Searching for God # 37

The church can be an institution that operates on a different premise and wave-length than those in hospitals, in courtrooms, classrooms, laboratories and banks. It is the difference in the premises and perceptions of what comprises both the reality in which we breathe the air, and drink the water and walk on the land, and look up into both the literal and the metaphoric ‘heavens’ that the search for God is based on and for which that search is still a singular and appropriate and challenging non-template to investigate. God’s truth may or may not align with the ‘truth’ of the objective scientist; and that is not a misalignment of either. (From the last post in this space)

The premise that our reason and cognition are our primary, or perhaps even our exclusive window, to the world, including to God, has some many obvious benefits, as well as a cluster of blind spots. Furthermore, to implicitly adopt the premise of the north American culture that extreme emotional ‘anything’ (loss, depression, anger, contempt, ecstasy, fantasizing, adulation, isolation, alienation, separation, catastrophizing, grief, ambition on steroids, greed, or narcissism….and the list continues) necessarily falls into two ‘buckets’ only: legal or medical, is another of the churchs’ bending to the conventions and dictates of normal society. (Psychiatric instances of sociopathology, or psychopathology, including sex offenders, and serial killers, serial sexual predators, and those proving incorrigible, intractable, must be sequestered into intense medical, psychiatric, and social-work treatment)

I read once that psychiatrists in Montreal who had come to the end of their professional limits with clients, could and would forward them to the clergy to continue their life path. While it may not be a demographic or sociological trend or even a dynamic the outcomes of which stories may not have yet been researched, in order to corroborate the effectiveness of such referrals, nevertheless there are some reasonable ‘ponderables’ in the paradigm.

And, in the ensuing section I am borrowing respectfully and rather heavily from James Hillman’s multiple works, starting with the notion that we have had decades of therapy and are no further ahead. While not denigrating nor dismissing therapy, Hillman suggests that ordinary men and women, with or without any specific clinical psychological or medical skills, have the capacity to listen, to be present, and to ‘show up’ with empathy and without judgement, for another, or others who are suffering any one or  more of those ‘in extremis’ moments, as he calls them. Citing psychology’s aim and purpose as ‘care of the soul’ and his differentiation of soul from spirit, (the former tends downward toward darkness, the latter upward toward light, in his proposition, without attempting either to denigrate the church or even to reform it (as he alleges was Jung’s goal), Hillman postulates an hypothesis that embraces a different lens on those ‘in extremis’ moments, the imagination, rather than a clinical diagnosis and pharmaceuticals. Indeed, he argues that, once a person is ‘labelled’ with a psychological diagnosis, s/he is both ‘sentenced’ to that ‘label’ for life, as well as potentially now free to escape from any responsibility to make changes in his or her life.

It is the objectification in the diagnosis, the label, all labels, which Hillman believes wounds the psyche, and he finds a myriad of instances in which, especially in a digital age, we have all been objectified, mainly for two primary purposes: national security and corporate profits. It might be relevant to insert here, that pastoral counseling, for its part, has inverted the ‘medical model’ and rather than look for the disease that requires treatment and fixing, it seeks to discern those attributes of one’s personality and character that ARE WORKING and to strengthen those, primarily through talk therapy, of which there are multiple approaches.

From a lifetime in Christian churches, I have learned that the notion of the soul has been considered identifiable with the individual and is in need of repentance, forgiveness and saving, a process known as soteriology. Inherent evil, as an inheritance from the Original Fall in the Garden of Eden, is the starting place. Those multiple judges of which Michel Foucault writes, could easily and feasibly be the birth-children of that original sin. Hillman’s psychological interpretation of the soul, as that element in our psyche (unconscious), with which each of us has to reckon, or wrestle or integrate into our consciousness, from his perspective, need not have to bear the presumptive moral and ethical diagnosis of evil, (irrespective of which of the venal or cardinal sins), and can be viewed as an integral and integral aspect of one’s way of seeing and perceiving the world. As a kind of ‘third’ eye’ neither fixated on ‘up’ nor fixated on ‘down’ the soul, in Hillman’s thinking, can take a position of neutrality between the dark voices and the light voices. And those voices, in Hillman’s lexicon, are considered archetypes, which, he views as repeating from earliest human history in mythology, in literature and in culture.

These voices, gods, goddesses, however, are not objects of worship, (as God is considered the object of worship); they are rather psychological memes or images which play themselves out in and through the lives of generations of humans following.

Mythology, as a window into the human psyche, however, is different from and also similar to the notion of all Christian myths. Even to utter those last two words simultaneously, for some, will be heretical. That perception and judgement stems from a notion that myth, by definition, has only its contemporary, cultural meaning: a lie. However, this simple concept is rarely if ever uttered, and even more rarely if ever discussed, within my eight decades of church affiliation. Especially among those whose interpretation of the Genesis Story is literally, historically and indisputable ‘true’ and factual’ and thereby beyond any other interpretation.

While there are other examples of ‘scripture being literal, historical, dogmatic fat and truth, among many, the concepts of poetry, visionary imagination.

From the website awakin.org, in a piece entitled, The Power of Myth, joseph Campbell is asked by Bill Moyers:

Why myths? Why should we care about myths? What do they have to do with my life?
Campbell: My first response would be, ‘Go on live your life, it’s a good life-you don’t need mythology.’….I don’t believe in being caught by (a subject) just because it is said to be important. I believe in being caught by it somehow or other. But you may find that, with a proper introduction, mythology will catch you. And so, what can it do for you if it does catch you?...

