Searching for God # 33

 In an op-ed in anglican.ink, dated April 17, 2025, entitled:

‘Why the Roman Catholic is Rising in England-and What It Reveals About Faith in an Age of Uncertainty’ we read:

(In a sub-head) Conviction is attractive. And strong convictions are strongly attractive…

In an age of moral confusion and cultural uncertainty people are drawn to those who actually believe what they say- and who live as if their core convictions are real and unshakeable. …This more than anything may explain the quiet shift now unfolding in England. For the first time in centuries, the Roman Catholic Church is England now surpasses the Church of England in active attendance. Among young people, Catholics outnumber Anglicans. In London, the shift is even more pronounced. The tide is turning-and it’s not turning toward trendy liturgies or progressive theology; it’s turning toward clarity, continuity, and conviction.

Every Anglican worldwide, and every Episcopalian in the U.S. knows that even after 500 years, the hierarchy of the church is still thinking through its theology. Its doctrine, famously, is up for a vote. That’s not a small thing.

Roman Catholicism is not democratic. It doesn’t ask the culture to weigh in on what it believes-it declares it. And in an age when society is debating everything-from truth to gender to morality- there is something profoundly reassuring about a church that does not budge.

Women priests? No

Abortion? Never

Gender fluidity: Not affirmed

However, the Anglican Church, even with its closely held principles, because of its penchant for shared governance and democracy and its allergy toward a Roman pope, always seems to be making up its mind.

Having spent well over three decades in the Anglican/Episcopal church, as adherent, member, Warden, seminarian, Deacon and Priest, after a two-decade career in education and journalism, I am somewhat familiar with the central issue as it is articulated in this op-ed, at least in Canada and the United States. No longer having any formal or informal ties to the ecclesiastical institution, I feel also free to ponder publicly on the implications of this demographic trend.

As one of what are considered ‘establishment’ churches in Canada, (along with the Roman Catholic), the Anglican church has, for over a century, been very cozy with political, economic, academic and corporate leadership. Indeed, funds from those specific sources have sustained the institution, both underwriting the operating budget as well as generating substantial trust accounts. Private schools for boy and girls, under the aegis, if not the formal umbrella of the church, have also catered to the children of both the exceptionally affluent as well as the nouveau-riche, and more recently to many children of Asian heritage. Daily chapel services, supplemented by weekly attendance in community cathedrals, were and are considered de rigueur for students and many faculty. Head masters and head mistresses generally ruled as benevolent rulers. A quasi-military regimen comprised the culture in most of those schools, at least in Canada. (I began my teaching career in one of those schools in Ontario). There rarely was any question or appeal of the ‘rule’ of the headmaster, given the assumed, assigned and conferred authority in the position. Of course, faculty and administration officials were engaged in discussions of policy and practices. The final word, however, remained with the ‘head’.

Catering to a plethora of linguistic, ethnic and religious heritages, the Anglican ‘faith’ was observed more in ritual and human relations than in dogmatic creeds or convictions, at least in daily parlance, discussion and informal debate. Pursuing the truth, with respect and dignity of all participants in most conflicts was a predictable, reliable and trust-worthy pattern for resolving disputes. There was, and likely still is, an ‘air’ of quiet, solemn and reserved decorum and attitudes among both students and staff. I really respected, and still do, that ‘cultural feature’ of those private schools, emblematic of and resonating with the tradition of the English public school.

Was the whole operation open to charges of snobbery? Absolutely. Whether in academics, athletics, or in career placements, these schools reeked of ‘elitism’ and ‘specialness’ especially when compared with the much more informal and unstructured public school system. Was there a kind of moral superiority? Not nccessarily; however, the matters of morality were often kept ‘in house’ as opposed to being aired, like ‘dirty linen’ in the public domain.

Fundraising, the driving engine of these schools, both in enrolment, as well as in scholarships, capital building programs, recruitment campaigns, and solicitation of esteemed board members, was never far from the consciousness of all members of the school community. “Civilizing finishing schools,” these institutions could and would be dubbed by many, including parents who subscribed to their elitism. Prayers from established ‘ecclesial prayer books,’ both traditional and more contemporary (“red” and “green”), were read a daily chapel services, along with the traditional scriptural readings designed by the church calendar. There was a ‘way of being’ Anglican, that, for someone like this scribe, offered relief from the bombastic, absolutist, convicted ‘fundamental’ ‘evangelical’ born-again’ theology of my youth.

Therein lies the convergence of how religion is practiced with the foundations on which such religion is believed to be traditionally, biblically and experientially supported and sustained. Chaplains, in these institutions from my limited experience, would be open to discussion of any biblical, or ethical or moral questions that were raised by either or both faculty or students. Never, however, was there evidence of proselytizing, converting, or even denigrating any because of their family’s faith tradition, if any.

Ungirding not only the praxis but the theology of any faith community, lies the conception of, through imagination, experience, reading and reflection one’s God, including one’s association with, understanding of, and application of both biblical narratives and principles. Whether specific classroom time was dedicated to scriptural and formal faith concepts varied from school to school.

Undoubtedly, in the residential schools, (the dark side of the private school façade of elitism) biblical studies were regimented whether those schools were operated by protestant or Roman Catholic educators. Scars, psychological, physical, cultural and sociological continue, decades after the schools closed, to plague students of the residential school system in both Canada and the United States, and both Roman Catholics and Anglicans/Episcopalians were engaged.

Any religion, applied with physical, emotional, psychological and cultural abuse, is not only abhorrent, and precisely counter to the intent and purpose of any faith worthy of the name. The very notion of ‘civilizing’ and ‘shaping the character’ of students lies at the core of both the private and the residential school systems. The difference lies at least partly in the tuition, boarding fees and financial contribution of all private school students and their families, (excepting those on full or partial scholarship), a source of funds absent from the residential schools.

Denigrating, bigotry, outright social ostracism seems to have characterized many of the experiences of indigenous students in the residential system, whereas, few, if any students in the private schools, were ever shown the contempt poured over the indigenous students.

The issue of faith conviction, espousing a set of doctrines, beliefs, and practices, including regular attendance, regular tithing, regular baptisms, confirmations, marriages and moats to cross in order to achieve a formal divorce, for example, are all benchmarks of the Roman Catholic church, most of which are more causally observed and required among Anglicans/Episcopalians. Even rules on marriage to those not of the Roman Catholic faith by Roman Catholic members in good standing, are (or at least were over the last two decades) more stringent that for those seeking to marry an Anglican/Episcopalian.

And yes, gay priests, as well as female clergy are not only ordained and practicing in the Anglican/Episcopal church, while the issue of formal celebration of LGBTQ marriages continues to stir considerable controversy. Therein lies one of the points of friction, not only between churches, but also among the culture generally, especially in the West.

Absolute opinions, as opposed to reflective exploration of options, seem to be serving as a magnet for those seeking some kind of ‘security’ in a world careening over multiple cliffs, economically, environmentally, politically, militarily, and especially culturally. James Hillman points to the dependence on literalism, empiricism as the primary mode of both perception and cognition; reality has to be based on what is literally, empirically proven, and even then, we are now living in a sea of ‘alternative facts’ (recalling those prophetic words of trump’s mouth-piece, Kellyanne Conway). Thinking constructs such as irony, metaphor, all based on one’s imagination, have fallen into public disrepute, almost as if they were ‘specious’ or irrelevant, in spite of the alternate view that we all deploy our imagination and our creativity each time we reflect on an experience, including whatever might be attempting to pass as a religious or spiritual experience.

Stories of biblical narratives, and those ‘precisely spoken words of Jesus’ although studied and somewhat ‘declassified’ as literally and empirically applicable to the mouth of Jesus, have become, for many metaphoric ‘bullets’ with which to attack any whose ‘faith’ seems questionable, and whose convictions seem wobbly at best.

Absolutism, as a kind of ‘rock of cognitive, ethical, moral and social determination of ‘right’ (and wrong), based on the belief that ‘we know without doubt or question the mind of God’ has become a magnet pole of Christian theology for many. And by that notion and conviction, the mind of God is ‘frozen’ in both time and eternity in a frame to which “I” (whoever I is) can demonstrate my allegiance and loyalty. Absolutism, in and of itself, becomes a metaphor for God’s will for human beings, who claim to have been ‘converted from sin unto eternal life’ as that portion of scripture holds. And therein lie two other of those cornerstones of Christian theology, the interpretation of both the Fall in the Garden, and then the key and path to forgiveness and the promise of eternal life in the Crucifixion and Resurrection.

