Search for God #13

 There is a history of evolution from polytheism to monotheism that Western religion and culture has inherited. And the relationship of a people to its ‘deity(ies)’ includes, among other matters, the question of ‘sacrifice’….animals to Greek and tribal (early Biblical tribes) deities, and in the Christian lexicon, the presumed and indoctrinated sacrifice of the individual human will to that of God. The legacy of monotheism is attributed to the Jewish community.

When we read Hillman we find a proposition that the religion based on monotheism has infiltrated, inflicted and come to dominate other forms of ‘knowing’ and ‘believing’. Unity, especially unification of the disparate aspects of a human soul, from the religious perspective, and unity of man with God, are significant constructs in both theology and in psychology.

In religious terms, ‘atonement’ (often transliterated as ‘at-one-ment’ with God) implies a confession of sin and an embrace of the sacrifice as forgiveness at Calvary for ‘my’ sins, rendering one in a position described as ‘believing in the Lord Jesus Christ as my personal saviour’. “Saved” then, I am promised an eternal life in ‘a’ heaven.  Belief in the veracity of that dynamic and eschatology*, is presumed to be linked also to one’s ethic and moral conviction, as well as to one’s intellectual and psychological concurrence. (*Eschatology: the theology concerned with death,  judgement and the final destiny of the human soul)

In psychological terms, following Freud and later Jung, and still later Hillman, the notion of bringing the conscious mind and the unconscious mind into an open relationship expressing a universal tension holds meaning and significance for many. Of course, much of the gift from these three men is not founded exclusively nor even primarily on what science calls empirical evidence. Each has spent years wondering about how the human mind/psyche/soul might be, for purposes of analysis, examined both empirically and metaphorically in both personal and private treatment sessions and in and through reflections on those sessions. Neurological science, behavioral science, brain chemistry, neural synapses and various forms of obstruction and derailing have central to the public and academic research into this area of human psychology in recent years

Indeed, we have become a culture imbued with a lexicon of what are termed psychiatric illnesses, for each of which, a recommended treatment plan has been designed. Much of the work of all three, Freud, Jung and Hillman has effectively been sidelined from the empirical scientific scholarly and professional approach endorsed and funded by government, the academy and private philanthropic foundations. The medical model, in short, has been applied to the human mind/psyche/soul as the reliable, verifiable and thereby justifiable and trustworthy process of discerning the complexes of human psychology. On the ‘pastoral’ side’ however, rather than investigate what is ‘wrong’ (as in an illness) with the individual, pastoral counselling deems it both appropriate and essential to its calling and purpose to begin with those aspects of a person’s mind/psyche/soul that seem to be working in support of their best selves. Care, nurture, identification and stretching the capacities of those traits and strengths is considered a path more closely identified with what some might call ‘celebrating God’s gifts.’

There is a crucial intersection between both belief and psychological notions and concepts on one hand with what Hillman and others call phenomenology: the first person account of one’s experience.

In Stanford.edu, we read this under phenomenology:

Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first person-point of view. The central structure of an experience its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object….Literally, phenomenology is the study of ‘phenomena’: appearance of things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the  meaning things have in our experience.

Each of us faces the ‘perception of our experiences’ in our own way. And those experiences, as we ‘give them meaning’ play a significant part in all of our relationships to things, to abstractions, to ethereal and ephemeral matters as well as to God. It is in the interpretation, curation and discernment of those experiences that we attempt to locate both meaning and identity. And, it seems more than reasonable, even inevitable, that how we experience and interpret our lives is relevant to and incontrovertibly intertwined with both our theology and our psychology.

Given that language (including artistic images, dance images, musical manuscripts, architectural images, movie and dramatic images) is our vehicle for the expression of our experience, the contextual use of our words helps us, and our ‘others’ to discern some glimpse of the meaning we have derived from a particular experience. And, just to add some different dimension to this non-static, and evolving and creative expression of images, from our imagination(s), can there be any doubt that simultaneously as we are ‘taking in’ our experiences and interpreting them from outside, another equally and perhaps less conscious process of generating images from within, interesting with both those images from without as well as with those images from within. The multiple intersecting electrical currents of images at warp speed are barely a beginning of our depiction of our mind/psyche/soul activity. Parsing individual moments, faces, eye expressions, emotional responses to a scene in a movie, or one at the kitchen table is a life-long evolving process from which we are unlikely ever to escape. And then beginning to parse and to comprehend and to interpret the larger picture of intersecting and enveloping images while engaging with the immediate situation, all of it without any external deciphering authority, might seem monumental.

However, we are all engaged in a process of searching for what we most treasure about being alive, about being who we are, about even being who we might have been but are no longer that person after decades…and that process is indisputably about relating, about relationships to things, to people and to ourselves, and to God, if we consider that relevant.

The question of ‘what comprises the theology’ of a person and ‘what comprises the psychology’ of that person is an open question. ‘Is there a discernible intersection or a tolerable and necessary overlap’ is another question looking for some response.

