EASY TO THINK ONE'S EGO IS EVEN MORE AMAZING THAN IT IS...March 25, 2022

 Our ego, our 'me' or 'I' came into our awareness at some point in early childhood. Before that we were out and about entertaining the adults but we were very unconscious little beings with little conscious ego presence. This is how we each began our mind development, fully apart from our own conscious plan or personal willing. 

Once 'in' us and somewhat conscious to us  as our 'me' our ego kept expanding and eventually it came to believe it was all that we are.  And it remained unaware of any vast Unconscious in us which contains all possible development and from which the ego was given its birth to start with. 

This unawareness is the reason the ego tends to feel itself quite superior in its assessments of reality and accounts for our human general lack of humility the first half of life. It is usually at midlife that the ego slows down enough to ask ourselves questions about what we are beyond only our ego me. 

This 'talking to our self' or reflection can begin an expansion of the deeper, still mostly unconscious, part of us that the ego in it's rapid growth the first half of life had ignored and remained mostly unaware of. 

For example we were aware we dreamed at night but we felt no real connection or responsibility to our dreams. We were emotionally moved by stories, movies, pictures and family and religious rituals but little did we know all these themes and impressions were already present in us unconsciously waiting to be awakened. Even our 'falling in love' was more about an awakening of what was already in us than in our really 'knowing' our beloved one.

FOR WHAT WAS JESUS WILLING TO DIE, HIS PASSION? ..March 13, 2022

Thank you for joining this second of six Lenten devotionals with 1st Congregational United Church of Christ.  

Focusing on the story of the last weeks, and especially the last days, of Jesus' life are central in the earliest gospel we have about Jesus. 

*That earliest gospel is Mark. It was written about 40 years after Jesus died. Like the other gospels it was not an eye witness report but one creatively inspired by a gifted believer to try to capture how the words and deeds of a simple-living, poor, roaming teacher had touched and uplifted so many lives. 

Jesus is shown providing the most oppressed and rejected persons of his homeland renewed hope in life and in God. 

Mark's emphasis is important because it shows what to some earliest Christians was most important to know about Jesus. We will try to capture some of that central emphasis in this devotion. This is important because the  emphasis in telling the old old story has changed through the centuries and risks losing what the original story says is most important for us to know and practice.

For example the popular movie The Passion  Of Christ eighteen years ago excited many Christians that Jesus was again in the secular headlines. Churches were renting and showing the movie to their people and guests. How could all this excitement not be good? Unfortunately what the movie emphasized above all else was the horrible suffering of Jesus' death. There were continuous graphic images of his beating, bleeding and slow murder by Roman crucifixion. 

The expression 'Christ's passion' has often been equated to his horrible death and we've been  told that the Jews and even the rest of us are guilty of killing Jesus. This has resulted in worldwide centuries of persecution of Jews and a general sense of false guilt among Christians. We Christians have our share of guilt to bear but I don't think killing Jesus is one of them.  This misguided understanding of the meaning of Jesus' passion implies that God is unable to forgive humans of our wrongs if Jesus did not suffer this horrible way. 

But Mark does not aggrandize Jesus death that way. He writes simply, " After mocking him, they stripped him of the purple cloak and put his own clothes on him. Then lead him out to crucify him."  Mark 15:20. As we will see the movie unfortunately failed to even come close to capturing Mark's emphasis.

Another, and our most common, meaning of a person's passion is what is most important in life to them, what is it they most love and want to be real and true in this world? So what does Mark's gospel clearly show was Jesus' true passion?

Whoever the actual inspired author of this creative gospel was, he frames his story around contrasting Jesus' passion with that of his high powered enemies who wanted him killed. Mark makes clear that Jesus' true passion was not about dying a cruel suffering death. Jesus did not want that anymore than you and I or any sane person does. 

Yes he was certainly willing to endure that suffering in order to follow his real passion which Mark says was his longing for what he called the, 'coming of the kingdom of God' into this world.  Jesus saw his human and sacred purpose in life was to do what he could to bring forth a new and different humanity, a transformed humanity with a raised appreciation of and compassion for each other, especially those who at any time are most oppressed and crushed by life. 

