Searching for God #16

 In his work, The Gay Science, (1882), (Nietzsche) told the story of a madman who ran one morning into the marketplace, crying, ‘I seek God!’ In mild amusement, the sophisticated bystanders asked him if God had run away or emigrated. ‘Where has God gone?’ the madman demanded. ‘We have killed him—you and I! We are all his murderers!’ * The astonishing progress of science had made God quite irrelevant; it had caused human beings to focus so intently on the physical world that they would soon be constitutionally unable to take God seriously. The death of God—the fact that the Christian God had become incredible—was beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe….The madman longed to believe in God but he could not. The unthinkable had happened: everything that the symbol of God had pointed to—absolute goodness, beauty, order, peace, truthfulness justice—was being slowly but surely eliminated from European culture. Morality would no longer be measured by reference to an ultimate value that transcended human interests but simply by the needs of the moment. For Marx the death of God had been a project—something to be achieved in the future; for Nietzsche it had already occurred: it was only a matter of time before ‘God’ would cease to be a presence in the scientific civilization of the West. (Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, p 256…*Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman, 1974, p. 181)

Rejecting Nietzsche’s answer, that human beings could counter the risks of nihilism by making themselves divine in a form of Superman (Ubermensch), some today are facing a similar framing of God, while struggling to search, not for some superhuman identity, but rather, to counter the literal, empirical ‘hold’ that continues to entangle the West in a physical, and literal perception and apprehension that ignores, or merely dismisses God.  Whether this dismissal is the result of indifference, or through a kind of social affinity and determination to ‘fit in’ to a secular, scientific understanding of all things significant, or perhaps a kind of veil of detachment that comes over busy, aspiring, highly motivated striving and competitive men and women ‘reaching for the gold ring’ of success in secular terms or some combination and confluence of other motives, science has come to reign over our academies, our businesses, our governments and our churches.

Churches are largely empty; social service clubs struggle to survive, given that mothers and fathers in their late thirties and forties are so busily engaged in the multiple athletic, artistic, social and play activities of their children. Also, although few would see it from this perspective, ‘altruism’ and the spirit of generosity has fallen into the ‘cheque mode’…whereby people write cheques that bring a tax credit on their income tax. I even learned this week, that a small Canadian post office staff has put a small table beside the mail-boxes where the community retrieves its mail, as a mini-food-bank. Customers bring in and take food, given the seriously depleted incomes of many in their community.

What have the churches said and done to contribute to their own apparent demise? And has that demise exaggerated the ‘death of God’ theme?

If there is inherently a common core of both perception and attitude, of philosophy and religious impulse, of poetry/art and religion then the words of Irving Layton might be useful as part of the curriculum for Christian seminarians:

The poet offends the brainwashed millions who are the majority in any country. His words, his free manner of living are a constant irritation to the repressed, the fearful, the self-satisfied, and the incurious. (From ‘Whatever else, Poetry is Freedom’)

Hijacking morality, as many would agree the churches have attempted, has generated a moral strait-jacket for many, especially around sexuality. Start there to address the repressed:

Borrowing from the anthropologist, Lionel Tiger, in the magnificent work, The Manufacture of Evil, we read:

It is possible that we have been systematically misled about our morality from the very beginning. Why should God have interfered with Eden as he did, evidently for the dual offense of sexual awareness …and empirical skepticism, that forbidden fruit? And why blame poor Adam, whom after all God made? And why was what happened in Eden the ‘Fall’? And why were Adam and Eve so harshly and disproportionately ridiculed for their sexual frisson? Were not those perplexing pleasurable nerve endings in their genitalia there for a purpose? Was orgasm an accidental spasm, which happened to be so mighty pleasing that (later on when the churches got going) its occurrence or not could be held up as a measure of obedience to God? This is mad. No wonder practitioners of the morality trades have so enthusiastically separated man from animal, culture from nature, devotion from innocence. If morality is natural, then you don’t need priests as much as you are going to be enjoy being informed by scientists. If morality is a biological problem, then it is merely insulting to harass mankind for it current condition because of an historic Gall in the past and a putative Heaven in the future. When spirituality became a special flavor and ceased being fun, when mystical congregation and speculation became instead a matter of bare knees on cold stone and varying renunciations: when involvement with the seasons and the other subtle rhythms of nature became formalized into arbitrary rituals governed by functionaries, then the classical impulse for moral affiliation became translated into something else: into a calculation of ethical profit and loss supervised by an accountant Church and a demanding God. A new tax was born. The Tithe. Ten percent for the first agents. (Lionel Tiger, The Manufacture of Evil, pps 32-33)d

