Searcing for God # 98

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

In death’s dream kingdom

These do not appear

There, the eyes are

Sunlight on a broken column

There, is a tree swinging

And voices are

In the wind’s singing

More distant and more solemn

Than a fading star

 

Let me be no nearer

In death’s dream kingdom

Let me also  wear

Such deliberate disguises

Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves

In a field

Behaving as the wind behaves

No nearer

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do I mean by that apparent paradox?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Searching for God # 97

Anyone who happened to watch “The Whole Story” with Anderson Cooper, hosted by Pamela Brown, Sunday March 22, 2026 featuring the religious scourge being propagated by some Doug Wilson, including their intimate links to the White House, would have to be shocked, and dismayed.

Not only is the ‘putative’ saviour of these people the current occupant of the Oval Office, and the current Secretary of War one of the more prominent disciples of this quasi-religious behemoth, but the religion being preached is little more than another literal, fundamental and highly motivated political cult.

Essentially conceived and executed it is a religious war against Islam, along with several other hot-button social issues, like ‘women must be obedient to their male partners’ who, themselves, are the head of the house. Of course, there must be no abortion, and there must be ‘compliance’ to a rendition of parts of scripture that suit the purpose of these mostly men.

Under the rubric of Christian (and implied white) nationalism, these people are attempting to generate a theocratic nation within the United States.

Fortunately, there are voices who stand ready to engage these religious zealots with both theological and political arguments.

In providencemag.com, in a piece entitled, The Case Against Christian Nationalism, by Mark Tooley, March 12, 2026, we read:

…(S)elf-identified Christian Nationalists, at least the intellectuals, want a confessional state that will punish apostasy and blasphemy. The nonintellectual advocates usually articulate a less sympathetic arrangement, where government promotes of privileges Christian beliefs. …Both Temperance/Prohibition and Civil Rights were spiritual and mostly bipartisan movements that surged through public opinion, generated by churches and civil society, only later enacted in law, unsuccessfully for the former, and more enduringly in the latter. The same could be said for women’s suffrage and the larger drive for legal equality for women.

From the idahostatesman.com, in a piece entitled, Idaho Christian nationalists embrace the immoral if they have power, by Bryan Clark, August 15, 2025, we read:

The point is to gain power for a reactionary kind of political and cultural view-hence the movement’s constant insistence on the submission of women to men; the sympathy for the Old South, even to the point of defending slavery: constant attacks on gays and transgender people occasionally downplaying the Holocaust and so on—and Christianity is a pretty cloak to wrap that foul project in. This explains their consistent embrace of individuals who relentlessly exhibit personal debauchery—so long as they have political power—people like Hegseth and Trump…..The Christian nationalists movement’s embrace of people like this can be understood in much the same way as the massive board of pornography found in the outwardly pious Osama ben Laden’s hard drives after his death; it shows that terrorism was his primary commitment, and his religion was a situationally dispensable secondary matter. ….Asked if Muslims in Idaho should have to live by Christian law, (Doug) Wilson (the leader of this movement) responded: If I went to Saudi Arabia, I would fully expect to live under their God’s laws….What the Christian nationalist movement proposes is not a return to Idaho’s older and better days; it is the imposition of a new and fundamentally alien order…..The point isn’t for America or Idaho to be Saudi Arabia with a  different religion. The point is for American and for Idaho to be free. If Wilson doesn’t like that, maybe he should find another vineyard. Maybe the aforementioned Saudi Arabia, where it’s illegal to be gay, where women can’t vote,, where institutions quite like slavery persist, where most of what Wilson and his cohort want for Idaho is already accomplished.

From motherjones.com, in a piece entitled, Christian Nationalists Dream of Taking Ove America. This Movement is Actually Doing It, subtitled, ‘The New Apostolic Reformation is ‘the greatest threat to democracy you’ve never heard of,’ by Kiera Butler, Photography by Caroline Gutman, November-December 2024 Issue, we read:

The devotees….(are) leaders in the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a charismatic evangelical Christian movement led by a loose network of self-appointed prophets and apostles, who claim that God speaks directly to them, often in dreams. They believe that Christians are called to wage a spiritual battle for control of  the United States. In the vanguard of an ascendant Christian nationalist movement, they are seeking an explicitly Christian command of public schools, public policy and all levels of government, including the courts….Its laser focus on starting a spiritual war to Christianize America has led the  Southern Poverty Law Center to call NAR ‘the greatest threat to US democracy that you have never heard of. Estimates of Christians influenced by NAR vary widely, from 3 million to 33 million. But the number of adherents isn’t the extent of its influence; its main tenets have moved beyond the confines of churches and into the political mainstream, largely thanks to traveling apostles and prophets who preach at evangelical churches all over the world. Fred Clarkson a senior research analyst with the extremism watchdog group Political Research Associates, described the New Apostolic Reformation as a seismic cultural shift. ‘It’s the transformation of an entire society with this certain kind of Christo-centric worldview,’ he told me. ‘We’re talking about something so transcendentally revolutionary that most people never even thought about something like this.’

According to Britannica.org:

According to a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institute whose results were published in February 2023, more than half of all Republicans either identified themselves as Christian nationalists or sympathize with Christian nationalist views.

From the website of the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, ambs.edu, in a section entitled ‘What is Christian nationalism?’ Drew Strait, PhD, Associate Professor of New Testament and Public Faith, contends:

Christian nationalism, in short, is a worldview where one’s theological imagination is coopted by state power. It exchanges the church’s loyalty to the Lord of Peace for a false god fashioned by the myth of American exceptionalism. In fact, Christian nationalism is a form of political idolatry that distorts our knowledge of God and neighbor through a xenophobic, radicalized and militarized gospel that ios at odds with the life and teaching of Jesus.

From gs2025.anglican.ca, The Anglican Church of Canada, we find these intriguing and assertive notes:

Opposition to Christian Nationalism

Be it resolved that this General Synod

1.    Condemn Christian nationalism as a distortion of the gospel of Jesus and a threat to Canadian democracy

2.    Reject the damaging political ideology of Christian Nationalism and oppose this threat to our faith and to our nation

3.    Encourage individuals, congregations, dioceses, and other communities within the Church to educate themselves about this issue and its negative effects on marginalized groups.

