Searching for God # 50

 Deploying Moltmann’s hope beyond all evidence of hope, as a description of a moment when one is actively contemplating ending one’s own life, why is such A a deployment not congruent with an application of Moltmann’s conception of hope and also compatible with the notion that God is already familiar with, open to and already present in that moment? What if such a moment offers an opportunity for a coming to a realization of a new and seemingly paradoxical ‘aha’ in God’s presence.?

Could one depiction of our state include or even be dominated by our fixation, obsession, delight in and complete self-indulgence in a universe that is outside of us, seducing us into a mode of both thought and behaviour that complies almost involuntarily with the classical conditioning model of Pavlov’s dogs? And is it possible that our morality and ethics, as well as our Christian theology, are also bound in a similar ‘pen’ of positivism’ and empiricism, literalism and extrinsic psychology?

Needing proof, needing demonstrations, have we founded our belief system on what we  can and do with and through our experience, justified also by our  conviction that the allegedly historic narratives of biblical events, persons, and tribes represent the whole truth, the God’s truth and nothing but the truth? Have we possibly foundered, not only our theology but also our psyche and our souls on the one hand on the shoals of logic and reason, and with them on literalism and empiricism and on the other hand, on a fear of offending God, if we relax our tight-fisted hold on the sanctity of life?

Neither life nor death are, it says here, reducible to a literal, empirical, positivist epistemology nor a theology based on an empirical cognition. Nor is God! And trying to push an ineffable, ephemeral, infinity of any kind into a vessel of reason, logic and empiricism, is not only blind but, over centuries has been quite destructive, even lethal and highly counter to a collaborative,  relational, tolerant and empathic embodiment of all of the various forms of love, including man to/for man and man to/for God and God to/for man..

Much of that ‘stuffing’ emerges, results from and seems inevitable and now conventionally normal, so that we have come to a place where we package and brand everything, for the ostensible purpose of ‘selling’ or ‘pitching’ it to others. And we have done the same thing to God. All of the systematic theology in the world will never wrestle God or God’s love for each human being into a template, or a ritual, or a dogma or a metaphor. That is not because those who are steeped in such intellectual pursuits have been evil, wrong-headed or even deceptive. It is only that their theories, images, bridges for those images and the theologies that have emerged are, in a word, partial, incomplete.

So is everything written or even contemplated in this space, partial and incomplete.

That is partly why I think we have an opportunity to ‘perceive’ and to adjust and to adopt and to re-vision the Christian perspective to include, without disposing of the rescuing Good Samaritan, or the prophet or the teacher or the miracle-worker as models and images of God, a world of the human ‘inner psychic’ energies, as well as an imagination that sees our ‘in extremis’ moments from the perspective of ‘not being conducive to, or amenable to, or even ready and open to the kind of ‘prevention’ to which we are currently subjecting those moments, and the individuals who are in the midst of them.

From a Christian theological perspective, it seems that our noble, honourable, ethical and professional interventions as ‘prevention agents’ are, in fact counter-intuitive to the very process needed at the moment of highest risk, the moment when another human being is actively contemplating suicide. I am not sure if the Jewish concept of TSIMTSUM might be appropriate and relevant on this moment. However, it is our ‘silent, non-judgemental, non-interferent, non-affirming, non-condemning living breathing presence, with the other at those crucial moments when the other is actively engaged in the contemplation and reflective process of ending his or her life that I am suggesting be considered as appropriate, empathic, loving embodiment of the Christian word ‘agape’.

I had a brilliant supervisor for Chaplaincy training at Scarborough Centennary Hospital back in the late eighties, named John McKibbon, who left two indelibly imprinted questions and scenarios with this naïve, incipient candidate. The first was his personal story of having to sit in the solarium in Sick Childrens’ Hospital, while his 11-year-old daughter was dying, if I remember correctly of leukemia. A man approached him, sat down beside him without uttering a word. The two remained in silence for two or three hours, when the man rose, shook the grieving father’s hand, and departed. After the death and the funeral, and the hours of tears and grieving, the besotted father realized that the one thing that had ‘stayed with him’ was that time with the stranger in silence. As a healing impulse, out of that experience, the grieving father initiated a group called Grieving Parents of Ontario.

The second was a question he asked, of his class of a half-dozen: “Did Jesus and/or God have a Shadow (in the Jungian perspective)?

I recall my ‘gut’ uttering immediately, silently, ‘Of course!’….I do not recall the responses of my classmates, or whether they uttered any.

Since then, I have had considerable time and opportunities to reflect on those training experiences, with events, persons, and thoughts of others rambling in and out of my person. The institutional church has, it seems after more than a decade of my personal and direct engagement, fallen into the comfortable pew of invoking God’s presence, promise and love as palliatives and as building blocks of and for the institution as much or more than for the people in the pews. Of course, there is an individual human aspect to all of the liturgies, seasons, biblical stories and especially promises of eternal life for those who have ‘converted’ from sin to accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, as the words tumble out. The sacrificial death of Jesus on the Cross, as the act of atonement for human sins, following by the Resurrection, symbolic of the triumph over death, has, together with other aspects of the theology, contributed to a theology founded upon an original fall, applicable to each of us, and a pathway to redemption through belief in the loving sacrifice on the Cross of Calvary.

