Searching for God # 52

 Many Christians in the West, N. T. Wright says, have the goal of their faith completely upside down. Instead of seeing Christianity as God renewing the whole world and uniting Heaven and Earth, many believers think the point is simply for their souls to escape to Heaven when they die.

Wright argues the New Testament teaches the opposite: God comes to dwell with us, and Jesus’ resurrection launches a new creation that’s already underway. Ephesians shows that God’s plan has always been to unite all things in Christ—and the Church is supposed to be a preview of that new creation right now.

Because of this misunderstanding, Christians often misread the End Times, spiritual warfare, and even the afterlife. Wright says ideas like the rapture and apocalyptic timelines aren’t in the New Testament—they’re modern distortions mixed with Western philosophy.

True spiritual warfare, he says, isn’t about blaming people or seeing demons everywhere. It’s about living faithfully as a united, Spirit-filled community that reflects God’s future in the present. (N. T. Wright*, from Facebook page of Will Horn)

*Rt. Rev. N.T. Wright or Tom Wright is an English New Testament scholar, Pauling theologian, and Anglican Bishop. He is currently Senior Research Fellow, University of Oxford

I recently heard a professional woman declare, ‘I know that Jesus is coming back and I sure do want to be ready, ‘cause I sure don’t want to have to stay here.’

The apocalypse is a word that has been used to anticipate a second coming, tied to the Judgement Day, coming in part from the book of Revelation, a mode of literature with which the contemporary world is unfamiliar. Linked with the Crucifixion and Resurrection, it provides considerable ‘cover’ for the justification of the proposition of judgement that has plagued the church and its adherents for centuries. And, let’s acknowledge that a metaphor of classical conditioning, with rewards for ‘good behaviour’ and ‘surrender’ to a saviour have served the ecclesial development movement for a long time. God as critical parent, with a clear and readily grasped set of goals and objectives, is a metaphor that can be grasped by both child and adult, on a literal, empirical level. It supports the privatizing of sin, and the capacity of all to make judgements about the sins of others. It also supports the ‘moment of ‘conversion/confession’ and surrender, for the fulfilment of the ‘fishers-of-men’ image that is frequently deployed by the evangelists.

Enabling and even ‘arming’ ‘believers’ to ‘save the world’ from the sins of which each of us is responsible, provides a template for many to serve both church and self in piling up numbers of new ‘believers’. The notion/teaching that a new creation is already underway, at least from this perch, is congruent with Tolstoy’s non-violent confrontation of evil with force, without the added appendage of dividing the ‘superior converts’ from the ‘inferior pilgrims.’

It is the waves, ripples, and even rivers of division and conflict with each parish that, from my limited experience, have left parishes foundering on the shoals of a deep divide between the literalist judges and those who read and understand with more of a metaphoric and poetic perspective. Little, if any, formal discussion is available on the subject of how, if at all, the imagination plays a part in the formation and sustaining of a faith perspective. If faith is defined as ‘holding an intellectual conviction’ about specific truths of history, as in ‘I believe that yesterday’s temperature was a minus 5 Celsuis’ then dispute about that ‘conviction’ is without recourse to appeal, irrelevant, dismissable and abhorrent.

Such a divide of both perception as well as ‘perspective’ and the attitudes and emotions that come with each perspective, is frequently cause for bitter and intense disagreements. I once heard a professor of theology note that he had spent much of his scholar-life attempting to wrestle with the conflict between science and religion. Does such a continuing study not begin with a proposition of incompatibility? And what if such incompatibility does not exist and each is reconcilable with the other?

The notion of ‘time’ and a savior’s literal, historical, as well as meta-historical return at some far-off time in the distant future, enables those who favour such a vision to take much less seriously the conditions under which we are living right now. Conversely, some might even believe that their ‘charge’ and conviction is to ‘bring about the Kingdom of God right here right now’ as we have heard from some in the MAGA movement.

Finite perceptions of both time and money, especially, bring with them a degree of urgency on the one hand and obsessive-compulsion on the other. Scarcity of both, as an over-riding metaphor, perspective and even ‘belief’ have plagued the church in many quarters for centuries. Sanctity and reverence for God have both been encaptured, as some would see it, in the church’s ‘poor church mouse’ image as well as in such attitudes as silence on steroids within the sanctuary, constricted notions of legitimate subjects for church formal debate, and a reductionistic God as ultimate ‘super-ego’ or critical parent or final judge.

How, pray tell, is such a retinue or menu of scarcities congruent with the abundance of God’s unconditional, unrestrained, and ubiquitous love in all of its many forms? That question is not ‘penned’ as rhetorical! Too many lives have been twisted, torpedoed, submarined, sabotaged and utterly decimated by failing to ‘live up’ to the standards of morality, ethics and religious commitment, or by believing that those lives were ‘beyond redemption’ given an ethos of choking judgement.

And one of the more tragic aspects of such a cultural dynamic has been the impunity of accountability and responsibility of the Christian church for limiting the imaginations of millions as to the nature of God, the nature of ‘living a good life’ and, of course, the inverse. I once heard another Anglican bishop comment, ‘The church has fallen into the trap of being ‘politically correct’!’

Politically correct has so many implications that it is likely impossible  to account for all of them. Being agreeable, being friendly, being of good humour, being kind, and being uplifting and inspiring are all reasonable expressions of being ‘politically correct’ and have been adopted almost as a template for the contemporary transactional culture. As a life-long retailer, my father knew that by restraining his choice of topics with customers to the weather and perhaps the latest Maple Leafs’ score, he would avoid tension and conflict. Concentrating on the needs of that customer, for a specific piece of hardware, fishing equipment, paint selection, building material or bone china, he rarely if ever strayed outside the boundaries of ‘nice man’ in order to preserve his reputation as a ‘nice-guy’ with whom to do business. Taboo were both religion and politics!

Think for a moment about those moments in our lives when ‘something went wrong’ and how each and every time we asked ourselves ‘what did I do wrong?’ as the initial emotional and intellectual assessment of the situation. Millions of us have lived with a proverbial ‘cawing crow’ sitting on our shoulder as an inheritance of the Christian church. How many times have we measured our moments of specific choices as ‘different’ from the example of our parents, whose example was set from such constrictions as ‘sobriety,’ ‘abstinence’ or ‘excess frugality’ or ‘reticence’ or ‘withdrawal’ or ‘not volunteering’ or ‘not applying’ or ‘failing to disclose how I feel’….all because, whether consciously or unconsciously we ‘thought’ or ‘believed’ or ‘considered’ or ‘were told’ that to open up was ‘too much’….and ‘too much’ came from  morality and an ethic as well as a conventional social tolerance, all of it conditioned by an underlying religious imperative?

For these and many other constrictions we have the church to ‘thank’ if only we would dare.

Is this legacy in part an inheritance from scripture read in a constricted and constricting manner?

It simply will not do, it is a cultural luxury that we can no longer afford, if ever we could, for any Christian on the whims of an uninformed and culturally driven piety to read the Bible and to pronounce upon its meaning with any less effort than these questions (in this case antisemitism) require. (Peter J. Gomes*, The Good Book,  Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart, p.119) (Gomes was arguing against the case that Jews had fallen from God and that the only way back was to cease to be Jews and to become Christian.)

*Peter J. Gomes, ordained a Baptist clergy, was professor and Pusey Minister of Harvard’s Memorial Church and Professor of Christian Morals at the Harvard Divinity School. He died in 2011.

Gomes observes the ‘assigning of sin’ to institutions as compared with the privatized sin of personal malfeasance. He notes that social activists who discern and disclaim the sin of the institutions call it a ‘system(s) failure. And he notes that such sin is abstract, with juxtaposed with personal, private sin.

What I am positing here is that much of the theology of the Christian church, as practiced, is (or has been) focused on private sin, given its clear dimensions, diagnosis, and irrespective of whether scripture holds a strong position of concurrence. An example, from Augustine would be that ‘sex is sin’ while not all sex is sin and not all sin is sex.

Such a perception can be applied to homosexuality. We read in Gomes:

In his study Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, John Boswell concluded his chapter on the New Testament texts having to do with homosexuality with these words:

The New Testament takes no demonstrable position on homosexuality. To suggest that Paul’s references to excesses of sexual indulgence involving homosexual behavior are indicative of a general position in opposition to same-sex eroticism if as unfounded as arguing that his condemnation of drunkenness implies opposition to the drinking of wine.