 

Tow thousand years of writing, praying, debating and even excommunicating and military and political conflict have provided the curricular outline for the study of what purports to be the underpinnings of Christianity. Both the Roman Catholic and the Anglican/Episcopalian churches have self-proclaimed themselves as the ‘right and only Christian faith’ as their way to protect the institution from apostasy.

Institutions, by definition and both birth and development, have believed they had to set boundaries around whom to admit to their ‘inner sanctum’ as well as whom to exclude. And, as is true for most, if not all, humans, acceptance into the ‘inner-sanctum’ of whatever especially ostensibly sacred sanctuary, matters a great deal. Compliance and conformity to whatever the demands of the institution are the sine qua non to such ‘admission’ and ‘acceptance’ and ‘ordination’ as well as ‘blessing’ however such designations appeal and are applied.

Rewards and sanctions, too, are considered essential ‘instruments’ for administering and sustaining all institutions, especially given that religion has taken upon itself the role of defining a culture’s moral and ethical criteria. Again, for many of us, the notion of ‘fear’ as a core experience, irrespective of the name of nature of the ‘authority’ who/which has inculcated that experience, comprises an inescapable emotional and psychic ingredient as to what path seems to ‘fit’ and how rigorous is the requirement to ‘adhere’ to that path.

As one who has had to ‘dispel’ unwonted, externally-imposed illegitimate authority, much of it based on what seemed to have been a constricted and literal interpretation of the gospel, and who has also disavowed all images of a God who endorses the abuse of power in any and all its forms and applications, and who continues to operate under the minimal guidance of ‘question authority’ as an integral guiding principle of my theology, I seek the restraint of military, social, economic, political and academic conflict that abuses any and all parties. Truth, in so far as we can together begin to establish it, (with relevant and respectful participants), compassion, empathy and kind generosity (see that Sermon on the Mount again), seem to offer expression of a theology worthy of both a ‘believer’ and a God of Love.

As Tolstoy reminds, us, those concepts and notions seem to have been engraved within the heart and mind, the spirit and psyche and soul of each and every living and deceased person, whether recognized, acknowledged or applied. The pursuit of absolute ‘anything’ including a God suffering from any form of reduction, continues outside my search for a faith community…indeed perhaps even outside my search or expectation of a faith community….as William Blake held, ‘I am a searcher and not a joiner!’

And my search will no longer be either complicated nor confounded by nor ‘approved and affirmed’ by any ecclesial institution.

Searching for God # 32

But the more the church of the crucified Christ became the prevailing religion of society, and set about satisfying the personal and public needs of this society, the more it left the cross behind it, and gilded the cross with the expectations and ideas of salvation.

This quote from the previous post, begs to be unpacked.

In a culture dedicated to the assessment, discernment and execution of ‘programs’ to address the personal and public needs of the society, (in the case of this quote the U.S. society, but certainly, it applies to many other western ‘so-called Christian’ societies as well), the church has made a bargain with the devil, metaphorically speaking. It is to the satisfaction of those personal and public needs, all of which are demanding attention in both the public vernacular and in the public square…The terms both of identification of needs and then of attempts to meet them, are all constricted within the framework of the public’s literal, empirical perception of what is considered to be ‘social consciousness’ and social knowledge and social awareness. Both the private, for-profit corporations as well as the social service agencies of government and the non-profits based both their diagnostics and their remediations on what can be perceived literally, empirically

, and then delivered in the same mode.

Religion, as defined by Voltaire, from his Philosophical Dictionary (1764)

‘would be as simple as possible’…Would it not be that which taught much morality and very little dogma? that which intended to make men just without making them absurd? that which did not order one to believe in things that are impossible, contradictory, injurious to divinity, and pernicious to mankind, and which dared not menace with eternal punishment anyone possessing common sense? Would it not be that which did  not uphold its belief with executioners and did not inundate the earth with blood on account of unintelligible sophism?...which taught only the worship of one god, justice, tolerance and humanity. (Karen Armstong, The Case for God, p. 211)

Armstrong adds: The philosophers of the Enlightenment did not reject the idea of God. They rejected the cruel God of the orthodox who threatened mankind with eternal fire. They rejected mysterious doctrines that were abhorrent to reason. But their belief in a Supreme Being remained in tact. (Ibid)

Morality as a guide for personal exemplary behaviour, and social programs that addressed personal and public needs, are both concepts that find their genesis in empirical observation, using literal and often numerical diagnoses. Nothing ‘abhorrent to reason’ while retaining a belief in a Supreme Being, (some supernatural entity different from and separate from human beings, and nature?)

America ‘gilded the cross with the expectations and ideas of salvation’ to lift another phrase from the above quote. Somehow, human expectation of a ‘seat at the right hand of God’ in an eternity, captures the sentiment of a former parishioner: “I am only coming to church each Sunday as an insurance policy to assure me an afterlife in heaven!” Next to another parishioner’s comment, “Jesus was the best salesman the world has ever seen!” I am astounded at the degree to which the two themes of ‘salvation’ and ‘salesmanship’ have become embedded, perhaps (although I doubt) unconsciously, into the psyche of church attendees in both Canada and the United States. Slipped into a chorus of one-liners, we might add the Augustinian line, ‘There is no salvation outside the church.’  How pretentious and hollow that last line echoes in the 21^st century.

Salvation and personal and social needs, comprise one continuum of tension.

Deism and theism comprise another: the former that  a creator God does not intervene after creation in the lives of human; the latter that God indeed does intervene in the lives of humans.

This scribe leans towards the second of the two terms, theism, rather than deism.

As for the salvation feature in tension with the ‘personal and social needs, lies the concept of belief and the manner of humans attempting to relate to, and integrate with some God. The Christian tension between ‘grace’ and ‘good works’ is also in play in every pilgrimage envisioned by Christians. The former, a la Luther, is available only from God, the latter is ascribed to the activities of humans. And in any attempt to search for God, we encounter another tension between reason and mysticism, the former a catch-all for human intellect and cognition, while the latter believes in the possibility of some direct and intimate union with the divine or spiritual reality though such activities as meditation, prayer, rituals. Rationalists often ascribe the moniker ‘irrational’ to mysticism, whereas, another way of characterizing the concept is the term ‘super-naturalism.’

Another more recent continuum, this time perhaps a dichotomy, is the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic religion and theology. Psychological terms both, and referring to motivation: internal motivation comes from within while external motivation comes from outside sources. From a religious perspective, an intrinsic religion sees faith as an end in itself, while an extrinsic religion considers religion as a tool to achieve other ends such as social status. A person who espouses an intrinsic religion, ‘lives’ their religion, including the creeds and the teaching of their faith. A person who espouses an extrinsic religion ‘uses’ their religion.

Central to all of the tensions of opposites, however, is the question of ‘relationship’ and that is the crux of the matter: relationship to and with God, relationship to and with others, and relationship to and with the self. And pivotal to all relationships is another question from the secular world and vocabulary: world view.

Collinsdictionary.com defines world view: a person’s world view is the way they see and understand the world, especially regarding issues such as politics, philosophy, and religion, another word for Weltanschauung, a comprehensive conception or image of the universe and of humanity’s relation to it.

Implicit in one’s world view is how one ‘sees’ live and death, birth, formal relationships like marriage, divorce, and also one’s ‘place’ in the universe.

Talk about a mug’s breakfast of both terms and concepts, lenses and cognitions, perceptions and apperceptions, intuitions and observations, and we must not forget, good and bad, right and wrong, holy and unholy, sacred and secular. Perhaps we might have just slipped out a pivotal word: apperceptions, as different from perceptions.

Merriamwebster.com defines apperception: introspective self-consciousness; mental perception, especially the process of understanding something perceived in terms of previous experience.

From forbes.com, 2 September 2026, Mark travers: According to a 2021 study on silence phenomena, silence is not simply the absence of words but a state rich with apperception: the intertwining of presence, memory and imagination.

Etymology: French apperception, from apercevoir, from Middle French apperceivre, from a ( from Latin ad-)+perceive to perceive.