Jesus'  passion then is his world view that every human no matter her religion, ethnicity, color, sexual orientation, gender, economic status or any other natural differences is an equally loved and valued child of God. The Kingdom of God breaking into human life was Jesus' dream, his passion- that all persons come to be seen as having authoritatively equal dignity and respect in life and death. 

But then, as still now, that is not how the world is. Instead of desiring the equal valuing of all persons some have an opposite view, that our primary goal as humans be to accumulate power, wealth, status and authority over others as much as we can.  And the winners of this competition are said to deserve the necessities and the overflowing fruits and gifts of the Earth, while the ones who fall behind in this competition are not.

This opposite view of life's purpose was what Jesus eventually ran into head on in Jerusalem, even to the point of dying for his passion and his message. This opposing view is what the Roman emperor and his empowered underlings believed. They called the emperor King, Lord and son of God.

Jesus had daily seen ordinary poor people not being given opportunity to live in a valued and respected way but instead suffering much for the high life styles of the Roman elite and the ranking leaders of the Jewish religion who had become political puppets of Rome. These of course were the ones who in ignorance crucified Jesus.

Mark shows Jesus throughout his teaching ministry as never entering big cities where the rich and powerful lived. He knew his message would enrage them. Jesus was not a coward but had his own sense of Divine timing. 

Mark shows Jesus in his last week finally and purposely entering the largest city in his homeland, Jerusalem. Jerusalem was the center of political and religious power. Jesus knew he would likely be killed. And we all know how the situation resulted in his murderous crucifixion.

Mark creatively crafts his story leading to the ultimate climax of this true passion of Jesus.This was six days before Jesus was killed and what what came to be called Palm Sunday. The remainder of Mark's  gospel (more than a third of it)is devoted to his last week. Here is how Mark begins these last days with words of chapter 11 verses 1-11. ....

Today the church in the form of individual persons can desire to have the passion of Jesus grip our very inner beings, to capture our souls. It is from that same passion, only possible in individual hearts, that something grand, good and redeeming can still come in the world. Such can come in spite of the intervening centuries of injustice, power grabbing, war, materialistic world views and lack of respect for humanity including all our diverse brothers and sisters across this rapidly shrinking world .

Our prayer this Lenton season can surely be, "May it be so. May the kingdom of God come. Amen."

*The information shared here is influenced by the scholarship of Marcus Borg, co-author of 'The Last Week.'

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INTRODUCTION TO THIS BLOG...June 20, 2011(edited February 25, 2022))

 

This blog's purpose will be to share aspects of my spiritual journey of the past thirty seven years. It will consist primarily of short essays I write and personal  *dream reflections. I have attempted to be more aware of my dreams  during these same years and have recorded  and reflected on many of them. 

Some of the earlier  essays are  my responses to a conservative Bible Scholar and friend who's email essays I think reflect  accurately the conservative standpoint  of Historical Christianity. My respected friend Edward Fudge gave me this permission. Portions of his essays will be included with any such posts I make. Edward passed away November 25, 2017.

During these same  years I have moved from a very conservative view of the Bible and Christian tradition informed by my non-instrumental Church of Christ background(A heritage I'm very grateful for) to a point of seeing a need for major re-visioning of parts  of mainline Historic Christianity's usual interpretation of scripture and tradition. After a sad break with the Church of my heritage, in time I became a licensed minister in the United Church of Christ and Presbyterian Church(USA) where I served three rural churches for twenty years. I was ordained in the United Church of Christ in 2007 through its 'multiple paths to ordination' pronouncement. Until the Covid 19 pandemic I had been a part time  hospital/hospice chaplain. I am a member of a local United Church of Christ congregation.

Dreams are far more presented as avenues of the 'voice of God' in the Biblical and other Sacred narrative than most any Christian denomination values them in our day. I am of the view they are a  kind of  'royal road to the unconscious' and thus serve what in Biblical  and ancient times was considered a 'voice of the Sacred.' I believe this personal avenue of Spiritual discipline is open to all persons regardless of  interest or affiliation with organized religion.  Essays I continue to write express my concerns, insights  and beliefs about  important areas of  Biblical/Spiritual/Psychological  ideas and realities. At the risk of any reader not having before them the sequence in my  'changes ' of perception in these areas I plan to begin with recent essays and dreams rather than starting in the far past. For one thing this will keep it more interesting and challenging to me for I will be sharing present inner concerns. Then if a reader has questions or comments I may draw from my archives of personal writings something that may fit the particular area of interest.