Gomes was asked to speak to a rally at Harvard in 1991 about the expressed experience of abuse of gays and lesbians, Gomes, himself a homosexual. Here is a direct quote from that address from the New York Times reprinted on npr.org in a piece entitled Peter J. Gomes, ‘Harvard’s Pastor dies by Korva Coleman, March 1, 2011

I do not know when the quality of life has been more violated….I am a Christian who also happens to be gay…Those realities, which are irreconcilable to some, are reconcilable in me by a loving God.

In his own work, The Good Book, writing about that same incident, Gomes writes:

I warned of the dangers of Christian absolutism, with the appropriate references to the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch trials and I dismissed the easy references to scripture and the rathe glib social analysis as unworthy of thinking of charitable Christian debate. (Gomes op. cit. p 165)

And after the barrage of criticism that greeted him subsequently, much of it from the Bible, (he writes):

Many of my critics, chiefly from within the religious community, asked if I read the same Bible they did, and if I did how could I possibly reconcile my position with that of scripture? When arguments failed, anathemas were hurled and damnations promised. The whole incident confirmed what had long been my suspicion (as it is also this scribe’s). Fear was at the heart of homophobia, as it was at the heart of racism, and as with racism, religion---particularly the Protestant evangelical kind that nourished me (and this scribe too!)---was the moral fig leaf that covered naked prejudice. I further concluded that more rather than less attention must be given to how we read the scriptures, what we bring to the text, what we find in the text, and what we take from the text.( Gomes op. cit. p. 166)

With respect to ‘constrictions’ based on some kind of assumed piety, I was accused by a supervisor, while a deacon, of being ‘much too intense for me’….to which I responded without skipping a breath, “Well, I am also too bald; deal with it!” She phoned the bishop later that day to recommend against my ordination. With respect to biblical interpretation, my homilies have been dubbed heretical, and I the antichrist, by those whose reading of scripture echo those of Gomes’ scriptural-based critics.’ In first year of theology studies, I encountered a literal interpretation of scripture from class mates who upon hearing one member of our Field Education Class claim that Hitler had gone to heaven, (a provocative statement uttered doubtless to arouse the ire of those known as ‘fundies’) retorted, “That’s not true and I know it isn’t true because the Bible says so!”

There is much to ponder upon reading the Bible, and one starting place might be that of a kindergarten kid, ‘I’m in kindergarten here; please help me and my wonder! I am in awe but not in fear!’

Searching for God # 51

 Maybe what I have been attempting to focus a lens or a light onto is the mystery that is each and every human being and the mystery of God, a place where, in the human imagination, some various kinds of encounters, surprises, shocks or even mutual hymns might intermingle in a kind of soul/spirit synchronicity…..

We are much more than our cells, organs, systems, and brain….and while we continue to uncover more of the ways in and by which these various components interact with each other, along with the foods, air, water and circumstances to which we are invited or compelled, our mystery remains both an enigma and a blessing. Centuries of generations of thoughtful, insightful, sensitive and sensible (Mostly) men have pondered, prayed, written and debated the various pathways to the divine and that kind of reflection, including the exegesis of scripture, and the connections and resistances of and between various religious communities, and that process continues unabated.

Throughout these pieces I have been labouring over concepts like literal, empirical, sensate, rational, reason as compared with the imagination, images, metaphors, symbols, archetypes, and of course, personal and collective conscious and unconscious. Recently I included a piece reflecting on a contemporary political phrase, ‘virtue signalling,’ to which I was disdainful. Somehow, the notion that ‘signalling’ a virtue, without making the empirical changes needed to achieve the literal, empirical measureable virtue brings a perception and mind-set that says ‘signalling’ is useless, redundant, and therefore dismissable. A municipal politician of my brief acquaintance commented, upon being elected, ‘I will be judged by my effectiveness in making observable change.’ And while there is some political justification in that sentence, it leaves much omitted, ignored, and dismissed, as potential range of influence that a community leader can and does actually have.

In  culture obsessed with literal, empirical, sensate, reason and logic, is it not to be expected that while there are many shared benefits of this approach, there are serious omissions as well as risks to the exclusive, obsessive pursuit of such purposes and goals. Would it not be ‘expected’ that, as a counter-point to the empirical, literal, scientific and rational, theology might attempt to wrestle with the matters of the soul, meaning and belief, to borrow again from Hillman?

And would it not be expected in such a culture also to  find some who are determined to examine critically any imbalance that might be blurring any attempt to insert the ‘matters of the soul’ into the debate. Let’s start with some of the implications of an obvious imbalance on the lives of millions of individuals.

We have already mentioned pressure on human ego, that aspect/image of the person to which we attach our executive, decision-making choices. Conventionally we seem both to presume and to assume that moral and ethical choices depend on a strong, disciplined, mature and healthy ego….whatever that might mean in medical, legal, sociological and even cognitive terms. Anyone can see that those we hold as ‘examples’ of success,  maturity and icons of the values we collectively hold most worthy are wrapped in images of wealth, power, influence, skill, and something we call leadership, in some circles referred to as charisma. These leaders are featured in much of the media, both news and entertainment, and also especially social media. Go out and win the ‘brass ring’ whatever you consider that to be, and however it might take to attain it, seems to be a motto, and a mantra for our culture.

Of course, there are rebels who disdain such ‘carboard templates’ and reject those aspirations. Many lives are lived in complete privacy, while both learning and altruism continue in silence. Nevertheless, the conventional template of ‘social and financial success’ have motived millions, and continue to drive the ambitions ofu many. That is a drum-beat to which readers of this space have long ago grown bored, weary and numb.

However, it is also pertinent and cogent to note that such a model of success brings with it a plethora of expectations for the neophyte just entering the ‘fray’. References, whether in formal letters or in informal phone calls, have a way of influencing decision-makers at colleges and universities, as well as in many, if not most corporations. And, fitting in, complying with the rules, regulations, conventions and expectations all demonstrate the reliability, trustworthiness, the integrity and especially the loyalty to whatever the enterprise might be. On the back of those observations, promotions, additional references, ‘following’ numbers rise, and recruiters with their own radar of networking, come calling. The system has a way of sustaining itself, on the basis of a very elegant, easily defined and relatively easily ladder to climb….depending on one’s willingness to climb that ladder.

Concentrating on those extrinsic metrics, until forty-five, approximately,  according to Jung, one then tends to begin to look inside for whether or not those achievements, recognitions, awards, applause and elaborate networks are ‘enough’. Peggy Lee’s famous ballad, ‘Is that all there Is?’ embraces the mood, the moment and the shift in perception and expectation.

Is the search for God as relevant, as meaningful or even as necessary until that point in one’s life? Or, is the search for God precisely analogous to, as well as supportive of that shift? Or is the search for God a metaphor for the parallel search for the inner self, the soul? It is impossible to exclude issues like death and meaning from such a search, as it is also virtually impossible to exclude those issues from one’s interior dialogue.

Reflection, meditation, prayer, reading, seeking community, silence, and some degree of withdrawal are all included as both manifestations of and circumstances of support in whatever degree of intensity and depth each person chooses.

Christian churches have been theologically founded on a theology of child-like celebrations of the birth of Jesus at Christmas, the Death and Resurrection at Easter, and the various holy days, and their feasts and festivals, with little to no active engagement in a process of evolution of one’s need for and search for God, as an integral component of one’s life. Of course, crises have a way of bringing one to one’s knees, psychologically, as well as emotionally and spiritually. The very word ‘search’ seems to denote a skepticism and a tentativeness and even a doubt, as to whether a person who uses that word is really serious about being a Christian.

The concept of a certitude in an absolute faith conviction in promised ‘outcomes’….’if I am saved,’ seems to have a potential of either minimizing or eliminating any approach that smells of a search. “Look in the Bible” is one of the critical responses to the encounter of a word like ‘search’…it’s all there! There is no need for you to search!....are either or both the words and the attitudes of those already ‘saved’.

Deficient then in conviction, as well as in biblical ‘knowledge’ the ‘searcher’ is effectively and perhaps for the last time from both tolerance and inclusion in the life of the faith community. And the dominant superiority of those ‘inside’ the circle of conviction and faith, in a rational, literal, empirical culture which also frequently subscribes to a literal interpretation of the words of Scripture, tends to exclude both questions and questioners.

Books under consideration for inclusion in the Bible have been excluded because they were ‘too risky’ for inclusion, and would being about doubt among potential adherents. Women have been excluded from Church hierarchies, because Jesus had no female disciples. Slaves have been excluded from the human race, endorsed and supported by the Christian church. The LGBTQ+ segment of society have struggled and continue to struggle for church acceptance.