Now, and this nexus of forces, intersecting within each of us, as well as within the ecclesial institutions, is some process whereby an action in our experience occurs within a world view, is perceived by the senses and cognition, and then reflected upon in and through apperception, and, if we were to follow the Jesuit model, it would then be followed by an action. How self-contained is this model! And yet, the containment is attempting to integrate all aspects of the individual, hopefully including both the conscious and unconscious aspects of that individual. Two things jump out, from my experience:

First the action (experience) is perceived, and then also perceived by others differently, thereby generating a cloud of ambiguity in which much contemporary noise and confusion abound. What actually did happen? And for a culture to become enmeshed in the nuances and the ‘weeds’ of the action, is to cloud the process of even seeking its meaning, while providing cover for ‘instant judgements’ many of which prove fallacious later. Insert stereotypes of various characters, the clown, the gangster, the puppet, the wimp, the warrior, the innocent, the ’thinker’ and the executive/entrepreneur from the participants in the action as well as from the observers/potential reflectors. At that moment, we are neither perceiving nor apperceiving…we are merely reacting, knee-jerk-style, as if an opinion is all that is needed to participate in the moment.

Or course, among the epithets and the verbiage that ensues, we discover names of what are called emotions, another instant and impulsive ‘reaction’ that can and usually will morph into a variety of other ‘emotions’ if we permit their release. Sadness and pity usually accompany a serious accident, rage and anger a different kind of accident, while compassion and empathy a serious illness, loss, death or tragedy. Whether these ‘actions/incidents’ are personal and private or public, we each have a film or a file of incidents both similar and different from which we draw to compare, to assess, to discern, and to detach….another of our stereotyped responses to whatever might cause us the most discomfort. Rarely, if ever, in my experience, both inside and outside the walls of cathedrals and sanctuaries, sacristies and committee rooms within the church hierarchy, have I listened to interjections of more reflection than, ‘from my experience, I know this’….which it a completely reasonable place to start the discussion on any subject within an faith community.

Human pain and hurt, not of the medical or legal variety, but of the emotional or psychological variety, are the most common  tones of such discussions. And, on reflection, the manner in and by which each of us ‘sees,’ ‘reckons with,’ ‘succumbs to,’ ‘combats,’ and or ‘overcomes’ deep and profound pain is at the heart of the religious experience. An example of such ‘perceptions and apperceptions is found in Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s, On Grief and Grieving, based on her interviews with patients suffering from a serious illness, and not from those experiencing bereavement. Listing stages of one’s emotion, irrespective of whether within a serious diagnosis, or following the death of a loved one, however, is itself besot with risk. Vacillations of minor and extreme degrees of emotion, mental clarity, emotional stability, degrees of seeking or avoiding socializing, even attitudes of pushing forward or perhaps abandoning hope are all potential and are not amenable to some template of sociology.

Similarly, there is no one ‘path,’ and certainly not a linearity of rational and predictable stages of ‘development’ in and to any single individual’s path in search of the ineffable, the ephemeral, the beyond-the-natural, all of which adjectives and phrases attempt the impossible to depict God. None of the words in these spaces is intended as a prescription or a diagnosis for an individual determined to seek out God.

What there might be are glimpses of some lenses pointed to the culture, as well as other lenses directed to what have been decades of a personal search for the ever-escaping and ever-receding image of the divine. Never satisfied with ‘pat’ and ‘paint-by-number’ answers to questions of consequence such as the meaning and purpose of life, our relation to and with the planet, our relation to and with each other, and, especially in this century, our relations with the public square that seem to have found a new way of being both revolutionary and revolting, consider this scribe a skeptic, a searcher, and a wanderer.

Pastoral care, however and by whom such a discipline might be defined, does offer the potential to put into practice some of the basic theological, religious, spiritual and established conventional practices that raise the level of ‘attention’ to the other above what passes for ‘concern’ on the social and political and academic levels, as well as on the medical and legal theatres.

Persons in serious illness of course, need a variety of ‘presences’ from others, different from cheerleading, and pity. They need and deserve a presence that ‘hears and sees and grasps’ their most intimate emotions, thoughts and apprehensions. And that ‘discernment’ is very different from a ‘case study’ that might be accomplished by a social worker. Such a discernment remains open to and patiently waits for some sign of trusting disclosure that evokes first empathy and then silent reflection on the part of the pastoral visitor. What is the meaning of that facial expression? What did that sigh attempt to say? What might those tears be trying to express? With the mention of that name, did s/he refer to a dear relative who is no longer ‘in’ his or her life? Is that loss compounding the illness? And while, here on paper, the last few lines might read like a jack-hammer of questions, they are not intended as questions to be asked of the patient/client. They are reflective questions of the pastoral visitor to him or herself, as a commitment to enter into the personal space of the patient/client, both unobtrusively and supportively, confidentially and confidently,  as if that space is conceived as potentially ‘sacred’ for both. And, remembering Saint Benedict’s rules, one must never ‘do’ the work of another…translated as ‘one’s spiritual work. That is to say weeping even profusely, atoning, forgiving, remembering and reframing, letting go, and grieving are so absolutely personal and private, that to merely identify what might be attempting to take place is challenge enough for the pastoral visitor. And to have the patience, the patience, and even more patience to sit quietly without in any way attempting to ‘make it all better’ or ‘make it go away’ as is the most common and ready human response to the pain of another about whom we care, like learning to stop before learning the stem-christie turn on the ski hill for the very first time.

The public phrase, ‘active listening’ is a first step in the process. And it is only a first step, but one that, for the sake of the solidarity of both the society and the sanity of the millions attempting to survive in this diabolic cauldron, it might be a step we might all consider. 

Serching for God # 31

 From episcopalchurch.org, in a segment entitled, An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church, we find:

The importance of the biblical narratives of salvation history is reflected in the scripture readings for Easter Vigil…including the story of creation, the flood, Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, Israel’s deliverance at the Red Sea, and other stories of redemption and renewal….The concept if based on the German term Heilsgeschichte (history of Salvation, or redemption history). It was used by C. von Hofmann (1810-1877), who urged that all sacred history can be deduced from the fact of personal conversion.

The Cross, that pivotal, historic, epic and transformational moment on the Christian calendar has become an archetypal image for the faith, as well as for the secular society. Linked intimately, an perpetually with human ‘sin’ and the need for forgiveness, it has marked a turning point in the consciousness of the West, irrespective of the specific faith to which one is in any way connected. On the website, danielleshroyer.com, in a piece entitled Moltmann Monday: Burdening the Cross with Salvation, March 12, 2017, we read, quoting from Moltmann’s work, The Crucified God, and the chapter, Resistance of the Cross Against Its Interpretations:

(From Moltmann:) The religion and humanist world which surrounded Christianity from the very first despised the Cross, because the dehumanized Christ represented a contradiction to all ideas of God, and man as divine. Yet even in historic Christianity the bitterness of the cross was not maintained in the recollection of believers or in the reality presented by the church. There were times of persecution and times of reformation, in which the Crucified Christ was to some extent experienced as directly present. In historic Christianity there was also the religion of the suppressed (Laternari) who knew that their faith brought them into spontaneous fellowship with the suffering Christ. But the more the church of the crucified Christ became the prevailing religion of society, and set about satisfying the personal and public needs of this society, the more it left the cross behind it, and gilded the cross with the expectations and ideas of salvation.

And then Moltmann quotes H. J. Iwand, who said this doozy of a sentence;

We have made the bitterness of the Cross, the revelation of God in the cross of Jesus Christ, tolerable to ourselves by learning to understand it as a necessity for the process of salvation…As a result the cross loss its arbitrary and incomprehensible character.

(Back now to Daniele Shroyer)

Moltman and Iwand do not mean to say that the cross has nothing to do with salvation, or that the cross isn’t deeply and intentionally tied up in God’s act of salvation in Jesus. What they are trying to say is that it’s worth considering how we have so simplified the cross that it has become nothing more than a convenient solution to our rather basic salvation math problem. And the reason that is problematic is because a) salvation is a lot more complicated than that and b) the cross means a whole lot more than that. When we choose to see the cross only as a means of fulfilling our personal salvation needs, we sidestep all the things that make the cross difficult, uncomfortable, scandalous and incomprehensible. Rather than squirming, we decide instead to ignore, to personalize, and to sentimentalize it…..

