—because we cannot live life otherwise than in these three ways.

These three views of life are as follows: First, embracing the individual, or the animal view of life; second embracing the society, or the pagan view of life; third, embracing the whole world, or the divine view of life.

In the first theory of life a man’s life is limited to his one individuality; the aim of life is the satisfaction of the will of this individuality. In the second theory of life a man’s life is limited not to his own individuality, but to certain societies and classes of individuals: to the tribe, the family, the class, the nation; the aim of life is limited to the satisfaction of the will of those associations of individuals. In the third theory of life a man’s life is limited not to societies and classes of individuals, but extends to the principle and source of life—to God. (Tolstoy, op. cit., p. 88)

And a little later, Tolstoy writes:

Christ recognizes the existence of both sides of the parallelogram, of both eternal indestructible forces of which the life of man is compounded; the force of his animal nature and the fore of the consciousness of kinship to God…The true life, according to preceding religions, consists in carrying out rules, the law; according to Christ’s teaching it consists in an ever lose approximation to the divine perfection held up before every man, and recognized within himself by every man, in  an ever closer and closer approach to the perfect fusion of his will in the will of God, that fusion to which man strives, and the attainment of which would be the destruction of the life we know. The divine perfection is the asymptote of human life to which it is always striving, and always approaching, though it can only be reached in infinity. (Tolstoy, op. cit. p. 98)

Asymptote: a line that continually approaches a given curve but does not meet it at any finite distance. A straight line that constantly approaches a given curve but does not meet at any infinite distance. (a tangent)

The Russian writer continues:

Life, according to the Christian religion, is a progress toward the divine perfection. No one condition, according to this doctrine, can be higher or lower than another. Every condition, according to this doctrine, is only a particular stage, of no consequence in itself, on the way toward unattainably perfection and therefore in itself it does not imply a greater or lesser degree of life. Increase in life, according to this, consists in nothing but the quickening of the progress toward perfection. And therefore the progress toward perfection of the publican Zaccheus, of the woman that was a sinner, and of the robber on the cross, implies a higher degree of life than the stagnant righteousness of the Pharisee. And therefore for this religion there cannot be rules which are obligatory to obey. The man who is lower level but is moving onward toward perfection is living s more moral, a better life, is more fully carrying out Christ’s teaching, than the man on a much higher level of morality who is not moving onward toward perfection. It is in this sense that the lost sheep is dearer to the father than those that were not lost. The prodigal son, the piece of money lost and found again, were more precious than those that were not lost. The fulfilment of Christ’s teaching consists in moving aware from self toward God. It is obvious that there cannot be definite laws and rules for this fulfillment of the teaching. (Tolstoy, op. cit. p. 100)

Let’s think back, for a moment, to the work of Gregory Baum, and his ‘privatizing of sin’ as opposed to the inclusion of both institutional and social/cultural sin…and the need for a more creative approach in which the church submits itself to a critical self-reflection. Many have been indoctrinated into a mind-set that sets forth specific acts which the church declares are considered sins, whether venal or mortal. And also let’s recall the Scott Peck book, The People of the Lie, in which the psychiatrist searched throughout the Pentagon for person who was responsible for the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and found no one. Apparently the decision was taken by some group or groups, behind which ‘group’ cover every military officer claimed immunity and avoided both accountability and responsibility. In Christian teaching, the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, have been rigorously and religiously taught as moral ‘do not’s to millions of children. Indeed, much of Western law follows the principles and precepts of those declarations. Tolstoy, however, posits a very different image of a path ‘toward’ not a path of judgement and inadequacy and inherent and inescapable evil as the starting place for a pilgrimage toward God.

Centering the Sermon on the Mount, as the cornerstone of his view of the Christian life, Tolstoy writes:

The Christian precepts (the commandment of love is not a precept in the strict sense of the word, but the expression of the very essence of the religion) are the five commandments of the Sermon on the Mount---all negative in character. They show only what at a certain stage of development of humanity men may not do. The commandments are, as it were, signposts on the endless road to perfection, toward which humanity is moving, showing the point of perfection which is possible at a certain period in the development of humanity. Christ has given expression in the Sermon on the Monut to the eternal ideal toward which men are spontaneously struggling, and also the degree of attainment of it to which man may reach in our times. The ideal is not to desire to do ill to anyone, not to provoke ill will, to love all men. (Tolstoy, op. cit. p. 101)….

The ideal is to love the enemies who hate us. The precept showing the level below which we cannot fall is that of returning good for evil, being patient under wrong, giving the cloak also. (Ibid, p. 102)

This illustrates one of the ideals from the Sermon and the precept below which Tolstoy indicates we must not fall.

The concept of an ideal, to which to strive, and the accompanying precept as a kind of modest and appropriate application in a developmental progressive model, sparked by what is conceived as the divine spark within each human, is, at least to this scribe, refreshing, restorative and reconciling, within myself, as well as in the context of a relationship with God.

Let’s pause on this aspect of the Sermon….the ideal of loving the enemies who hate us. For some, those enemies may be family members, with whom we can be patient, and if and when asked for a coat, give our cloak also. For others, those enemies may be political and ideological.

Adopting this precept of returning good for evil, which some might say is the path the Democrats have adopted in their contest of shared hatreds with the Republicans. And for their attempting what society calls the ‘high road’ they are also incurring the wrath of new enemies who believe they are forfeiting the democracy at the core of the American experiment.

What would one do if one were to consider an application of the Sermon on the Mount to the divide of hatred that currently paralyzes the United States government? In retorting to the widow of Charlie Kirk’s forgiveness of her husband’s assassin, the president actually shouted, ‘Not for me, I hate my enemies! Sorry, Erika!”

If in Tolstoy’s view, there is no difference between any, no one is higher or lower, then it is clear that Erika’s path and progress toward fulfilling this aspect of the Sermon is ahead of the path and current state of the president, who, it seems, has declared his acknowledgement of a state of stasis, similar to that of the Pharisees, in his case a self-righteousness and pride of the stasis of hating his enemies.

For many people, the notion of motion, movement, transformation, and aspiration is inherent both in our mindset as well as in our nurturing, education, training and socializing. We are pointed to the future,  as part of our hard-wiring. And the notion of stasis is inherently both uncommon and tragically arresting. And that collision, between a common shared inherent ‘movement’ toward perfection in many and the stasis that has been declared by the president.