Explanatory notes/Background

As Christians, our faith teaches us everyone is created in God’s image and commands us to love one another. In our Baptismal Covenant, we promise to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbours as ourselves, and to strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being. As Christians we are bound to Christ, not by citizenship, but by faith. As Canadians, we value our systems of government and the good that can be accomplished in our parliamentary democracy.

It is our hope that this motion reaffirms our beliefs that:

·      People of all faiths and none have the right and responsibility to engage constructively in the public square

·      Canada has no second-class faiths

·      Patriotism does not require us to minimize our religious convictions

·      One’s religious affiliation, or lack thereof, should be irrelevant to one’s standing in the civic community

·      Government should not prefer one religion over another or religion over non-religion

·       Canada’s historic commitment to religious pluralism enables faith communities to live in civic harmony with one another without sacrificing our theological convictions

·      Conflating religious authority with political authority is idolatrous and often leads to oppression of minority and other marginalized groups as well as the spiritual impoverishment of religion

·      We must stand up to and speak out against Christian nationalism, especially when it inspires acts of violence and intimidation—including vandalism, bob threats, arson, hate crimes, and attacks on houses of worship- against religious communities at home and abroad.

I  can think of nor find a more appropriate quote from a favourite theologian about the escapism of some religionists, especially those who have been induced (seduced)into the Christian Nationalism Reformation: This quote is from Moltmann’s Ethics of  Hope 2012,  from sdmorrison.org, in a piece entitled, Jurgen Moltmann on the Rapture and ‘Left Behind’ by Stephen D. Morrison, November 18, 2017, we read:

(A) religious escapism is coming to the fore especially in the present spread of a vague Gnostic religiosity of redemption. The person who surrenders himself to this religiosity feels at home in ‘the world beyond’ and on earth sees himself merely as a guest. So, it is only by the way he is concerned about the fate of life on this earth. His soul is going to heaven, that is the main thing. In the body and on the earth he was no more than a guest, so the fate of this hostelry really has nothing to do with him. Religious practices lauding an indifference to life are offered under many high sounding names…American pop-apocalyptic offers an especially dramatic escapism. Before the great afflictions of the end of the world, true believers will be ‘raptured’ ---snatched away to heaven, so that they can then build with Christ as the Second Coming. All unbelievers unfortunately belong to the ‘Left Behind’, the people who are not ‘caught up’ and who will perish in the downfall of the world. (Left Behind is the title of an American book series read by millions). Whether people throw themselves into the pleasures of the present or flee into the next world because they either cannot or will not withstand the threats, they destroy the love for life and put themselves at the service of terror and annihilation of the world. Today life is in acute danger because in one way or the other it is not longer loved of but is delivered over to the forces of destruction.

Readers of this space will already be familiar with my own “Left Behind” by such  fundamental religious extremism, although in 1958, the enemy for the Presbyterian clergy was Roman Catholicism. “If you are a Roman Catholic, you are going to Hell!” is a sentence verbatim from the pulpit on a Sunday morning. I was 16 at the time, seated in the pew with my parents, on this, the last Sunday I worshipped in that church. Imagine, if today, that brand of religious bigotry had the target of Islam to provoke and invoke its vengeance! 

Searching for God # 96

 I would like to offer a quote from Rollo May, whose book, Psychology and the Human Dilemma, published in 1967. That date may render the book both outdated and therefore out of touch to many readers. Nevertheless, as the cliché goes, please bear with me and check it out.

The ultimate self-destructive use of technology consists of employing it to fill the vacuum of our own diminished consciousness. And conversely, the ultimate challenge facing modern man is whether he can widen and deepen his own consciousness to fill the vacuum created by the fantastic increase of his technological power. It seems to me, and not the outcome of a particular war, is the issue on which our survival depends.

There is, however, a particular dilemma we need to mention which is made more difficult by modern technology. This is the phenomenon of the ‘organization man.’ Increasingly in out time,--this is an inevitable result of collectivization—and it is the organization man who succeeds. And he is characterized by the fact that he has significance only if he gives up his significance….One becomes the man who works well in an organization, the harmonistic ‘team man,’ the worker who maintains protective coloring so that he won’t be singled out and shot at. To this extent you are said to be significant, but it is a significance that is bought precisely at the price of giving up your significance.

The loss of the experience of one’s own significance leads to the kind of anxiety that Paul Tillich called the anxiety of meaninglessness, or what Kierkegaard terms anxiety as the fear of nothingness….Now such anxiety is endemic throughout our whole society. (May, op. cit. p. 37)

From christianscholars.org, in a piece entitled, “Good Work, Done Well for the Right Reasons and with an End in Mind: Playing at Work,’ by Margaret Diddams, August 22, 2024, we read:

…(T)heologian Jurgen Moltmann, in his ‘Theology of Play,’…contended that in twentieth century Western culture, the root causes of both meaningless labor and alienated play could be found in the control of the ruling political authority; they had become the servant of the oppressor. Worse still, he argued, play had become modeled on the emptiness of work, diminishing its hopefulness. Play, if it was to become authentic and regain its joyfulness, must be separated from earthly powers and refocused on the eschaton. Moltmann, seeing no similar hope for work, does not make a similar plea to the eschaton for its redemption…..

With respect to the person focused on work-and-play which theologians have generally regarded as complementary to each other, Theologian Brian Edgar refers to this focus as a person’s ‘playfulness,’ incorporating freedom, delight, and creativity. He suggests that a playful attitude ‘lies at the very heart of spirituality and is critical for the whole of life. Play isn’t so much about what we do as who we are…Play has one more important attribute: its role in the eschaton. A realized eschatology recognizes that God’s kingdom, while not yet perfect, is present among us and gives reason for hope not just in an afterlife but in the here and now. As Albert Wolters writes, redemption of God’s kingdom has already begun since the ‘healing restoring work of Christ marks the invasion of the kingdom into the fallen creation. Subsequently, the eschaton is also about ‘those things which possess finality and ultimacy of meaning. Yet, God is not saving His end purposes for the end times alone. Both the Old and New Testament are full of parties, dancing, feasts, festivals and songs of praise that will culminate in the ultimate restoration of God’s kingdom. If play is part of God’s kingdom and the eschaton is associated with ultimate meaning then play must be part of that ultimate meaning. Theologian Jurgen Momltmann drew just such a conclusion. After publishing his view of realized eschatology in ‘Theology of Hope’ in 1964, Moltmann came to realize the importance of play in his view of the eschaton that is both present and future oriented, publishing his Theology of Play in 1972. As he did in his ‘Theology of Hope,’ in ‘Theology of Play’ he argues that the eschaton is present now. In consequence, we should strive to life spontaneously, as if playing, which gives a foretaste of the joy we will experience in the fulfillment of God’s kingdom. Edgar echoes this, writing, ‘a playful attitude, I suggest, lies at the very heart of spirituality and is critical for the whole of life. It will enrich our lives if we come to see that play is essential and an ultimate form of relationship with God. Play as part of God’s kingdom has redemptive purposes.