 I realize I will be inviting friends to this blog who knew me and worked with me before these significant changes outwardly began to take shape. I think I can assure them they would find anything good they experienced then in my character and attitude is still in tact. They would likely observe  they were speaking with the 'same old Jim  Hibbett.' I'm glad for that. Other readers may have known me since much of this change has taken place but they also may find that I have more, than they are aware of, concern with some typical interpretations and doctrines regarding the Christ story, along with hope of how it could be re-visioned. 

Whoever an interested reader my be I welcome your thought and feedback. Most of what I will share here  has been quite personal and private except for my efforts to share some of it the last twenty years I was preaching and a few editorial pieces in local news papers.

I do not offer this blog as a place of argument but where a person is invited to disagree with me and to ask for explanation or clarification of what I express.  I'm blogging to fulfill some sense of responsibility to make some of my inner journey more public. Perhaps my experience  can be of some encouragement  to others who are still finding their way through the vicissitudes of life including the various teachings/traditions  of the Christian Church and their applications to daily life and culture; people  who may  have similar questions as I have.  I feel the questions and doubts that arise for some of us and the tentative answers we find can have a major impact on the quality of our lives and indirectly  on the spiritual/psychological/religious needs that face our culture and the world.  

Respectfully, Jim Hibbett

*The reader may wish to read the post entitled  'Dreams 101' before reading other Dream Reflections: http://jhibbett.blogspot.com/2011/07/dreams-101.html

RUSSIA'S PUTIN HAS INVADED SOVERIGN UKRAINE...February 24, 2022

 The world is experiencing a spinning into irrational chaos....which war always is. Are we being  personally taught worldwide to turn to our deepest inner human resources...beyond the rational, national, political and traditional religious views?

One needs to be careful what she takes as her deepest authority or certainty. Former outer certainties are fast giving way. Take care to seek the truly undefinable Ultimate Sacred not our former exclusive piecemeal ones. 

Hopefully we will find our deepest inner realities are compassionately dedicated and inclusive of all humanity and the Earth...not our still determined tribal, religionist and nationalistic values.

Our prayer seems best now to be,"God bless your whole world not just our ego centered  'us' anymore.  Bless the whole of creation. Let us see the whole more clearly and our one place in it but not at the head of it. May  present human decisions and behavior be much more concerned for the whole. We can strongly confess we do not know where or how yet to lead in this present world. May we learn the new lessons for these new times."

I'm relieved that Biden is in the White House.  I hope his full human experiences can dominate his judgment above any dependence on clever once functional political know-how. We must rely on genuine inner divine guidance, not grand stories of how we once solved threats in a past world.

Being Honest, our American spirit has been dominated, as it had to be evolutionarily, by self interests. And not primarily focused on the good of global humanity or the Earth. It was born of a scrapping survivor-underdog mentality. And tends to return to that in crisis.

It requires a giant moral step by humans to make it otherwise. I pray Biden and others on the globe are up to it. May the 'all inclusive good increase and the small self serving decrease.' We surely must be at a global turning point. 

Putin is seeking to undermine the future of humanity. Unlike his similarly but weaker minded U.S. buddy, Putin at least has a personally intellectualized, however sinister and flawed, view of history he's determined to press upon the world beginning in Ukraine.

THOUGHTS ON THE IMPORTANCE OF OUR COLLECTIVE & PERSONAL ICONS. February 1, 2022

    This to me is a rather important and complex matter, Icons. I'll try to give some definition and different ideas about what Icons might mean to us.

    My main understanding of an icon is it's an image, picture, scene or sculpture that has come to have a strong emotional mindul effect on a person. Well developed icons become that to whole cultures and help hold them together as a people. Reflecting on such an Icon gives a person a sense of their highest values about life's meaning and supports them through difficulties and disappointments.. These can be actual ' living symbols' that go beyond being describable in words( mean more to a person than can ever be expressed) and one can sense that their spiritual dimension is moved deeply by such an icon. Icons can represent the basis of one's religious type experiences.