If there is any resonance, relevance and significance to the collision of a plurality of men and women inherently aspiring and moving in their personal private lives toward perfection and the will of God and a leader who is completely satisfied in his own stasis, especially one that ‘hates his enemies, the dimension of such a divide defies both language and perception for those who see themselves aspiring toward perfection.

And the risk that the ‘structure, stability, strength, and fixity of the stasis’ to seduce many who have lost sight of the inherent nature of their aspiration toward perfection (and the will of God, as Tolstoy explains it), and think that the notion of transitioning and transformations is too ethereal, ephemeral, and frothy, when compared with the concrete of ‘stasis’ (in which hate is only one important example) screams out at us.

The lie that is inherent in the stasis of stability (demonstrated by the stasis of hatred of enemies) over against the truth of inherent aspiration towards perfection and the will of God, is so camouflaged in repeated rhetorical flourishes that currently dominate the public air waves, as if that message eclipsed the more natural, flowing, developing and transforming reality of a majority of men and women in America who are genetically and spiritually wired differently.

Are there any clergy who might consider this divide worthy of their risking public shame if they were to address it? Especially in this time frame, creeds and rituals seem to be ineffectual when the cry from the ‘mount’ summons us all to resist evil by force.

Searching for God #20

 There is always a surprise when some reading seems so congruent with one’s unsubstantiated, and intuitive and deeply felt perceptions that it seems incroyable as the French say, unbelievable.

Such an experience emerged this morning, while reading Tolstoy’s ‘The Kingdom of God is Within You’ and the following lines, on page 68, jumped into view:

To whatever degrees of understanding and perfection the follower of Christ may have attained, he always feels the insufficiency of his understanding and fulfilment of it, and is always striving toward a fuller understanding and fulfilment. And, therefore, to assert of one’s self or of any body of men that one is or they are in possession of perfect understanding and fulfilment of Christ’s word, is to renounce the very spirit of Christ’s teaching.

The mystery of any search for God is, like a gossamer cloud of both beauty and uncertainty, always drawing one back and back and back into the same inescapable, unending search. And the offering of platitudes of certainty, as if to ‘know’ the mind, requirements, and purpose and intent of God and to be determined to share that certainty, ‘because it has been so impactful in my life’ as the phrase often accompanies that ‘proselytizing, is only proof of its essentially having served to terminate the search for God of and by such a person.

Strange as it may seem, the churches as churches have always been and cannot but be, institutions not only alien in spirit to Christ’s teaching, but even directly antagonistic to it. With good reason Voltaire calls the Church l’infame: with good reason have all or almost all so-called sects of Christianity recognized the Church as the scarlet woman  foretold in the Apocalypse*; with good reason is the history of the Church the history of the greatest cruelties and horrors.

*In Revelation 17, is the whore of Babylon, a symbolic figure representing a corrupt, idolatrous system that opposed God, specifically Babylon the Great.

And also, a few pages later Tolstoy’s words:

If a man can be saved by the redemption, by sacraments, and by prayer, then he does not need good works.

The Sermon on the Mount or the Creed. One cannot believe in both. And Churchmen have chosen the latter. The Creed is taught and is read as a prayer in the churches, but the Sermon on the Mount is excluded even from the Gospel passages read in the churches, so that the congregation never hears it in the church, except on those days when the whole of the Gospel is read. Indeed it could not be otherwise. People who believe in a wicked and senseless God-who has cursed the human race and devoted his own Son to sacrifice, and a part of mankind to eternal torment—cannot believe in the God of love. The man who believes in a God, in a Christ coming again in glory to judge and to punish the quick and the dead, cannot believe in the Christ who bade us turn the left cheek, judge not, forgive those that wrong us, and love your enemies. The man who believes in the inspiration of the Old Testament and the sacred character of David, who commanded on his deathbed the murder of an old man who has cursed hum, and whom he could not kill himself because he was bound by an oath to him, and the similar atrocities of which the Old Testament is full, cannot believe in the holy love of God. The man who believes in the Church’s doctrine of the compatibility of warfare and capital punishment  with Christianity cannot believe in the brotherhood of all men.

And what is most important of all-the man who believes in salvation through faith in the redemption or the sacraments, cannot devote all his power to realizing Christ’s moral teaching in his life. (p.75-6)

Attempting to say what Christianity is not, is very different from posing as the ‘authority’ on the matter. And while the clarifications Tolstoy offers, serve as a kind of light in a darkened path, resisting evil by force, is not exactly a formula easily discerned and applied in one’s life.

What constitutes evil? Is a question to which Tolstoy and many others have dedicated much of their lives to trying to answer. From the perspective of this scribe, everyone is thereby enjoined to discern what is, not only opposed to or blocking “life” as the field education supervisor in theological school put it, but even to discern what is opposed to or blocking the God of love from breaking into our existence.

From marxists.org in a piece entitled Thoughts on God,, transcription/Markup by Andy Carloff, Note to the Second Edition, we read Tolstoy’s words:

God is for me that after which I strive-that, in striving after which consists my life, and who therefore for me is: but is necessarily such that I cannot comprehend of name Him. If I understood Him, I should have reached Him, and there would be nothing to strive after; there would be no life. But, and this seems a contradiction, though I cannot understand nor name Him, yet at the same time I know Him and the direction towards Him, and even of all my knowledge this is the most certain.

From a lay perspective, it would seem that, based on Tolstoy’s ‘resisting evil by force,’ upon the recognition and discernment of evil, not only those obvious hot-button issues such as war and capital punishment, one discerns the intent, or the hidden methods of those determined to abuse power, and then discerns clearly, the potentials of the various ways to bring ‘force’ to bear against that evil, one is beginning to approach in a vigorous, nuanced, even creative and muscular manner the depth and the range of that evil.

