Searching for God # 75

 Having breakfast with a prospective supervisor in another life, I heard him assert, clearly, comfortably and surprisingly, ‘I believe in fatalism!’ In a context and conversation of religious faith, belief and his life within such a community, the line struck a note of what I considered dissonance. How did fate have anything to do with a belief in a Christian God?

The next line from the colleague, “I really have no regrets, anxieties or fears!” pushed me further into wondering ‘Was God part of his ‘fatalism?’ Did he either conflate or even equate God with Fate? And was this attitude/perception/conviction a kind of foundational cornerstone to what been a highly engaged, proactive and rather successful back-room life in political circles.

How we ‘see’ ourselves, and the impact of multiple influences, taken sometimes individually and sometimes collectively, is a process that, for many begins with a Christian aphorism, ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven!’ from the Lord’s Prayer. Dante expresses a similar attitude, ‘In His will is our peace.’

Previously the Greek Thanatos and Eros, from Freud, were evoked in this space as forces engaged in the lives of human beings, perhaps imperceptibly, however, unconsciously, nevertheless, ‘pulling’ us in opposite directions, the former to death and destruction, the latter to life and creativity.

Under Fate, in Britannica.com we read:

Fate, in Greek and Roman mythology, any of three goddesses who determine human destinies, and in particular the span of a person’s life and his allotment of misery and suffering….From the time of the poet Hesiod (8^th century BC) on, …the Fates were personified as three very old women who spin the threads of human destiny. Their names were Clotho (Spinner), Lachesis (Allotter), and Atropos (Inflexible). Clotho spun the ‘thread’ of human fate, Lachesis dispensed it, and Atropos cut the thread thus determining the individual’s moment of death.

Under free will, in Britannica.com we read:

Free will, in philosophy and science, the supposed or capacity of humans to make decisions or perform actions independently of any prior event or state of the universe. Arguments for free will have been based on the subjective experience of freedom, on sentiments of guilt, on revealed religion, and on the common assumption of individual moral responsibility that underlies the concepts of law, reward, punishment, and incentive. In theology, the existence of free will must be reconciled with God’s omniscience and benevolence and with divine grace, which allegedly is necessary for any meritorious act. A prominent feature of existentialism is the concept of a radical, perpetual, and frequently agonizing freedom of choice. Jean-Paul Satre (1905-1980) for example, spoke of the individual ‘condemned to be free.’

From Britannica.com under Determinism we read:

Determinism entails that, in a situation in which people make a certain decision or perform a certain action, it is impossible that they could have made any other decision or performed any other action. In other words, it is never true that people could have decided or acted otherwise than they actually did.

The concept, prospect and even the feasibility of aligning human will with God’s will are all daunting at best and impossibly retching at worst. Indeed, the human preference when thinking and acting about, for, with and by God, too often leads one to aspire to and to attempt to embody ‘perfection.’ Here is another of many intersections of psychology and theology.

Reflect on the words of Marion Woodman, Jungian Analyst, in her profound work, Addiction to Perfection, The Still Unravaged Bride (p. 15):

The I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, recognizes the continual shifts that go on within the individual. The Yang power, the creative masculine, moves ahead with steadfast perseverance toward a goal until it becomes too strong, begins to break—and then the Yin, the receptive feminine, enters from below and gradually moves toward the top. Life is a continual attempt to balance these two forces. With growing maturity the individual is able to avoid the extreme of either polarity so that the pendulum does not gain too much momentum by swinging too far to the right only to come crashing back to the left in a relentless cycle of action and reaction, inflation and depression. Rather one recognizes that these poles are the  domain of the gods, the extremes of black and white. To identify with one or the other can only lead to plunging into its opposite. The ratio is cruelly exact. The further I move into the white radiance on one side, the blacker the energy that is unconsciously constellated behind my back: the more I force myself to perfect my ideal image of myself, the more overflowing toilet bowls I’m going to have in my dreams. The man who identifies with his own ideal becomes like Swift’s adoring lover who cries,           Nor wonder how I lost my Wits;

                                    Oh! Caelia, Caelia, Caelia shits!

He cannot accept that the radiance of his beloved can be stained by the humanity of her excremental functions.

As human creatures, not gods, we must go for the grey, the steady solid line that makes its serpentine way only slightly to left and right down the middle course between the opposites.

Developing her argument Woodman continues in a prescient and insightful examination of North American culture.

This sense of finality (the end of the world) is partly why compulsions, particularly those having to do with the body, are constellating so forcibly in our culture. In every newscast we are confronted with destruction-wars, airplane crashes, rape, murder, Books, movies, theatre—from every side we are bombarded with the possibility of our imminent annihilation. At the same time, the structures which once would have supported us are crumbling; the nuclear family, the community, the Church. Rituals which were once the cornerstone of living are now hollow and rosaries are worn as adornments. Coupled with this dread of extinction is the natural propensity of compulsives to live in the future. Often intuitive by nature, they don’t clasp the here-and-now reality with which they cannot cope: rather than dream about what could be, should be, were meant to be in the future. The gap between reality and dream is often filled by the obsession. (Op. cit. p 25)

Furthermore, the technological age is propelling us into a space quite unrelated to our instincts. We have forgotten how to listen to our bodies; we pop pills for everything that goes wrong with us; we can have an intestinal bypass or we can have our stomach stapled. We can turn ourselves over to medicine without ever questioning what the body is trying to tell us. To our peril, we assume it has no wisdom of its own and we attempt to right our physical ills without making the necessary psychic corrections. (Op. cit. p. 30)

Although primarily written for modern women (published in 1982) Woodman’s insights have application and implications for men as well as for both the culture and the Church. Is the compulsive-obsessive drive for instant gratification a psychological issue? OR is it also a theological, spiritual issue? And how do we separate our decisions and behaviour from our psyche and our religious instincts? Or, indeed, can we?