Moltmann’s point is that there is much about the cross that is and that will always be a little bit despicable to us, and out faithfulness as Christians is not to reject it but to accept that as part of what makes the cross such a transformative act. Jesus was stripped o his humanity and his divinity on the cross. He was left for dead. He was an enemy of the state, an enemy of organized religion, an enemy of the status quo, an enemy of just deserts. He was above all- and this is important- the enemy of death and destruction, which throws some rather serious shade on all the other things that got tangled up in his own condemnation on the cross, because it assumes that they were in some way, too….The American church is not the church of the crucified Christ. It is not and it never has been. It is the prevailing religion of society, and its central desire to satisfy the personal and public needs of that society and to support in any number of ways its own survival. And because it continues to choose that path, it continues to leave the cross farther and farther behind it. American Christianity has decided to burden the cross with only one thing, to the exclusion of all else: our own misguided expectations and ideas of salvation. By doing so, we have made the cross tolerable (how else could we have cotton blankets with crosses on it or blinged out cross jewelry and shirts or cure little ceramic cross s hanging in our kitchens) but we have also made it cheap, and shallow, and rather empty. Which is why I will never stop being grateful that the cross has this unfathomable magical way of resisting our bad interpretation of it. The facts are the facts and no amount of cross-encrusted coffee mugs are going to take away from the fact that an innocent Jewish man born to a refugee family who we profess to be the son of God was condemned, beaten and executed as an enemy of the state and an enemy of organized religion and that even his followers abandoned him because they could not bear to see it happen. And apparently neither can we. The very first sentence of this book which is a sentence that literally saved my faith, is this:

The cross is not and cannot be loved. This Lent, consider letting go of your need to love the cross for what you think it gives you. Look on it instead, in all its complicated, confusing facets and allow it to destabilize you. Allow yourself to be brought into Christ’s suffering rather than doing everything you can to avoid it. See what happens when you stop burdening the cross with your own salvation, and see it as the salvation of God for the life of the world instead.

The church, as depicted by Shroyer, with Moltmann’s underpinning, has reduced the cross to a cheap and easily-revered image of personal salvation, especially when compared with the facts of the suffering opposition to death and destruction, the defaming of the innocent one, whose sacrifice can be ‘viewed’ from the perspective of the whole world, and not as another of those placeboes to sooth and calm the personal needs including the need for personal salvation.

I was raised in a church in which the personal salvation of each individual was the standard of ‘success’ for whether the clergy and the theology being preached was biblical, literally. At twelve, I sat on a sofa with the clergy in the chair in front of me, as he asked, in preparation for my first communion, “John have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Saviour?” How could I have had even an inkling of whatever that might mean, at that age? Of course, I knew, intuitively, that, if I wished to participate in a first communion, the answer expected was, “Yes!” and it was to be proferred unequivocally and unreservedly. I had watched, and was to watch millions parade to a altar in evangelical revivals both in person and on television (think Billy Graham) and ponder, what did that ‘walk’ mean to each of those millions?

Recently in this space, I have been walking a path in and through gardens of thoughts that exposed the ‘privatization of sin’ and the ‘impunity of the church’ from reflection on its own darkness. Pleasing to the society, as a different kind of, but nevertheless another ‘agency of service to the society’  (tax exempt, in many jurisdictions) the Christian church has defaulted on the mission of the horror and sacrifice of Calvary, (here recall Jay Alison’s The Joy of Being Wrong) that posits a perspective of a willing sacrificial martyr to the notion of relationality, in opposition to conflict and violence in relationships (of and for the whole world). Except perhaps to have made if dogmatic to ‘oppose abortion’ as its sign of conviction to have grasped and incarnated that aspect of opposition to death, without at the same time, even coming close to a similar opposition to military conflict, or, in many instances, to capital punishment.

The model of a willing sacrifice to the injust, unwarranted, murder of this Jesus, as an exemplar for humanity, not only those who call themselves Christian, in the light of the manifest volcanoes of violence, mostly of revenge and retribution, that erupt at the personal, organizational, state and national levels, on innocent, mostly unwilling and unwitting, men, women and children is both graphic and epic.

There is another aspect to this notion of the ‘personal need for salvation’ that instantly separates, with a degree of both impunity and indignity, those who profess their loyalty and belief in the Cross as an instrument of forgiveness and the concomitant salvation it assures, from those who don’t fully need or comprehend, or refuse to extract the mystery and the complications of the Cross, or those who see the salvation of the world as paramount.

We live in a culture so deeply embedded, even enmeshed in the personal individual, as to be both literally and metaphorically blind to the ‘whole world’ as having both a need and an inherent and inalienable access to the universal intrinsic compassion, brotherhood and equality and fraternity that is encompassed in the Sermon on the Mount, (remember Tolstoy).

It seems highly unlikely even perhaps impossible that the ‘culture’ or as Hillman calls it, the ‘anima mundi’ will ever be put under the same kind of magnification to which we submit human blood and tissue cells in our search for both disease and antidote. It is highly unlikely, especially and so long as, we continue to consider and to value our personal salvation as eclipsing legitimately any thought of the kind of reformation needed by a culture blind to its own denial and blindness to the ‘wholeness’ or our shared existence. Even in our critiques of our own culture, we continue to deploy the lens of the ‘personal evil’ as evidence that we are diagnosing and the treating the malaise that is smothering humanity.

And, think of the suffering of the most deprived, the most alienated, the most homeless, the most starving, the most diseased and war-torn refugees, immigrants and asylum-seekers as closest to that suffering on Calvary….that suffering is unwarranted, unequal, dispassionate, detached, and inhumane….just as was the death of Jesus on Calvary…..

And to think that we are continuing, if not perhaps even enhancing the impunity with which we view violence, at all levels of our human interactions, including especially between and among nations whose obsessive-compulsive consumption of the latest and most lethal weaponry has spiked recently.

Protecting the homeland from the invasive threats of evil and even deranged men (and it is mostly men who demand more weapons, and more conflict and inflict more death and destruction) is the precise opposite of what ever human being on the planet knows ‘intimately and innately’ within him or herself. Shifting to an ethic of being true to our own self, refusing to engage in wanton violence, whether it is verbal, physical, emotional, or even military, is one path to rendering to the Cross a meaning and a definition and purpose beyond ‘personal salvation.’

And there is no escaping the bond that links the religious impulse to the foundational currents that undergird our culture. And a re-consideration of the Cross could be at the centre of that bond.

Searching for God # 30

 Innocence is America’s mystical cloud of unknowing. We are forgiven simply by virtue of not knowing what we do. To wrap ourselves round in the Good—that is the American dream, leaving place for the evil nightmare only in the ‘other’, where it can be diagnosed, treated, prevented, and sermonized about.

This Hillman quote from The Soul’s Code, begs parsing and exegesis.

On andrewjtaggart.com, in a piece entitled, The Cloud of Unknowing: A

Summary for Mystics, May 18, 2021, we read:

The ‘cloud of unknowing refers to the state of being that is not of the sensible or the mental nor is it unified was God. Zen calls this samadhi, a largely thought-free state in which all is gathered into one. Most new meditators, catching a brief glimpse of this state, will report that it is ‘neutral’ or ‘calm’ or that ‘they feel nothing.’…In time, this cloud of unknowing is experienced as being peaceful, restful, and almost full. (Almost full because it is not yet in union with the divine.)

To get this existential inquiry underway, the Cloud author also suggest, quite reasonably, that we set aside all ideas about creation, all worldly actions, and, as he often repeats, all the bodily senses. In fact, even the intellect cannot attain to the heights of union with the divine (God is ‘beyond the reach of all created intellectual faculties’) (The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works,  trans. A.C. Spearing, p. 23). Quite simply we are ‘to forget’ everything temporal so as to remember only God in himself….

In short, the genuine seeker (after God) is to long so deeply and so steadily for the Real that she can learn to ‘forget’  for a time all that is unreal. The ‘cloud of unknowing’ is, as it were, the unreal between God and all that is to be forgotten.

Such seekers are regarded as ‘mystics’ and Britannica.com defines mysticism this way:

The traditional conception of mysticism

From late antiquity through the Middle Ages, Christians used prayer to contemplate both God’s omnipresence in the world and God in his essence. The soul’s ecstasy, or rapture, in contemplation of God was termed a spiritual marriage’ by St. Bernard of Clairvaux the greatest mystical authority of the 12^th century. In the 13^th century the term unio mystica (Latin: mystical union) came into use as a synonym. During the same period the range of objects of contemplation was increased to include he Passion of Christ, visions of saints, and tours of

heaven and hell. In the 17^th and 18^th centuries the enthusiasms of quaking, shaking and other infusions of the Holy Spirit were also called mystical.