And the conflicts among various religious and faith communities seem to take precedence over the motive and ambition and will to co-operate, to find common ground and to demonstrate a spirit of both truth and tolerance. Would skeptics and doubters from various faith communities not be more likely to find common ground than convicted absolutists?

From my experience, the loudest voices in the room are never the ones to which I gravitate for counsel. They usually have a not-so-hidden agenda to attempt to impose that agenda on anyone who might pause long enough to listen. Perhaps it is the rebel in me or perhaps the trickster who has gravitated to the silent, reflective, meditative and the pondering man or woman as one who is already ( at least in my imagination) on the path of a search similar to this one. They are comfortable with uncertainty and wonder, mystery and questions, and far less comfortable with dogmatic answers to dogmatically based questions.

Is this semblance of a paradox another of God’s tricks for us to attempt to unpack, if we are continuing along a path of ‘searching’ for the divine…and looking for guides likes Moltmann, Tolstoy, and even Hillman to help form the questions that we consider relevant? Is the skeptic and the doubter a candidate for the search for God? Ot is the search one that has already been completed, and one needs to ‘get on the program’ if one really wants to be included, and especially if one wants to be saved?

 

 

 

 

Searching for God # 50

 Deploying Moltmann’s hope beyond all evidence of hope, as a description of a moment when one is actively contemplating ending one’s own life, why is such A a deployment not congruent with an application of Moltmann’s conception of hope and also compatible with the notion that God is already familiar with, open to and already present in that moment? What if such a moment offers an opportunity for a coming to a realization of a new and seemingly paradoxical ‘aha’ in God’s presence.?

Could one depiction of our state include or even be dominated by our fixation, obsession, delight in and complete self-indulgence in a universe that is outside of us, seducing us into a mode of both thought and behaviour that complies almost involuntarily with the classical conditioning model of Pavlov’s dogs? And is it possible that our morality and ethics, as well as our Christian theology, are also bound in a similar ‘pen’ of positivism’ and empiricism, literalism and extrinsic psychology?

Needing proof, needing demonstrations, have we founded our belief system on what we  can and do with and through our experience, justified also by our  conviction that the allegedly historic narratives of biblical events, persons, and tribes represent the whole truth, the God’s truth and nothing but the truth? Have we possibly foundered, not only our theology but also our psyche and our souls on the one hand on the shoals of logic and reason, and with them on literalism and empiricism and on the other hand, on a fear of offending God, if we relax our tight-fisted hold on the sanctity of life?

Neither life nor death are, it says here, reducible to a literal, empirical, positivist epistemology nor a theology based on an empirical cognition. Nor is God! And trying to push an ineffable, ephemeral, infinity of any kind into a vessel of reason, logic and empiricism, is not only blind but, over centuries has been quite destructive, even lethal and highly counter to a collaborative,  relational, tolerant and empathic embodiment of all of the various forms of love, including man to/for man and man to/for God and God to/for man..

Much of that ‘stuffing’ emerges, results from and seems inevitable and now conventionally normal, so that we have come to a place where we package and brand everything, for the ostensible purpose of ‘selling’ or ‘pitching’ it to others. And we have done the same thing to God. All of the systematic theology in the world will never wrestle God or God’s love for each human being into a template, or a ritual, or a dogma or a metaphor. That is not because those who are steeped in such intellectual pursuits have been evil, wrong-headed or even deceptive. It is only that their theories, images, bridges for those images and the theologies that have emerged are, in a word, partial, incomplete.

So is everything written or even contemplated in this space, partial and incomplete.

That is partly why I think we have an opportunity to ‘perceive’ and to adjust and to adopt and to re-vision the Christian perspective to include, without disposing of the rescuing Good Samaritan, or the prophet or the teacher or the miracle-worker as models and images of God, a world of the human ‘inner psychic’ energies, as well as an imagination that sees our ‘in extremis’ moments from the perspective of ‘not being conducive to, or amenable to, or even ready and open to the kind of ‘prevention’ to which we are currently subjecting those moments, and the individuals who are in the midst of them.

From a Christian theological perspective, it seems that our noble, honourable, ethical and professional interventions as ‘prevention agents’ are, in fact counter-intuitive to the very process needed at the moment of highest risk, the moment when another human being is actively contemplating suicide. I am not sure if the Jewish concept of TSIMTSUM might be appropriate and relevant on this moment. However, it is our ‘silent, non-judgemental, non-interferent, non-affirming, non-condemning living breathing presence, with the other at those crucial moments when the other is actively engaged in the contemplation and reflective process of ending his or her life that I am suggesting be considered as appropriate, empathic, loving embodiment of the Christian word ‘agape’.

I had a brilliant supervisor for Chaplaincy training at Scarborough Centennary Hospital back in the late eighties, named John McKibbon, who left two indelibly imprinted questions and scenarios with this naïve, incipient candidate. The first was his personal story of having to sit in the solarium in Sick Childrens’ Hospital, while his 11-year-old daughter was dying, if I remember correctly of leukemia. A man approached him, sat down beside him without uttering a word. The two remained in silence for two or three hours, when the man rose, shook the grieving father’s hand, and departed. After the death and the funeral, and the hours of tears and grieving, the besotted father realized that the one thing that had ‘stayed with him’ was that time with the stranger in silence. As a healing impulse, out of that experience, the grieving father initiated a group called Grieving Parents of Ontario.

The second was a question he asked, of his class of a half-dozen: “Did Jesus and/or God have a Shadow (in the Jungian perspective)?

I recall my ‘gut’ uttering immediately, silently, ‘Of course!’….I do not recall the responses of my classmates, or whether they uttered any.

Since then, I have had considerable time and opportunities to reflect on those training experiences, with events, persons, and thoughts of others rambling in and out of my person. The institutional church has, it seems after more than a decade of my personal and direct engagement, fallen into the comfortable pew of invoking God’s presence, promise and love as palliatives and as building blocks of and for the institution as much or more than for the people in the pews. Of course, there is an individual human aspect to all of the liturgies, seasons, biblical stories and especially promises of eternal life for those who have ‘converted’ from sin to accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, as the words tumble out. The sacrificial death of Jesus on the Cross, as the act of atonement for human sins, following by the Resurrection, symbolic of the triumph over death, has, together with other aspects of the theology, contributed to a theology founded upon an original fall, applicable to each of us, and a pathway to redemption through belief in the loving sacrifice on the Cross of Calvary.

And this template has been nurtured, massaged, messaged and liturgically re-enacted for centuries. It is, without doubt, a compelling template for the proposed salvation of mankind. An extrinsic Jesus as Son of God, sent by the Father, to ‘save’ his people is both humbling and inspiring, revering and, to a degree somewhat revolting. And it has captured the minds, hearts and spirits of millions.

As a ‘searcher’ I have, I have to admit, both involuntarily and somewhat unconsciously wondered about the ramification of the template from a variety of perspectives from a very early age. Pivot-points of absolute conviction (in personal sin, the evil of abortion, even the ‘evil’ and sentence to Hell of anyone who is Roman Catholic, or who divorces, or who is gay or lesbian, along with the championing of those who wrote/write cheques to pay the heating bills or to install the carillon bells in the bell tower, together these images have congealed into a gestalt of a ‘corporation’ with ‘profit motives’ and ‘success benchmarks analogous to the for-profit corporation. It is after all an extrinsic, empirically measured culture!….Question of theology, from my curtailed time of serving as deacon and then as priest, have touched on the ‘admissability of gays and lesbians to membership, and to ordination, the option of conducting or even sanctioning marriages between gays and lesbians, and the question of whether or not small numerically struggling parishes and missions might survive. In Canada, the issue of the reconciliation between the indigenous communities whose children suffered the tragedies of the residential school movement, operated jointly by churches and government offered another deep and indelible stain on the various institutions. Similarly, the issue of celibate clergy abusing young boys, and non-celibate clergy allegedly abusing women found public attention and headlines.

Exposure of what has been and continues to be ‘private sins’ of fallible and fallen individuals, without even a modest, moderate and legitimate surveillance of the contexts of personal sins within the church, has offered a picture of an institution dependent on, desirous of and seemingly obsessed with finding and exposing the sins of individuals. The church has, apparently no accountability, responsibility nor need for or desire to atone for any of the multiple sins, save and except to utter bland, if sincere, apologies with some reparations to the indigenous communities.

The very requirement of celibacy in the Roman Catholic church, as a starting place, is in desperate need of investigation, research and accounting in that such an absolute demand is incompatible with and for most men, whether gay or straight. Commandeering the marriage ‘business’ as sacred, and then defining its moral, ethical and thereby religiously tolerated parameters, too, as are all attempts to ‘regulate human sexuality’ is tantamount to an institutional neurosis that, if the church were not to ‘own’ that aspect of human life, it would cease to have ‘control’ over its parishioners.