A playful attitude amidst the daily requiem of news of death, however, may seem both incongruous and immature, unconsciously disrespectful and even irresponsible. Moralising and  judging too, seem incompatible and incongruous with a ‘serious’ adult, socially and culturally ‘fitting’ attitude, especially the attitude May depicts as one of ‘organization man’. Giving up one’s identity by fitting into the organization is never more evident and depressing that at a church retreat for aspiring, naïve, innocent, and idealistic candidates for postulancy for ministry.

In my experience, having been required to submit a biography to those who will be conducting ‘audition’ interviews as the gatekeepers of the organization, and then having one of the those ‘adjudicators enter the room to interview me and opening with this line, “Having read your biography, I was afraid to come in to interview you!” Stunned, and yet determined to ‘fit in’ I somewhat meekly responded, “I am here to answer whatever questions you might have.” After some forty-five minutes, I asked, “Do you still feel the same way you did when you entered?” and heard, “No, I feel quite comfortable now! And, would you like another interview?”

Having already sat for three interviews, I noted I would prepared for a fourth, but did not personally seek a fourth. As I was then recently (60 days) separated from a 23-year marriage, I can only suppose that, in 1987, candidates with that ‘scar’ on their resume were considered ‘dangerous’ for a church that prides itself in being part of, if not the symbol of, ‘the establishment.’ The adage ‘The Anglican Church is the Conservative Party at Prayer’ is, or at least was in the late 1980’s, very close to the bone of truth. Certainly, admitting prospective candidates for ministry was then, and likely is still today, the antithesis of play.

Similarly, while attending seminary, I found that issues of power and authority obedience to bishops, gender relationships, and internship assignments had high priority. Earnestness of fellow classmates, eagerness, serious discussions, sermon preparations and delivery in chapel, written assignments and meetings with a faculty advisor were all important; levity, playfulness and even imagination were not much in evidence.

Doubtless, there were moments of levity among individuals; the institutional demeanour and culture, however, were anything but playful. Indeed, the seriousness of the prospect of completing seminary, much of it by ‘fitting in’ and certainly ‘not asking too many questions in class’ hung like a shroud over those years.

Sunday school picnics, including various games, even potluck suppers, and choir and young peoples’ parties, while infrequent, did occasionally find their appropriate, if infrequent, entry on the calendar of an adolescent in the 1950’s.This business of surrendering to God, of adhering to his precepts, demands, expectations and the concomitant consequences of compliance or defiance was all shrouded in seriousness, and  with high moral expectations came the inevitable gossip among church community members.

On reflection, I have to surmise that, in those circumstances, the kingdom of God was generally considered to be ‘separate’ from the life here on the earth. Those in charge had been ‘raised’ and ‘encultured’ in a somewhat sanctified ethos. Clergy were generally considered ‘serious men’ (no women at all back then) and the business of serious illness, death, baptism, marriage, and the liturgies of funerals cast a level of darkness over the whole religious enterprise. Even the installation of the carillon bells, while a celebration, seemed to be considered more of a ‘status’ thing within the community. Certainly no other church, protestant or catholic exhibited such musical capacity, daily, at five o’clock every weekday afternoon. Predominantly what were then considered ‘chest-nut’ hymns, (such as the Old Rugged Cross) were beamed out across the little town.

This matter of the relationship between and the connection between the life here and now and the prospect of a life at the end of times, is and has been a matter for considerable confusion, debate, discussion and uncertainty. Theologians have reflected and written about this matter from the beginning. And, for this scribe, the issue has relevance as ‘metaphor’ and image of a world beyond human conception, human expectation, but not beyond human anticipation.

And it is in the anticipation, whether felt and believed to be credible (not literal, not historical, not married to a calendar or a time clock, indeed, totally dis-connected by both calendar and clock) that Moltmann expresses in his phrase, ‘hope when there is no sign or hint or foreshadowing of hope’….

And that is where one’s faith either rests, or does not rest. And for this scribe, that is another of the many ‘beyond one’s capacity to perform, to imagine, to expect and to be worthy of’ that embodies, not so much in a physical, literal, historical or empirical way, but rather in another dimension of which only glimpses might be accessible to many of us humans.

And, even in that imagined anticipation, one’s tilting toward playfulness is being expressed.

The church has much re-visioning to consider if it is to be open to many of the thoughts and perceptions, attitudes and tendencies in this space. Is that another of the many pieces of evidence that whatever theologians might be thinking rarely if ever finds its way into the few moments in a church liturgy, and especially into a cleric’s homily. Playfulness, however, is not anathema or counterintuitive to scholarship. Indeed, it may be that scholarship itself could use some serious injection of playfulness.

Searching for God # 95

 Excerpts of two essays appearing in The Conversation, today, March 19, 2026

Spiritual warfare and an end times revival

Among some pro-Trump leaders in neo-Pentecostal and neo-Charismatic circles, the conflict with Iran is interpreted as spiritual warfare. They view global events as part of an ongoing struggle between divine and demonic forces and believe the prayers of Christians help push back what they see as evil powers.

Lou Engle, a U.S. neo-Charismatic prophet, posted one day before the attack, that in 2006, a group of 70 believers gathered in Boston for a prolonged period of prayer lasting 40 days and nights. He referenced the prophecy of Jeremiah 49:34-38, which names the judgment against Elam — an ancient region located in what is now southern Iran. Mobilizing this text, he said believers prayed “God would break the bow of Islam and set His throne in Iran.”

The Jewish feast of Purim, which was celebrated on March 2 and 3, was leveraged to explain the current conflict as spiritual warfare.

This framing is rooted in how some of these pro-Trump Pentecostal leaders see examples of cosmic battles in biblical texts, such as Daniel 10,12-21 which depicts supernatural forces at work in conflict among nations. By André Gagné Full Professor, Department of Theological Studies, Concordia University

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Seeking Armageddon Rhetoric about wars being religious, and Trump being divinely anointed and about to cause Armageddon, is deeply disturbing and has catalyzed condemnation from Christians in the U.S. and beyond advocating non-violent and diplomatic foreign policy.