Whatever might be appropriate and relevant response to such questions may, of necessity, belong to the work of others with more formal and informal education and experience than this scribe. From my personal experience, I have found that my time spent within the walls of ecclesial sanctuaries, and throughout what I consider a pilgrimage in search of God, has been an unpredictable mélange of intense emotional highs, even more intense emotional depths and considerable time wandering about between these extremes.

I have been appalled by many experiences:

·      the religious bigotry spewing from the pulpit,

·      the arrogance and presumption of parishioners at the ‘sins’ of their peers,

·      the incredible and inexcusable ignorance and innocence of the church hierarchy,

·      the heavy-fisted organists who quite literally pounded the keys to the most melodious hymns and anthems

·      the sanctimony of Sunday School teachers whose self-righteousness and presumed ‘salvation’ barely masked their glib and high-handed pedagogy of ‘dispensations’ a word likely delivered from their ‘saintly’ clergy-hero

·      the academic and viscious internecine warfare among professors in a Christian school of theology over ideology and power, and the complete absence of any hint of acknowledgement that any of this beg for a penitential

·      the glib and reductionistic concept of ‘the spiritual life’ as expressed by clergy and bishops

·      the politics of power within, that compared with the politics of a town hall, was significantly more blood-thirsty and recriminating and permanently ostracizing of the other…

·      the isolation, alienation and literal exclusion of ‘deviant’ others irrespective of the full knowledge and investigation of the full back story

·      a tempestuous angry eruption as a bishop leapt from his chair at my words: “I think it is time for men to own and to claim their emotions” and his screaming: “No! That can’t happen! It is too dangerous!”

 

Sprinkled within those dark moments, are moments:

Ø filled with awe and splendour during the singing of a hymn such as the Halleluiah Chorus, or ‘Let There be Peace’ or the Taisé  transcriptions of the Psalms

Ø homilies that drew me to the edge of my pew with their combined and interwoven tapestry of biblical references with current human life questions

Ø other homilies that disdained the fundamentalist, evangelical concept of a single moment of salvation

Ø the heart and authentic welcome of refugee families into both the secular and the church community

Ø an introduction to the Benedictine discipline written by the spouse of a former Archbishop of Canterbury

Ø Sister Bridget of the Benedictine order in Kansas whose hospitality and kindness epitomized agape at the end of a day-long drive in a winter blizzard

Ø a weekend silent retreat with a Jesuit who exclaimed, at the end of the weekend, “I’m glad this was only a three-day retreat; it I had expected and required a week-long retreat, the silence would have killed you!”

Ø a nuanced introduction to Celtic spirituality from Rev. Herb O’Driscoll

Ø an ironic and comic narrative from his brother, Rev. Percy O’Driscoll, about a priest bedeviled by a fellow rail passenger as he rode from Vancouver to Calgary. The passenger demanded, persistently what the civilian-clad clergy did for a living. After repeated pleadings, as the clergy’s patience became exhausted, the clergy exclaimed, “I am a fucking priest!”

Ø Shaking hands with Bishop Desmond Tutu, while bringing greatings from his colleague, my former New Testament professor, in the bowels of the Pepsi Centre in Denver, following an ecumenical convention of the city’s youth, attended by all denominational ecclesial leaders, from which the then Episcopal Bishop of Colorado was absent

Ø Nonchalantly mentioning to a woman struggling with an alcoholic dependency, which had never been evident in my presence, ‘Choose life!’ only to learn three decades later, that that moment began her search for sobriety

Ø Spending a Sunday afternoon on Civic Holiday weekend, with some 75-80 men, women and children, the day after a hay-ride flatbed had accidentally crushed the head of a ten-year-old boy who had fallen from the trailer all of us grieving, remembering, many angry, guilty, shamed and despondent

Ø Pushing a wheelchair through the corridors of an unban hospital, with a late-thirties woman patient in the last stages of breast cancer, who muttered, “I am going to use you today!”…Shocked I responded, “Oh how is that?”…”Well, you are going to take me to the patio where I can have a cigarette! And you are not going to refuse to do that!” to which I replied, “Of course not!”

Ø Learning mid-morning that my chaplain’s class of interns was scheduled to attend an autopsy at 1:00 p.m. on that day and shuddering at the thought….upon describing my angst at the prospect to the instructor/trainer, he responded, in one of the most enlightened sentences of my life: “Just show up and give yourself permission to leave at any moment if you feel you have to!” I did, and stayed growing increasingly entranced and amazed and humbled at the highly nuanced, complex of human ‘systems’ within the body that, for the first time were no longer  an abstraction on a page of an anatomy text…and thinking of the miracle of both birth and life with intense gratitude and awe.

 Personal accounts of personal experiences has not been the preferred menu for notes in this space. However, if one is going to attempt to search for God, and then attempt to write about that search, it seems that the personal, in my own words, without the benefit of an academic text, or a religious or moral template to determine the validity of this search and without feeling the pressure or the angst of being unworthy to have undertaken the search, I share some of those experiences by way of demonstrating that God is available in places where there is considerable ‘darkness,’ and despair’ and uncertainty, and doubt.

Indeed, it may well be that those are the moments in the human life in which the reality of God becomes inescapable, and for that we can all be thankful.