Searching for God # 63

 There are and always will be issues, subjects, on which members of a congregation will be divided. Most of those concern administrative, personnel issues and occasionally matters raised in homilies. And, with the latter, the issue could well be considered both political and theological.

An example comes from a homily delivered in the latter part of the summer of 1995, shortly after the election of the then premier of Ontario, Mike Harris. A comment, from the pulpit went something like this: It is noteworthy that the provincial government has announced its cancelation of the funding for Wheel Trans, the transport service used and needed by men, women and children of varying degrees of impairment, or disability. Not a large budget item, however, this funding is essential for those who desperately need it to travel to work, to school to appointments etc. Someone simply has to put a stop to this decision!

Shortly thereafter, amid a parish discussion about whether to grant an honorarium to the homilist who delivered that homily in the absence of the then rector, a prominent member of the congregation announced in a public meeting, “We can’t have homilies like that in our pulpit criticizing the man we just elected as premier!” In the context of this honorarium discussion, someone else remarked publicly about the rector who had just recently returned from Bejing from the Women’s Conference there, about this homilist, ‘He is a leader and you’re not!”

Needless to say, the honorarium was turned down, and further assignments were dismissed.

Any direct information about the parish meeting, effectively a kangaroo court, was virtually locked in a vault of confidentiality except that the vote to retain the homilist and pay the honorarium went approximately and allegedly 9 in favour, 2 opposed and 2 abstentions.

Church politics being church politics, however, the question at the root of this mini-drama is a question of power and the retention of power. Personal agendas obviously play a significant role in the drama, as they invariably do. And as is also invariably the case, outsiders, as opposed to insiders, have little if any voice, clout or even influence. Social expectations, conventions and the residue of the judgements made about individuals by the social ‘compact’ inside an organization will linger long after the unfolding of events themselves. That is true in the secular world as it is most certainly true in the world of ecclesial sanctuaries and boardrooms.

Whether, however, such political and administrative decisions are acknowledged from the perspective of the unconscious psychic dynamics of the participants, is a different matter. Just immediately prior to the tragic act of taking his own life a parish priest is reported to have exclaimed to his secretary, “Beware of the projections!”

Two or three quotes from Carl Jung might help to open this subject:

Projection is one of the commonest psychic phenomena...Everything that is unconscious in ourselves we discover in our neighbour, and we treat him accordingly.

Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face. In the last analysis, therefore, they lead to an autoerotic or autistic condition in which one dreams a world whose reality remains forever unattainable. The resultant sentiment d’incomplétude and the still worse feeling of sterility are in their turn explained  by the projection of malevolence of the environment, and by means of this vicious circle the isolation is intensified. The more projections are thrust in between subject and the environment, the harder it is for the ego to see through its illusions. A forty-five-year-old patient who had suffered from a compulsion neurosis since he was twenty and had become completely cut off from the world once said to me: ‘But I can never admit to myself that I’ve wasted the best twenty-five years of my life!’ It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously of course—for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.

The best political, social and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projections of our shadow onto others.

The idea of a ‘soul’ separate from the world, distinct from the world  and essentially rarefied in its purity, as different from the world, manifesting a kind of cocoon  of innocence, is described also by Wolfgang Gegerich in Soul in the World (Vol.5 p.44)

If the soul in the axis of the world, we are obliged to look for it in what is really happening in the world and to reject any idea of a ‘ beautiful’ soul floating freely, disconnected and in opposition to the real world, which would then be seen as the Fallen World. But there is only one world and this is in itself the unity and tension between its perfection and its ‘being fallen.’ We must not in the style of the mannequin, dissociate in two what is a single dialectic and face a moment against another. The Mercury spirit is in matter—even precisely in ‘stinky matter’ and therefore the soul conceived as axis mundi can only be searched also in today’s concrete reality as it is. We cannot move from a preconceived idea of the ego about what the ‘soul’ should be in our eyes, se must let reality show us what the soul actually is and how it is. And we should not, with teenage innocence, give the soul a semantic definition as if it were a ‘sweet’ part of the world, a ‘romantic’ entity against other ‘hard’ parts of reality (soul in contrast with spirits, soul against the world of ego, body or spirit; that which is ‘full of soul’ vs what is rational, cold technical). Because if it is the mundi axis (which as we have seen, is not an entity in the world, but the notion of its center), it can only defined logically, syntactically, formally—as that which is its own center: an interior as such. Our soul is not a soul you want.