Reminiscent of the ‘keeping the biblical translations out of the hands of the laity,’ because they are untrained and will be unable to interpret and to assimilate its proper meaning, and purpose, especially since such meaning and purpose can only be ‘divined’ by trained theological scholars and clergy, retaining an ethical, moral and religious hold on human sexuality says more about the institution’s anxiety and fear of the original sin from which the church found much of its original validity and purpose.

And it is precisely that God-dictated ‘need’ dogmatically documented, enforced, and applied that has ship-wrecked many lives on shoals of the church’s theology. Some may ask, is the alternative really tolerable?

One response is that the question of the abuse of power has so many forms, faces, iterations and enactments, many, if not most of which go ‘unchallenged’ by both the state and ecclesial authorities. Thea abuse of power of an individual by another individual, whether of a sexual nature or not, is worthy of challenge. And in order to ascertain whether and where there has been an abuse of power, it is essential tdig into the full context of the situation, and, for example, not base any judgements on the template that a male, because he is a male, is automatically an abuser, or inversely, that a female, because she is a female is automatically not an abuser and always a victim. Too many judgments based on templates that render quick and glib assessments, judgements, dismissals and repercussions for which the institution has impunity, have and will continue to destroy human lives unnecessarily.

Even complicit the ‘no-workplace co-worker relationships’ requirement, whether of a power imbalance or not, require a degree of sensitivity and authentic determination  in adducing whether there is mutual consent and concurrence. A starting place that deploys a social, political correctness with predictable highly headline-grabbing radioactivity, will bring about neither fairness nor equality of the genders.

The church’s overt and somewhat covert, by consent or unconscious detachment, high-jacking of the moral and ethical codes of North America, is a shackle out from which the money-idolizing, ego-centred, privatized sin, and institutional (ecclesial) moral impunity needs to climb.

And a first step could well be the re-consideration of the issue of the sanctity of life, especially regarding the legitimacy of the decision to take one’s own life.

Such a process of reconsideration would and could bring about a domino impact on the churchs’ unjustified self-assumed moral authority, essentially without accountability. And that would enable many of us to begin to reconsider trusting in an institution which we once believed attempted to ‘imitate’, replicate, emulate and incarnate the life and spirit and mind of God.

Non-violent resistance of evil, with force, can and must  include the church in the cross-hairs.

Searching for God # 49

If ‘medicalizing’ suicide, for the psychiatric profession, and declaring abortion and suicide and murder all evil and criminal, in many if not most jurisdictions, by both church and state is the current reality, how is it even within the realm of conscious, moderate, curious and exploratory questions to consider suicide a legitimate human decision?

We might begin with a look at some of Hillman’s penetrating and highly challenging thoughts, observations and insights.

Searching for proof and demonstration of immortality is muddled thinking, because proof and demonstration are categories of science and logic. The mind uses these categories and the mind is convinced by proof. That is why the mind can be replaced by machines and the soul is not. Soul is not mind and has other categories for dealing with its problem of immortality. For the soul, the equivalents of proof and demonstration are belief and meaning. They are as difficult to develop and make clear, as hard to wrestle with, as is proof. Out of these experiences, not out of dogma or logic or empirical evidence, the positions of faith are built. And the fact alone that the psyche has this faculty of belief, unaffected by proof or demonstration, presses us toward the possibility of psychic immortality. Psychic immortality means neither resurrection of the flesh nor personal afterlife. The former refers to immortality of the body, the latter to immortality of the mind Our concern is with immortality of the soul……

What is immortality and reincarnation of the soul in psychology is conservation and transformation of energy in physics. The mind’s certainty that energy is ‘eternal’ is given by the law in physics. This corresponds with the soul’s conviction that it is immortal, and the sense of immortality is the inner feeling of the certainty of psychic energy. For if the psyche is an energetic phenomenon, then it is indestructible.(James Hillman, Suicide and the Soul, pps. 54-55)

Do these words even belong in a piece focused on the search for the divine?

Are they such an abomination as to be rendered ‘out of bounds’ for the theological pursuit of belief and meaning? Perhaps not.

Immortality, an afterlife, for the soul, is an image that lies at the heart of the Christian theology. Different mind and soul, with the former reliant on proof and demonstration, while the soul is reliant on meaning and belief, seems congruent with the notion that our psychic energy is both a bridge and a ‘current’ that flows between psychology and religion. At the centre of much of the writing of Christian theology is the notion of ‘transformation.’ Even the Greek word metanoia (from Oxford Dictionary, change in one’s way of life resulting from penitence or spiritual conversion, a change of mind, reorientation, a fundamental transformation of outlook, of one’s vision of the world and of oneself, a new way of loving others and God.) is pointing to, and evocative of, a substantial transformation. Whether that transformation is or even can be exclusively ‘religious’ or exclusively ‘psychological’ is outside my pay grade. From this perspective, it does not seem beyond legitimacy to suggest, however tentatively, there could well be an overlap.

If the soul’s search is for meaning and belief, and one’s meaning, purpose and belief, however that last word is defined, it seems at least coherent to consider, with respect, some kind of relationship between psychology and faith, especially around the issue of immortality and death.

Some additional thoughts from Hillman:

‘death appears in order to make way for transformation,’ (from analysands). The flower withers around its swelling pod, the snake sheds its skin, and the adult puts off his childish ways. The creative force kills as it produces the new. Every turmoil and disorder called neurosis can be seen as a life and death struggle in which the players are masked. What is called death by the neurotic mainly because it is dark and unknown is a new life trying to break through into consciousness; what he calls life because it is familiar is but a dying pattern he tries to keep alive. The death experience breaks down the old order, and in so far as analysis is a prolonged ‘nervous breakdown’  (synthesizing as it goes along) analysis means dying. ….Without a dying to the world of the old order, there is no place for renewal, because…..it is illusory to hope that growth is but an additive process requiring neither sacrifice nor death. The soul favors the death experience to usher in change. Viewed this way, a suicide impulse is a transformation drive. It says: ‘Life as it presents itself must change. Something must give way,. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow is a tale told by an idiot. The pattern must come to a complete stop. But since I can do nothing about life out there, having tried every twist and turn, I shall put an end to it here, in my own body, that part of the objective world over which I still have power. I put an end to myself.  (Hillman, op.cit. pps. 55-56)

In a secular culture in which the denial of death is a prominent, sustained and even preferred way to ‘not consider’ death, we continue to turn our eyes, our ears and our mind and hearts away from what is considered, in some Christian ecclesial institutions, a sign of evil, being the absolute inverse of ‘life’. If life is sacred, then does it not follow that death is evil? Well, what if both absolutes were a conjoined, Siamese twin of theology, and were not necessarily indigenous to the thought, mind, hope and love of God?

It is the notion that God’s will for man can be encapsulated in a series of absolute concepts, notions, beliefs and rituals, even if considered metaphorically, and not merely literally, to which I am attempting to question.

Most arguments against suicide, whether medically assisted or not, focus on the sin. We might wish to consider acknowledging that in our conventional cultural perspective, even the term ‘mental health’ implies a ‘mental illness’ ironically and paradoxically. What is not considered is the raw, detailed, unexpurgated, undiluted experience of the person contemplating ending his or her own life. And, it is the  prospect of actually  listening to that person, at the ‘in extremis’ moment that this piece would like to focus.

Agape love, identifying with the person in whatever distress might be enacting itself out in a person’s life, is valued quite highly among Christians. It is even modelled as an emulation (or imitation) of God’s love for humanity. And here I am unabashedly borrowing from Hillman’s two ideas; one, that to listen without judgement, without being distracted, without even a facial or a breath that could be interpreted as ‘signaling’ an opinion, one way or another, when being present with a person actively contemplating suicide, is essential. We all come to most significant moments from a perspective that segregates those moments into ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Our moral judgement intervenes, whether consciously or not, in the moment. The task of emptying that ‘per-conception’ of ‘good and evil’ in order for the person to ‘listen’ and to ‘hear’ the specific words of how s/he sees himself in the world, and how s/he sees the world seeing himself or herself is, or at least can be imagined as an intense, extreme and highly demanding expectation of being present. Not to rescue, not to prevent, not to dissuade, not to argue, not to demean any of the observations, perceptions, attitudes and beliefs of the other person, but to be fully present….as another human being.

