Searching for God # 66

 Can we pin the responsibility for declaring the female gender, “the weaker sex,” on the history of the alpha male? And if we can, does that also enable us to release our cultural archetypes from the collective, conscious and apparently indomitable alpha males’ controlling influence on North American culture, perhaps others as well? Of course, not all males are or even aspire to be ‘alpha’ males; however, much of history has been carried out, written about and then dispensed, taught and championed by men. And the ‘weaker sex’ has, with few exceptions, been defined by house and family management, gathering, cooking and essentially, informally, holding the community together. The men, nevertheless, made the laws, regulations, wars and conducted whatever trade was appropriate to the region and time frame.

This world’s culture for centuries held the view that what they could  appreciate with their senses, was ‘their’ world, while beyond the sensate was other-worldly, and generated various myths, depending on the tribe and time. God and solar system remained, along with nature as ‘separate’ from human ‘reality’ and for many years the separation was considered inviolate.

It is only within the last century and the work of Freud, Jung and later Hillman that the notion of a human unconscious came into play, as theoretical concept and/or archetype that, different from and separate from the consciousness and the senses, cognition and imagination, nevertheless, was deemed to play an active role in the events, perceptions attitudes in our lives. Dreams, visions, hallucinations, traumas, memories and even actions and words that blurted out from beyond our conscious minds took on a significance for those researchers, the impacts of which continue to ripple through our culture in the twenty-first century.

However, the “academic” subject (for formal academic/scientific study) of the unconscious, both personal and collective, has escaped critical scrutiny from many quarters, not least of which is the STEM-focused-and-driven university and college community in North America. “Escaped” could well be a euphemism for ‘buried’ and ‘ignored,’ ‘denied’ and ‘dismissed.’ Whether naturally, or unconsciously from a deeply seated fear of being obliterated by the mainstream of the culture if they divert from and disdain the tidal wave, the churches, too, have fallen in lock-step with STEM-attitudes as well as the collective thinking, demonstrable and provable reality and its verity. Literal, empirical perceptions and measurements comprise the reality in which we live, and our many comparisons, observations, and judgements are based on those levels of perception, thought and even belief.

Behaviorism, ‘we behave our way out of our emotional troubles” as Dr. Phil has put it so often, dominates the landscape of therapies too. Married to and intimate with a behavioral measure of evil, morality and ethics are also measured, assessed, discerned and judged by and through one’s behavior.  Motivations for actions, however, remain a matter of deep, perplexing and confounding professional research and discernment. Omissions are considered from the lens of ‘what is expected as good and moral and ethical and conventional behavior’ and left to be ‘seen’ as gaps in what otherwise ‘should’ or ‘could’ or ‘would’ have been. Emotions are considered, in many quarters, as fickle and transitory and therefore untrustworthy experiences and expressions of psychic states that, like gnats on a pond, flit here and there and disappear. Lapses in judgement, too, are often considered mere ‘gaps’ of civil and polite society. It is far easier to perceive, and then to judge, with little to no injury, those gaps in polite and considerate and gracious behavior than it is to judge what might have been a malicious intent. Social conformity, too, plays an integral role in our minimizing, deflecting, deferring or even denying malicious intent on the part of another whether that malicious intent is conscious or even unconscious.

Nevertheless, social media is replete with malicious words and acts, for which no one is, at least ostensibly, held accountable. Transparency having evaporated, responsibility and accountability were thrown out with the bathwater. The degrees of consciousness and unconsciousness that are playing out on social media is a subject for considerable highly warranted research.

What has all of this to do with any conceivable, credible, responsible and authentic ‘search for God?’

Well, for starters, if our physical reality is permitted to trump, minimize or even represent our psychic and emotional and spiritual reality, then, of course no one can argue that men have more body mass, more physical muscle than women. A literal and fleeting glance on the part of a space alien could only conclude that men are bigger and  stronger, in general, than women. Nevertheless, there are many other variables on which women score as much stronger than men. Let’s start with the endurance of pain, and move to the statistical life expectancy, and the capacity to endure heavier and more complex emotional distress, not to mention the collective strength of their ‘circles’ from which many women take and resupply emotional, psychic and narrative energy. Indeed the paradox of their literal weakness is matched by their fundamental strength, as compared directly with the male species. Even with these conceded strengths of women by many men, the stereotype of the weaker gender prevails, to the detriment, socially, politically, culturally, psychologically and certainly theologically of both men and women.

Why is it a detriment to women? First, it sets up a negative starting position for women to consider their identity alongside of their male counterparts, a presumption that is not borne out by the full composite and detailed and nuanced picture of their gender. The psychic role of ‘size,’ ‘dimension,’ ‘power,’ ‘status,’ ‘influence,’ is another of the male-propagated myths that, some of us considered might have been de-bunked as long ago as the story of David and Goliath. Nevertheless, the prowess of ‘big’ over ‘small’ is a foundational element in many of the distortions, conflicts and tensions with which the world is currently grappling, and not only on the gender-war front.