Today, in a period of the bandying about of various ideologies, as if they were either or both God’s will or the purpose of a person’s life or even the purpose of a state or nation, it can be quite challenging to discern the ‘wheat from the chaff’. God is not amenable to a political philosophy; God is not amenable to a historical theory, for example the Divine Right of Kings. God is not amenable to a marketing strategy that declares, for example, “Death is caused by our sins” that blares on an urban billboard on an office building in a modern urban city. God is not amenable to the appropriation as sanctification of a war, as, for example, the war in Ukraine endorsed and supported by the Russian Orthodox Church and its hierarchy. God is not amenable or able to be contained in the declared intent of the current Speaker of the House of Representatives ‘to bring about the Kingdom of God in America now’. God is not amenable to profound and largesse amounts of philanthropy for any of the highly relevant, useful and absolutely necessary programs to prevent or to forestall starvation in Gaza, or to prevent or sustain civil war in Sudan.

And then, we get to those intensely radioactive issues like, ‘The Ten Commandments’ posted on the walls of Oklahoma public school rooms, as if for the government of that state to declare, ‘we know we are doing God’s will’ God is not either amenable nor containable in such a public show of religiosity.

And it is the public show of religiosity to which  Tolstoy is so vehemently opposed. There is an inescapable element of hubris, self-righteousness, pride and self-promotion in many of the acts of altruism, philanthropy, and the writing of cheques for various causes. It is not that those causes per se are evil. Indeed, given the kind of destitution in which millions are expected to attempt to survive, no one can deny their necessity, nor the generosity of the donors who help them to survive and to their work.

And yet, God is not amenable even to such high ideals…..the question of ‘resisting evil by force,’ what Tolstoy considers the core injunction of the Sermon on the Mount, stretches beyond doing ‘good’…..and we have been reminded of this ‘resistance’ theme by others like Martin Luther King Jr….

From Amsterdam News, in a piece entitled, When Dr.King broke his betrayal of silence, by Herb Boyd, January 10, 2024, we read:

‘When machines and computers profit motives and property right,s are considered more important that people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.’ …These words belong unmistakably to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The words were part of a speech he delivered on April 4, 1976, a year to the day before his assassination….It was a speech that, although loudly applauded by the audience that day at Riverside Church in Harlem brought a wave of condemnation from proponents of the mainstream media, and even several of King’s fellow clergy, which was no surprise because many of them had chastised him at the beginning of his ministry of peace and justice…..

And also, from the same piece:

‘The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit., he said, ‘and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy and laymen concerned committees for the next generation.’

It may not be considered rocket science, by some, to discern what amounts to ‘evil’ in a culture; for many who are sentient, and intuitive and engaged, it seems it might even be obvious. What is not so simply and easily discerned or proferred is the commitment to commit to speaking out publicly, without fear or also without sugar-coating the truth, knowing that the establishment will engage in retribution, and that word has more recently become a litmus-test applied to himself for the current occupant of the Oval Office…. ‘I am your retribution!’

No matter how many seminars and lectures, law suits and public debates, and even laws and constitutions declare that the state and the church as separate, there is still the overriding fact that men and women populate and comprise both the church and the state, and their lives intersect both ‘entities.’ And while freedom from and freedom for religion is an important aspect of the concept of separation, the words, and the perceptions and attitudes of people know no boundaries.

Another intuitively grasped, as well as historically and almost genetically grounded, is the notion that every single one of us ‘knows’ within if and when we witness or even ‘sense’ evil in our midst. Dogs too, flag persons they do not trust. So do we and whether that flagging proves literally true, or merely reinforcement of our inherent radar for ‘sensing’ and perceiving and feeling evil (choose the word you prefer), the question upon our realization is ‘what do we do about it.’

Since 9/11, we have heard the chant, ‘If you see something, say something!’ and yet, while many do, many do not. Evil is not contained exclusively in violent acts, robberies, rapes, murders, and wars, although these are among the most sensational. Tax frauds, corporations that lie and deceive their clients, and governments that envelop themselves in layers of lies, out from which entanglement they are loath to emerge, because for the most part they have come to believe their own press reports of their own lies and deceptions and propaganda.

Resisting evil by force, in a world in which evil men and evil deeds, both of commission and omission proliferate the world’s cultural, political and environmental and military theatres, the theatres in which we all live and breathe, and drink our water and grow, harvest, cook and consume our food has come to be a monumental, even dangerous disturbed mountain of hot lava, about to explode in our faces…We all know that. There is not  sentient human who can or will deny it.

And, it is almost as if the size and the scope and the ubiquity of the evil is so overwhelming in scope, size, range and ensnaring for the whole world population, that, even to speak out as a individual seems to be a mere whisper when compared with the decibels of propaganda and lies to which we are being fed.

Hierarchies, whether they are governmental, ecclesial, academic, corporate or military, medical, legal, or scientific converge into a kind of cultural ‘bolus’ of attitudes, perceptions, beliefs and conventionalities, in which we all both swim and paradoxically drown.

The drowning in this case, may not be literal, but metaphoric, in that what we know in the intimacy and privacy and secrecy of our hearts and minds, even though it may correspond and echo the same thoughts and feelings around the world, remains ‘behind our choice, in effect, to hold our breath, and stop our larynx, for fear of ‘retribution.’

It is that retribution itself, that is the evil facing every one of us. Can and will we agree and begin to start breathing and rehearsing our voices in  forceful protest?

Searching for God # 19

 And aberrant behaviour lies at the heart of many personal and social tensions, problems, and intractable situations, all of them needing and begging for our attention, both as part of our psychological perspective and also our theological perspective. (Closing sentence from #18 Searching for God)

What is aberrant behaviour? Who decides? And, also, importantly, who decides what to do about it?

Merriam-webster.com defines aberrant this way: deviating from the usual or natural type; straying from the right or normal way; a person whose behaviour departs substantially from the standard..

Synonyms are: unusual, abnormal, unique, uncommon, outstanding, extraordinary, exceptional, rare, odd.