Secondly, the ‘listening’ person, need not be a trained, clinically certified professional, given that for Hillman the ‘raw’ experience contains the seeds of very deep and imaginative perspective and potential understanding of what might be playing out in the ‘subject’s life, and if that ‘narrative’ can be analogized as parallel to a god, goddess, myth or archetype of which the ‘subject’ may be totally unaware, then this new ‘perception’ and ‘understanding’ of the moment might serve as a ‘lightbulb’ of awareness, an ‘aha’ moment.

The notion of confronting suicide exclusively from a preventive modality and mentality, inescapably and indisputably either walks over or denies the ‘fine print’ of the subject’s experience, given that it starts with a no-no absolute position.

If we as Christians worship a God of omniscience, and if as Rumi reminds us that God sees us from the inside:

When you look for God, God is in  the look of your eyes,

In the thought of looking,

Nearer to you than yourself,

Or things that have happened to you

There is no need to go outside.

If we are ever to open the door to the darkest and most dire experiences of our lives to both God and to ourselves, what moment could there be that could be more congruent with self-emptying that that moment when one comes to the point of actively contemplating the termination of one’s life.

It is in our conscious, deliberate and even disciplined denial of ‘darkness’ including death as evil, as individuals and certainly as churches purporting to represent, emulate, worship and imitate God, in and for all of his love and glory, that our ‘absoluteness’ of the evil of suicide lies beholden to. As Jung reminds us, if our religion is focused on salvation, we will have a mind-set and attitude of fear; if our religion is focused on mystery, we will have a mind-set and attitude of wonder. Is God not more than intimate with the depths of human darkness, both literally and imaginatively? And can our search for God even begin without the legitimate option of opening that vault, even if such a moment has brought us to active contemplation of ‘ending it’?

Can we begin to consider bringing suicide out of the closet of our legitimate search for God, not only for ourselves but for others who, themselves might well and sincerely, sensitively and even perhaps blindly and naively, be contemplating suicide? And as an integral beginning of that answer, can we at least begin to imagine being fully present, without judgement, without anxiety, without interfering, and attempting to attain a neutrality, in order for the subject’s voice, the inner voice, to be given sound and vibration.

In such a moment, neither person participating, can not be transformed, irrespective of what the physical outcome is.

Searching for God # 48

 Having struggled with letting go of the dogmatic traditional exegesis of the Original Sin, I have also to acknowledge another struggle, this time with one of the church’s unshakeable, immutable, and perfectly envisioned foundations, the sanctity of life.

In principle, who could fundamentally disagree, oppose or even contest the notion that life, with all of its beauty and confounding turbulences, is not worth herculean efforts to protect, preserve, enhance and explore its limitless opportunities and challenges. Whether, for Christians, considered a gift of God, and thereby sacred, or for others, a high value to uphold, like all other ‘absolutes,’ it seems to beg a more nuanced, less dogmatic, and more serious and critical examination.

Why?

I have struggled, as previously noted, with the male suicides in my community, by men whose character, reputation, sensitivity and sensibility seemed not even remotely deserving of being written off as medically ill, criminally insane, or even psychologically unbalanced. All lay terms, I acknowledge, and certainly, without professional qualifications and certifications, I have no legitimacy to make such a statement when all around me, only the word of the clinical experts, the psychiatrists, almost exclusively, have rendered a ‘medical judgement’ with which the law and society have concurred, mostly without serious debate.

Notwithstanding the recent ‘Medical Assistance In Dying legislation in some jurisdictions, and the rigorous criteria that more than one professional must concur, I am proposing that we look again, even from the perspective of ‘searching for God’ at this question. There are several foundational, yet still potential and unsubstantiated by the professional or the ecclesial communities, thoughts that have led to this both bold and timid place of probing.

We have created a society, especially the West, in which the individual has become a functional ‘thing’. It is not merely Margaret Atwood who can legitimately claim, following her heroic rise to fame and public ‘adulation,’ that she has become a thing. Funneled into careers that bring with them extremely high demands on the human brain, psyche and intellect, many of them designed with highly ulterior motives, millions of men and women, many of them highly educated, and even more highly sensitive and nuanced in their perceptions and observations and critical judgements of many of the tasks for which they have trained, have taken their own lives.

Stretching individuals to a ‘breaking point’ without regard either to where or why that breaking point has shown its face, the culture could not give a fig about that individual. Of course, there are family cries of despair, loss and shock, even guilt and shame that someone whom they love, found it necessary to terminate their life.

And, the public, too, has and does repeat its own shock, shame and degrees of guilt and confusion that anyone of their acquaintance, or even a stranger, would consider that s/he has been placed in a situation from which there seemed to be no other option but self-inflicted death.

Men and women returning from military combat with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, have, even after months or years of professional therapy, also found it necessary to take their own lives. And yet we continue to perpetuate our ‘love of war’ as another instrument in our insatiable quest for power, control, dominance, superiority and national security and what we persistently and hubristically, and with concurrent impunity, call, ‘national pride, honour and reputation and empire.’

The difference between national security and ‘national honour and reputation,’ however has become so blurred that, for many the two are indistinguishable. We pay little if any attention to the paradox that those most trained in military strategy and tactics, especially among the hierarchy, are those most opposed to the commencement of a military campaign. The (Colin) Powell doctrine, ‘you only can be permitted to start a war provided you have a preplanned and pre-conceived exit strategy’ seems to have suffered its own demise through the hands and policies of Putin, Netanyahu and trump.

Let’s look further at how we have, and increasingly are further deepening the angst, stress, anxiety, frustration and hopelessness of millions of people in so many jurisdictions. We strip environmental regulations away from polluting corporations, so that they can generate more profit and dividends for their share holders. We reduce corporate and income taxes on the very rich for a similar reason, to mollify and pander to the rich, given the faux-glory that money, fame and social insider-ship’ have become the near-religious idol of the very wealthy. We defund social programs, a process that did not start with the latest American administration. After all, from the point of view of ‘fiscally responsible politicians’ how can, for example, a government afford to provide free transportation to those who have neither a vehicle to drive or have a handicap that excludes them from driving, as the former Harris government did when it withdrew funding for Wheel-trans in Toronto shortly after winning its election? Sarcasm notwithstanding, that kind of gutting of social policy is not merely short-sighted and recriminatory, it sucks hope out of the system, not only for those directly deprived, but for all the rest who can understand the fundamental need.

Human rights, the prized by-word of the establishment, comprises much more than whether those in power comply with some specific law. Human rights commit both those writing the legislation and those beyond those charged with enforcement, but a culture generally, to grapple with its responsibility for ensuring that each jurisdiction respect, honours and dignifies everyone. And we are eons away from anything that might resemble that kind of aspiration. Indeed, we are drifting quickly backwards from that. Just this week, the American president told a former Somali refugee, now a member of the United States Congress that she should go back to her home country and was not welcome in America.

From a religious perspective, we have inherited a perspective on ‘sin’ that is private, personal and highly reductionistic, without in any way providing the necessary patience, or the tools or the training for the necessary investigations of the frequency and the manner and methods by which very injured people invariably inflict serious physical, emotional, financial injuries on even those they aspire to care for any love. We have also ‘jiggered’ an economy based on the success/failure quotients of individuals based on the ‘shoulders’ of the individual ego. If the ego is strong enough, then the person ‘succeeds’ while if the ego is weak, naturally the person fails.

Conventional wisdom entraps every single person between the two book-ends of private sin and personal ego as the fulcrums around which each human life is supposed to roll. And, accompanying both of those book-ends, there are many institutional edifices charged with enforcing both of those ‘shares’..private sin and personal ego.

Public debate rarely if ever even wonders about how much ‘pressure’ any single individual can sustain. And the question is absurd, given the capitalist, competitive and zero-sum game that has overtaken both politics and governance, and apparently also many ecclesial institutions. In the United States, the derision under which all forms of therapy struggle, in part has emerged from the Paul Szasz’s work:

From academic.oup.com, in a piece entitled ‘Szasz, suicide and medical ethics, by George J. Annas, January 2019,  we read:

Szasz (a trained professional and practicing psychiatrist) objected to the medicalization of suicide, the legalization  of suicide prevention, and especially the coercive role of psychiatry in this realm. He declared that by medicalizing suicide, we banish the subject from discussion.  What is meant by acceptable suicide and unacceptable ‘suicide’? Who has a right to commit suicide? How does suicide implicate freedom? Does it reflect abortion jurisprudence? How do psychiatrists become suicide’s gatekeepers? Current phenomena (e.g., new physician-assisted suicide legislation) illuminate these and other issues (e.g. euthanasia, informed consent, informed refusal, the ‘right to die’) all suggesting how Szasz would react to each. Suicide is legal, but is almost always considered a result of mental illness. Courts approve psychiatrists who want to commit ‘suicidal’ patients involuntarily. Granting physicians prospective legal immunity for prescribing lethal drugs is, at best, a strange and tangential reaction to our inability to discuss suicide (and dying) rationally. Szasz got it right. (https.//doi.org/10.1093/n\med/97801098813491.003.0006, pages 55-56)

And from madinamerica.com, a website whose subtitle is: Science, psychiatry and Social Justice, in a piece by  Keith Hoeller PhD,  September 17,  2022 entitled, “Thomas Szasz Versus the Mental Health Movement,” we read:

Szasz believed that the concept of ‘mental illness’ was a metaphor that became literalized due to the category error of applying disease to social moral and political behavior. The people who are labelled mentally ill do not in fact have not anything demonstrably wrong with their bodies or brains, and the standards from which they differ from others are not biological, but social norms.