And this template has been nurtured, massaged, messaged and liturgically re-enacted for centuries. It is, without doubt, a compelling template for the proposed salvation of mankind. An extrinsic Jesus as Son of God, sent by the Father, to ‘save’ his people is both humbling and inspiring, revering and, to a degree somewhat revolting. And it has captured the minds, hearts and spirits of millions.

As a ‘searcher’ I have, I have to admit, both involuntarily and somewhat unconsciously wondered about the ramification of the template from a variety of perspectives from a very early age. Pivot-points of absolute conviction (in personal sin, the evil of abortion, even the ‘evil’ and sentence to Hell of anyone who is Roman Catholic, or who divorces, or who is gay or lesbian, along with the championing of those who wrote/write cheques to pay the heating bills or to install the carillon bells in the bell tower, together these images have congealed into a gestalt of a ‘corporation’ with ‘profit motives’ and ‘success benchmarks analogous to the for-profit corporation. It is after all an extrinsic, empirically measured culture!….Question of theology, from my curtailed time of serving as deacon and then as priest, have touched on the ‘admissability of gays and lesbians to membership, and to ordination, the option of conducting or even sanctioning marriages between gays and lesbians, and the question of whether or not small numerically struggling parishes and missions might survive. In Canada, the issue of the reconciliation between the indigenous communities whose children suffered the tragedies of the residential school movement, operated jointly by churches and government offered another deep and indelible stain on the various institutions. Similarly, the issue of celibate clergy abusing young boys, and non-celibate clergy allegedly abusing women found public attention and headlines.

Exposure of what has been and continues to be ‘private sins’ of fallible and fallen individuals, without even a modest, moderate and legitimate surveillance of the contexts of personal sins within the church, has offered a picture of an institution dependent on, desirous of and seemingly obsessed with finding and exposing the sins of individuals. The church has, apparently no accountability, responsibility nor need for or desire to atone for any of the multiple sins, save and except to utter bland, if sincere, apologies with some reparations to the indigenous communities.

The very requirement of celibacy in the Roman Catholic church, as a starting place, is in desperate need of investigation, research and accounting in that such an absolute demand is incompatible with and for most men, whether gay or straight. Commandeering the marriage ‘business’ as sacred, and then defining its moral, ethical and thereby religiously tolerated parameters, too, as are all attempts to ‘regulate human sexuality’ is tantamount to an institutional neurosis that, if the church were not to ‘own’ that aspect of human life, it would cease to have ‘control’ over its parishioners.

Reminiscent of the ‘keeping the biblical translations out of the hands of the laity,’ because they are untrained and will be unable to interpret and to assimilate its proper meaning, and purpose, especially since such meaning and purpose can only be ‘divined’ by trained theological scholars and clergy, retaining an ethical, moral and religious hold on human sexuality says more about the institution’s anxiety and fear of the original sin from which the church found much of its original validity and purpose.

And it is precisely that God-dictated ‘need’ dogmatically documented, enforced, and applied that has ship-wrecked many lives on shoals of the church’s theology. Some may ask, is the alternative really tolerable?

One response is that the question of the abuse of power has so many forms, faces, iterations and enactments, many, if not most of which go ‘unchallenged’ by both the state and ecclesial authorities. Thea abuse of power of an individual by another individual, whether of a sexual nature or not, is worthy of challenge. And in order to ascertain whether and where there has been an abuse of power, it is essential tdig into the full context of the situation, and, for example, not base any judgements on the template that a male, because he is a male, is automatically an abuser, or inversely, that a female, because she is a female is automatically not an abuser and always a victim. Too many judgments based on templates that render quick and glib assessments, judgements, dismissals and repercussions for which the institution has impunity, have and will continue to destroy human lives unnecessarily.

Even complicit the ‘no-workplace co-worker relationships’ requirement, whether of a power imbalance or not, require a degree of sensitivity and authentic determination  in adducing whether there is mutual consent and concurrence. A starting place that deploys a social, political correctness with predictable highly headline-grabbing radioactivity, will bring about neither fairness nor equality of the genders.

The church’s overt and somewhat covert, by consent or unconscious detachment, high-jacking of the moral and ethical codes of North America, is a shackle out from which the money-idolizing, ego-centred, privatized sin, and institutional (ecclesial) moral impunity needs to climb.

And a first step could well be the re-consideration of the issue of the sanctity of life, especially regarding the legitimacy of the decision to take one’s own life.

Such a process of reconsideration would and could bring about a domino impact on the churchs’ unjustified self-assumed moral authority, essentially without accountability. And that would enable many of us to begin to reconsider trusting in an institution which we once believed attempted to ‘imitate’, replicate, emulate and incarnate the life and spirit and mind of God.

Non-violent resistance of evil, with force, can and must  include the church in the cross-hairs.