I recently listened on line to an aspiring and apparently neophyte clergy deliver a homily on the Sunday appointed as Peter’s Confession, when, as Matthew records, Jesus is reported to have asked his disciples,

Who do you say the Son of Man is? The replied, ‘Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and still others, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets. ‘But what about you?’ he asked, ‘Who do you say that I am?’ Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.’ Jesus replied, ‘ Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in Heaven. (Matthew 16:13-17)

After delving into the use of different languages, Roman, Hebrew and Aramaic the homilist then exhorted,( approximately), the congregation to go forth into the world to speak as Jesus spoke with integrity, authenticity, humility, grace and clarity. The notion I gathered was for the congregation to emulate Jesus in the manner in which they spoke of their faith and their life as Christians. So far, so good.

The notion that words, embodying concepts, attitudes, tones, intentions, beliefs, emotions, as well as the Jesus model, and the ‘ethos’ and ‘soul’ of the moment carries considerable freight. That is not to say or even to suggest that everyone must be a linguist, or a grammarian, or a psychic shaman, or an intuitive permitting and enabling  verbal expressions that equate with the values contained and implicit in the words of Jesus, as reported by Matthew.

The repeated question, ‘Who do you say that I am?’ echoes both the curiosity of the one asking, Jesus, as well as the nature of the response which is inevitably also an indication or sign of the relationship of the one answering. Given the rise and preponderance of existentialism, ‘Who do you say that I am?’ is at the heart of both our social integration as well as our honest perceptions of ourselves, if and when we ask it of ourselves. The various possibilities proferred by the apostles suggest an ambivalence and a speculation about who this one is as well as an inference of someone ‘different,’ for example, John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.

It is not surprising that the group of scholars who call themselves, “The Jesus Seminar,” created to ascertain the authenticity of Jesus sayings, would have found these words of Jesus to be non-historical or fiction. For example, Jesus did not claim to be the Messiah. The seminar deemed Jesus’ affirmation of being the Son of the living God’ to be a post-Easter utterance by the early church rather than a statement uttered historically and literally by Jesus.

Those notes are not included here to throw aspersions on the homily or the homilist. They are inserted to demonstrate that we are all working in an exploratory, discovering, and interpreting method and purpose in our search for God. The manner in which we perceive, conceive, imagine, interpret and aspire in this realm of our personal lives will impact our perception of God and our aspiring relationship with God. Each of us lives in a post-Easter world, with perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs that may have preceded that epic event and some that may have followed.

From another point of view, that might to some seem relevant here, there is no evidence that Jesus wrote any books, nor established any churches. Most of that latter work was the result of a converted, passionate and determined convert named Paul. Borrowing again from the Jesus Seminar, the notion of Peter as the “rock” on which the church is built is also not considered a historical statement of Jesus. Even the idea of Jesus founding an organized church is anachronistic, a later development that they did not consider to be attributable to the historic Jesus.

These notes are not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. This is not a dismissal of Christian theology, nor it is a condemnation of the Christian church. What it is an attempt to do is to question the priorities of both the identity and the relative purpose of the ecclesial institution, especially at a time when all traditional institutions are apparently and allegedly, crumbling before our eyes. Building edifices, whether they are idols, icons, or even bone fragments sold as tickets to salvation, can be a testament to a theology that has lost its focus. Glorifying God, as did Johann Sebastian Bach on his manuscripts, by signing many with the initials, S.D.G. (Soli Deo Gloria-To God alone the glory) is a personal, private declaration of a personal faith, believe and a form of worship. He often began his manuscripts with the initials, J.J. (Jesu Juva-Jesus, help me).

The most recent decision and act by those in charge, including Bishop Barbara Budde, at the Washington National Cathedral to inter the ashes of Matthew Shephard within the cathedral vault was an act of reverence for a gay man who was severely beaten and left to die tied to a fence for 18 hours near Laramie Wyoming. He died five days later. He was then a 21-year-old college student when he was murdered in 1998. He was also an acolyte in his local Episcopal church, and when Bishop V. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop consecrated in the Episcopal Church suggested the National Cathedral as a fitting resting place for Matthew’s ashes, his family agreed. Bishop Robinson delivered the homily at the service, at times overcome with emotion..saying, ‘I have three things to say to Matt,’ he said through tears. ‘Gently rest in this place. You are safe now. And Matt, welcome home. (with notes from abc.net.au, in a piece entitled, Matthew Shepherd is laid to rest 20 years after his brutal murder)

Decisions, amid personal internal and public external turbulences, taken as acts of reverence, worship, gratitude and humility, and even perhaps in revenge, can best be evaluated, learned from and integrated into our world view, after they occur. And then concepts like fate, free will, determinism, perfectionism and concepts like projections can be teased out of the narrative. And that is where the faith-supported courage enables a deeper, more intense and perhaps even more authentic discernment is accessible…and that kind of process can be best done with a trusted ‘other’.