Searching for God # 35

 We say, ‘Christianity isn’t a religion; it’s a relationship. (from the last two posts)

Is a religion also a relationship? And why is that characterization of religion viewed with so much disdain, even contempt in some circles?

If both the notions of “God” and “love” are mercurial, multidimensional, ineffable, ephemeral and ultimately resistant to finite definitions and meanings then, the concept of relationship fits those criteria as well. After two thousand-plus years of religious faith (thinking in the Christian calendar), at the centre of which we have been bombarded with the God is love theme will a plethora of illustrations examples, tenets and guidance, and love is the sine qua non of all effective, mutual, respectful and sustainable human relationships, at least in the West, relationships, both of the intimate and loving kind as well as of the more functional kind, fall apart at an alarming rate.

Collectively, we pontificate about loving our neighbour, ‘as Christ loved us’ unconditionally, while at the same time, we engage in the most petty, personal, picayune and pedestrian of taking offence, competitive comparisons, jibes, put-downs, ridicules and satiric jests, much of it not in a spirit of ‘good humour’. There are both scriptural and secular sentences depicting the human heart as ‘evil’ and ‘full of hate’ and ‘vengeful’ and ‘seeking retribution.’ The Christian education programs to which I have had access stressed a general notion of universal human sin, the need for repentance and the potential of God’s forgiveness, on surrender to Jesus Christ as personal saviour. Rarely, if ever, have I been exposed to diligent and disciplined and rigorous attempts to unpack the human heart’s dark side,  except in and through the work of Carl Jung. The metaphysical and psychological notion of a Shadow, a dark side of both trauma and painful memory, buried in the unconscious, that irreverently and unexpectedly raises its ‘head’ when we least expect it. It could be in a moment of a word of phrase uttered in the ‘now’ that triggers a moment in our past, long forgotten, that suddenly finds an ‘opening’ into consciousness, with or without our conscious acquiescence, or even awareness.

While in private conversations, even with clergy, the thinking and writing of Jung is deployed, rarely, if ever have I found it emerging in formal homilies. Similarly, many universities have expunged Jung’s (along with  James Hillman’s) work from their curricula, partly because it smacks of ‘the non-empirical, the fastastical, the ghostly and the unpredictable. Jung’s  work is not exclusively contained in the boundaries of empirical science, empirical medicine, empirical sociology, empirical legal foundations. Indeed, it not only refuses to conform to those intellectual and cognitive boundaries; it attempts to shed a different perspective on what the world has tried to wrestle ‘to the ground’ as human sin or evil, from the beginning.

And in the resistance to cast an open eye into the realm and layers of a human underworld, after spending centuries pondering and praying about ‘avoiding the ravages of ‘Hell’, the Christian church(es) seem to prefer a personal, private and thereby confidential and secret ‘relationship’ with each person’s own transgressions. Ironically, while the ‘forgiveness of sin’ lies at the core of the penitential (confession), there is rarely any mention of the church’s institutional evil or sin, nor any reference to the church’s need for critical self-examination and reflection.

The metaphoric ‘evil’ heart, however, as well as our own inexplicable losing our way, or missing the mark, even when we know and feel and intuit that what we are/will do or have done, is indeed ‘off-base’ or despicably unkind, mean-spirited, vengeful, vindictive. And each of us ‘knows’ when we have crossed some momentarily unrecognized or unacknowledged line of morality, ethics, and relationship fracturing. In a parallel psychic balance, we also know when we have extended ourselves into the love of another, of a situation, or even of an enemy. Of course, loving our enemies, is a prominent, if rarely uttered, Christian aspiration.

And the question, ‘who is my enemy?’ lies at the heart of this injunction. Is he a personal ‘acquaintance’ or a family member, a neighbour, or a boss or professional whom I have hired and who has betrayed me?

The Tolstoy work, The Kingdom of God is Within You, takes a more universal, historical, and deeply theological view of the enemy. Those who use, depend on, rely on, violence, including those institutions designed specifically as protection against the violence of other are inimical to those who, whether through an aha metanoia moment of insight, or trauma-induced insight, have come to the moment and place and integrous consciousness enabling them to integrate  non-violent resistance to evil by force.

No human, if my reading of Tolstoy is credible, is fully capable of what he terms ‘divine love’ which extends equally and unequivocally to all persons. What we are capable of, if we are listening to the Russian bear, is to contemplate and to ruminate and to imagine how, when and where we might non-violently resist evil by force. Tolstoy makes much of the historic evidence that all institutions consider their own demise and the threats to that demise as ‘existential’ and are therefore more than ready and even energetic to seek their own violence, as ‘protection’ from the violence of others.

We are not enjoined to twist ourselves out of emotional and psychological shape in order to ‘love our enemies’ (purportedly those who impose their will in and through violence of various sorts and kinds), but rather to step back and recognize the violence that is being imposed, always illicitly, illegitimately and unjustly and that we have both the obligation and the capacity to resist in a non-violent manner.