James Hillman, in Revisioning Psychology, writes:

The falling apart of the individual at death, the dissolution of his complexity, which the Buddha taught in his last cautionary enigma—'Decay is inherent in all composite things. Work on your salvation with diligence.’--points to the absolute non-normality of each individual person. If the fundamental principle of psychological life is differentiation, then no single perspective can embrace psychological life, and norms are the delusions that parts prescribe to one another. A standard for one figure may be pathology for another, and pathology for one part may be normal from another perspective within the same individual. Hillman, Revisioning Psychology, p.88)

Starting from a different vantage point about normality, and its opposite abnormality, Hillman stresses both individuality and the imagination in its inveterate and interminable movement into and out of images, both conscious and unconscious, some of which ‘take us over’ as in our dreams. Often a psychological diagnosis, specifically I reference the appellation, ‘abnormal,’ is a kind of professionally applied designation that serves as a flag on a forehead stigmatizing the individual for ever. Some clients might exclaim, ‘I always knew I was weird!’ while others might silently wonder, ‘What is the ‘norm’ to which I am being compared?’

Preferring a world in which we are less targeted by medical, scientific psychological/psychiatric diagnoses, Hillman seeks a metaphoric image, a voice of a mythic god or goddess, that might add both depth and profound connection to the enacted behaviour in question, much of which, if perceived and viewed imaginatively, brings with it a very different orientation to the ‘behaviour’ and to the person who struggles with how and why s/he did or said something. One of the more serious implications of the current medical, scientific, diagnostic model is that we ‘enchain ourselves to some moral deviance’ (supported and enhanced by that diagnosis of abnormal) before we even begin to look for what else might be going on.

Obviously, the word aberrant is used here in a direct push-back to the clinical psychological diagnosis of abnormal. It is perhaps risqué  and a little dangerous to suggest, or even contend, that ‘abnormal’ as a psychological diagnosis is, even without intending to be, a reductive, and socially estranging adjective, especially given the deep well of psychological terms that have infiltrated the social lexicon, to the point where, at times, each of us attempts to be a wannabe professional. And without perhaps realizing it, ‘the other’ instantly becomes a ‘patient’ or a ‘case’ or a ‘problem’ or a…..(fill in the blank with you choice). None of us lay persons, untrained and unschooled in the academic disciplines of either psychology or psychiatry, is exempt from honest, experiential expressions of how another impacts us in the multiple ways that impact occurs. Whether it is body image, voice timbre, scent of the day, vocabulary, any idiosyncrasies or any other ‘vibe’ that we ‘get’ goes into our imagination and forms an image of our unconscious and conscious combined temperament.

An appropriate analogy might be the relationship of all parents to the school which their child attends. Most parents are not schooled and trained and educated in pedagogy, nor in school administration, nor in school counseling, nor in athletic of kinetics or science or any of the other academic and technical subjects in which their child is or will enrol. And yet, on parents’ nights, every parent, being an expert on their child, offers opinions, insights, recommendations, and even criticisms to teachers about how to ‘manage’ and ‘teach’ their child. For teachers to disregard those ‘lay’ comments is a peril of self-sabotage, based, perhaps sadly, on the ‘superior knowledge of the teacher to that of the parent. The combination of both views, even if different, can lead to a better relationship at home and at school.

The potential balance, integration, blending of lay and expert perspectives is a missing ingredient, from many interactions between professionals and ordinary people. And that is especially true in the realm of personal theology, relationship to God, questions about dogma, the meaning and purpose of life and death, healthy relationships, and especially about hot-button issues in the public square. Generally, in a world filled with ‘professional experts’ advising, counselling, and admonishing others, it has been my experience that in general people sitting in pews in Christian churches respect, and even honour and absorb, both cognitively and emotionally, as part of their ‘religious pilgrimage,’ the words of the clergy. And those words, as are all other words written, spoken, debated and even battled about God, about God’s role in our lives, and God’s relationship to the universe, have to be quarantined into ‘speculative’ and ‘imagined,’ and based on the speculations and imaginations of others, some of them scholarly, some of the mystical, some of them historical, some of them prophetic and some of them delusional.

To some extent, it is highly pretentious for any of us, including especially this scribe, even contemplate or envision strict and inflexible ‘rules’ or even ‘directions’ or certainly ‘mandates’ that are required of anyone seeking God, as prescribed by that God (of any faith). Whatever impulses, images, instinctual urges, visions, and even fears and traumas, conscious and unconscious, comprise the totality of both one’s psychological life, as well as one’s religious and spiritual life. In the view of this scribe, those lives are inseparably intertwined and it may be impossible to extricate one from the other.

The imaginative, archetypal psychological perspective, however, offers a potential bridge, a glimpse of how we might distinguish, or perhaps reconcile our psychological life with our spiritual life.

Over decades of being ‘churched,’ I found that dark moments, both in the church’s life and in the lives of individuals seemed relegated to evil, almost without reflection. Death is viewed variously as a result of sin or an entrance into an eternal heavenly afterlife. Satan, another personification, the preeminent doctor of evil, holds sway in such moments, leading one away from the holiness and unconditional love of God…..or so goes the basic, reductionistic theology. Underlying that premise is the implicit threat of ‘Hell’ and/or purgatory, depending both on the ‘sin’ and the perception of the clergy and his or her penitent, unless and until confessed and atoned for. Any conversations about darkness (in human behaviour), in my experience, were shrouded in silence, secrecy, and the inevitable unavoidable gossip.

By hijacking morality the church has effectively bifurcated both our thinking and our world view into ‘good and bad’…do good, do not do evil. Such a proposition either overtly overlooks or covertly denies that each of us is both capable of and mysteriously and inexplicably susceptible to both…And we live our lives in a complex and often murky middle…and what seems to be skated around, like the end-run of a quarterback or halfback around the defensive end in football, is the serious and often malignant impact of our families, our culture, our anima mundi, as Hillman reminds us.

Indeed, he goes so far as to utter, that, in a world so troubled and troublesome, only those who do not ‘fit’ are the most healthy, and that many, in such a world, would legitimately consider taking their own lives.