One of the central question of a religious faith is how the ‘soul is ‘envisioned’ pictured, and defined. And that question relates to the other, how is the world defined. From a lay perspective, it seems somewhat both problematic as well as axiomatic that, if both are considered ‘fallen’ and both are enmeshed, how does one extricate oneself from the fallenness of the world. If, however, we have a romantic, idealistic, sense of our ‘soul’ that keeps us ‘safe’ and confined’ within a mirage of reality, reinforcing and sustaining an image of a ‘fallen world, from which we are separate, then we are most likely to engage in a sabotage of our own reality.

From my experience, the church has purposed itself as an agent of God, representing a path out of the fallenness of individual, private sin, through repentance, forgiveness and that by the grace of God, into a world where one is now separate, distinct and ‘saved’ in the eyes of God, and thereby entitled to a promise of an eternal life in heaven ‘joined’ with God. The church, loyal and committed to such a theological vision, pays little attention to the nature of the ‘world’ except that in a general way it wishes there were fewer to none of conflicts, wars, disasters, pandemics, droughts, starvations, refugees, immigrants and homelessness. The fallenness of the world and the reasons, motivations and darkness of its fallenness, however, is not something with which it is particularly concerned, preferring to focus on the individual.

Beware of the projections, is such an insightful, pregnant and almost radioactive injunction that it needs both careful and imaginative unpacking. Projecting our least admirable traits onto another is a depiction of a scene, for example, that could be deduced from the life and perception of the homilist referenced above. As that homilist, I acknowledge that I was fully prepared, without announcing it publicly, to replace that rector, should I ever have been asked to do so. I projected a somewhat jealous and ambitions and even somewhat ruthless picture, unconsciously on that rector. Not realizing it at the time, of course, I was  unhappy with the decision to cease all assignments. On reflection, thirty years on, however, my own aura or even my presence, as perceived by other projections (e.g. ‘he is a leader and you are not’) might well have been my unravelling. I do not acknowledge the critique of the premier for announcing defunding of WheelTrans as a projection. 

This matter of the unconscious and its relation to what the church calls ‘fallenness’ (original sin) in a culture wrapped in the isolation, purity and perfectionism of protecting a public image, (Jung calls it a persona, a MASK) it seems is long past due of being acknowledged both formally and informally. And, as an agent of reducing, ameliorating, preventing, or even withholding what previously has been keep silent unconsciously and inarguably also erupting not only as social and personal psychic shock, the church could well have a different kind of opportunity of enlivening both its clergy and laity by having open conversations and workshops and seminars and social gatherings that for a brief time at least, took the mask off, exposed what might have been projections in the past and begun a series of relationships beyond the exclusively performative.

Such conversations, relegated to the privacy and confidentiality of the confessional, preserve the persona of both the clergy and the penitent. Not incidentally, that model also preserves and protects the unconscious of the institution and permits the avoidance of any recognition or acknowledgement of an unconscious Shadow of the world.

It might be posited that the unconscious Shadow and the unconscious Shadow of the world are highly and intimately related, without the benefit of careful, sensitive and deliberate, (not necessarily therapeutic) acknowledgment. And who, among us, is about to argue that God is either unaware or innocent or unprepared or unsupportive of an attempt to discern sensitively and compassionately and empathically? It is the mystery, both of God and of our own psyche that, perhaps, if we were emboldened sufficiently by our theology to attempt to share (we are likely already engaged in such a process in our prayer life, as well as in our confessional life).

We will never be able even to envision the surgical removal of what are called ‘the politics of organizations’ from the church. However, if we were to be less tense, fearful and constricted in our ‘self-talk’ as well as in what we both tolerate and expect from others, we might find a locus of commonality that reaches far beyond developmental age attributes, regional cultural perceptions and attitudes, and biological anatomical systems’ similarities.

Those fears, traumas, losses, what Hillman calls’ in extremis’ moments, those we call crises, are inescapably and intimately a part of each of our lives. And, where better, than in the safety, confidentiality and security of a conversation with a fellow pilgrim, beginning at least with a one-on-one, conversation, could one experience new and different perceptions, attitudes and ideas about ‘fallenness’ and romanticism, and idealism and separation of soul from other, both person and world, in a sanctuary could such conversations begin?

We are all indeed a part of this ‘stinky mess’ we call reality. And no theology or belief system is ever going to erase that truth. Being an intimate part of that ‘stinky mess’ can and would be freeing, and may not need professionally trained therapists to the extent and degree that we currently think reasonable.

Is God smiling, smirking or frowning or even wretching as you read this?