Greek and Latin and biblical literature used to be part of everyone’s education. Now when these were dropper, a whole tradition of Occidental mythological information was lost. It used to be that these stories were in the minds of people. When the story is in your mind, then you see its relevance to something happening in your own life. It gives you perspective on what’s happening to you. With the loss of that, we’ve really lost something because we don’t have a comparable literature to take its place. Thee bits of information form ancient times, which have to do with the themes that have supported human life, built civilizations, and former religions over the millennia, have to do with deep inner problems, inner mysteries, inner thresholds of passage, and if you don’t know what the guide-sins are along the way, you have to work it out yourself. But once this subject catches you, there is such a feeling from one or other of these traditions, of information of a deep, rich, life-vivifying sort that you don’t want to give it up.

From eustaciatan.com, in a piece by Eustacia entitled, The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell, we read:

As Campbell defines it, myths are ‘stories about the wisdom of life’ and without a powerful mythology, ‘society as provided them (children) no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, or the community’ resulting in a violent society where people don’t know how to grow up and behave as adults.

Here is another intersection of the tension between Genesis story as literal historical fact and Christian myth. And the question for anyone interested in investigating how to interpret and ‘view’ the story, is one that applies to much of Christian scripture. However, suffice it to say that, to consider the Genesis story a myth is not to denigrate its meaning, or its relevance in  our culture. Indeed, rather than ‘literal’ history, it takes on an even greater meaning and significance when considered from the perspective of the question ‘What is the writer trying to say about the creation story, and the story of the fall?’

What is the meaning of this apocryphal story, one which millions of young and old people have ‘adopted’ as significant, from the perspective of the tradition of the Christian faith. It the meaning confined to the God-creator, first human beings as God’s creation and the weakness of both Adam and Eve to the seduction of the snake? Or is it also possible, feasible and not a defiance against the Christian faith, to consider the story a matter of a repeating theme, (What is the origin of the universe? And what is the origin of mankind?) and the Old Testament scribes attempt to answer those questions, in a credible, yet also fantasy narrative of characters who are and always have been larger than ‘life’ proportions.

Myth, soul, psyche, the human life that seeks all of the guideposts, both physical and literal, as well as those generated by the human imagination, and the inescapable intersection of myth, literature, story, morality, and the meaning of both life and death. These are not questions or issues easily, readily or even capable of dichotomizing into neat little packages of truth or lie. An imagined ‘starting point’ is also contained in the story of the ‘big bang’ from astrophysics and astronomy, another  of the ‘perspectives’ roiling in and through both our minds and our imaginations, as well as in and through our curricular designs for both secular and religious education.

Can and does the church (specifically the Christian church) own the word ‘soul’ as its exclusive ‘target’ for salvation? And can such a targeted proposition, by itself, through allocation of private sin, and the spectre of the sacrifice of atonement and forgiveness from the Cross, explain and justify the church’s defined purpose and meaning for its existence? And does this ‘confluence of theological influences’ serve as the model for its own success? Is there room for a less literal, empirical and historical view of these stories that might have relevance for the faith?

What is the role of the imagination in our discernment of our identify, our motivation, our connection with the rest of the universe, including ancient history? Is myth a legitimate and credible link with our imaginative and well as our spiritual and psyche heritage? Are both myth and scripture part of the same historic, literary, mythological, philosophical and ethical and moral heritage we have inherited?

The church does not and should not fall victim to the seductive appeal of myth, nor should it turn a blind eye to questions that myth can unpack. Similarly, the church is not a psychological laboratory, nor a counselling centre; and yet, are there precepts, for example, from pastoral counselling, that might very well have an influence on the search for God of anyone whose life has been impacted by a serious psychic, social and perhaps domestic or financial tragedy?

Religion claims to wrestle with matters of life and death, their meaning and purpose; their universality and relationship with God. And, from the limited perspective of this scribe, I see no reason why borrowing concepts and notions of universal experience, and their various theoretical interpretations, are, specifically and generally highly relevant in any search for God.

It may not be a straight line of personal psychic and spiritual development for which we strive; indeed, it may not be even the spectre of a final vision of ‘completion’ and ‘ultimate salvation’ for which we belief a singe path exists for realization.

This search for God, as one has to presume, for any and all other searches for God, is not reducible to a template, to a single interpretation of a single set of narratives, or myths or psychic voices. And who can say if and when the voice of God is not whispering through the winds of the pine boughs, and or the smile on a child’s face, and or through the words of a profound and authentic thinker, and or in and through the melody and rhythm of a Beethoven Symphony?

Running through the various archetypes as outlined by Carol S. Pearson in The Hero Within, the innocent, the Orphan, the Wanderer, the Warrior, the Altruist and the Magician, are urges for clarity, as well as for ambiguity. And throughout, each of those archetypes struggles with the differences between ‘scarcity’ and ‘abundance’ as psychological lenses.

It seems that a search for God, passing through and back through each of those archetypes, encounters others on a similar pilgrimage, can be, is and will be impacted by other examples of those various archetypes, each of which have origins deep in our shared mythic legacy.

And any discussion of any of these issues is both highly unlikely to find tolerance, acceptance and especially prayerful and reflective resonance in any institution outside of a church, here thinking primarily of a Christian church.