Violent U.S. religious rhetoric being amplified with the U.S.-Israel war against Iran is associated with beliefs that once Israel is restored as a nation and the temple in Jerusalem is rebuilt, Jesus will return and judge humanity

Christians adhering to these views read the Biblical Book of Revelation, with its vivid symbolic apocalyptic language, as making literal claims about history. They maintain their inspired and authoritative Biblical interpretation allows them to know that conflicts in the Middle East initiate God’s final act in history, with Trump seen as the dominating and aggressive man who can help usher in God’s violent judgment of his enemies.

Interpretations of Jesus’s death and violence It’s relevant to consider how some Christian beliefs about Jesus’s death correlate with a willingness to support or justify violence.

Protestant Evangelical theologians, such as J. I. Packer and John Stott, argue that Jesus’s death primarily “paid the penalty” for human sin. They emphasize that God’s holiness requires a payment for this sin. In this framework, God orchestrates the violent death of Jesus to satisfy God’s penal justice to forgive humanity.

Non-evangelical Christians, on the other hand, like 19th-century Congregationalist Horace Bushnell and contemporary Mennonite theologian J. Denny Weaver, understand the death of Jesus as an example of God’s love.

In this interpretation, Jesus doesn’t endure violence to pay a debt to God. Instead, the death of Jesus is more akin to that of a martyr’s tragic death. These theologians reject violence as a condition for forgiveness.

A 2012 debate in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) about a hymn demonstrates this tension, with a proposed change of hymn lyrics from “on that cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied” to “the love of God was magnified.” Ultimately, the authors rejected the proposal.

A more responsible evangelical theology

I argue Christians should not believe in a God of violent death, but life. Violent atonement and eschatology portrays a God who is not above revenge and a God who leaves most of humanity hopeless.

We are left asking a series of disturbing questions if God is indeed about to end the world with violence. Why does the tone of this theology resemble the tone of empire, which crushes enemies instead of building bridges with them? Why does Jesus, as One Person of the One God, expect his followers to love their enemies — if God the Father ultimately does not?

All Christians in the U.S. and beyond need to reject violent theology as incompatible with the love of God that was magnified on the cross. By Matthew Burkholder PhD Candidate, Theological Studies, University of Toronto

In this space in the last post, the word eschatology was referenced, as the study of the end of times. Throughout that piece I had attempted to discern between a literal, historical reading of scripture and a mythical, poetic, imaginative reading of those same words, stories, and their ultimate intent. The question of loving one’s enemies, as posed by Burkholder, positing Jesus as a symbol of love and his father as symbol of enmity, lies at the heart of much of what has been discussed in this space for some weeks.

Tolstoy notes that loving enemies for most of us might extend to a level of forgiveness of which humans might be capable, without demanding or requiring a perfect absolution of which only God is capable. It is the absolutism, the literalism, and the ‘imposition’ of such dogmatic, intractable, self-righteous, and even imperialistic attitudes as integral to one’s Christian (or any other) faith that is and will continue to be so repulsive, so anti-theology of all forms, faces, iterations and applications.

The symbiotic confluence of expecting the ‘rapture’ by both Jews and Christians, for example, is a piece of theology in which many legitimate scholars, far more schooled and brilliant of mind than this scribe, disagree, again except in the ‘metaphoric, the imaginative, and the beyond anything humans can ‘conceive conceptualise and certainly deliver.

From sdmorrison.org, in a piece entitled, Jurgen Moltmann on the Rapture and ‘Left Behind’ by Stephen D. Morrison, November 18, 2017, we read:

Jurgen Moltmann discusses the problem of religious escapism with a particular appeal  again the rapture theory, in his book, Ethic of Hope:

Here a religious escapism is coming to the fore especially in the present spread of a vague Gnostic religiosity of redemption. The person who surrenders himself to this religiosity feels at home in ‘the world beyond’ and on earth sees himself merely as a guest. So it is only by the way he is concerned about the fate of life on this earth. His soul is going to heaven, that is the main thing. In the body and on the earth it was no more than a guest, so the fate of this hostelry really has nothing to do with him. Religious practices lauding an indifference to life are offered under many high sounding names…American pop-apocalyptic offers an especially dramatic escapism. Before the great afflictions of the end of the world, true believers will be ‘raptured’ ---snatched away to heaven, so that they can then build with Christ as the Second Coming. All unbelievers unfortunately belong to the ‘Left Behind’, the people who are not ‘caught up’ and who will perish in the downfall of the world. (Left Behind is the title of an American book series read by millions). Whether people throw themselves into the pleasures of he present or flee into the next world because they either cannot or will not withstand the threats, they destroy the love for life and put themselves at the service of terror and annihilation of the world. Today life is in acute danger because in one way or the other it is not longer loved but is delivered over to the forces of destruction.

Morrison editorialises:

When our Earthly/bodily life is not loved, affirmed and accepted, we either resign ourselves to a religious escapism or numb ourselves with hedonistic pleasures….Redemption does not mean an escape from this world, but we hope that together with creation we will be made new.

Morrison then quotes Moltmann again from Ethics of Hope:

I don’t want to go to heave. Heaven is there for the angels, and I am a child of the earth. But I expect passionately the world to come: The new heaven and the new earth where justice dwells, where God will wipe away every tear and make all things new. And this expectation makes life in this world for me, here and now, most lovable.

It is past time for the mainline churches to come out of the closet, not only to publicly criticize the lies and the duplicity and the propaganda and the insidious narcissism married to an even more insidious religiosity that undergirds arguments for the American administrations wars, injustices, and nihilism. It is time for the mainline clergy, and their bishops to underscore a theology that relegates the escapism, cloaked in heroic American white Christian nationalism predicated on a ‘rapture’ of self-and-other-delusion, to the margins, or into the waste basket, where it belongs.

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On a personal note, (again referenced several times in this space) I was a child in a ‘Christian fundamentalist, evangelical, born-again cult of a Northern Irish charismatic clergy from Balleymena, where I chose, at sixteen, to become one of the ‘Left Behind’ long before I had ever heard of or read Moltmann. The power and influence of this theology is as dangerous as fascism and warnings against its hegemony need to have as many voices as possible, relentlessly protesting the evil both of its content and of its ‘praxis’.