    With that kind of definition I think the two strongest and most important icons in our Western cultures are still Jesus and the Virgin Mary. It is likely that these have become less positively effective on modern Americans than in centuries past and that we now stand in need of new icons coming into existence for us in our times. We are imo significantly without the needed clear symbolic icons in our age. This can mean a culture is dangerously vulnerable to weaknesses within.

   It may be today that movie/sports/music stars or politicians or war heroes  are called icons. And these can surely  have strong inner effects for good or bad on persons  but they don’t rise to be centuries  long-lived effective cultural icons such Jesus and  Mary. They are more temporary hero figures.

Harlan Hill Chicago Bears football star from Florence and singer Pat Boone were such icons for me.  And even my brothers who ‘could do no wrong’ in my eyes. I still carry that childhood emotion for them but am ‘conscious’ that such iconic energy is something primarily ‘ in and from me’ that transcends their actual personal ordinary humanity. So it is with any human we ‘idolize’ or ‘iconize’.  We sort of unconsciously  ‘do something’ to these persons making them be what some image in us ‘needs’ them to be. That can sometimes be problematic and not a very loving thing to do. We may unintentionally be making them be what we want them to be rather than accepting their actual unique personhood.

So our unconscious ‘projections’ onto others  can prevent us from seeing them more for whom they more actually are.   We are ‘projecting’ on to them what images were already unconscious inside of us. This is also what happens with our parents and with whoever we much  ‘fall in love’ with.

These are powerful important ongoing processes that at first seem to us as coming totally from persons  ‘outside us”. We can become to some degree conscious of it and  become more ‘objective’ of what and who we are  inwardly by such experiences while remaining  appreciative of the actual  persons, or even things, our unconscious has sort of locked us onto. This in short is how we learn out of our own unconscosciousness according to the depth psychology of C.G. Jung and others.

  When Icons have arisen from  historical persons like Jesus and Mary the iconic images  have over time become even more adorned and exaggerated than were the actual living human beings where the projection started.  This unconscious process helps form world cultures in a positive way when these icons are noble, compassionate or emotionally uplifting.   But whole cultures can become so adoring of very debasing icons which also began with attractions to humans of much less than noble, and even dangerous, character.  
 For real  persons living ages ago  to have become such living culture and religion making icons  like Jesus  and Mary or political like Hitler they must have been quite extraordinary real life persons for either very  good or bad.

  Both Jesus and Mary are significantly effective as icons for me. They still emotionally represent to me the values of human/divine love, courage, justice, feminine and masculine principles and personal living sacrifice for the good of others. I can appreciate that such noble qualities must be’ in me’  unconsciously  for me to at all  project them on to these historic icons.  

They are a ‘God and Goddess’ type image that have been mostly helpful and healthy and uplifting for our Western culture. But maybe less so now than in the past 2000 years. So there may be a yearning and need for new icons to appear for us  collectively through our unconscious projections for a new culture seeking birth in and from us.

Icons can also be non-human images that come to have strong emotional effect on us for good or bad. Nationally we have many ..the Liberty Bell, our Flag, the Lady Liberty Statue( my favorite), Mt Rushmore, the DC monuments etc. Some natural phenomena have become strong national Icons like the Grand Canyon, Rocky Mountains, Mississippi River and the Oceans and Red Wood Forests. All of these have an iconic strong positive emotional effect on me and many other Americans. So much that we want to seriously preserve them as forever treasures. The list of Icons in these ways is real and limitless. Think of the Bear, Lion, Eagle, the US Constitution, the Bible etc. 

Icons when highly valued can give the sense that one's soul is being fed. It is more than a head or thinking experience. 'Numinous' is a good word for the rich effect a living icon can have on an individual, even transforming one's character for better or worse.

    Other Icons can be past or contemporary persons who one believes have in their living, work and writings given extremely important knowledge and truth to our world cultures, even revelatory type knowledge that can help us find our way through very challenging times. Carl Jung is one of several of this kind of Icon for me. He is contemporary enough to be fully human and flawed. His work has supported my own path of change and development more than any other contemporary. He died when I was a Jr in high school and I knew nothing of him until my mid life.