Naturally, we all have the imagination and the intuition to ‘reach out to help another who is struggling and could use a helping hand. Just this morning, as I was dragging bags of leaves and twigs to a dumping station with my left hand, while leaning on my cane with my right hand,  a smiling face appeared at the hatch of my vehicle, and without even saying ‘hello’ asked, “Do you have any more bags I can help you with?”

Shocked, surprised and elated, I removed my glove, extended my hand, introduced myself as John and expressed my deep thanks. “I’m John too and I just thought you could use a hand, from John to John!” the other John rejoined, as we both parted in smiles. It is the extension of such a kindness and empathy and compassion universally to which the Sermon on the Mount points and aspires.

And yet, we live in a culture clinging to a very different kind of ethic and mind-set. It is the ethic and mind-set of power, sought after, pursued and attained through many means and manners, many of which are self-sabotaging as well as not only malodorous but malignant. The common enemy of all is the malignancy of violence, borrowing from the Russian shaman, and, from both observation and evidence, some of that violence, indeed much of it, has been and continues to be imposed by the church(es) themselves.

Threats of a life in hell, based on a life of sin and evil, as a method of waking up a dispirited man or woman, is indeed, a misapplication and a mis-interpretation of any Christian faith worthy of the name and the emulation.

A recent post by film actor Sandra Bullock caught my eye, made me pause to read and reflect and I would like to share it:

A lesson in grace from Sandra Bullock

There are moments when the urge to fight back feels impossible to resist.

When every insult, every cold look begs for revenge.

But I stop.

I look deeper—not just at what they did, but at who they are..

The tiredness in their eyes.

The weight they carry.

The silent battles they’ve already lost.

And  I realize—life has hit them hard enough.

Not even fight needs another fighter.

Some just need someone strong enough to walk away.

So no, I won’t strike back

Not because I’m weak—

But because I’m strong enough to protect my peace.

In the end, we don’t give what people deserve.

We give what we carry inside.

And I choose to carry light.

How we conceptualize, imagine, run from, hide from, compete in, embrace or even deny the potential of a relationship, with our family, with our friends, classmates, neighbours, colleagues and even with our God, nevertheless, relationships comprise the core of the energies in which we are engaged, whether we are conscious of that convergence of relationships.

To disdain a religion because it stresses ‘relationship’ is, frankly, to miss the point of the religion, any and all religions. Essentially both a bridge and a conveyor belt between one and another, a line of communication, and a mirror, an imagined face, or a recalled tone of voice, a moment when eyes met, or when someone noticed something “I” did, (all of us “I’s”), an image pictured from a writer or a teacher, or even an image of a relationship captured on film, in a television drama, across the aisle in a classroom….these moments are the grist of the loaf of individual relationships. Taken together, they comprise the ‘bakery’ of our own ovens and cooling bins, as if we were the bakers of our own life of relationships.

And to impose a set of demands, expectations and requirements, prior to any engagement or encounter, seems quite counter-intuitive to the potential of a healthy relationship evolving, at least among adults. Boundaries, preferences, ideals, aspirations, visions, all of them welcome, essential and mutually shared.

The ‘thou shalt not’s’ of religion, including the Christian faith, and the comparative ‘we are the one and only, or the best religion’….these are the disuaders, the mnon-starters, the precluders of potential…

Even the ‘heart of evil’ within, if indeed that must be a starting point, can and must be viewed as non-defining, and as open to transformation….and yet, transformation has so many healing and hopeful and attractive potentials….We are never going to eviscerate that ‘heart of evil’ (literally, metaphorically, ethically morally, spiritually, religiously or even imaginatively) and yet, it need not determine our image of ourself.

Image deo, is another of the aspirational blessings we have been gifted, created in the image of God, while neither a literal nor a dominating picture is either needed or implied. It is, as Tolstoy reminds, that inheritance that comes with the inheritance of the ‘shared common consciousness/unconsciousness’ of the brotherhood, the compassionate, empathic, and the universal gift of the human capacity to love, and to aspire to emulate, the divine and unconditional love of God for all of us.

When we are ‘relating’ to our own selves with kindness, care, compassion and care, it becomes more likely that we can envision extending such empathy and compassion to the other. However, so long as we are burdened with the image of ‘not OK’ in it psychic, moral, ethical and even relational dimensions, and especially if we might imagine that God ‘sees’ us as evil, we are blinded to a larger, life-giving and life-sustaining.

Phrases like “O my God!” uttered almost involuntarily at moments of extreme delight, insight, angst, loss or even despair are both natural and relevant. They serve to illustrate some form of intimate, private, confidential and deeply meaningful and moving ‘relationship’ with some force, energy, deity, of a beyond-reason, beyond nature kind whether that force is without or without or both. And that force, energy, deity knows or cares little about the denominational, or even the sectarian differences we pay so much attention to.