Searching for God # 94

 But there is also something the spiritual life teaches, again and again, in ways both gentle and severe. (The Emptiness that Heals, by Rev. Allison Burns-Lagreca, on Substack, Thoughts, Prayers Art,  March 18, 2026)

Reverend Burns-Lagreca, in this piece is reflecting on her unexplained loss of ten years of digital writing, memories, prayers, significant days when reflections really matter, and, as she acknowledges, a part of herself is in that loss. Poof! Gone! Never to be recovered!

Sitting in the grief and loss, in emotional pain and confusion and self-doubt, there comes a moment of, ‘what might this be teaching me?’ Not as a short-cut to avoid the emotional angst, but as an inner voice evoking a thought-pause, an emotional modulation, into a new key without losing the anguish.

Individuals caught in such moments when whatever has happened has no perceptible cause, no explanation, and no access to recourse and recovery, we all know about this, feel small.

It is at such moments when Jurgen Moltmann’s notion of hope when there is no sign to suggest or to enable its being envisioned, as one of the cores of the Christian faith, somehow, for many, almost without evocation or prompting, speaks from deep inside. And while Reverend Burns-Lagreca has heard its soft whisper and paused to listen intently, many in the church do not, perhaps can not heard that still small voice.

Over the last few posts in this space, has heard from Robert Funk, organizer of the Jesus Seminar, William Blake and James Alison.

Funk deplored the habit of many Christian clergy of simply repeating the stereotypical, conventional stories from the life of Jesus, without examining much if anything of the more recent scholarly work that has uncovered new facts, new insights and new images from the ‘old wine in old wine skins that we are all fed in Sundary school.

Revisiting William Blake we discovered a slice of his somewhat unconventional, even provocative and arresting interpretation of The Fall, in which he notes the androgyny of God and of Adam and Eve, which then separated into masculinity and femininity, a separation which  has been dragged into the 21^st century in many Christian communities. Whether or not, over time, considerable time, we humans can or will ever return to a place where androgyny is not only acknowledged and tolerated, but perhaps even celebrated, remains an open question. Blake’s posing it so long ago illustrates both an imaginative and courageous faith of a sceptic and offers some potential new ‘soil’ for extenuated discourse in the next decades.

James Alison, for his part, was noted for his take on the death and Resurrection, a view hardly likely to find any of the pillars of Christian theology signing on as adopters or even ones who might give consideration to his incisive and imaginative theological insight. Suggesting that Jesus is potentially portrayed as a sacrificial victim of unjust human violence and death, both being integral aspects of human culture and society, and then posing the image of Jesus as model for all of us, in the cause of what Alison calls relationality. We have all endured unjust violence, and even perhaps some forms and faces of various deaths, as part of our lives as humans. And few of us were ever likely to have imagined the crucifixion and Resurrection from Alison’s perspective.

Funk, Blake, and Alison, only three among hundreds of Christian thinkers, men who have pondered, reflected and written their thoughts as expressions of the courage, and support of the love of God, each of whom conceived and bore that love and support in his own unique manner. And we are all the better for their speculation, searching and tentatively, yet assertively, stretching themselves and their readers.

And it is the stretching, the searching, the pondering, that is, all of it, contiguous with and dependent upon whatever moments of darkness, self-doubt, and even self-abnegation with which we are all familiar.

Divides, separations, alienations, losses, deaths, divorces, lost manuscripts, (yes, while that may seem inconsequential, for writers, it is not!), serious and life-threatening diagnoses, wars, fires, famines, droughts, severe poverty, homelessness, and many of those lesser losses, (some call them unconscious) racial and/or colonial, and/or sexual, and/or religious  put-downs. Many of them are so subtle as to pass unnoticed and certainly not mentioned in polite society.

The Christian faith is anything but a static, fossilized, set of museum-pieces of dogmatic moralizing and judging, self-righteous arrogance and the then militant imposition of that hubris on others as a way of ‘building the faith community.’ Nevertheless, it has, and continues to suffer from a kind of ‘sacralizing of the literal, historical, empirical’ repetition of the same parables  A good example: The Good Samaritan, as imitating of God, when, as the Jesus Seminar proposes, it is the Jew taken for dead in the ditch that better serves as the image of the Christ.

Who, in this century of gender politics and invective, would conceive of countenancing Blake’s view of God as androgynous and the concomitant imagining of both Adam and Eve also as androgynous, until the Fall? Occasionally, we will read about a ‘new kind of man’ in a novel, one who is scorned by the conventional male models as ‘effeminate’ and instantly dismissed, if not, in real time, actually taken to a broken fence, murdered and left there to die, as was Matthew Shepherd in Wyoming in 1998. A quarter of a century on, and we still have macho-male-stick-men attempting to govern the richest and most powerful nation on the planet….with their fingers on the nuclear buttons, not to mention alpha-male imitators of their kind in various other counties.

Over the next few weeks, as we approach Easter, some churches may actually fill up a little as compared with their meagre congregation sizes on regular Sundays. And they will be remembering their early Christian education and scattering Easter eggs for their children and perhaps even being invited to join in singing the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah. It will be an emotionally uplifting moment, given the Resurrection from the dead as the bare-knuckles of the story has had it and told it in churches for centuries.

The dubiousness of the actual historical resurrection, however, will likely be either avoided or glanced by so that no parishioner complains, refuses to put his or her cheque in the plate and stamps out. The difference between history, and myth, too will likely suffer what in football we call an ‘end-run’….when, it is only in theological, mythical and spiritual connotations that these stories make far more sense (not rational sense, but imaginative, spiritual and outside of the time-space constrictions in which we all live).

I once encountered a group of very angry parishioners who gasped at my deliberate poke at their literal fixations, when I intimated God might be a ‘she’….And in another conversation, when I used the word myth to begin a conversation about  Genesis and both creation and the Fall, I was dubbed the anti-Christ, an apostate, and a heretic.

It will take eons  to shake the Christian establishment out of its ‘comfortable pew,’ an homage to Pierre Berton’s provocative book written in 1965.

Berton considered ‘the church as irrelevant to mainstream society.’ And to a large degree he was on to something very important. In the ensuing half-century-plus, there have been many worthy attempts to integrate the Christian theology with modern life, some more successful than others. One tragic and bereft trick was to think that by adding popular music in instrumentality and rhythm and volume, it would attract younger people.