From the same article, quoting from another of the author’s writing, ‘No Proof Mental Illness Rooted in Biology,’ we read: Psychiatrists have yet to conclusively prove that a single mental illness has a biological or physical cause, or a genetic origin. Psychiatry has yet to develop a single test that can determine that an individual actually has a particular mental illness. Indee, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders uses behavior, not physical symptoms to diagnose mental illness, and it lacks both scientific reliability and validity…..

As Szasz stated for many decades, ‘mental illness’ is the ideology used to justify a myriad of crimes against humanity in which people who have been afforded due process and convicted in court of law for specific offense and imprisoned for years, tortured against their will, and released only if they agreed to continue to take ‘chemical straightjackets’ once they are out.

Szasz believed that ‘mental illness’ was not possible, that ‘minds’ cannot be diseased only bodies can. If medicine was to discover that some constellation of symptoms were to be caused by bodily disease, then this would be added to our known compendium; it would no longer be treated by psychiatrists, but by regular doctors.

What we do not understand, and for which we have no empirical explanation, we, historically, assign a god or goddess or, as James Hillman does, an archetype which might ‘have us’ in its grip, and which may be having us reenact a narrative for which today’s cultural norms are both ill-prepared and quite ready to assign some ‘label’…..and for Hillman, those labels have been clustered under the broad title, “abnormal psychology’. Hillman argues that such academic developments are, at least in part, designed to enhance the profession of psychology. Prescribing pharmaceuticals as part of the treatment ‘naturally’ follows.

In a world awash with science, empiricism, positivism, and STEM educational and training models, in order to feed the economic needs of a capitalist, corporate culture and ethos, it hardly seems surprising that the ‘mental health field’ is exploding measured both on ‘aberrant behaviour’ as well as more and more labels and interventions to subdue, medicate, mediate and tolerate such ‘abnornal behaviour.’

As complicity in operating within the norms of the North American culture, the established churches have, for the most part, adopted the ‘mental illness’ model of perceiving and regarding individuals, both laity and clergy.

And suicide, for both social and theological reasons, qualifies in the church as an especially noxious, nefarious and sinful act, with which and from which the sole response is to ‘disown’ both the act and the perpetrator.

What if, as a consequence, or at least a corollary, to the ‘sanctity of life’ theology and the application of that dogma to ‘abortion,’ suicide has become victim to a distaste, detachment, and disavowal of acceptable  norms within ecclesial circles? And what if the church, and ensuing from that organ, millions of devout and even skeptical adherents learned and were indoctrinated into such a framework of normalcy, now whether overtly or imperceptibly, haloed by God, as another of the legitimate applications of the ‘sanctity of life’ foundations, and perhaps may, or already are foundering on the shoals of that underwater escarpment?

And what if, for hypothetical purposes at least, and for serious consideration at best, we were to listen to some of the words of James Hillman in his elucidation of the notion of the human soul, that ‘aspect’ of the human individual the churches have both laid claim to and have attempted to direct it to an everlasting life in heaven for the ‘saved’?

Taking a soul history means capturing emotions, fantasies, and images by entering the game and dreaming the myth along with the patient. Taking a souls history mean becoming part of the other person’s fate. Where a case history presents a sequence of facts leading to diagnosis, soul history shows rather a concentric helter-skelter pointing always beyond itself. Its facts are symbols and paradoxes….Soul history emerges as one shed case history, or in other words, as one dies to the world as an arena of projection. Soul history is a living obituary, recording life from the point of view of death, giving the uniqueness of a person sub specie aeternitatis. As one builds one’s death, so one writes one’s own obituary in one’s soul history. Case history classifies death by car crash differently from death by overdose of sleeping tablets. Death from disease, death from accident, and from sujicide are called different kinds of death—and so they are, from the outside. Even the more sophisticated classifications (unmeditated, premeditated, and submeditated death) fail to give credit to the involvement of the psyche in every death. These categories do not fully recognize that the soul is always meditating death. In Freud’s sense, Thanatos is ever present: the soul needs death and death resides in the soul permanently. (James Hillman, suicide and the soul, pps. 62-63)

“Building one’s death” seems like a phrase that would be considered heretical even to contemplate, let alone to utter within the confines of a church sanctuary. And yet, what if perhaps unconsciously, we are in some unknown and unmapped ways, envisioning a needed image of our own death, and that energy is so potent, individually and so reprehensible theologically and thereby ethically and morally, that our ego’s and our spirit are stripped of our dark ecentricities, our demons, our personal underworld, which, for Hillman, is the realm of the soul. For Hillman, spirit looks skyward, aspires to heaven, and risks being in danger of detaching from the soul.

Injecting ‘soul’ into the dialogue, discussion and reflection of theological issues, from an archetypal psychological perspective, may to some seem both frivolous and heretical, even an apostasy. Men and woman have been hanged for being heretics and for espousing apostacies……until they weren’t’ either heresies or apostasies.

………….

Next, we will attempt to look at some of the ways suicide might be perceived, assessed and still remain within the domain of Christian theology. And we will do so at our own risk!

Searcing for God # 47

I am usually ‘slow’ to join the party of conventional thought, perception, attitude and belief.

I have resisted as long as I possibly can, denouncing the theology of Original Sin, the belief that all of humanity is cursed with the stain of evil, apparently justified by the Augustinian interpretation, supported by others, that The Fall is the moral, ethical, theological and spiritual starting point of and for humanity.

The thought… ‘how can both the cliché that ‘God don’t make no junk’ and that God created us in his image be congruent with the notion of Original Sin?… has rambled through my cranium for decades. Some, likely mostly men, attempted to square that circle many centuries ago…..a project that, at least finally for this scribe, no longer holds either water or credibility.

Defining sin is one of  the most problematic and enigmatic challenges facing the human race, if it needs a formal, written, proclaimed and punished definition at all. And the implications, repercussions, residual fears, anxieties and self-loathings that have at least a portion of their seeding and gestation in the theology of Original Sin could legitimately been considered to lie at the heart of human history.

Strewn with the blood and bodies, the ink and weaponry of hate, contempt, jealousy, deceit, excess ambition, neurosis and even psychosis, history forms a very dark mirror into which we all have to peer, whether or not we are comfortable with the challenge. Empirical and literal narratives, written primarily by victors in all forms of human conflict, comprise the archives, the tombstones, the museums the libraries and both the human collective conscious and collective unconscious.

We each are awash in blood, shame, infamy, deception of both self and others, and are hourly, daily, monthly and yearly attempting to shed the stain and the shame and the guilt of those wounds in a process that seems only to enhance our need for and even obsession for more ‘self-justification. The number and degree of human conflicts seem only to escalate as our awareness of their nefarious nature is enhanced significantly by the 24-7-365 obsession we all have with the purveyors of what is called ‘news’.

And what if we are ensnared on our own petard: the petard of a theological notion that is both errant, unjustifiable and unsustainable?

OF course, the establishment Christian churches could not and would not accede to anything close to a positive concurrence with that ‘what if’. Traditional Christian theology is steeped in the archetype of the Crucifixion and the salvation from sin in and through the shedding of the blood and life of Jesus. The premise holds as the imprimatur of and for those who ‘believe’ in the historical and the mythical iterations of the New Testament gospels. And the theology, bridging various denominations in the Christian world, has been taught, re-taught,  preached, and re-preached by those who have qualified, been certified and ordained as clergy in the various ecclesial institutions. Belief, the concept of accepting the truth of the story, the implications of being saved from our personal sins, and the testifying to that faith has been the hallmark of both protestant and Roman Catholic religions for centuries.

