Searcing for God # 98

 The church lists some cardinal sins, including: murder, adultery, masturbation, pornography, abortion, blasphemy, idolatry and deliberately missing mass. On a lower scale, the church lists some venial sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, laziness, all of these pardonable. On a glance, the first list seems to be about ‘committing overt acts of a heinous and deplorable nature; the second seems to be more about attitudes, traits, and less about their physical demonstration, at least in the manner in which the lists are generated.

Whether the ‘hierarchy’ of these two lists is intended to be a ‘safe’ set of cautions for the church, the former more easily provable, demonstrable, and dependent on a gestalt of evidence, while the latter list is far more likely to be subject to interpretation, more ambiguous, and less easily both proven and ‘caught’ or needy of confession. The former list is also enforced, reinforced and prosecuted by the legal system while the latter list is considered more as motivation, perhaps, or state of mind, perhaps as a potential explanation for a more serious ‘offence’.

One question that comes to mind is whether these two lists are evidence of a ‘state of both public knowledge, cognition, and consciousness, at the time of their original generation, and whether, in the 21^st century their order of priority might be considered inverted.

Virginia Wolff once noted that she wanted to write a novel about silence, about everything that wasn’t said. In her Voyage Out, she is quoted as having written, ‘I want to write a novel about Silence,’ he said; ‘the things people don’t say.’

Here is a proposition for you to consider: If humans paid more attention to the ‘silence,’ the things we do not say, there would be far fewer incidents of the horrible acts of human nefariousness. I recognize that many lines and letters in these spaces have been echoing the notion of the tragic dominance of the literal, the empirical and the scientific, at the expense of the imagination and the soul. And while the literal/empirical is the language of ‘practical sense’ (so named by Northrup Frye), and the language of the imagination has been parceled out to and by the writers, the poets, the composers and has been thereby almost quarantined by the corporate, political, economic, scientific and public discourse language and mind-set.

Freud, Jung and Hillman have all acknowledged, differently perhaps, the role and significance of the unconscious in our daily lives, given that, in general, the degree to which it is repressed represents proportionally the degree to which it has the capacity to sabotage our ‘outer life.’ More repression, more radioactivity of the unconscious!  Writers like Margaret Laurence, and James Joyce, among others, have spent a considerable time and energy writing what has been variously dubbed, ‘inner monologue’ or ‘stream of consciousness’…both literary depictions. Sentences fall into fragments, single adjectives or adverbs evoke an image in the reader’s mind, leaving the task of ‘connecting the dots’ of the plot to the reader. Similarly, we are all, are we not, in the position hardly ever named or diagnosed, of ‘reading the silence’ both within our own minds and imaginations (that little inner voice) and also on the faces, in the eyes and in the body language of those we encounter.

Indeed, active listening amounts to practice and more practice in ‘reading’ those silent signals that are ‘coming off’ the person in front of us. Of course, we ‘hear’ the words being spoken, and we quickly discern both their literal import and perhaps if we are quizzical, what the person might be intending for us to ‘gather’ from those words, in the context of that facial expression. And T. S, Eliot seems to be reminding us that it is into the eyes that we are drawn to ‘see’ into whatever might be ‘going on’ behind them, in the mind and imagination of the ‘other’. Lines from The Hollow Men come to mind:

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

In death’s dream kingdom

These do not appear

There, the eyes are

Sunlight on a broken column

There, is a tree swinging

And voices are

In the wind’s singing

More distant and more solemn

Than a fading star

 

Let me be no nearer

In death’s dream kingdom

Let me also  wear

Such deliberate disguises

Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves

In a field

Behaving as the wind behaves

No nearer

 

Space, social space, detachment in order better to ‘discern’ the other, without being fully disclosed, naked, bare, to the other….these are not only the social conventions but the psychic fences we all erect, unconsciously perhaps, including our own unique disguises as ‘protection’ from ‘what?’….the risk of being really known, being really appreciated, being really and fully tolerated, accepted, embraced and supported.

And while these seem like depictions of a social conventionality, and a psychological security, (which is first, the chicken or the egg?), they may also be a kind of spiritual cocoon into which we either climb or never climb out of. And we do our climbing (or not) almost without being consciously aware of such behaviour. The epithet, “God’s chosen frozen” about the Anglicans is not either an accident nor a badge of honour. The imagined ‘distance’ and ‘separation’ of humans from God, and the honorifics we own to God have tended to generate a wide social space between God and humans. Even the exchanging of ‘the peace,’ a matter of liturgical change in the latter 20^th century, is so off-putting to some parishioners that they refuse to move toward another even to shake a hand, certainly never to share an embrace.

In my single conversation with a retiring Anglican clergy, I noted instantly his choice to remain approximately ten feet distant, in the sunlight on the lawn of his former rectory. As a mere intern, ‘green-broke’ as a neophyte, doubtless, he considered me an imposter, perhaps even an apostate, having been assigned to follow, under strict supervision, his 36-year hold on that parish. Erect, taciturn and frigid are three words I would use to describe him from memory.