Christian theology is not a brand to be marketed. It is not an ideology to be campaigned for through a regimen of popular advertising and political rhetoric. Nor is it a corporation whose ‘service’ exceeds all of the other religious ‘services’ of all the other faith sects and denominations and heritages. Nor is the Christian faith analogous to a bank, storing up treasure in investment portfolios so that future generations will not have to worry about heating or putting a new roof on the building.

God is not an object of thought, rationality, or scientific investigation. God exceeds, supercedes, and also remains unreachable, ineffable, and mysterious all of human attempts to ‘pin him/her/it’ down as on a pegboard in a science lad, as if he were an insect or an animal awaiting a biopsy.

Perhaps foreshadowing James Alison’s view of the Resurrection, Leonardo Boff, writing in Jesus Christ Liberator, in 1986, writes:

The kingdom (of God) entails a more radical liberation, one that gets beyond the breakdown of brotherhood and calls for the creation of new human beings….Jesus’ resurrection is intimately bound up with his life, death and proclamation of the kingdom. If the ‘kingdom of God’ is the semantic term connotating total liberation, if Jesus life weas a liberated and liberating life and if his death was his completely free offering up of that life then his resurrection realizes and fulfils his program in its eschatological form….As such the resurrection is simply the triumph of life and the explication of all its latent potentialities. It is the liberation of life from all its obstacles and conflicts in history. It is already an eschatological* reality; as such it reveals God’s ultimate intention for human beings and the world….In Jesus’ resurrection, light is shed on the anonymous death of all those who have lost out in history while fighting for the cause of justice and ultimate human meaningfulness. As one author suggests, ‘the question of resurrection is rightly posed from the standpoint of insurrection. The resurrection tells us that the murdered shall not triumph over his victim. (Boff, op. cit. p. 290-291)

Has the stone been, or is it being, rolled away from the tomb of each our lives? Whether we seek the serene or the severe,  in the resurrection, liberation is our’s from all the obstacles we and others put in our way. This Easter, let us shake off the binds of literal, empirical and open our minds and hearts to the eschatological* of which we are an intimate part.

*Eschatological-the study of last things, including death, judgement, the afterlife, and the final destiny of humanity, not reducible to the historic, the literal, and embraceable only in and through the imagination.

Searching for God # 93

 Is there some ‘energy’ that nudges one’s thoughts, instincts, intuition and curiosity to dig into one of the most gordion of knots of Christian theology on St. Patrick’s Day 2026, The Resurrection?

Sure to tell, historians have documented how the Irish preserved civilization in and through their monks transcribing volumes in candle-light as an integral part of their discipline. That’s a metaphor for resurrection, isn’t it?

Every traditional Irish folk-song and dance brings new hope and energy to all who perform and all who listen and watch.

Surely, James Joyce, dependent as he was for much of his life on alcohol, contributed new life to Western literary cannon through his Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and his epic, Ulysses.

The Titanic was supposed to be the first ‘unsinkable’ ocean vessel in history, and like Icarus, it sank on its own hubris.

Irish wakes are sometimes interpreted as a living cycle, in which stories and songs serve as a form of resurrection of the deceased’s person and memory and life.

There really is an Anglican Church of the Resurrection in  Blarney, County Cork, dedicated to the Resurrection of Jesus.

On a personal, non-scholarly note, this scribe has for decades adopted something of an ambivalent approach to the subject of the Resurrection. On the one hand, I have consistently intuited that ‘new life’ in all of its multiple iterations lies at the heart or core of nature, of the imagination, of the unspoken and imagined fantasies and dreams and ambitions of each one of us. These perceptions, attitudes, intuitions and even ‘hopes and aspirations ‘seemed’ to be grounded in the earth, the water, the sky and the hopes and aspirations of all mankind, in every historic epoch.  And my ‘take’ was never tied to or dependent on a religious conviction, nor a cognitively held piece of historic data. Easter Sunday services, whether at sunrise on an adjacent hill, or within a sanctuary, seemed ‘larger than life’ and somehow ‘enhanced’ out of the ordinary, especially to my pre-adult sensibilities and naivety.

To a field education prof in seminary who counselled, “The question, ‘Is it life giving?’ has served as my criterion for making many of my life decisions, I silently and repeatedly added, “And that question concurs with everything I hold dear about God and theology, including the Resurrection.”

Rising from death and the Crucifixion into New Life, as the Sunday school teachers tried to explain the Christian ‘story’ as their ‘belief’ never failed to leave me wondering, ‘What does it mean ‘to believe’? Does it mean that ‘I believe the events of both the Crucifixion and the Resurrection actually, literally, historically really happened?’ Does it mean something different, such as, ‘God’s message and story are all about loving and forgiving everyone in our darkest moments and through grace lifting us up out of our despond, despair, shame, guilt and worthlessness’? Or is there something about a metaphoric ‘dying’ of my sinful will that cannot resist temptation in order to come to a place of ‘acceptance’ of Jesus Christ, Resurrected, as my personal Saviour, in which state, and through His grace, I will be more enabled to resist the temptations of things like carnal lust?

Underlying even the most prosaic of these questions is the notion of new life following some ‘form’ of death, with the ultimate meaning and purpose of that symbol, from a literal, fundamental Christian pulpit and Sunday School classes, an afterlife in Heaven, promised to the ‘saved.’ And, of course, in the binary form of this theology, the alternative is the promise of an eternal life in Hell, of fire, or ice or indifference, yet characterized by punishment for those who are not saved.

All or at least most of these ‘speculations’ have been gurgling around in my consciousness, and undoubtedly in my unconscious as well for nigh onto 8 decades. More recently, while rummaging through some more recent scholarship, I stumbled upon a title, from an author named James Alison, ‘The Joy of Being Wrong,’ to which I was instantly drawn. Having considered myself the ‘archetype of being wrong,’ as a sinner, and one cast as ‘no good’ from my family of origin, and one who seemed to have a ‘nack’ of self-sabotaging if the least likely opportunity surfaced, I wondered whether Alison had anything to say that might be enlightening.