Supplement that forgiveness with the added commitment to spend eternity in heaven with God and all others who have ‘been saved’ and/or ‘have converted’ to the theology of ‘resurrection, rebirth, transformation and eternal life. The package is a highly radioactive, seductive, provocative and powerful impulsion for many millions who seek to reconcile their lives with God, in and through their faith in Jesus Christ Resurrected.

Having attended hundreds of church services that breathed and sang, nodded and even applauded this story, never once have I been prompted or felt an impulse to take that walk to the front of the sanctuary, or the stadium to identify with those who were demonstrating their ‘conversion.’ Many moments through eight decades, I have wondered if the ‘imposter’ archetype applies to me for my resistance to the theology and the practice and the social blessing that ensues such public conversions.

Now, at the place where the ineffability and unknowability of God, the mystery of God has a prominent place in my thought-feeling-experience-perception of the universe, I am feeling slightly less ‘imposterish’ and am a little more open to the notion that not knowing about the certitude of such a salvation process, linked to a privatized notion of sin, while the world drowns in its/our own self-sabotage, I wonder if we need to take a step back from the urgency of such a dramatic and, for those who have entered and confirmed their ‘conversion’ certainty, and re-think the notion that salvation for the whole world may not have been intended to have a one-person-by-one-person application.

What if a gestalt, a collective conscious and collective unconscious awareness that we indeed are ‘in this together’ and face what can only be described as an existential crisis, (even for those who are not existentialists)? What if rather than Original Sin, we are empowered with, by and from a kind of innate inheritance that rather than claiming to know God, claims rather to know ‘evil’.

The phrase, you will know when the ‘right person comes along’ or  ‘when the house feels right’ or when ‘things are in a flow’ have a ring and a perception that something beyond cognition, intellect and even social confirmation lingers in each situation, if we are open and confident enough to be ready to ‘see’ it and to ‘respond’ to it? Our lives are much more than our answers on examinations, and diseases in our gut, and stipends on our trust accounts, and births, confirmations and marriages on our ancestry pages. There is another ‘phase’ or ‘hidden mystery’ to which we may or may not have conscious ‘access’ to its meaning and/or purpose.

And given that the universe of belief in a deity itself, is a stretch far beyond our cognitive, perceptive, emotive and social consciousness, this ‘otherness’ of some kind of synchronicity, ‘stars-aligning’ or improbable surprises over which we have neither control nor comprehension, seems to have some ‘connection’ or relationship to whatever or whomever of however that deity might be.

The church as leader, followed by a plethora  of public institutions, academic faculties, professional practitioners, and rules and regulations have together formed a formidable phalanx of warriors to combat evil. And, as the cliché asks, ‘How is that monstrous edifice working for you?

Has the Original Sin concept not become a self-fulfilling prophecy? Are we not issuing evidence in torrents and tsunamis that we are capable of such heinous, detestable and hateful evil, some of which is apparently so egregious as to have been both untried and unexpected, and for which we are certainly ill-prepared?

Blaming the other guy, as is our shared complicity, is generating precisely the inverse of what it is intended to generate…more intensity in both the evil and in the self-declared impunity for those embedded in the evils. It emboldens those engaged in the worst evils, and fails to take account of our shared conviction that only ‘others’ can and will commit evil.

We may certainly not have access to the mind of God, although some profess to have ‘insider’ information and credible information as they see it. What we do have, however, and this may cause discomfort, anxiety and even significant distress, is a kind of inner awareness to recognize, to name, to identify, and to confront evil, whether it is originated by us ourselves, or by others.

And that innate certainty, a certainty which knows neither national, nor religious, nor ideological, nor generational, nor cultural nor ethnic boundaries, could just be the common trait, bond, shared identity, and transformative ‘perception’ and awareness that we all share. If we were each and everyone, everywhere, all ages, social and academic and economic and political statuses, all faiths, to acknowledge that inherent metaphoric DNA, cand when we ‘see something say something’ a reductionistic cliché for bumper sticker purposes, we could even shift the playing field from favouring those who are determined to do evil to a field that makes doing evil very difficult.

Instead of the occasional ‘whistle-blower’ for whom we have to institute laws for protection from the revenge of the establishment whose evil they have and will continue to expose, we could all accept the challenge, and the opportunity to engage in a different, certainly unconventional by the last two thousand years of history, way of seeing ourselves, and the evils that surround us and threaten to take us down, every day.

This vision is not a political movement! It is not a denominational conversion call! It is not an ideological deposition for the ‘plaintiff’ or a counter-argument for the defence. It is not an academically certified, credentialled and verified degree project for which one must pass through the academic institutional hoops. None of us is ‘unqualified,’ ‘inadequate,’ ‘uncertified,’ or either inappropriate or incompetent to open our own eyes to a very different way of seeing and appreciating our identity. And that identity has for millions been hidden behind a cloud of ‘fear of embarrassment, fear of reprisals, fear of revenge and outright ‘lethal retaliation’ for opening our mouths.

Writing more laws in more law books, following exhaustive debate in political circles and governments will only challenge those committed to doing evil to enhance the use of their imagination to prove that they are ‘smarter’ than the rest of us. It is not laws we need, especially as we can all see that many if not all of the important ones are being abrogated by the hour.

Intervening non-violently to counter evil by force does not mean taking up military arms, waging war, or even imposing tariffs or sanctions on our enemies. It does not and need not result in arms production and sales that put a weapon in the hands of millions, ‘as false protection’…..the only shield and spear we need is already in our minds, our hearts and our imaginations….the truth.

If Tolstoy’s reading and rendering of the Sermon on the Mount has any relevance, significance and potency, the time for that relevance, significance and potency is now!

It is not a matter of converting bad people to being Good’ before God! It is not a matter of some new intellectual or scientific research project! It is not a program of ‘food aid for the starving’ from the United Nations! It is not a new economic fiscal or monetary policy from the Federal Reserve, or the European Bank, or the Bric Bank. It is not a matter of the supremacy of the Chinese over the Americans, or of the Russians over the Ukrainians, or the Jews over the Palestinians.

There is a levelling aspect to a universally inherited imaginative DNA that finds the muscle it needs to begin to express itself. There are already thousands of especially young people who, like Greta Sundberg, and Malala Yousafzai, and thousands of others who, upon seeing an evil have chosen to confront it non-violently with force.

Before them, Mandela and Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were all moved to articulate the relevance, significant and potency of the Tolstoy homily to their people in their time. Of course, each of these men and young women have their circles of influence, all of which need to be highlighted. We need to begin the process of identifying those who have already crossed the line between complicit silence in the face of evil, evil that no one can dispute stares us in the face, and start championing them, rather than muddying the waters further by micro-reporting on the evils of those who are intent on gaining complete control of the world stage.

Perhaps it is in our silence and complicity and blindness to our own inherent consciousness and unconsciousness of evil, more than in our overt revenge and hatred, bigotries and exclusions, our defamations and our pettiness that bespeaks our own self-sabotage and evil.

We are blessed with a different vision, and the courage to enact and embody its promise.

Searching for God # 46

In the last post words like agency, intervention, action, birthed and nurtured under several banners such as ‘purpose, meaning, training, ambition, imagination, commitment, and occasionally prevention.’ The church, too, has a vocabulary and a mind-set to ‘intervene’ and to ‘save’ and to ‘comfort’ and to ‘accompany’ and to ‘support’ and to ‘remember’ and also ‘to prevent’….

Institutional growth, however it might be measured, is presumed to be a matter of designed plans, processes, training, interventions and hard work. Similarly personal growth, whether it be of a psychic or spiritual or intellectual nature, is premised on ‘doing the work’ as if we are each expected to consider ourselves our own special ‘project’ as an indication, perhaps to God, that we take ourselves seriously and operate under the belief that God also  takes each of us very seriously. High standards, high criticisms and retribution and reformation and rehabilitation programs abound for all of us, depending on our specific lists of ‘deficiencies’.

And we have trained and mentored and supervised millions of professionals in many fields to assist with our ‘remediation,’ ‘reformation,’ ‘rehabilitation,’ and ‘development’….as if each of our lives were a design piece on a continuum of normality. Age stages, imagined and researched by various academics, like Erikson, and Piaget, Montessorie, have helped ‘define’ norms by which we attempt to ‘gauge’ the relative development of many young boys and girls.

And, normalcy, like some kind of ‘mannah’ from heaven, both physically, emotionally, psychically, and intellectually has become a kind of ‘obsession’ especially for those who have either been told, or have observed that a particular child is ‘different’…..almost like the Green Witch of the West. Her archetype is so familiar to so many that one is tempted and even prompted to ask, ‘Who among us has not felt ‘different’ depending on the perception, attitude and insensitivity of others?’ I recall, in my sixties walking up a street near the downtown core of a modern middle-sized city, when  I heard a male voice, that I thought I recognized, cough briefly and then exclaim, ‘There is an ass I would recognize anywhere!’ as he passed me. It was a colleague of some two decades from a previous life, who, one supposes, was attempting to crack a joke about an obese body, as his way of ‘greeting’.

