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.