Indeed, so insidious and nefarious is that simple reductionism that skepticism from all  quarters is needed in order to discern if and when the prototypical even applies. The identity of the Sumo wrestler, for example, is defined by his body size and shape, as is the ballerina’s. Fitting ‘size’ into ‘roles’ is a task for which considerable experience, training, judgement and sensitivity are required.

And size, physical and literal size, while it plays a significant role in many of our life decisions, is also a metaphor for much of our individual and collective perceptions, thoughts, observations, judgements and decisions. “What you see is what you get” is an adage that captures the mind-set, the culture, even the authenticity of reality, including the character of others. And to posit a different perspective, that there is a deep well (metaphorically) of memories, traumas, dreams, visions, hallucinations and voices (think mythic gods and goddesses) that also have considerable influence on our lives, our perceptions, projections, atttitudes, beliefs, calling it the unconscious, (that is both personal and individual as well as shared and collective) to some may seem like ‘gobble-de-gook’!

“Psycho-babble” is another disdainful attempt to describe the subject. “Out of sight, out of mind” is a posture chosen deliberately by many men and women, given the already highly complex, subtle and nuanced and confusing aspects of our lives. And, if we can make a substantial living through the formal learning of mathematics, science, engineering and technology, who needs to dig into a realm about which there is so much mystery, uncertainty, confusion, and speculation. Medicine, law, accounting, engineering, astronomy, physics, chemistry, bio-chemistry, biology, neuroscience, economics, social sciences and even psychology are all operating, highly successfully it would seem, under the guidelines of the literal, empirical, and the scientific.

Why would theology have any interest in the unconscious? The theology schools, churches, seminaries and even the liberal arts programs where comparative theology is taught are all using methods and protocols borrowed from and emulating and imitating the scientific, academic world of perception, cognition, behaviour and even morality and ethics.

Let’s try a tentative hypothesis. The very nature of God is a mystery, beyond the grasp of the human intellect, beyond the empirical evidence needed by science, depicted and preserved in narratives which, themselves, defy the literal, empirical demands of history, the law and medicine. Is there just some possible bridge, link or even a potential connection between the psychic unconscious and the divine? To the extent that our unconscious is a mystery for most humans, and subject to imaginative depiction metaphorically as voices of mythic gods and goddesses, and/or of archetypes, which control our psyche even beyond our conscious control, is it just a feasible possibility that God, the deity, the divine, might be ‘in touch’ with that realm of our existence, waiting for our acknowledgement and unburying it from our psychic vaults? Put another way, it is past of our spiritual journey to become conscious of the energies, meanings and influences of the unconscious as a way of ‘becoming a person before God’….a phrase borrowed from Rev. Dr. Romney Moseley’s theological book of that title.

The inordinate influence of science in the 21^st century has a similar historic development from which to learn. And, theology too, has a significant opportunity to reclaim its legitimate place in the academy, in the culture, and in the anima mundi.

The Romantic movement had already started to rebel against Enlightenment rationalism. The English poet, mystic, and engraver William Blake (1757-1827) believed that human beings had been damaged during the Age of Reason. Even religion had gone over to the side of a science that alienated people from nature and from themselves. Newtonian science had been exploited by the establishment, wo used it to support a social hierarchy that suppressed the ‘lower orders,’ and in Blake’s poetry, Newton, albeit unfairly, became a symbol of the oppression, aggressive capitalism, industrialization and exploitation of the modern state. The true prophet of the industrial age was the poet, not the scientist. He alone could recall human beings to values that had been lost during the scientific age, which had tried to master and control the whole of reality:

Calling the lapsed soul

And weeping in the evening dew

That might control

The starry pole

And fallen, fallen light renew. (William Blake Songs of Experience, Introduction)

The Enlightenment had created a God of ‘fearful symmetry,’ like the Tyger, remote from the world in ‘distant deeps and skies. The God of Newton must undergo a kenosis, return to earth, die a symbolic death in the person of Jesus, and become one with humanity.(Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, p.228-229)…

Unlike the philosophes, The Romantics were not averse to the mysterious and indefinable. Nature was not an object to be tested, manipulated, and dominated but should be approached with reverence as a source of revelation. Far from being inactive, the material world was imbued with a spiritual power that could instruct and guide us.

Since childhood, Wordsworth had been aware of a ‘Spirit’ in nature. He was careful not to call it ‘God’ because it was quite different from the God of the natural scientists and theologians; it was rather

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply intrerfused

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought

And rolls through all things   (William Wordsworth, Lines Composed a Few Miles from Tintern Abbey) (Armstrong, op, cit. p. 229)

No doubt others have articulated more fully and likely with more clarity the obvious connection between the negative impact of rationalism and the Enlightenment on humans, and a similar negative impact of the prevalent STEM literalism, empiricism, and scientific positivism of the 21 century. (Hillman for one!)

The advocacy of a link between this ‘spirit’ and the ‘soul’ of the unconscious that includes light and dark, could follow, in this highly tentative, speculative and meandering ‘search for God’ in the 21^st century.

To be continued…….