In his introduction and editing of Hillman’s A Blue Fire, Thomas Moore writes:

To the archetypal psychologist the world, too, is a patient in need of therapeutic attention. (P.95)

In an essay entitled Peaks and Vales, Hillman writes:

Vale in the usual religious language of our culture is a depressed emotional place-the vale of tears. Jesus walked the lonesome valley, the valley of the shadow of death…The meaning of vale and valley include entire subcategories referring to such sad things as the decline of years and old age, the world regarded as a place of troubles, sorrow, and weeping, and the world regarded as the scene of the mortal, the earthly, the lowly. (Hillman, A Blue Fire, p. 115)

He then borrows from the Dalai Lama, who compares peak and vale:

In a letter (to Peter Goullart) he (Dalai Lama) 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 the most spiritual flowers…I call the high and light aspects of my being spirit and the dark and heavy aspect soul. Soul is the home in the deep, shaded valleys. Heavy torpid flowers saturated with black grow there. The rivers flow like arm 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…People need to climb the mountain not simply because it is there but because the soulful divinity needs to be mated with the spirit.  (A Blue Fire, pps. 115-116)

This message is one I would respectfully and humbly offer to the candidates for ministry, as well as to the curriculum designers in the theological faculties. Church sanctuaries, as well as every social event among parishioners where safety and confidence have been established can avail the opportunities to exchange their dark moments, as part of their spiritual journey, without having either to closet them or to bury them like squirrels with their nuts for winter. And the churches themselves, all of which have experienced very dark periods, not measured only by falling revenues and attendees, but by racial, economic or political or social strife, perhaps even suicide, have to be permitted to release their experiences together, in a safe environment, both the ‘healing of the community, and also for the modelling of such release for each family.

Preserving the psychological and the psychiatric for the clinical office visit, not only obviates the religious dimension and potential for psychic and spiritual growth; it also forecloses on the conscious demonstration, not only in the privacy of prayer, but to others whom one trusts, the universal truth of our own shared humanity.

It was Hélene, my first chaplaincy patient who asked, in the depths of her lethal diagnosis of breast cancer, ‘Why is God doing this to me? I have lived a good life and do not deserve this!’

It is the human cry, of ‘why have you forsaken me’ to which both religious faith and psychological verdancy both speak and answer. And the answers need not be divorced one from the other. Indeed, more than some combination of both perspectives can enhance our understanding of our spirit and our soul. And all of these questionings and wonderings, curses and blessings comprise a lively and rigorous life of abundance for which, it seems, God is both profoundly familiar  and hyper-supportive.

Continuing through these keys to struggle with the blending of both psychology (archetypal) and religious aspirations…

To be continued…..

Searcing for God # 18

 It is to the mystery and the awe  of God that the search for God is dedicated…

a sentence from the last paragraph “Searching for God #17”…

After decades of ‘churching,’ from childhood Sunday School, junior choirs, young people’s groups, to lay reader, warden, seminary student, and a dozen-plus years practising ministry, to a couple of decades in withdrawal and ‘recovery’ from the impact of a collision between my nascent and emerging ‘theology’ and the practices of the institutional church to a day sitting in the chemo ward of an urban hospital.

Having ‘bought into’ the social, conventional model of ‘achievement’ of career, education, public performance, all of it emerging from a profound unconscious desire, need, or perhaps even desperation to be valued, respected, integrated and welcomed into the human family, and thereby dependent on notices of approval, approbation, even a meagre compliment. Applause, recognition, approval of others, and the concomitant disapproval and criticism and judgement of others, comprised an oscillation to which I was, at first totally unconscious, and only gradually became aware.

While in undergraduate studies, pretentiously enrolled in Honours History, in first year, I managed only a decrepit D grade on the final evaluation. Not having learned in high school, the importance of ‘themes’ or major ideas, and studied, as a consequence, the broad and superficial details of approximately 1000 years of European History, I ‘knew’ a very little about a range of topics and insufficient details about the major themes.

Nevertheless, I came across a book that caught my eye; published in 1961, What is History? by E.H. Carr, based on a series of lectures delivered at Cambridge University. It explores the nature of history, arguing that historical ‘facts’ are a product of the historian’s selection and interpretation. Themes such as ‘economic history,’ as compared with ‘political history’ and ‘military history’ and ‘governmental history,’ ‘architectural history,’ ‘scientific history’…etc.

Instantly, upon reading that text, my ‘eyes’ opened to a different, more ‘macro’ perception of the world. It was not that, as I recall, Carr was proposing anything resembling a hierarchy of historical perspectives, only that there is a variety, and as students, it is important to become familiar with the ‘perspective’ of each historian. On reflection, I soon realized that many times in senior high school history class, I had wondered about how various people had come to various ‘opinions’ or perspectives on the events, battles, treaties, peace conferences and editorial opinions found in school texts., without having the benefit of a text or tutor like Carr.

Facts, when provincial department examinations were a rigorous and standard component to high school evaluation ruled; opinions were barely mentioned. Memorization of facts, as expected daily in history class, was the regime expected. Needless to say, I was comfortable with ‘facts’ and, at that stage of my life, completely unaware of and immune to anything called opinions, as a matter of either scholarship generally or history specifically.

Why go all through that meandering labyrinth about facts and opinions, in a piece about ‘searching for God’?

Well, as a parallel to the nature of the ‘learning’ in school, like many others, we were also ‘learning’ what purported to be ‘facts’ in church. Belief based on the facts of the biblical stories, seemed to be the receipt for membership, and even for conversion and acceptance into ‘receiving communion’ as per some more memory work from the Westminster Shorter Catechism. More memory work! This time about God, about Biblical stories and about Calvinistic pre-determination. The only opinion that seemed to matter was the one emerging from the clergy’s larynx from the elevated pulpit, itself a massive piece of oak furniture. And that opinion was itself infused with evangelical intensity, given that, it seemed even to an adolescent then, that the more people and money that gravitated into the sanctuary, the more ebullient were the clergy, the session and the congregation generally. This church was a model of an evangelical tent revival meeting, every Sunday.

On one Sunday morning, in my sixteenth year, when I heard from that pulpit words that were so reprehensible to my naïve and innocent ears and mind, I rebelled. ‘If you are a Roman Catholic, you are going to Hell; if you drink wine, you are going to Hell; if you go to dances or the movie, or wear makeup, you are going to Hell.’

That homily effectively terminated my church attendance, for the rest of high school years. Those words were totally divergent from anything I had read in the New Testament, or heard previously. The words, however, helped my to draw a line between what I would tolerate and what I would not tolerate.

And that line, repeated many times over the ensuring decades, has been a defining tenet not only of my belief system, but also of my interactions with both ideas and people espousing various opinions, especially those come from someone who purports to be a theologian, or a clergy, or a professor of theology or a bishop of an established mainline church.

