Searching for God # 131

 In many spaces we read, hear or are bombarded with a cliche that goes something like this: 

‘Our shared humanity, common identity, and inheritance as ‘children of God’ (irrespective of which ‘God’ is intended), seems to be both compromised and even denied and obliterated by the very theologies and religions that promulgate such ‘pastoral equanimity. Rejecting a view that reduces this paradox to another cliche, ‘life is paradox,’ and does not withstand any attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable, let’s take a little walk in this ‘forest.’ 

Frankl is renowned for introducing us to the ‘search for meaning’ as a guiding principle to help ‘organize’ our identity and our orientation to our own meaninglessness. Existentialism underscores what it calls the ‘existential moment’ when we become conscious of our inherent meaningless, and our responsibility for finding, imagining, creating, enjoining some ‘purpose’ and, as another cliche goes, ‘one that is bigger than oneself’...as if to say that a purpose/meaning congruent with our ‘size’ is insufficient or inadequate. 

The idealism of the quote about our shared humanity and identity, continues hovering, like the loon call over a twilight lake, to haunt our imagination and, at the same time, bedevil our hope. Of course, none of us is free from the image of a shared humanity, equally accessing good clean water, adequate shelter, access to adequate health care, education and work with dignity. None of us, too, is free from the chasm between that ideal image and the growing reality on the ground everywhere. 

In our last post, the ambition, or perhaps the primal urge, to strive toward Paradise was offered by words from James Hillman. It can seem that this urge, if it is really universally shared, is being thwarted in so many ways in so many places, without the obstructions being fully identified as ‘causes’ rather than symptoms. 

Of course, we know the daily news of negligence on the environmental protection front, the political self-serving narcissism on the political front, the economic opportunism of the wealthiest on the financial front, the explosion of military capability and its deployment on the war front, the volcanic eruption of cyber technology and its subversive deployment in international relationships on the national security front, the lethal zero-sum conflicts on both the religious and ethnic fronts, the seemingly irreconcilable divide over such moral/ethical/religious issues as abortion, gender rights, gender conversions, and the interminable tensions over public versus private health care, education, and the government’s interference in such deeply profound issues as ‘suicide.’ 

Such a catalogue of ‘symptoms’ could easily be prepared and presented by any average grade 12 high school student, interested in global affairs. And while various religious communities might concentrate on specific ‘illnesses’ (seen and considered as a cluster of symptoms) it seems rare to read or hear someone or some institute address whatever might be some pattern of forces underlying the cumulative and especially the summative impact of these forces, energies that both individually and collectively can be seen to threaten the continuing survival, health and hope of humanity. 

If our shared humanity and common identity are actually part of our perception and conviction about who we are and our place in the cosmos, how might we begin to ‘see’ the situation from a perspective that honours our equality and not only our legal rights but our moral, ethical and legitimate access to sharing the basic necessities for survival? 

We might begin by noting that ‘paradise’ is very different for each individual, as is each social and genetic ‘womb/nursery’ in which we are raised. God, too, is defined, inculcated and indoctrinated differently in each faith and faith community. A question that remains is, ‘why do our differences eclipse our common identity and shared access to the means of survival? Are we really in a competition to acquire those means of survival? Or, have we (based on the power of the powerful) encased our world in a bubble of convention in which the powerful continue to spread their influence (and their abuse) when and wherever they please, with the impunity and immunity of the silent compliance of the powerless? Spreading access to meagerly-paid jobs as a crumb to placate and pacify the masses, while scooping the ‘cream’ of billions from the top of the economic pie, is only one of the many abuses imposed, and considered ‘normal,’ on the dispossessed. Purchasing the organs and instruments of politics, sports, entertainment and propaganda, in order to control the information and the indoctrination deemed ‘correct’ and ‘essential’ is another of the pathways to domination we witness everywhere. Separating private from public health care with enhanced remuneration in the former, as compared with the latter, ensures the eventual demise of the public system, except for a residue of idealistic and altruistic medical practitioners who refuse to comply. Purchasing the votes of politicians with undisclosed campaign donations to anonymous super-pacs  ensures a permanent iron-clad grip on legislation that also favours those same political donors and their ideological, self-serving agendas. And the pursuit of profit, dividends, stock options, buy-outs, offshore tax havens beyond the reach of government resources (and intent) needs the freedom to pursue such ‘legitimate business’ goals and objectives. The specific elimination of previously sound and public-interest-focused legislation, protecting the environment for example, that would have cost the private sector more in taxes and in production and distribution, follows as part of the pursuit of such corporate and more recently oligarchic privilege. 

And one of the over-riding questions remains, ‘are these issues legitimately defined, confined and relegated to ‘public policy’ including economic agreements in trade, and in societal growth and development? Or are they also ethical, spiritual and even religious in many of their less-observed hidden dimensions? 