 The even sided cross has been an iconic symbol since very ancient times and in various religions. Depth Psychogy would  consider it a living symbol of wholeness and completion or the Self or of God presented by the Collective Unconscious.

    Jung rediscovered that circular shapes around a center called 'mandalas' which pop up in nature, on religious edifices and many other places are living(can have a strong spontaneous  emotional effect on persons) symbols of the highest inner meaning for humans and even can be  symbolic of the Ultimate God. They can be Icons to us. I've had mandalas come often in my dreams. So such mandalas are  supporting Icons for me.

    

EXCEPTIONAL TV SHOWS HAVE TRIED TO TEACH GENUINE MORALITY..Jan 1, 2022

I'd feel better if every American watched and felt this episode of Heat of the Night. In this series I suspect Carrol O'Conner gets to act out his actual life values. 

This in contrast to his excellent portrayal of bigoted racist Archie Bunker in the series All In The Family. That character, ahead of its time in TV, was meant to satirically teach Americans the destructive mental health of such a man as Archie. That is why it is in the form of rich Comedy. 

Sadly these decades later we find many Americans admire such a character.  Apparently it was taken as a man who speaks his mind, lives his prejudices and bigotry openly like a 'tough guy.'

Such TV shows in the 60s and 70s did much to bring America's dark side into the open with such episodes as this rape of a school teacher. And we are still trying to come to terms with those same issues in 2022. I'm not content  that  presently heralded emotional TV series have the creativity or will to deal with such ethical issues as these older programs did. 

This episode is surely not out of date. It is done not only creatively but I think with rich psychological and spiritual insight. Reading the plot can be a reminder but watching the presentation( try YouTube) is an experience I wish all adults might have or have again.

'UNION OF OPPOSITES' FOR 2022?...January 15, 2022 January 1, 2022

A ' UNION OF OPPOSITES' FOR 2022? 

A widely known Jungian depth psychologist explains the opinion that 2022 with it's many 2's can have a hopeful meaning for the world....that we've reached a time where many of the harsh  'opposites' we've necessarily lived and suffered with in recent centuries are perhaps finely tuned for a pronounced culture changing  increased 'union of opposites'. This, depth psychology suggests, has long been unconsciously yearned for by humanity. We all likely experience this split or lack of union in our potential wholeness day in and day out. And we see it increasingly clear in our outer world.

These 'opposite pairs' may include:  thinking & feeling, high & low, inner & outer, heaven & earth, conservative & liberal extremes, the masculine & feminine principles, man & woman, intuition & physical reality, strong & weak, sexuality & spirituality, assertiveness & passivity, flesh & spirit, head & soul, peace & war, intellect & heart, good & evil, disease & health, negative & positive, chaos &  order,  giving & receiving, science & 'religion', well being &  suffering, fullness & emptiness, Divine & Human, wealth & poverty, rules & freedom, material & spiritual, conscious & unconscious, Eros & Logos, Apollo & Dionysius, introversion & extroversion, love & control, calm & tension, choice & destiny, rational and irrational, fear & confidence, life & death, trust & doubt, love & power....and many other opposing factor pairs we experience in our daily living reality.

With our still necessarily limited consciousness all of us at times fall victim to one side of some of these opposites. We then strive for, culturally and personally, and often accept only one side while ignoring, denying and even despising and demonsizing the other. This reduces our capacity for balance and wholeness. The appropriate divine/human response has eternally been not to irradicate any side of an opposite pair but to seek and pray for a transcending union to occur.

Should 2022 be a year where many of these opposites  come together in better harmonies than yet known, both in individuals and in world dynamics,  we may be very satisfied and appreciative to have lived in this new year. 

There is likely imo no more realistic or supportable optimistic view of our present situation and problems than this one or something similar...ie expecting a significant increase in the 'union of opposites' resulting in broader consciousness in us and in our one world.

The equal sided cross has been at intervals, from most ancinet times, a spiritually living symbol of the 'union of opposites' the world  has always evolutionarily been moving toward. It indicates a greater completion, harmony, balance and  wholeness naturally longing to be expressed uniquely in persons and in our only world home

A blessed 2022 for all persons worldwide !!