If those words and thoughts run counter to the fundamental argument in this space that reality is errantly defined exclusively in empirical and scientific terms, then we might pause to consider human sexuality from Tiger’s perspective, without having to succumb to a wholistic world view, and operating premise on all of reality that can and does emerge solely from an empirical, scientific perspective. Whatever justification deployed for reining in sexuality, from a religious, moral, ethical perspective, has proven its own failure, given that sexuality is not and never will be constrained by some dogma, doctrine, or even law.’ The truth and inescapable force of human sexuality need not be a gate through which Christians or any other adherents to a faith community need to comply, save and except that abuse of the inherent power of sexuality must never be inflicted on another by anyone.

Let’s move to the ‘fearful’ from Layton. What are millions of people afraid of. A popular magazine, Psychology Today lists five fears whare by humans:

·      Extinction, the fear of annihilation, of ceasing to exist, another way of framing ‘fear of death’

·      Mutilation, the fear of losing any part of our precious bodily structure

·      Loss of autonomy, the fear of being immobilized, paralyzed, restricted, overwhelmed, entrapped, imprisoned

·      Separation, the fear of abandonment, rejection, loss of connectedness, or becoming a non-person, not wanted, respected of valued by anyone else.

·      Ego-death, the fear of humiliation, shame, or any other mechanism of profound disapproval that threatens the loss of integrity of the self (From The (only) 5 Fears We all Share, by Karl Albrecht, Psychology Today, March 22, 2012)

It seems obvious that the last two (abandonment and fear of humiliation) are two fundamental fears with which many Christian churches are either ignorant of or avoiding given that rejection and humiliation and shame lie at the heart of the divide that churches not merely seek but impose on those who ‘fail’ or ‘sin’ in their respective eyes. Never is the institution itself, held accountable or responsible for inflicting a kind and degree of self-righteousness on any who might question, doubt, or debate a theological premise, especially those for which there is a phrase or sentence from scripture that is considered an absolute standard. In fact, the notion of kenosis, the self-emptying core spiritual practice following Christ’s emptying himself on the Cross, emulated by the Christian who empties oneself of ego, anxiety, resentment, judgement, desire, (essentially will and negative emotions) is rarely, if ever discussed in relation to ego-death. And the surrender of negative thoughts and emotions, as well as ego is so fraught in a world in which one’s secular identity hangs on one’s proven accomplishments.

Are these possible some of the background reasons why William Blake considered himself a ‘searcher’ and not a joiner.

Blake paints the priests (of the Church of England) as predators seeking out prey who are too foolish to not accept their message. Their whole existence is to forcibly promote this single way of thinking in order to subordinate the masses….Just Blake sees in the Garden, everything in existence has Godly value, and priests disturb this natural perfection by trying to separate the value from the object. The natural tendency of humanity is to appreciate the beauty in objects and view the beauty as an intrinsic quality; the Church aims to separate beauty from the object and tear apart at this fabric of value. The institution does not trust in a natural human comprehension of God. To them, everything must be spelled out directly to the people so that there are no discrepancies between belief systems. This is also seen in ‘The Proverbs of Hell,’ where Blake states, ‘As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys. (1793. p.73, from As the Caterpillar Chooses: William Blake’s Hell and the Church’s Condescension, by Noah Barboza on vurj.vanderbilt.edu)

A picture of a theology of skepticism, doubt, and wonder, questioning the rigidity and the rigor mortis of the ecclesial institution is shooting a tiny sprout of green here. And it can be laid adjacent to the church’s foundation of its Christian theology, God’s natural law. For this scribe, it is not a matter of pitting anthropologists or poets against the church. It is a matter of attempting to discern the essential awe, wonder, mystery and beauty of God’s legacy and human inheritance. And, after decades of continued searching, I come down on the side of the poets and not the church hierarchies, in order to keep my own faith alive and stimulating and supporting the search for God.