From westernmystics.wordpress.com, we read:

 Walter ‘Walt’ Whitman was an American mystic poet, essayist, and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works…..In his prose work, Democratic Vistas, Whitman describes the kind of experiences he enjoys:

‘There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that arises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars shining eternal. This is the thought of identity—your for you, whoever you are, as mine for me. Miracle of miracles, beyond statement, most spiritual and vaguest of earth’s dreams, yet hardest basic fact, and only entrance to all facts. In such devout hours, in the midst of significant wonders of heaven and earth, (significant only because of the Me in the center) creeds, convictions, fall away and become of no account before this simple idea. Under the luminousness of real vision, it alone takes possession, takes value. Like the shadowy dwarf in the fable, once liberated and look’d upon, it expands over the whole earth, an spreads to the roof of heaven.

Hillman saws limits to transcendentalism, based on an heightened concentration on the I, the ego, the individual self, as access to universal truth and the potential that one could mistake one’s own subjectivity for a deeper truth. Furthermore, the ‘forgiveness’ that results from ‘not knowing’ in the secular domain as ignorance, lack of knowledge, in the cognitive, intellectual and epistemological domain, and stretched out to an ethical and moral dimension of denial and the open option of never being either culpable, or responsible is different from its use in mystical, religious, spiritual domain. This elision of re different from its use in mystical, religious, spiritual, religious, spiritual, mystical meaning and intent of the ‘cloud of unknowing’ with the literal, empirical, cognitive and intellectual represents one of the major difficulties in both pursuing a God, from within a secular culture and in dialoguing with others about such a pilgrimage.

Of course, there are theologies that refuse to separate the two and posit that whatever happens in the secular domain has implications and references in the spiritual domain, and similarly vice versa. In contemporary western culture that is swimming (perhaps risking drowning) in the oceans of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) such a concept of a ‘cloud of unknowing’ is virtually absent, and if not absent, at least ridiculed. The innocence that the secular culture prefers is akin to the minor hockey player who, upon taking a penalty, immediately points to the ‘other guy’ who actually committed the foul. Another application that emerges frequently in secular culture is the dismissive, “I did not know I was committing a foul!” And so, knowledge and intent have been written into many secular laws to ‘cover’ such incidences.

Innocence in the society, especially one draped in legal robes and consciousness, as well as empiricism and positivism, is almost universally considered from a question of culpability, as compared with the cloud of a blank mind and psyche, in order to better be open to the ‘other’ kind of reality, associated with, imbued with, and saturated with a vision of the supernatural or the divine. Transcendental innocence is akin to awe, surprise, wonder, even bewilderment, perhaps confusion and emptiness. For a culture either unwilling or unable (or both) to discern the difference between the two context and meanings of precisely the same words is an indictment of the teachings of the church. It is also a kind of default of those engaged in religious curricula, and the humanities, to push back against the tectonic shift of not only the vocabulary but also the culture away perceiving, identifying and even defining reality as literal, empirical from anything mystical….only to cling to its vestiges of ‘innocence’ within the secular meaning.

To wrap ourselves round in the Good—that is the American dream, leaving place for the evil nightmare only in the ‘other’, where it can be diagnosed, treated, prevented, and sermonized about.

This sentence, another way of levelling a scathing indictment of his own nation’s psyche, posits the separation of Good (within America and within Americans,) and Evil, in ‘the other’ to be essentially reformed at the hands and interventions of Americans is a different way of expressing, ‘The Ugly American.’ This novel by William J Lederer and Eugene Burdick, published in1958, gave a fictionalized narrative of Americans working in Southeast Asia. The boorishness and parochialism of Americans in geopolitics, diplomacy and military conflict has been summarized when the title is evoked.

We have read about the church’s separation of man from nature, a divide we are still attempting to bridge. We have heard of the separation of good and evil, in the Christian’s life….Man is evil as demonstrated by the Original Sin, whereas God is Good. And the question of the enmeshment of good and evil, in our lives, in our news, in our academies, legislatures, courts (always inherent in the other) “where it can be diagnosed, treated, prevented, and sermonized about”.

So ubiquitous and deeply rooted is this ‘agency-interventionist’ archetype, that it essentially defines the American psyche, the American economy, the American foreign policy and the canyon of separation of the American Christianity from its roots, ‘The Kingdom of God is Within You’ a notion. This tenacious rendering of the significance and the relevance of the Sermon on the Mount coming as it does from a Russian writer, thereby permits and sustains its own disavowal, dismissal and distrust by America. Russia is after all, another of those ‘others’ in whom evil resides and rules.

A similar divide between science and imagination continues, in and through the linking of Hillman’s writing with anything purporting to be a ‘search for God’..Hillman’s archetypal psychology, reinforcing an imaginative, metaphoric perception and rendering of human ‘in extremis’ moments under a perceived, imagined influence of mythic voices, does not comply with clinical psychology’s academic pursuit of diagnoses, and pharmaceutical and therapeutic interventions, on top of triage assignments to either or both legal or medical fraternities…for reformation. Nor does his archetypal psychology ‘fit’ with the religious fraternity, with its traditions, dogmas, ethics, morals and rejection of the dark side of human existence.

Hillman tutors his readers on his discernment of the nuanced differences between ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’; the former always reaches up to the light, the latter down toward the darkness. A religious pilgrimage needs a nativity crib that welcomes both. Religion in both theory and praxis welcomes the human psyche’s meanderings from light to dark, from moments of ecstasy to moments of dire distress and trouble, without the instant and counterintuitive intervention or the lawyers, the police, the doctors or the ethics police (the clergy). The Divine, God, is neither an advocate for nor an incarnation of ‘a specific’ externally defined, institutionally mediated, debated and taught ethics, morality or ideology. The Divine, God, is also neither immune to, nor dismissive of any of the angst, ‘missing the mark’ instances that come into each and every human life. Furthermore, the Divine, God, is so identified with the deepest of our ‘in extremis’ moments, as exemplified in the “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”

Rather than interpret that line as God’s hatred of sin, perhaps we might reconsider it to be an identification of the Divine with the moments in each of our lives when ‘total abandonment, complete isolation, utter alienation’ were actually embodied and uttered from a Cross.

That abandonment, isolation, alienation, each and all of them on steroids in our worst and most depraved moments are universal, crossing ethnicities, religions, ideologies, time frames, and all academic classifications and classes. Indeed, it is feasible to posit that, without the ‘annus horribilis’ (as the Queen defined 1992) in our lives, we would be deprived of the very grist and grit and stabilizing that ‘understanding and caring for the soul affords.

We are all embodied innocence, and in that embodiment, we, consciously, unconsciously or unwittingly attempt to break out of the ‘sack of ignorance’ that seems nearly to suffocate us, at various moments in our lives. Innocence, purity, simplicity, superficiality, reductionisms, quick solutions and judgements serve, like band-aids, or aspirin for our minor setbacks. We learn that something which before we did not see, is now starting to show a sprig of a different insight, and, depending on the convergence of our experiences, a similar pattern develops, repeats, deepens and repeats. Whether we call those ‘aha’ moments, epiphanies, turning points, tragedies, or demoralizing devastations, we know we have hit a wall.

Everyone of us has a narrative of one or more such moments. And impact of such moments can rarely be contained in a psychological, or an intellectual, or a social, or a political or an economic or an ethical, or a religious/spiritual box. Those moments transcend all categories, all attempts to wrestle the fullness of their meaning and purpose, perhaps for years or decades.

What Divine, what God, would be alien to, or separating from, or abandoning men women and children in such moments? Indeed, the divine presence is not only most needed at such moments, and also much sought.  Why do we all say, at such moments, ‘My God! What am I going to do?’ and/or ‘My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?’

If, as many of us Christians have been taught, we consider such moments as the indisputable proof of man’s evil, we are, in the extreme moment of potentially relating to and needing and recognizing our vulnerability and our need for support. For a so-called religious and spiritual purpose and moment, we are placing ourselves in double-jeopardy….isolated, alone, and also disdained, as we embody sin, by God.