Body language has become weaponized in the gender-conflicts of the last few decades…given the impropriety of male ‘aggressiveness’ uninvited and unwanted by many if not most women. Teachers in elementary schools are forbidden any longer to ‘hug’ their students, given the fear and anxiety of sexual predation on the part of parents. The touchless car-wash has expanded into the school classroom and corridor. Even the ‘laying on of hands’ in healing prayer, as a biblically noted action, today, is one to which lay people are advised to resist, and even if remaining open to it from a clergy, the person is advised to discern the motivation and risk of manipulation by the clergy prior to acceding.

Silence, touch, self-talk, self-fantasizing, day-dreaming, distance, body language…all of these human traits and features are language of  both the thought and emotions of each one of us. The church, potentially a sanctuary for ‘opening up’ if not to each other, at least to God, in many instances has been shut-down-shut-out and repressed from the human silences within.

Of course, we all use phrases like OMG! if and when we encounter a tragic moment, our own or another’s. And of course, we all emit tears silently and too often imperceptibly in order to avoid embarrassment (so we say to ourselves!).

One of the arguments for emotional privacy is that such privacy is not prosecutable. We are not judged for what we think or feel, are we? Yet, are we judged as being exclusive, reclusive, secret, untrustworthy or even ‘risky’ because of our ‘silence’ and aloofness. The glib and often legitimate and true answer is that some are merely shy, introverted and private. And then there is a social cliché for those men and women: “Still waters run deep!” Silence, in stereotypical consideration bespeaks mystery.

So, why is there such a public and conventional perception and attitude that ‘talking out’ our problems is both healing and restorative? Is that therapeutic model based primarily on gathered evidence from female therapy clients, as some suggest? And, why do men not engage in ‘talk therapy’ to the same degree as women? Are men wired differently? Do man not have either the vocabulary or the confidence (again which is chicken and which is egg?) to grasp and articulate their (our) emotions? Is the male emotional ‘wiring’ more intense, while at the same time far less intense.

What do I mean by that apparent paradox?

Are men, for example, far less engaged emotionally in most of life’s daily occurrences, and then, far more deeply impacted by the very serious emotional moments, than women? Is that hypothetical pattern one feasible ‘take’ that has yet to receive the clinical, therapeutic research documentation? And, if we are to  observe and to recognize and to acknowledge and to respect Blake’s interpretation of The Fall, as originating in God, the androgynous one, and originally humanity being also androgynous, and then splitting into masculine and feminine, is this ‘emotive’ and language difference one of the ways in and through which humanity might evolve over the next centuries?

Just pause for a moment to consider the hypothetical notion of androgyny as inherent in and to all humans, not only as a matter of our shared psychology, but also our shared spirituality. What if, before, God, we are neither male nor female, but androgynous? What would that prospect mean to our relationships to each other? And to God?

What would happen to the stereotypes of gender into which we have seemingly become locked? What would happen to the language of love and collaboration and marriage and raising children? What would happen to the dependency we currently have, and have had for centuries, for armaments, for ‘crossed staves’ from Eliot’s poem above, and for disguises generally?

Jung’s theoretical concept of the ‘persona’ (or Mask) behind which we all operate in the public square, as roles, as expected social barometers and benchmarks and fences, and as ‘ruses’ not only on Halloween, but everyday…would our reliance on that unconscious ‘protector’ continue? Would the incidence of becoming locked into a fusion between our ‘ego’ and our ‘persona’ (Jung’s enantiodromia), when, for example, a submissive, nice self (persona) explodes into a rage or a workaholic facing burn-out, totally changes lifestyle?

In our silences, including the repression of our unconscious, risking becoming ‘known’ even to ourselves? And in that pattern, are we also in danger of remaining unknown also to our partners, our children, to our employers and certainly to God?

Theologians, especially those interested in pastoral theology, often speak and write about ‘transcendent transformations,’ or moments analogous to rebirth, from a former pattern to a very different pattern. Moments of enantiodromia are often associated with such transformations. And it is the breaking through of a long-repressed ‘type’ or Mask and giving often unwanted and unexpected voice to a different pattern that is a break-through….and the association of such a break-through with one’s spirituality, one’s relationships with oneself, with one’s partner and one’s children, one’s employer and one’s God is forever changed.

Are those granite-like silences the incubators of such re-births? Are they, in various shapes, forms, faces and narratives and biographies, the hot-house for seeding, nurturing and eventual flowering of whatever previous, public, ‘organization-man’  mask we might have been wearing, however unconsciously?

We all have a novel within us comprised of silences….are we open to writing it? And then sharing it? And then risking the uproar of being ‘deceitful’ and duplicitous and manipulative and thereby untrustworthy, for all those ‘other years’ prior to our awakening?