Many years ago, the Canadian super-environmentalist, David Suzuki made a public statement that, in a nutshell, captures the intent of what I am trying to articulate. He said ..instead of people ‘working for the economy, the economy should be working for the people. 

On its surface, it appears somewhat benign. Dig a little deeper, and those who find it offensive will have already characterized it summarily as ‘communistic’. It is as if the public consciousness oscillates between two mutually exclusive opposites: capitalism and communism (often also dismissed as socialism). We all know, intellectually, psychologically, and especially imaginatively, that there are more than two ‘poles’ to every tension. And here we might be getting a little closer to one of the blind-spots we all share: the religious-theologically-morally-ethically-empirically-professionally-sustained, binary perception of reality between good and evil. 

The church (including all of the mainline world religions) has owned, operated on and propagated an institutional status of the ‘adult’ in the room, in terms of both defining and prosecuting evil from good. And, to be more specific, it sees itself not only as the ‘adult’ but even more pervasively as the ‘parent’, even wrapping itself, in the Christian world, around the image of God the Father. And preserving, conserving, sustaining what the church has considered, based on what it calls ‘sacred words and laws,’ the moral code of the Western civilization. 

Even more insidiously than wrapping its theology in the image of the Father God, much of church history demonstrates a decidedly unholy and unacknowledged dependence on the political and economic status norms and leadership of the secular culture. Mainline churches, have for centuries either been the instrument of the state (often kings and princes seeking to establish their own control and hegemony) or has reflected precisely the business, corporate and profit-driven objectives and the means of achieving those monetary ends. In family relations, we call such an arrangement, ‘incest,’ and the damage and abuse of the family model is not more nefarious than the damage and abuse of the public model. The scale of course, of the damage is different. 

Some will consider these notes as another ‘class warfare’ piece thereby permitting its immediate dismissal. It is not, and cannot be reduced to such a precipitate, in the bottom of the beaker which we are holding over the bunsen burner, in our attempt to analyze the cultural/chemical components of our collective unconscious, our shared anima mundi. If our inheritance from our alleged Christian ‘values’, ethics, morals and theology, both in theory and in practice, have impacted our way of life to the degree that, it suggests here, it has, then it might be well past time for us to turn those tables in the temples over in a re-enactment of a New Testament story of very conscious, very deliberate and very authentic act of rebellion. 

Rather than threaten those whose lives include an involuntary choice of gayness, or even of transgender, could we not see that we, in the so-called Judeo-Christian-dominated cultures have both more insidious and more ubiquitous impediments to the ‘paradise’ of an equally shared access to human survival and dignity? First, we might have to abandon a binary, empirical, literal and historically fascinating, if not seducing, model of both perception and apperception. Shades of colour, shades of interpretation, shades of complexity and shades of multiple challenges for all of us accompany such a monumental rejection. And it is not that total abandonment may be required. It is only to integrate a more imaginative, poetic and thereby more wholistic, comprehensive and truthful appreciation or reality. And that shift can be applied to our images of God and God’s intent, perception and aspiration for humanity. 

Rather than the ultimate moral, ethical arbiter, prosecutor and jailer (born again or go to Hell!) we might, perhaps with the help of people like Rober Funk to re-examine the life of Jesus of Nazareth and derive some significant life guidelines therefrom, begin to consider a God whose aspirations for humanity far exceed our imagination, our sky-level of hope, and our legitimate place as being fully loved, accepted and supported by this God. While rational justification seems irrelevant and unnecessary, the pursuit of paradise with the support of a loving God seems far more potentially likely than a pursuit reliant on a primal, inescapable and irreversible judgement of original sin, as the defining moment in human mythic history...think The Garden. 

Christian theology can be seen, in a nutshell, to be a demonstrated model of human sabotage, especially when considered from the perspective of post-hydrogen-bomb narrative history. God, any God, would not ‘want’ to be associated with such a pre-ordained epic self-sabotage. 

And yet, here we are. 

All of our preoccupations with the hurly-burly of daily and hourly malfeasances committed by mostly men, acting in their own personal narcissistic self-interest aside, (and that is the only survivable approach), we now have both the time and the perhaps forced or at least nudged urgency to re-consider who we are as God’s, who God is to us and how that potential, evolving and life-giving relationship (I came that you might have life and that more abundantly),might begin a new chapter. 

We are not the baby to be thrown out with the bath-water, as the atheists, agnostics or even the nihilists might wish and perceive. We are the very hope that, together sharing both our consciousness and unconsciousness, offer the most authentic and most potency and hope for survival, with our untapped imagination, our capacity to see deeply into the life of things, (as Wordsworth reminds us). And we too, can open to what to many may seem like the most preposterous proposition, or reading, or interpretation of the Original Fall...the separation of the genders from androgyny to male and female. If that might be part of the return to paradise to which we aspire, it could breathe new life into many circumstances. 

Let’s try to wrap our imaginations around that gift of the romantic poet, William Blake, a ‘seeker not a joiner,’ if we can!