English professors and the literature they presented, however, were, for me, in a different ‘place in my mind…in that opinions about the significant subjects of novels, poems, plays, short stories embodied as kind of elasticity, based on how ‘facts’ were interpreted. So long as one could and did master the facts from the text that led to and supported and sustained an opinion, from various sources, there was a kind of legitimacy to that perspective.

And, after decades, and the clarity of consciousness that all things philosophical, theological, historical and rudimentary to Western thought were written and carried forward primarily by men, and a growing consciousness of a masculine perspective that in many ways diverges from perspectives of women, and that those writings, including even scripture, came from the quill or stick or hieroglyph of men.

And those ‘characters’ represented opinions, imaginations, visions, dreaded fears and apprehensions, of aspects of the Christian faith, for example, the Original Fall and its application on a large street billboard I encountered only yesterday in an active urban city, ‘Death is the result of sin!’ I nearly drove off the road when I gulped, exclaimed to my wife: ‘Did you read that crap?”

Imagine a theology that explains death as the result of human sin! How perverted, distorted and actually dangerous is such an axiom. Not only are we all going to die, irrespective of the nature of the kind of life we life; this ‘cause-effect’ modality lies at the heart of any theology that demonizes both man and God.

The kind of bartering that comes from such a template, provokes many to adopt a mind-set, and a kind of religion that says, ‘if I do….say, think, believe….this, then  will guarantee my seat in heaven as a reward in the afterlife.’ Fill in the blanks as you undoubtedly have already heard the adage. And then, if you can, begin the process of erasing even such kinds of thoughts, perceptions, beliefs and convictions.

Religion, any religion, that takes as its purpose and meaning to impose highly critical judgements (think and remember, ‘Going to Hell’) for what are effectively ‘privatized sins,’ and that was the kind to which I was subjected in my youth, along with many others in many other churches, fails the most basic litmus test of a faith community worthy of adherence.

The question of knowing the mind of God, the intentions of the gospel writers, the prophets, including the Decalogue, and the multitude of prohibitions found in scripture, as well as the exhortations to superior moral conduct, including the overlap of the purpose of a faith and the commandeering of the institutions of government into that faith-counselled mandate, all have to be filtered through a variety of lenses.

First, the not-knowing absolutely and precisely the appropriate application of any and all moral injunctions requires a detailed appreciation of the context in which it was originated. It also requires an intimate and sensitive and nuanced appreciation for the differences between its original context and the context in which we all live.

Secondly, the various levels and modes of language, literal, metaphoric, mythic, historic, journalistic, scientific, ancestral, legal and foundational all need to be considered, both from the perspective of the writer, and then of the various layers of scholarship and also the contemporary situation, before any kind of appropriate adjudication can be deduced, never mind applied.

Long ago, I regret not having been introduced into some words from Buddhism that, latterly have been instructive and healing;

Religion was never meant to be a weapon to judge, criticize, or hurt others. Its essence is to help us rise above our ego, game our desires, and cultivate compassion. Every holy book, every teaching and every spiritual path ultimately points toward the same truth: control yourself, not others….Religion is a mirror, not a sword. Its purpose is self-transformation, not criticism of others. When we live this truth humanity moves closer to harmony

For those of us raised in the West, primarily under Christian teaching, we might find a middle-step in this aspiration for self-transformation if we were to reflect on some of the thoughts of people like Jung and Hillman. After Freud’s first mention of the unconscious, these two men elaborated on that theme further.

More specifically, Hillman, without attempting to reform the church, considers the soul as an image of the psyche that ‘tends to focus on those aspects of our lives that we consider ‘dark’ and ‘mysterious,’ and somewhat uncomfortable, slightly different from Jung’s Shadow. He refers to a ‘spirit’ which, in is thinking, aspires toward light, success, memorable achievements and the like.

And for my little mind, I am wondering if, through opening my eyes to seeing a non-judgemental psychological perspective on those dark moments that I have inflicted on others, and those that I have experienced myself, rather than a moral and potentially mortal) sin, I might begin to appreciate that both my ‘betrayer’ and the betrayer in others might have a psychic impulse with which I and others have been innocent and ignorant. And the church, itself, having laid all of its ‘eggs’ in the basket of salvation, and disavowed any institutional or professional association with a darkness of its own, has, whether through design or a kind of  blindness, imposed a very restricted, constricted and reductionistic image of God and also on the people in the pews, to its own self-sabotage.

For example, if as a young man, many are attempting to get out from under the psychic thumb of a strong mother, and take steps to that end, without being conscious of how the path will inevitably impact others, likely some other woman or women, such an image of a psychic reality would be quite helpful.

Similarly, if a clergy is ‘crucified’ by a congregation, repeating an archetype that is central to the stories of the faith, that too might warrant a different perspective and interpretation. Different from the ‘death is the result of sin,’ perhaps the image of a willing, sacrificing Jesus submitting to the unjustified violence of the public, in order to engender a different kind of relationship and relationality might be more appropriate and helpful.

Re-appropriating death, darkness, non-privatized sin including institutional self-critical examination, and a perception that welcomes  every single ‘soul’ history, as opposed to a literal, scientific, empirical and legal/moral ‘case’ history, might well change the modus operandi of how the church incarnates its mission, including a tentative, humble and empathic God in support of human beings. It could also  offer a different, non-clinical perception, without imposing an immediate moral, legal, medical defect as the reason for one’s aberrant behaviour.

And aberrant behaviour lies at the heart of many personal and social tensions, problems, and intractable situations, all of them needing and begging for our attention, both as part of our psychological perspective and also our theological perspective.

 

 

Reflecting on virtue signalling...??

 I learned a new phrase today: “virtue signalling” from a politician in response to a question about local council support for a nuclear weapons ban. His view was that anything a local council would do, presumably in support or not, would have no impact on the issue and thus, to do anything, like a municipal bylaw or even a letter to I-Can would be a waste of energy and time and amount to virtue signalling.

Where to start?