From the perspective of this scribe, that proposition is preposterous. The hatred of sin, and the forgiveness ostensibly ensuing from Calvary, through faith (today translated as ‘cognitive belief in, historically translated as metanoia, a turning around. “This did not mean (after Laertes conversation with Socrates) that he had accepted a new doctrinal truth, on the contrary he had discovered that, like Socrates himself, he knew that the value system by which he had lived was without foundation; as a result, in order to go forward authentically, his new self must be based on doubt (aporia) rather than certainty. (Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, p. 62)

The innocence we speak and write of is embodied by degrees in the baby, the youth, the orphan, as well as the wanderer, warrior, altruist and magician….shedding layers of its impact throughout the passages, returns and revisits. The metanoia, also in various degrees accompanies those pivotal moments, often triggered by deep and profound pain and anxiety. For a sustaining faith (based in doubt, uncertainty and humility) one’s biography includes both the ‘case history of secular accomplishments’ and the ‘soul’ history of the rising and falling tides of the emotions with the vicissitudes of experience.

And it is this linking of  ‘soul’ with darkness that begs inclusion in our religious, spiritual pilgrimage…..not for ethical or moral or decalogue-based compliance but for the realization of the embrace and welcome of the divine from which we cannot be separated. And, as for salvation, that is a topic for another day…..

To be continued……

Searching for God # 29

 Merriam-Webster.com defines KARMA this way:

The force generated by a person’s actions held in Hinduism and Buddhism to perpetuate transmigration  and its ethical consequences to determine the nature of the person’s next existence.

Broadly: such a force considered as affecting the events of one’s life

A characteristic emanation, aura or spirit that infuses of vitalizes someone  or something.

For those of us who are not either Hindu or Buddhist, it is likely risky to attempt to embrace the concept, especially as it is applied to an individual’s life, and transport it into a metaphor for the civilization.

Living on the edge of risk, however, is a place and state to which I have grown more accustomed than I would have envisioned decades ago.

As a cause-effect notion, karma seems to foreshadow its own consequences. It seems that if one lives a good life, one’s next life promises to be happier and more gratifying than the first; if one lives not-such-a-good-life, one’s next life will be shadowed by the first life. And as a Canadian, living for decades in the shadow of the American cultural behemoth, I am increasingly imbued with the perception that, while every nation and person is embedded in his/her/its own denial, for various reasons, the American enmeshment in denial, like much of the rest of American culture, her denial is both epic and unmistakable. And, intuitively, it only seems to follow that such universal denial, analogous to karma, may have unintended and unplanned-for, unanticipated and even unwanted consequences.

Support for the American reliance on denial is found in James Hillman’s writings.

Let’s start here:

Innocence is America’s mystical cloud of unknowing. We are forgiven simply by virtue of not knowing what we do. To wrap ourselves round in the Good—that is the American dream, leaving place for the evil nightmare only in the ‘other’, where it can be diagnosed, treated, prevented, and sermonized about. A history of this habit of the heart has been exposed by Elaine Pagels (in her important study The Origin of Satan) as a disastrous, perhaps ‘evil’ essential, and inherent bad seed, in Western religious denominations, making obligatory as countermeasure their relentless insistence on ‘love’. (Hillman, The Soul’s Code, p. 247)

And also:

The book, Mein Kampf, that (Hitler) wrote in prison in his early thirties, lays out the visionary project he intended to fulfil. The entire disaster is there in a nutshell for anyone to read. Yet the Jews, The Western statesmen, the intellectuals and democrats, the church, could not see the demonic. The dark eye that can see evil had been blinded by the bright hopes in human progress and faith in goodwill and peace.

Without a profound sense of psychopathy and a strong conviction that the demonic is always among us—and not only in its extreme criminal forms, we hide in denial and wide-eyed innocence, that openness which also opens wide the gate to the worst. Again: Note how political tyranny lives on a gullible populace, and now a gullible populace falls for tyranny. Innocence seems to ask for evil. (Hillman, TSC, p. 239)

Hillman references American biographical examples of men, heroes to many, whose lives relied on the notion of belief, especially its ‘pure persuasive power.’ The three men were named Thomas Dewey, Oliver North, and Billy Graham. Attempting, on reflection to account for a common denominator, Hillman writes:

Perhaps the one god that provides the common denominator here is just this habit of self-control. But not self-control as such; rather its shadow: control in service of belief, in particular, of a belief that required control over the shadow. This is abundantly clear in North’s statements of belief before Congress. There was an enemy to be faced: international Communism and the compromising that weakens the patriotic fiber of America. Things must be put in order. Dewey’s target was crime, the gangsters in the dark tenements of Manhattan, the Irish Tammany hall, the Jewish racketeers and the Italian mobsters and extortionists. Dewey was cleaning up America, remaking it on the model of his own fastidiousness.. Graham’s charge was the cleaning of the spirit throughout the world: his enterprise was called a crusade….Control over the weakness and evil in self, and control over evil in others go together: for Dewey, by convicting criminals to the penitentiaries; for North, by bombing the bad guys in El Salvador, Grenada, and Libya; for Graham, by beating sin and Satan through converting sinners to Christ. In all, belief justifies the control and the furor agenda with which the shadow is opposed, whether the shadow be Tammany Hall, or the mullahs of Teheran, or the Evil One himself. (Hillman, TSC. Pps. 266-7)

Denial of the shadow of both the individual and the nation, is a cultural feature that embraces the church, the corporation and the political theatre….No one does anything ‘wrong’ as was evidenced in Scott Peck’s search within the Pentagon for those responsible for the My Lai massacre…everyone claimed immunity, given that the decision, another of the heroic attempts to erase the communists (think North’s belief) from Viet Nam, was taken by a committee.

Echoes of this kind of misguided ‘belief’ are not restricted to the United States. Netanyahu is determined to ‘erase’ Hamas from the face of the earth, just as Hamas is committed to the erasure of Israel from the face of the earth. Seems to be a similar chant coming out of Moscow, to erase the fascists from Ukraine. And, of course, how could we miss the erasure of all criminality from the streets of Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta,  perhaps New Orleans, all of them governed by Democrats.

Meanwhile, the energy that encompasses the cultural commitment to denial, permits and insures the denial of global warming and climate change, at the official government level, as well as the impending business failures of many farmers suffering from the tariffs imposed on China, who, in a tit-for-tat move refuses to buy American soy and Canadian canola. The very official denial of the actual amounts of fentanyl coming into American over the Canadian border, and deploying of such denial as the cornerstone of American trade policy, is, it seems, tied to a similar kind of blinding belief that has risen to the peak of the American political theatrical façade. Are we watching a gullible public, raised on the promise of the hope of the improvement, even the ultimate  perfection of the “imperfect union,” by slaying the evils that offer another fake pseudo justification for ‘immediate, and total(itarian) action to eliminate ‘evil’ depicted and imagined in whatever visages fit the whim of the wannabe dictator?

As the cliché goes, DENIAL is much more than a river in Egypt!

Is the nation now in the grip of innocence, denial, manipulation by those desperate for perfect (yet pseudo) self-control, obtainable only through the absolute elimination of a perceived, personified evil monster, in pursuit of a perfectly executed national security policy, itself another denial of the facts that it is not immigrants, or refugees or asylum seekers that are at the core of the American criminal problem? Add to this the bombing of what are determined, without public evidence, to be ‘drug cartel boats from Venezeula’ in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, while denying the insatiable appetite for illicit drugs among the American people. Add to the list the denial that millions of Americans are living in conditions so ripe for revolt, conditions designed executed and imposed by various government and state decisions whose benefits are being eviscerated, while their harsh impositions are being enhanced simultaneously.

And, of course, American denialism, really a core political, psychological and even a religious regime, not only cripples the American anima mundi; it also gives both cover and enthusiasm for denial and avoidance in other places, under the rubric of exaggerated and ‘belief-driven’ actions of individuals themselves seduced by their own blindness and denial of their own shadow.

When a culture makes heroes of men who, for their own personal inadequacies, (impotence?) and who find ‘an evil monster’ to eradicate, and in both the denial of their inadequacy, and the fabrication of their own ‘definition of evil’ they are not only permitted but adulated for their heroism, what can we expect as the ensuing ‘karma’ from such a situation?

Many times, in this space, I have derisively told and re-told the story of the evangelist of my youth whose sermon, ‘If you are Roman Catholic, go to dances, to movies, use makeup and prepare meals on Sunday, you are going to Hell’…..and, yet, what is the difference between a military or a political or a self-declared (self-declared Christian) evangelist and this heretical, heinous and despicable theology? Add his bio to Hillman’s list!