I found these words:

The resurrection of Jesus was not a miraculous event within a pre-existing framework of understand of God, but the event by which God recast the possibility of human understanding of God. For this to happen God simultaneously made use of and blew apart the understanding of  God that had developed over the centuries among the Jewish people. God did this in the person of Jesus, through his life and teaching, leading up to and including his death. There is a first step to this recasting of God through the resurrection of the crucified Jesus, and this is the demonstration that death itself is a matter of indifference to God. Jesus had already taught exactly this in his answer to the Sadducees in Mark 12:18-27, a teaching which must have seemed mysterious at the time because it showed that in Jesus’ perception of God, as opposed to that of his interlocutors, there was already before Jesus’ death, a clear awareness that an understanding structured by death cannot begin to speak adequately about God….This marks a decisive change in the understanding of God, one which had been a long time in the making, since if God ahs nothing to do with death, if God is indifferent to death, then our representations of God, all of which are marked by a human culture in which death appears as, at the very least, inevitable, are wrong, as Jesus remarked to the Sadducees: ‘You are greatly mistaken.’ The resurrection of Jesus, at the same time as it showed the unimagined strength of divine love for a particular human being and therefore revealed the loving proximity of God, also marked a final and definitive sundering of God from any human representational capacity. (Alison op. cit. p.115-116)

Alison continues:

It is not only that our representation of God is contrary to the understanding of God which God wishes to make known. That is to say that the death of this man Jesus showed that death is not merely a biological reality, but it is also a sinful reality. To put it another way,  it is not just that death is a human reality and not a divine one, but as a human reality it is a sinful reality. God, in raising Jesus, was not merely showing that death has no power over him, but also revealing that the putting to death of Jesus showed humans as actively involved in death. In human reality, death and sin are intertwined: the necessity of human death is itself a necessity born of sin. In us, death is not merely a passive reality but an active one, not something we merely receive but one we deal out….The third step in the recasting of God and the recasting of sin is that God raised up this man who had been killed in this way for us. The victim of human iniquity was raised up as forgiveness; in fact the resurrection was the raising up of the victim as forgiveness. This it was which permitted the recasting of God as love. It was not just that God loved his son and so raised him up, but that the giving of the son and his raising up revealed God as love for us….If the third step reveals God as forgiving us (and the presence of the crucified and risen victim was exactly this revelation), then it also simultaneously reveals that death is not only a human reality, and one inflicted by sin, but that the human reality of death itself is capable of being forgiven…..That is to say, the forgiveness which flows from the resurrection affects not only such acts as we may have carried out, but, much more importantly, what we had hitherto imagined to be our very natures. If death is something that can be forgiven us, we were not only wrong about God, but we were fundamentally wrong about ourselves. (Ibid, p.117-118)

Cutting through some obvious and highly noxious and nefarious stereotypes that have ‘polluted’ and ‘infected’ the ethos, the air, the arguments about and the fears and demons that have taken up residence in the Christian consciousness for centuries, Alison, offers a challenging perspective and insight into a very unique exegesis of sin, death and resurrection.

Instead of separating God from man, Alison separates God from death, as a human reality and removes both the horror, terror, fear and even the culpability, if needed. There is a risk that Alison might be considered to be playing God, although his analysis seems securely grounded in his reading of scripture. The conclusion that Jesus was a willing sacrificial victim to the unjust violence by which he was victimized, in favour of relationality, as Alison concludes, shines as a spiritual, religious, moral and ethical beacon for the ‘inner rescuer’ to which such exegesis speaks.

Tolstoy, in his ‘The Kingdom of God is Within You,’ would remind us that it is in and through our non-violent opposition to evil (consciousness of which is innately available to everyone) with force, the both underlies and emphasizes a position which Alison may or may not be consciously echoing all these decades later.

The daily menu of humans inflicting death on innocent children, men and women, unjustly, unjustifiably, illegally, immorally, unethically, and unacceptably, while we all seem and feel powerless to bring about its cessation, offers a unique historic moment in which, in this Lent of 2026. We are mere weeks away from another Christian celebration of the liturgies and rituals of Maundy Thursday,  Good Friday, Easter Sunday and both our having been steeped, like luke-warm (and worn) tea in the traditional ‘version’ of this season. Doubtless, our human innate search for ‘new life’ as that phrase applies to each of us individually, finds opportunity to revisit a thesis like the one James Alison offers.

Searching for God # 92

 From thehumandivine.org, in a piece entitled, “Gender and Perception: Willilam Blake and the Fall into Male and Female, by Northrop Frye,” September 18, 2022, by Golgonooza, we read:

Blake believed that Consciousness was originally integrated, non-gendered, and ‘androgenous’ (as he terms it). Human consciousness was, before the Fall, the ‘image’ or likeness of this: indeed as the Book of Genesis itself notes: ‘God (‘the Elohim’, an honorific plural) created man in his (in their) own image, in the image of God he created he him, male and female he created them.’ ‘God’ here is originally both what we know term ‘male’ and ‘female’ denoting the integrated sexuality of the sacred. As our imagination fell, due to the advance of rationalizing and moralising (judging) processes within the brain, the world appeared increasingly literal and separate from this original consciousness. In Blake’s terms, it ‘fell’ (or divided) into a rationalizing Spectre (Adam) and a feminine Emanation  (Eve). The beauty of the world, human consciousness now thought was ‘external’ to the perceiving consciousness of it. Poets are the last reminders of this primal connection—what is called in literary criticism ‘the pathetic fallacy’. Except of course, it’s not a fallacy. If anything it’s a ‘phallus-y’, a newly gendered schizophrenia within the perceiving consciousness—that is to say within perception itself- which now divided into ‘subject’ and ‘object’, perceiver and perceived, active and passive, and eventually ‘male’ and ‘female’. This was the world of Eden now seen in terms of Generation, of divided opposites, like a serpent with its tail in its mouth……Blake is not interested in the separation of emanations from their primary zoas as a tale about particular women and men (in terms of gender politics), or in terms of the orthodox story of Adam and Eve as usually understood. This is an archetypal, internal, process, a fundamental structural split within the brain—a powerful spiritual self-alienation that humans have repeated in stories throughout cultures: not only in the construct of Adam and Eve, but in the narratives of Dumuzi and Inanna (Mesopotamian, Ninti and Enki (Sumerian), Askr and Embla (Norse mythology), Artemis and Orino (Grece) and its many cultural and literary variations—Circe and Odysseus, Samson and Delilah, Jason and Medea, Cleopatra and Caesar, Salome and Herod. All these ‘couples’ exist within the one psyche, the tragedies of their outcomes lies in them not seeing this.

