Searching for God # 69

 In what was a provocative piece of insight, back in the 1940’s and through several reprints up until 1961, D. Joshua Liebman’s book, ‘Peace of Mind’ attempted to marry the insights of early psychology and psychiatry with theology. As a Jewish rabbi, he postulated that religion, especially fundamentalist religion that started with the original sin as the defining, and thereby constricting primary characteristic of all human beings, (as the Christians saw it), could and would bring considerable insight and new ways of both seeing and thinking if religion especially could open to the new insights of both psychiatry and psychology.

Primarily through ‘verbalizing our worst thoughts, our deepest fears’ by bringing them to consciousness,  Liebmann  believed that one could and would gain new insights about oneself, that could help men and women move in the direction of that proverbial universal goal, the good life. During the decade-plus of my intense association with theology study and practical ministry, several therapies including Gestalt, Roger’s mirroring, psychodrama, neurolinguistic programming and others were being deployed through the therapeutic community, along with an explosion of pharmaceuticals that were being prescribed by psychiatrists.

The 21^st century has witnessed more research as well as more theory about the relationship between religion and psychology. In fact one of those theorists, James Hillman studied under Carl Jung, who advanced the work of Freud into the unconscious,  and Hillman nudged Jung’s work even further by essentially democratizing all talk and thought and perceptions about the ‘in extremis’ moments into a language of the imagination, complete with mythic characters, voices, gods and goddesses, that he claims could be at play in those moments, as a window into our own self-understanding.

His contention that abnormal psychology, as a clinical study, has done more to enhance the reputation of the academic study of psychology and the reputation of the profession with its exclusive focus on the literal, empirical, scientific modality, methodology and diagnoses that issue therefrom. A poetic basis of mind, (his phrase) using the imagination as a first ‘entry’ into the ‘scene’ of our worst ‘in extremis’ moments could temper the binary ‘triage of what are called abnormal psychological ‘cases’  into either medical sickness or criminality or both. The heavy influence of morality and ethics that pervades the work of abnormal psychology is both implicit and explicit in both theology and medicine.

By risking a startling premise that each of us, with or without clinical psychological/psychiatric training and credentials, can be available to others in our circle, as listeners without bringing to the situation a bias for or against the ‘narrative’ of the symptoms which ‘another’ is experiencing. Just letting the story of the symptoms, all of those symptoms, become the flags or guideposts that might lead to speculative, imaginative conjecturing about what archetype might be ‘having the person in its thrall’…as dreams have us all in their thrall. This business of dreams, the underworld, the Jungian Shadow into which, as Robert Bly puts it approximately, is imaged as: we shove our traumas, troublesome memories guilt, shame and embarrassments into a packet we metaphorically trundle around on our back, waiting for their re-emergence at some later date, some of their choosing and some of our accidental tripping over.

We are now more conscious of the universality of our shared ‘in extremis’ moments; some call them transformational, some call them revelatory and/or rebirths, some call them ‘maturational points of the soul’ picking up on John Keats image of human life as a ‘vale of tears’ that are essential for these ‘turning points’ in our psyche to occur in the ‘development of our soul.’ Hillman calls this process the ‘making of soul’ which he articulates as the ‘non-thing’ space or ‘tendency’ that exists between two polar opposites, such as puer (youth) and senex (old age).

Traditionally, at least the Christian religion has been focused on the promise of ‘eternal life’ as the reward for surrendering to Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord, whose death on the Cross was atonement for the sins of the world, and the grace of that atonement is the reward for ‘conversion’ to a disciple of Jesus Christ Resurrected. The spirit is lifted upward toward God and Heaven, as one’s thoughts, attitudes and actions begin to the focused on worship and thanksgiving to God and living to and for God.

The ‘vale of tears’ and the soul’s need for that vale (different as it is for each of us) open the gates of our individual and anxiety-generating ‘dark side’, in Hillman’s perspective, through a window of a repeating archetype, before the moment is diagnoses either as a psychic illness or a legal matter, prior to the morality police get their hands on it. This perspective is not an attempt  to disavow whatever harm might have been done to others. Nor is it a disavowal of any potential psychological intervention that might be needed. Hillman’s attitude is that we have had a half-century of therapy and we are no further ahead, in that the emotional crises, the social crises, and the geopolitical crises continue unabated. His professional intuitive, and imaginative counsel is to invite participation of all of us in those ‘in extremis’ moments of those who permit and invite us to walk with their psychic pain.

There is no worship of gods or goddesses, as there is in religion, merely an attempt to imagine an identification of the ‘voice’ or identity of the god or goddesses in the current moment of crisis. Nevertheless, this ‘archetypal psychology’ approach offers opportunities for active and sensitive imaginations to ‘speculate’ on the possibilities offered in and through the classical mythical world, for our insight, and our self-understanding and awareness as part and participant of a universal, timeless and repeating jumble of patterns.

The opening the door of our consciousness, both individual and shared, to our individual and shared collective unconscious, also has the merit of attributing ‘souls’ to everything, including plants, animals, buildings, cities, towns, families schools, colleges, in a manner of ‘getting us to go beyond and behind the superficial and the literal in all of our perceptions. And the attitudes and perceptions that are engendered in and through such a process enhance our openness and perception of our shared human value, our shared, yet unique, embodiment of an archetype of which we were likely unaware.

Heightened sensibilities, enhanced deployment of the imagination, democratized listening and listeners, and enhanced perceptions of our shared ‘human psyche’ seeks to re-orient our culture from positivism, from empiricism and from the scientific method and approach, by supplementing that approach, which engulfs even the church, with a less morally and ethical judgemental approach and relationship both to our worst moments and to others. Rather than focusing on judgemental doomsday fear and terror, shame and guilt, one is lead to healing and transforming, the attested and longed-for goal and purpose of theology and faith.

Of course, there will continue to be those among both the psychology and the theology fraternities who strenuously object to any ‘new’ intervention from the ‘secular’ world into the world of sacred theology, and for any portentous links between God and the psychological sciences. Irrespective of the basic fact that the bridge between science and theology has been both crossed and accommodated decades ago, this more recent iteration of the multiple links between science and theology from an imaginative and somewhat courageous and even intemperate and impulsive ‘explosion’ of a highly trained, disciplined and creative mind.

Nothing here claims that archetypal psychology is either ordained or sanctioned by God of any formal religion. Nothing here seeks to defame or decry the faith of those whose lives have been and will continue to be positively impacted by traditional images, traditionally defined and interpreted. This space explores what might be considered some new ‘lenses’ through which the spectre of faith and worship, and belief and both morality and ethics might be envisioned. Without attempting to ordain those lenses as “God formally approved” or dismissing them as “Godless” “heretical,” and “atheistic,” new thoughts, perceptions, attitudes and deployment of the imagination pays tribute to a tradition of William Blake the seeker.

…Blake’s insistence at the end of his piece, There is no Formal Religion, that God ‘becomes as we are, that we may be as he is,’ is surely an incarnational reflection, as much as his earlier observation that ‘He who sees the infinite in all things sees God’ (op.cit.) is mystical. Each can find their rightful place within thoughtful Christian writing…..For Blake, holding together what he called ‘contraries’ was important—even fiercely and protectively held contrary experiences, and opposite views, I heard echoes of a Blakean insistence that ‘without contraries there is no progression’ in a recent study by the University of York’s Centre for the Study of Christianity and Culture. In  three-year project with four sample cathedrals, one of the principles in the life of a contemporary cathedral on which they reflected was ‘the potency of adjacency.’ (Lucy Winkett, William Blake: A Prophet for our time, September 2018, from churchtimes.co.uk)