And to call out denial, from the perspective of political critique, is to miss the deeply embedded betrayal of the personal denial of the shadow. And the two aspects of the same dynamic are unable to find space or time in the print or electronic media. The personal shadow is a subject, if it is permitted time and space at all, (universities have almost all barred the teaching of Jung and Hillman from their curricula) is relegated to the family pages, and excluded from the political talking class. Personal attacks on the current occupant of the Oval Office, however, continue, in another (perhaps less heinous) vein of being prepared and offered as a way to expose the evil of this man….this man who is a direct ‘karma’ of the decades of deceitful, deceptive and delusional social, political, corporate and religious norm of denial and presumed innocence that have ensnared the nation for decades, if not from the beginning.

Impunity, immunity, absolvement of accountability, lack of transparency, and outright default are all forms of betrayal….and as Jack Smith put it in his interview with Andrew Wiseman, from London, (words to this effect): I was putting forth an argument for a speedy trial because the public is entitled to justice, just as is the criminal entitled to justice, both in time and in decision.

The public is also entitled to a far more rigorous assessment, discernment and public and open discussion of the kind of hidden and venomous silence of denial and presumed innocence behind public decisions which, clearly, are not only not in the public interest, but decidedly against the furthering of the public interest, and even detriental to its survival….in the most wide and deep definition of that last word.

Searcing for God # 28

From GZERO.com in a piece entitled, The new global arms race: who’s buying, who’s selling, what’s at stake by Tasha Kheiriddin, Jun 08, 2025:

Welcome to the new global arms race: faster, smarter, more dangerous and more expensive than ever. In 2024, world military spending surged to a record $2.7 trillion, the steepest annual increase since the Cold War's end, driven largely by European, Asian and Middle Eastern nations.

Who's buying?

Faced with threats from Russia, Europe has ramped up defense budgets, with Poland's spending growing by 31% to $38 billion and Sweden’s by 34% to $12 billion in its first year of NATO membership. Germany increased military expenditure by 28% to $88.5 billion, making it the fourth-largest spender globally and rearming the nation that precipitated the two major world wars of the last century.

In the Middle East, Israel's military spending soared by 65% per cent to $46.5 billion, the largest annual rise since 1967, amid its war with Hamas in Gaza and conflict with Hezbollah in South Lebanon. In Asia, China spent 7% more on its military in 2024, adding an estimated $314 billion, raising fears of an imminent operation against Taiwan, which boosted its military spending by 1.8% in 2024 to $16.5 billion. Fellow Asia-Pacific power Japan saw its military budget rise by 21% to $55.3 billion, its largest annual increase since 1952….

Strategic implications

All this warmongering could deal a death blow to arms control agreements. The New START treaty between the US and Russia is set to expire in February 2026, with little hope for renewal. It could also see new theatres of war emerge: in the Asia Pacific around Taiwan, in Europe in countries bordering Ukraine, and in cyberspace, through the use of disinformation and propaganda campaigns. And all that military spending will put a dent in national budgets, possibly requiring cuts to social benefits, increased debt, or fewer government services - which won’t make voters happy, and could contribute to political instability.

Just today, the French aviation manufacturer Dassault announced on the website: Zona Militar en/2025/10/12:

During the course of this week, French company Dassault Aviation announced that it has completed production of the 300th Rafale fighter jet, marking a milestone in the progress toward fulfilling a total of 533 aircraft on firm order from countries such as France, India, Indonesia, and Serbia. According to the company, this achievement reflects not only the operational strengths of the design itself but also its ability to develop an industrial network involving more than 400 local companies, consolidating a strong domestic aerospace industry.

Doubtless, the politicians of all stripes in nations around the globe will champion this kind of information, the rhetoric being at the core of ‘national security and self-defence. The adage that war inevitably benefits the GDP of a nation has been circling for decades, if not longer. However, there is significant research that brings that perception and attitude into question.

On ISCD.org, (International Security and Development Center,11/02/2022) website, we read:

Wars reduce the world economy by 12%-but some countries gain economically from violent conflict. The order of magnitude of the economic burden of war is comparable to that of other ‘global public bads’, such as climate change, land degradation, alcohol consumption and malaria.

And this from the Kiel Institute, kielinstitu.de, 14, 02, 2024, in a piece entitled: Economic Fallout: The Price of War:

These findings are based no a new study by researchers at the Kiel Institute and the University of Tubingen……

Wars often cause immense economic damage. In war sites, the capital stock, which comprises economic assets such as machinery and buildings is destroyed. At the same time, economic output, on average, falls by 30 percent and inflation rises by about 15 percentage points over five years. Yet non-belligerent third countries also bear high costs, especially the neighbouring countries of war sites: here, output fall by, on average, 10 percent after five years while inflation rises by 5 percentage points over the same period…..

Ukraine-what the war could cost by 2026

Base on the experience from past wars, the authors estimate that the Russian invasion will lead to an output loss in Ukraine of about 120 billion by 2026 and a concurrent reduction in Ukraine’s capital stock of more than USD950 billion. At the same time, the economic costs on non-belligerent third countries are also substantial with a GDP loss of about USD 250 billion, USD 70 billions of which are borne by the countries of the European Union and about USD 15-20 billion by Germany alone.

So much, however, brief,  for the GDP and economic impact of the futility, the sheer mindless and the nefariousness of war.

What about the humanitarian costs?

From UNHCR, on unhcr.org, in a piece entitled, “Explainer: War in Ukraine-the human cost and humanitarian response, by UNHCR Staff, 21 February, 2025:

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, nearly 11 million Ukrainians have been forced to flee their homes and are now either displaced within their own country or living as refugees abroad…..Since the start of the full-scale war, almost 6.9 million Ukrainians have registered as refugees. A further 3.7 million area internally displaced within Ukraine …More than 42,000 civilians have been wounded or killed—including 2,500 children-since Russia’s invasion, while attacks have also damaged or destroyed more than 2.5 million homes across Ukraine, roughly 13 percent of the housing stock. It is estimated thT $176 billion worth of damager has been done to vital infrastructure including housing, transport and energy, making civilian life a daily struggle.

From geneva-academy.ch: ( c Mahmoud Sulaiman Unplash)

Middle East and North Africa: More than 45 Armed Conflicts.  This is, in numbers, the most affected region: more than 45 armed conflicts are currently taking place throughout the Middle East and North Africa in the following territories: Cyprus, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Yemen, and Western Sahara.

Africa comes second in the number of armed conflicts per region with more than 35 non-international conflicts (NIACs) taking place in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic (CAR), The democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan.

And then there are some of the words of the American novelist, and war correspondent, Ernest Hemingway, as quoted in  Blue Fire, James Hillman, introduced and edited by Thomas Moore.

Hemingway writes that after World War I: ‘abstract wars such as glory, honor courage…were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the name of rivers, the regiments and dates. (And Hillman continues) How rare for anyone to know the date of Alamogordo (or even where it is ), the date of Hiroshima, of the first hydrogen bomb explosion, or the names of people or places or units engaged. Gone is abstraction. Glenn Gray writes: ‘Any fighting unit must have a limited and specific objective. A physical goal—a piece of earth to defend, a machine-gin nest to destroy, a strong point to annihilate—more likely evokes a sense of comradeship. Martial psychology turns events into images: physical, bounded named. Hurtgen Forest, Vimy Ridge, Iwo Jima, A beach, a bridge, a railroad crossing: battle places become iconic and sacred, physical images, claiming the utmost human love worth more than my life. (A Blue Fire, p.182-3)

And not only are wars currently being waged, and will continue for the foreseeable future; they have also changed, drones, highly sophisticated intelligence technology and highly advanced weaponry, deployed by skilled technicians from miles away from the war front, detached from the bloodshed, the personal confrontation with the sounds, the smells, and the devastation. And hanging over all military conflicts is the spectre of nuclear weapons, notation of which is captured by Hillman:

Quite different is the transcendent experience of the nuclear fireball. The emotion is stupefaction at destruction itself rather than a heightened regard for the destroyed. Nuclear devastation is not merely a cannonade or firebombing carried to a further degree. It is different in kind: archetypally different. It evokes the apocalyptic transformation of the world into fire, earth ascending in a pillar of cloud, an epiphanic fire revealing the inmost spirit of all things as in the Buddha’s fire sermon:

All things, O priests, are on fire…the mind is on fire, ideas are on fire…mind consciousness is no fire….