Why not start with a review of a two-decade-plus career in an English classroom, where poetry, novels, plays, short stories and news reporting language was the daily, hourly weekly, and annual menu. In the process of those discussions, theme papers, public speaking assignments, poetry-writing workshops, film reviews, the basic instrument was ‘words’….and their literal, metaphoric, contextual and even philosophic denotation and connotation. Every time a student proferred a opinion, about how a character in a novel responded to a predicament, s/he was using words, and those words were springing from what that student deemed to be his or her opinion, feeing, sentiment, and his/her relationship to that situation. Of course, those two or three sentences would invariably prompt successive responses from other who, too, had been listening, digesting both the words of the classmate and the situation presented by the novelist or playwright that prompted their response, again in words.

It is not only in political circles that words matter. In those classrooms, each person, whether s/he was consciously aware that his or her world view was developing, in a process of exchanging various views, attitudes, perceptions, even beliefs. When one hears one’s own voice among peers in a safe environment, one begins to take seriously the meaning and import of the words one chooses, as well as the words others choose. At the end of each class, or semester, or even high school graduation, there is no ‘bridge’ of a physical nature available for demonstration, evaluation, review and testing. Indeed, while most of the female students took those verbal exchanges fairly seriously, most of the males considered many of the subjects ‘too emotional’ and therefore, unsubstantial, ethereal and in general males classed them as ‘B.S.’….given that opinions are not really that important in an English class, (although they may be on Friday night’s date!)

Referencing details of the author’s text, as supporting evidence for the opinions offered, of course, inserted a degree of both preparation and concentration if one chose to engage. A situation in a play or novel will have as many interpretations as there might be students in a classroom of thirty. Sometimes, (an English teacher’s dream!) the students would depart continuing  the discussion and demonstrating their engagement with its resonance for them.  And who could have predicted the reaction of some of the parents of those classes, decades later, ‘The conversations went too far!’ Even after they had graduated, some of those students still suffered from parents who wanted to protect them retroactively.

Undoubtedly, some of the opinions expressed in those classes would qualify as ‘virtue signalling’ in that everyone, especially in public situations, wishes, almost as if by some instinct, to be on the side of virtue. Opinions expressed on that account could be dismissed as ‘virtue signalling.’

And, so after some thought about the phrase, I could, without fear of cynicism, ascribe the phrase to much of what comes out of the mouths of politicians, clergy, journalists, and even scholars. Theories abound in each academic discipline that either espouse or disdain some human ‘virtue’ or point to is absence. Virtues, in and of themselves, comprise much of the vernacular of the popular discourse. Indeed, signalling virtues just happens to be one of the more readily deployed worker appreciation and valuation phrases….Signally to another the virtue of his employment to an organization is not offered specifically as a carrot to prompt even more effort, concentration and performance, although it clearly may have that impact.

Let’s look at virtue signalling in the public square. Protesters around the world are demonstrating based on their perception and appreciation of the virtue of their position. Championing the Ukrainians against the Russians, demonstrates a high degree of commitment and conviction about the virtue of the Ukrainian position. Similarly, the thousands who protest the devastation of Gaza are pointing to the virtue of preserving and providing a homeland for Palestinians, especially  when the very future of a any idea of a two-state solution has been openly and defiantly dismissed (again?) just this week by Natanyahu.

Environmental ‘virtue signallers’ are growing in number, in newspaper columns, in conferences, in UN-sponsored conventions where agreements are signed, unfortunately without the imprimatur of sanctions to assure that commitments to protect the environment are carried out. Voluntarism, on the part of nations, as witnessed by the multi-national commitment (including Russia and the United States)) to protect Ukraine after she gave up her nuclear weapons in 1991, has proven hollow That failure or omission has perhaps even contributed to the ease with which Putin conceived first of his invasion of Crimea in 2014 and years later, in 2022, attempted to take over the whole nation.

There is a quote from the gospel of John, that reads, ‘In the beginning was the word’……while it originates in a religious context, please, dear reader, show mea something, anything, a relationship, a project, a corporation, a product or a law that does not begin with a word. And the choice of words does matter, unless, like those adolescent males, words are only for the ‘effete’ literati, which, by itself is another of those reverse snobberies that plague our culture at least as much if not more than top-down hierarchical snobbery. If words matter only to those who consider their significance seriously, and who contemplate what word ‘fits’ into a specific context, then dismissive epithets like ‘virtue signalling’ will come to spread their glib and superficial and reductionistic influence in many quarters of our social discourse.

And if our social discourse descends to the level where words are flippantly,  almost as if they were ‘flilpped off’ as someone who disdains another ‘flips him off,’ then it will not only be social media to which we point as seeding our discourse with faux thoughts, faux ideas, and faux interactions. Relationships depend on and require thoughtful consideration of the subject, and the meaning of a request, even an insignificant request to think critically of the idea of municipal support for a nuclear weapons ban.

Pointing to the promptness and the honesty of the response as ‘better than most political responses’  (another of the new perceptions and attitudes I learned) also depresses me. If we are merely competing on the level of promptness and straight talk, both of which have their place, then what is really happening to communication?

Of even competing, as the first ‘take’ on a letter from a taxpayer, is just another of the many ‘reductionisms’ to which I never dreamt local life could fall. Politicians have a difficult role; they are being besieged by their peers, and their voters for demands, many of which do not warrant even a response. However, not to respond is to risk another public humiliation, for not having even responded. Many Republicans are refusing to conduct town halls, for fear of being pilloried by their voters in their districts. And, when was the last town hall conducted by a municipal councillor in a small town in Ontario, except for those instances where there might be a contentious planning issue that needs public input?

Language has many levels, as does each and every issue before the world citizen. And we can no longer consider ourselves isolated from the rest of the world, just because we know many of the people who voted for us, and because we live in small communities.

Our voices matter, on local, provincial, national and global issues. And so long as we bury our heads in the sands of localism, parochialism and traditional methods and perceptions, we will be watching the world fly by at our peril.

Thanks for the many lessons I learned without any real consideration of the implications of my request..

Follow-up to 'the tyranny of absolutes'

Previously, the ‘tyranny of absolutes’ was the title of a post.

It is necessary to name, identify and acknowledge at least one perspective of a presenting dynamic in human relations before one can begin to consider the dimensions of the issue, the potential impulses for the issue, and only then begin to consider how any thoughts about mediating or modifying and ameliorating the issue.