As a mid-adolescent, at fifteen and sixteen I was 5’9” and weighed 195 pounds. I knew that ours of piano practice had contributed to my ‘body image’ and a menu of home cooking that would rival a castle for richness and tastiness only added to the issue. As if by some ‘accident’ or some other ‘blip’ in the universe, I had an accident while driving my father’s half-ton pick-up, after which the now-disposable vehicle was parked, it seemed for weeks, (perhaps only a few days) on the lot of a prominent car dealership, complete with his name printed in bold letters on the side of the box. For the next three weeks, while working a summer job in a Dominion Store (now they have all disappeared), I lost 25 pounds and was then able to enter the school track meet in the fall.

Prior to that accident, given a likely longer list of objections to date than I can conceivably imagine, my ‘dating life’ was non-existent. Who would have wanted to go out with an obese kid whose only hobby or interest seemed to be the piano? I recall standing against the wall at a teen-town dance in the Oddfellows Hall, in the summer of grade nine, wearing the brown flecked sport jacket and open-necked seersucker shirt over the jacket collar (a wardrobe insisted on by my mother), neither approaching a young girl of my acquaintance to dance, or certainly even being asked to dance by anyone else. In that same grade nine school year, while taking part in dancing classes at noon in the high school, I also recall the female PE teacher asking me to dance, presumably as part of her designed purpose to integrate everyone into the program. Testing dance students on their grasp of the dance steps was likely another of her purposes in asking.

Being ‘different’ in body shape and size was also supplemented by my not joining other young males in their hunting and/or fishing adventures. Oh, I was also among the small few, until sixteen, who were regular church attenders, ‘courtesy’ of my parents’ requirements. So in one calendar year, I publicly ‘left’ the church, has the truck accident, lost 25 pounds and was determined to begin some kind of athletic activity, starting with track and then with basketball, all of in my graduating year.

Private hours, however, during adolescence, were filled with popular hit tunes primarily aired over radio station CKEY out of Toronto. Hosts with names like Stu Kenny, Russ Thompson, Carl Bannis, were as familiar to me as the local mayor, or the local law fraternity. Voice modulation of those hosts, tone, tempo, and resonance, although none of those words were familiar, was something to which I was drawn, and would compare inside my own imagination…trying to ascertain what each of the hosts ‘looked like’ and what kind of person they might be.

At the same time, of course, I was following, apparently somewhat assiduously, the various solo singers and their rotating entries into the pop charts. I even sent away an order for a special magazine featuring and comparing Pat Boone and Perry Como. I had ‘graduated’ from Toronto Maple Leaf players photos and photo rings of players like Harry Watson and Sid Smith and Teeter Kennedy and Max Bentley to popular vocalists.

Imaginary ‘relationships’ with mere visions of men I admired, emulated and wanted to know more about comprised a ‘social life’ long before social media was a glint in anyone’s eye or imagination. I did not think about it then, being different was an almost imperceptible way for one to have more than one ‘path’ of life simultaneously. I was a radio ‘geek’ (in today’s parlance, secretly) and a hockey fan publicly, and a private piano student as a ‘performer’.

Apparently, I was also growing a muscle that was completely unfamiliar, whether because it was unconscious or whether it did not want to be ‘known’ to its human. That muscle was ‘critic’, that jumped out in my rebellion to the specific bigoted homily from the church pulpit. It jumped out when I heard my dad tell me, ‘You are being raised by Hitler and Chamberlain,’ a moment that clarified so many things that had puzzled me.  It had started to climb out of its ‘womb’ when I silently protested about ‘that drunken hockey player’ observation from my mother, to which I silently retorted, ‘what do you know about him and his pain?’

It was growing in both strength and clarity when I opposed the termination of the Arrow jet by the Diefenbaker government, an engine production facility with British engineers had already been operating only about 7 miles from town. It gathered some more resilience when I asked my mother to stop smoking DuMauriers, in our family kitchen. It gathered some confidence when, in a conversation with a visiting African clergy on the deck of my aunts’ cottage, I asked him about the possible relevance of the American ‘separation of church and state’ to which he affirmed it was impossible to separate. In grade thirteen, I asked the history teacher a ‘why’ question about the United Nations, and received a blunt and unappealable reply, ‘We do not have time for that question; we have to prepare for the final examination!’

University ‘questions’ were more about ‘what do I need to know’ and ‘will memory work ‘do’ here, especially memory work to regurgitate the professors’ notes? And why is there not more ‘challenging intellectual’ opportunity inside the classroom? It seems to be a repeat, at a more condensed level, of the pedagogy of that history teacher. Learn, memorize, write papers, something I fully engaged in, although not often with high grades, and then how to fill out a need to be engaged with the campus.

Fraternity membership was a Christmas gift from my parents, and minor responsibilities, like organizing a weekend conference, and then, helping to plan and organize a campus-formal were at the centre of my years as an undergrad.

Learning to teach, coach and supervise residents in a private school took time and energy, as a finished my degree with a correspondence course in Canadian History. Challenging the local clergy in a public debate on the subject: ‘Is the Christian faith relevant today?’ as part of a Lenten Study program, organized by the local clergy, stretched my ‘pushing the envelope’ muscle’ as did a Rotary classification ‘talk’ on education in which I invited two high school students, a vocalist and a guitarist, to perform ‘Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They are a’Changin’ and Gordon Lighfoot’s ‘In the Early Morning Rain’ as bookends to my little offering.

Now engaged in the teaching profession, I was determined to resist a path detailed by ‘salary incentives’ to complete a ‘specialist’ qualifications, in a specific subject. I chose instead, to the dismay of colleagues, to enroll and complete a master’s degree in administration. I had no idea that there even was such a program at that time in Counselling. I simply wanted more ‘education’ and more opportunity to learn, and I somehow thought broadening was more important than specializing. I had this nagging voice in my head saying, ‘you teach kids’ not ‘you teach English, or History’…

And then, surprise, I had an opportunity to ask questions as a requirement in a free-lance television journalism job covering local city hall. Wow! I was, without a single minute of formal training, asking local politicians why they were voting ‘this way’ or ‘that way’ on local issues. My Walter Mitty had found a playground for my curiosity! And then, I was invited to write a weekly opinion column from city hall, and also some radio editorials on public issues. And, to some it likely seemed that I was more interested and engaged in my ‘Walter Mitty’ life than I was in my profession as an English teacher.

In the vortex of deadlines, issues, personalities and trying to find my own voice, I found many opportunities to object to a decision, or to question a non-decision, through more than a dozen years of this Walter Mitty free-lance escapade.

Throughout these various ‘chapters’ (certainly not stages!) I was also exploring my curiosity about God, faith, religion, and questions about the meaning and purpose of death. These subjects were at the centre of much of the literature that was included in the curriculum of senior English students. And, as any teacher knows, the teacher needs to learn what s/he is teaching as much as the students might wish to learn. Indeed, we teach best what we need to know….and we also learn, likely more than some students who seem merely to attend class is their maximum commitment to their learning.

I bought into the cultural, and intellectual concept of ‘activity, intervention, agency,’ as it seemed integral and inherent to the process of ‘teaching’ and then ‘reporting’ as a freelancer. The world is  fast-moving kaleidoscope of colours, faces, words, sounds, ideas, and even prayers petitions to God…..and the human ‘separation’ as observer, curator, consumer,  reporter, interpreter and even gardener seemed to be the primary ‘lens’ through which I and many others perceived the world and attempted to find a place of ‘agency’ within that world.

And as I began to ‘experience’ a sense of hollowness in my own commitment to that process of being both an agent and an employee in a world dominated and tyrannized by economics, by amount of dollars as the primary criterion for so many decisions, both personal and public, I wanted to withdraw, to step back and to reflect both on my obsessive needs for ‘gratification and applause’ and how  I might live my life by peering through a different lens.

And as the years have flown, I have watched a changing horizon on both my perceptions and on the horizon itself. And those changes have some over-laping common characteristics. Although I was appalled with I heard a post-secondary educator-executive ponder that many issues, if left alone without especially urgent intervention, would probably resolve themselves, without much turbulence or disturbance.

And that whole ‘lens’ of ‘non-intervention’ has been taking more and more prominence in my perceptions for several decades.

To be continued……