Or like that passage from the Bhagavad which came to Oppenheimer when he saw the atomic blast:

If the radiance of a thousand suns

Were burst at once into the sky

That would be like the splendour of the Mighty One.

The nuclear imagination leaves the human behind for the worst sin of all: fascination by the Spirit. Superbia. The soul goes up in fire. If the epiphany in battle unveils love of this place and that man and values more than mh life yet bound with this world and its life, the nuclear epiphany unveils the apocalyptic god, a god of extinction, the dog-is-dead god, an epiphany of nihilism. (A Blue Fire, pps. 183-4) 

Searching for God # 27

 Recently, I read of a man who, because he could not longer tolerate the notion that he was not ‘loving his neighbour,’ as he put it, by continuing his formal membership in the Republican party of the United States. The removal of food stamps, higher health care costs, higher consumer costs especially around food and necessities, all combined to ‘push him over’ into the Democratic party.

And while the sentiment of aspiring to ‘love his neighbour’ a notion that takes on different meanings for each of us, is both honourable and worthy of respect, it falls into the category of a first step on a ladder toward what Tolstoy calls a higher calling, that is to non-violently resist evil by force. Doubtless, dear reader, you quickly and easily see the ‘gap’ between the man’s expression of his refusal to endorse his former political party, and in doing so, he is in a way taking a non0-violent path of resistance to the evil that party is foisting on the American people.

And, among his friends, family and neighbours, his shift in membership can and will be considered both laudable and commendable, as it is. Even to declare his decision publicly, as he did on his Facebook page, takes it to another level, so that his circles will have access and may even re-consider their own Republican membership loyalty.

Now, is he finished with his shift in both thinking and action? Is his step a first  one toward actually joining in active, non-violent resistance to the horrors that continue to tumble out of the Oval Office, about armed military personnel on city streets, especially those governed by Democratic mayors and/or governors, about deporting women and children without due process, about jerrymandering election districts in order to ‘win’ the 2026 mid-term elections, if there will even be any, and if whatever the results they will be termed ‘fake,’ ‘false,’ ‘fraudulent,’ or ‘rigged,’ by the current administration.

Can or will he write a letter to his Congressman and Senator explaining his valid and considered shift in political loyalties?

Can he or will he host a conversation with his neighbours, either formally or informally, in order to open up for discussion and debate the serious reasons behind his decision?

Can or will he make phone calls to engage in the political process at an even more active and assertive level, in order to more fully engage in non-violent resistance to the many exposed, obvious and invidious evils that are being perpetrated on the American people, as well as on the U.S relationships, both economic and military, as well as in foreign aid, health care, social services, education, and even national security?

This sinister, nefarious, invidious and heinous corpse of an administration, brain and heart dead from the get-go, is far more dangerous than merely threatening and obviating the minimal support services needed by many millions. The administration, or what passes as an excuse for an administration, really a bully pulpit for a bully and his bullying disrespect, dishonouring, and even deconstructuring of the traditional establishment, both in institutional form as well as in conventional expectations and aspirations. This current moment in history warrants  and needs and requires the ‘force’ of millions of Americans, Canadians, Europeans, East Asians, Africans, Indians, and Middle Easterners to form a spontaneous phalank of opposition, armed with data points, the support of millions of their respective countrymen and women, as well as the support of the American and international press corps and the universal human conscience within each of us, that we know points to brotherhood, equality, and justice.

It is not only those domestic and needed programs that are on life-support, those still breathing; it is everything else, especially international alliances, treaties, arms reduction treaties, and the honour to uphold promises previously kept (Think Ukraine, in 1991, having given up its nuclear weapons on the promise of protection from both Russia and the United States of America). NATO, the United Nations, and the plethora of human rights agencies, human mercy programs and agencies reliant on American funding support that are in jeopardy.

Our focus, while honourable and ethical, on our ‘own’ people (irrespective of our nation of birth), is no longer adequate to the history of this moment.

We have all an obligation to become ‘citizens of the world’ in a phrase so abstract as to be almost literally foreign to many. There have been monumental migration movements of refugees, immigrants, asylum seekers, students, and professionals who have travelled far from their homelands to cross borders into foreign lands, bringing with them their perspective, their industry, their ambition, their ideas and their creativity, and their courage to seek and to find new horizons and homes among strangers. None of us can say, any more, that there is only one racial group in our town or village. And none of us can say that our neighbourhoods have not been enriched by the arrival of those millions of new arrivals. Ou hospitals, our universities and our corporations are all profiting from their participation. And their contributions are exemplary, distinguished as scholars, as technicians, as entrepreneurs, and all of them paying taxes to their respective new national homes.

Perhaps their greatest gift, if we are willing to open our eyes and ears and minds to consider, is their traversing, both physically and culturally, the national boundaries that tend to keep millions in the illusion of being protected from the outside world.

That illusions, or is it rather a delusion, to which we can no longer cling, in our self-declared, paroachialism, under the ruse of the rubric of nationalism, especially heinously entitled ‘white Christian nationalism’…This is another of the many hypocrisies that serve as barnacles on the feet, legs, arms, and eyesm ears, and especially our minds, that enable many of us to utter words of self-congratulations about how welcoming we are to those very immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, without for a split-second giving a glancing thought about how they can and will open us to a new world of our shared re-creating.

We are all now co-creators, not merely co-habitors, in each and every nation on the planet, of new forms of traditions, customs, and festivals and festivities, none of which we had any idea we either missed or needed. And, the question for each of us white Caucasians, many of us raised as titular Christians (in name if not in life-embodiment) is whether we are open to the spectre of a new world in which we are no longer considered patronizing, condescending and superior ‘welcomers’ but actually share in a new equality, fraternity and brotherhood and sisterhood whose very existences have been re-configured, re-imagined, and re-created, for the shared and mutual benefit of both the new arrivals and those who consider ourselves native to our towns and villages, provinces and state.

A world-citizenship card is only a token of a  physical and emotional aspiration. No international agency exists for is inception. And, given the galloping rise of nationalism and the closing of minds and borders, it will require an international cadre of those, of all races, genders, ethnicities, religions, and non-religious, as well as all social and economic and educational levels, to come together in a collaborative, collective and unified ‘force’ of non-violent resistance to the toronadic winds of supremacy, superiority, elitism, privilege, and the concomitant abuses that those winds inevitably and universally spawn on the millions of ‘inferiors’.

We are all also those inferiors, in the face of an armed cabal, of identifiable world leaders, whose loyalty is exclusively to their own holding onto their power, by whatever means and methods available.

And we have all to be aware that we are also part of their ‘availability’ of power, so long as we are non-participating in their dreaded murders, wars, laws that ensconce them in power and in their sycophantic political and economic bowing to their so-declared-self-affirming elites, among the tech moguls, and the corporate behemoths whose share in the bounty of tax breaks, and regulation-releases, combine to threated the very air we breathe, the land we need to grow our food and the water desperately need to survive.

And it is not only mere humans whose lives are now endangered by these reprobates. Animals, fish, flora and fauna are all threated, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.

Anyone who thinks that  switching political parties, in the American political landscape is enough to non-violently resist the evil forces that have been unleashed  both through the chicanery of their hollow-man actors, and through the complicity of silent and obedient and unsuspecting and innocent and uninformed men and women who have left the governing of our jurisdictions to those who sought public office. And in failing to challenge and to vet those candidates, and in failing to critically evaluate their intentions, we are all complicit in the current dilemma.

And even the word dilemma is inadequate; it is a global disaster on our doorstep, irrespective of where we live. Politically, economically, environmentally, ethically and morally and even philosophically and spiritually we are on the edge of a metaphoric doomsday…..and it is of our own making.

Are we ready to acknowledge our personal responsibility to become fully informed, fully engaged fully non-violently resistant to this macabre monster of the abuse of power in the  lives of millions of voiceless, millions of homeless and millions of starving men, women and children.

And the complicity of the churches, of whatever brand, that not only sanction the abuse of power, but actually condone its existence, for the stability and security of the ‘state’ as if they were being loyal and compliant patriots, is appalling.

So too is the hypocritical complicity of the active and ‘elected’ politicians in many countries whose political lives depend on their loyalty to abusive tyrants, appalling and tragic in the extreme.

In this moment of global chaos, conflict, terror and tyranny, who is ready to roll up our sleeves an step the first of many steps toward engaging in non-violent resistance to the many manifest evils with force (not with weapons of war)?