There is unlikely to be a single sentient, conscious, thoughtful person who, if asked, ‘how do you feel about the world’s situation these days?’ would answer, “I’m fine with it!” Most of us feel anxious, withdrawn, skeptical, fearful, somewhat impotent and powerless, perhaps resigned and ultimately worried about the now and the foreseeable future.

An unfortunate and regrettable statement by Obama during one of his campaigns for the presidency alluded to the notion that when people are frightened, they ‘turn to their guns and bibles’. Of course, millions were deeply offended. The politics of his insight was deplorable; the magnitude of the issue, immeasurable.

Whether acknowledged or not, if in however imperfect language, fear stalked the land when Obama made his statement and the depth, range and insidious implications of its tentacles have only been inflated by steroidal injections of angst in the intervening years. We are, together, a region, nation, continent and world struggling with our worst and most debilitating fears. Anyone who would deny our shared symptom, presumably does not wish to acknowledge its existence and role in our shared ethos.

We could almost be justified in dubbing this period of our history as the period of ‘EC’, the universal Existential Crisis. Not completely divorced from the dreaded ED, this ‘condition (EC) is one to which we all waken each morning, to the morning headlines, the hourly reports, the social media, and the long-range reports with both data and predictions about such matters as rising temperatures around the planet. War, savage take-overs of land, dictators withdrawing from review, appeal, caution, sanctions and outright protests of both legal and ‘street’ kinds.

§  Laws written by a single pen in a single potentate’s hand, executed by armies of thugs masked, unidentified and unchallengable,

§  tonnes of toxic gases pouring into the atmosphere we all breathe,

§  undersea mining threatening aquatic ecosystems and species extinction at an every faster rate,

§  children kidnapped, imprisoned and brain-washed to comply with a tyrant’s wish, under the guise of national pride and honour, unilateral declarations of ‘never a Palestinian state’ without even reasonable and muscular retort, reprisal and withdrawal of support of the weapons needed to execute such a vision,

§  refugees, immigrants and desperate migrants pouring over borders of both physical barbed wire and metaphoric mental ‘walls’ while others are deported, with or without just cause or appeal, to foreign lands where they will rot potentially for the remainder of their lives

§  tariffs imposed, again by the single stroke of a unilateral pen, on any nation or product deemed to be ‘unfair’ to the nation imposing the tariff

§  war drones invading borders of neutral nations (Poland) activating NATO fighter jets, in what many deem a potential prelude to another European military conflict, or at least an expansion of the current three-year-old devastation of Ukraine

§  Ukraine patiently yet fervently asking for cash to continue to defend their homeland against a tyrant charged with war crimes for the abduction and imprisonment of Ukrainian children (numbers start at 20,000)

§  U.S. support for Ukraine, as well as for the Palestinians somehow etherized into designed ambiguity and ambivalence, leaving the Chief Executive all options, without any levers of ‘control or influence.

§  Public acknowledgements by Republicans that all (or virtually all) members of that political party are definitely and deplorably terrified of the repercussion of confronting and disagreeing with the ‘orange thug’ in the Oval Office.

§  World leaders unable or unwilling to confront the Oval Office occupant, also for fear of tariff or other unmentionable vengeful reprisals

§  The China summit of at leaders of at least half of the world’s population, comprising a phalanx of ‘muscle’ in opposition to the ‘American and western democratic side’, in effect sticking their thumb in the eye of the United States, and with that, all those allied to her

§  The obvious and deteriorating crumbling of the United Nations, whose Security Council desperately needs serious revision, removing vetoes from the five countries currently able and willing to sabotage any legitimate resolution that might offend one of their number.

 And this is neither intended to be, nor is, an exhaustive list. We are besieged by a significant escalation of power, money, influence and nefarious motives of the multiple oligarchs who, themselves, enjoy their hubristic and pretentious drinking from the fountain of bounty offered by their tyrant-friends.

We are far beyond the place where a critique of Peter Thiel’s $15million subsidy of the J.D Vance Senatorial election in Ohio is deplorable.

We are far beyond critiquing the dismissal of Steven Colbert from CBS because of his legitimate and stinging critique of the U.S. administration.

We are far beyond critiquing the impotence of complicity of the U.S. Supreme Court, and the multiple deaths threats to American judges.

We are far beyond critiquing the administration’s brazen and unilateral, unapproved kidnapping of those they deem ‘dangerous enemies’ without evidence.

We are also far beyond wondering about the future of the American democracy, indeed even the several other democracies clinging to history and tradition to abstract notions  like human rights, voting rights, right of free speech (now morphed into hate speech).

Decay, devolution, deconstruction and dismemberment of existing institutions cannot be considered individually and separately from the totality of the destruction. What is happening in GAZA is, metaphorically taking place under our eyes in the United States, spurred on by allies like Orban, and paradoxically Putin and Netanyahu….

Whom can we trust?

Whom can we believe?

And why would all of us not be confronted by the prospect of the temptation and the seduction of a desperate searching for and clinging to what amount to self-sabotaging ‘absolutes’ that neither represent reality, in the big picture, nor legitimacy on their own merits? Bromides, as ideological absolutes, or religious prejudice and bigotry, are minimally impactful, in the short run, and demonstrably dangerous for the health of the body politic.

Bromides, the instant-relief pill, the glib and instant intellectual solution, (really only a vacuous opinion inflated by the utter’s desperate need for control, agency, and purpose and meaning.

 Of course this is an existentialist’s as well as a pedestrian’s perspective, that, when under stress we all seek refuge in simplistic, easily proferred and digested ‘fast-food’ non-nutritional ‘food replacements.

Rather than fight the conspiracy of ‘replacement theories’ and dangerous DEI programs, and allying the United States with forces at home and abroad that seek to undo her honour, integrity prestige and history and tradition, America, as former and now dubious leader of the free world, needs to look in the mirror, both individual and nationally, see the fear and insecurity that lines each and every visage looking back, and, perhaps after a long walk in the snow in a nearby park, summon both the courage and the tenacity and the resilience and the determination of those, back in the 1860’s, like Lincoln and is cohorts, to bring about the demise of slavery. Or, perhaps, another model, to review the life and commitment and courage and resilience of men like Mandala, and more recently, Navalny and Litvinenko….It is going to take millions of us, world citizens, to counter the forces feeding on and fueling the flames of international world fear.