Reading and re-typing these ideas, perceptions, and their implications in 2026, is not only enlightening; it is indeed shocking, surprising and revolutionary. For many years the subject of androgyny has not only been mysterious and thereby magnetic; it has also been quite ‘radioactive’ among both secular and ecclesial societies. Men and  women have almost without consciousness become cardboard cut-outs of stereotypical gender identities. And the divide, for many, is so radioactive as to be considered life-threateningly dangerous to cross, especially among contemporary males.

Another ‘light-bulb’ that seeps into one’s consciousness when reading and reflecting on these words and ideas, is James Hillman’s attempt to wrap what he calls archetypal psychology, a re-invention of psychology, around the principle of the archetypal. Seeing such patterns in these repeated stories of a somewhat blinded and blinding male and female relationships, integrous to multiple cultures and societies, innocent of  the original ‘androgyny’ imaginatively embodied in God, offers a magnetic and magnifying lens through which to see both Christian theology and human psychology.

And the differences, apart from not being literal but archetypal, are illuminating, not only of how we have become stuck in stereotypes but also of how we conceive, perceive, and represent God.  The stuckness too in rationalizing and moralizing, especially from a Christian perspective, judging others, and feeling permanently judged as Paul puts it in Romans 3;23: (KJV)  For all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God. Imperceptibly yet blatantly linking such a ‘sentence’ with the list of ‘evils’ detailed in the Decalogue, among others, and then propagating criminal laws and punishments based on the commission of any of an innumerable number of ‘sins’ as a theological pattern to ‘awaken’ (frighten? terrify? scold? transform? Surrender? demean?) ‘empty’ and ‘confess’ to specific malfeasance(s) and to offer the grace of God’s forgiveness, upon those confessions, seems to, in many ways, perhaps to have missed the point of a much larger and much more deeply embedded and unconscious kind of permanent, conventional and even academic literalism, empiricism and rationalism.

Here we can see the deep and profound ‘connection’ between the thought of William Blake and James Hillman, a searcher and revolutionary in the former and a rebel and revolutionary in the latter. Recall that for Blake ‘Revelation’  (last book of New Testament) was equated with revolution as the core of what he believed was the core of the Christian theology.

One has to wonder about the depth of insecurity, and fear that has gripped centuries of Christian attempts to please and surrender to God, from the perspective of having committed various ‘malfeasances’ many of which any self-respecting culture would seek to eliminate if possible.

The irony is that given the tight-fisted and self-righteous rational judgements that have been inflicted, imposed and punished over the centuries, the relative numerical and statistical incidence of evil has not decreased, even with the promise of an eternal life in  heaven upon one’s death, following the confessions, and the surrenders and the emptying of our evil will.

The moralizing, especially of those whose words and general conduct are not conforming with the general, rational, literal, empirical, legal, medical, psychological and even theologically based ‘judgements’ has now reached a zenith beyond anything that might have been envisioned anytime in the last century.

Another fascinating aspect of the thoughts and perceptions of Blake is the universality of the cultural ‘couples’ blind to their own androgyny, crossing the boundaries of ethnicities, religions, geographies, political ideologies and literary traditions. Have we fallen victim to our own blindness about the implicit schizophrenia embedded in a divided human gender? Is that one of the reasons why, in the 21^st century, we are witnessing an explosion of incidents in which gender is being questioned, scrutinized and even biologically manipulated? Is this social and cultural explosion, to many of us both threatening and even for some disgusting, the incipient signs of a new consciousness about who we are, the nature of God and the implications of a relationship to our imagination as both relevant and essential to our recovery from our blindness?

Is it even feasible for us mortals, without the visionary imagination of a William Blake, to wrap our minds, hearts and spirits around his conception of the Fall? If it were, would we be able to envisage a theology that welcomes an archetypal, as opposed, or perhaps supplemental and complemental, to a literal, empirical, and academically endorsed epistemology? Has the Christian church so ‘fallen’ into the comfort and political correctness of a secular culture, with both its vernacular and its ‘take’ on reality, that theological exegesis has become almost exclusively literal, empirical and rational?

And if that is even imaginable, what has been the cost?

What do we lose by entrapping our “reality” in the strictures, constrictions, demands and expectations of a rational, literal world of expectations? Is such a template not potentially partially responsible for the millions of men and women who suffer from interminable, inescapable and insoluble agony of depression, worthlessnes, isolation, alienation and hopelessness? Insert the American version of an ‘ego’ that has certain specific rungs on one of many ladders of ‘success’ all of them defined in literal, empirical terms and then rationalized as both achievable and ethical and warranting cultural endorsement, into a ‘reality’ that is boundaried by the human capacity to reason, to account, to reduce to empirical literalism, and would that not likely make many of us wonder at our own blindness?

The nature of a God who seeks, first of all, to find and expose our sins, our frailties and our shame, in order to then rescue us from the damnation that has been barnacled to those sins as reinforced psychic pressure, seems to be a perhaps innocent, and yet dangerous and risky equation into which to condemn millions of men women and boys and girls.

Let’s, for a moment, take off the constrictions of the literal, the empirical and the judging and moralizing entrapment in which we have been ensnared, and wonder how we might conceptualize a return to androgyny, as men and women. While the hypothetical imaginative exercise may be anathema to some, it offers some interesting and provocative changes for each of us. For instance, men would no longer have to continually prove their (our) masculinity, in competition with millions of other males, themselves believing that ‘alpha’ male is the highest model of masculinity. Gay men would no longer feel the debasement from other men, who themselves would find new aspects of their own identities. Similarly lesbian women would no longer have to suffer the alienation that accompanies their uniqueness and their androgyny.

While it requires much more reflection, I know that the question of medically assisted gender change is one that has already presented itself in many jurisdictions, this scribe is not yet prepared to offer an opinion about such medical interventions, given that we have so little evidence of its impact on the long-term lives of those who have chosen that path.

Androgyny, as ‘natural’ and not aberration could lead us into a kind of equality and equity to which we have yet to give full imaginative consideration. A theology that embraces androgyny, too, will find multiple opportunities to ‘free’ formerly constricted and constricting images, expectations and even imaginations. And our image of God, too, could undergo a massive shift out of the gender politics of contemporary tension and conflict.

Oh, to continue to wonder, to imagine and to continue the search….for God!