SERMON: "THIS SON OF YOURS" Luke 15: 1-5, 11b-32 February 27, 2016

From an unquestioned fundamentalist Christian environment I was pretty much handed a Bible and told, 'Read this and you will know what God is like.' Then about forty years later , supposedly as a preacher of the Bible, I realized that the Bible shows many different images for God, not one. And most troubling they are indeed often contradictory. But much Christian teaching still tells folks that God in the Bible, which  often ordered the murder of innocents and genocide,  is the same as the one seen in Jesus' depiction of God here as an emotionally moved compassionate father. Luke pictures a father God extravagantly and unconditionally embracing his wayward son asking no questions. I could not continue to hold such a split notion of God in my head. I think this remains a problem for many today.

The author of the gospel of Luke attempts to describe what he had come to believe was the idea of God which Jesus carried in his mind and heart. As ones encouraged by what we see as the nature and character of Jesus, we can responsibly choose the nature of the ultimate God to include what is described here. We might be convinced that such a view of God just might help keep humans from destroying themselves and the planet in this post modern impersonal age, whereas other images of god only lead us toward destruction. This very reading helps me in sorting out  the nature and the will of what humans have immemorially  referred to as God.

Luke begins here presenting Jesus as someone who became focused on the suffering plight of the most powerless and marginalized and morally discredited people in the country villages where he traveled as a poor teaching rabbi. He recognized these people were being horribly treated and despised by both their religious leaders and the Roman civil authorities. The poor were unable to establish a livelihood for their families. Life was unlivable. Luke simply says such persons were naturally drawn to Jesus and came to him for his words of encouragement. Luke implies that the religious leaders were annoyed at Jesus and saw him as a threat to their power over these ordinary folks. Luke says they grumbled accusingly to each other, “ This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

Luke describes Jesus giving two quick metaphors about the nature of God: God's nature is like that of a shepherd who risks leaving the whole flock in order to find and bring back the one sheep that got lost. And God's nature is also like a woman who lost one of ten valuable coins and eagerly went to work sweeping the floor until she finds the one coin that was lost. I've noticed , as one prone to losing things, that nearly always 'endurance' is the key to finding anything lost. First my mother then my wife were always willing to help find my keys, billfold etc I had lost but for more than ten years I've been on my own. I'm now very aware that if I did not do the careful work of searching for such lost items then they are never found. So I hear Luke telling me something about how intent the ultimate nature of God is about finding a way to recover his creatures and whole creation when they get lost or disconnected.

Finally in more detail, as if to emphasize it, Luke speaks of a wealthy Father's two sons. The more adventuresome one , somewhat unappreciatively, asked for his full inheritance and headed out to see what he could make of life. Like many a person he pretty much made a mess of it. But he had in his youth at least noticed that his father likely had his best interest at heart. So with life wrenching humiliation Luke describes him returning home to beg a job from his father. But he never even got to make his apology or do any begging. To his amazement his father asked no questions, but instead ran out to meet his ragged child, embraced him and invited the whole extended family and workers to join him in a great party explaining that ' this son  got lost from me but is now found.' And so they began to celebrate.

Ironically Luke's theme does not focus on the young brother's story of 'getting lost' through his misguided, but maybe necessary, path of finding out for himself what in life is most valuable to him. But the emphasis here is on the seemingly irrationally extravagant acceptance by the Father of his son, without any need of apology or questions of where he had been or what he had done. No doubt most were expecting the father to drill his son and demand apology etc. But this at odds with Luke's description. The father was simply carried away with the fact that his son safe and home. He experienced an emotional high that demanded expression. That was all this Father needed in relationship with his sons. The younger son's process of development seems to be presented as a rather natural course of a human life finding itself. Life simply is not a perfect path by any means but one of much trial and error, success and failure.

An equally central concern of the whole teaching here is to examine the destructive disposition that frequently overtakes a human life and leaves it in an animal like state of complete self seeking. I'm speaking of that 'grumbling' elitist disposition of the leaders at the top of Luke's presentation. For he now returns to it. (Does anyone remember this 'grumbling state of mind' as displayed in Mr. Bluster on the Howdy Doody show? Well that is just another version of what Luke is addressing.)Only this time it is sadly occurring in the older brother. The attuned father listens when the older son takes him aside and demandingly asks, “What is all this making over 'this son of yours'.” The older brother is unable to really see his own returned brother but only now sees him as this despicable 'son of his father.' He then lets the resentment pour out. “ I've always been a good boy, never breaking the rules, always doing exactly the right thing but 'this son of yours' totally screws up , embarrasses you ; yet for him you throw this big party. We never do that here. Maybe I should not even try to be so good?” Luke has the father try to explain that his love for both sons is of equal quality but when either one has become dangerously forever lost , Well, “ We just have to celebrate his return. Please join us”, the father asks. Note the father makes no apology to the older son but makes clear that all are invited to celebrate. That is how it ends. This beautiful teaching about God and humans. This grumbling disposition is a life destroying trap that humans in all places and circumstances remain most vulnerable to.

Luke leaves his readers to reflect on this. To come up not only with how the story might continue but also to explore the implications of what his teaching about the nature of God and humans are in their personal lives. So I will not insult you reflecting intelligence by offering my take on what this story can mean today, no doubt many things. I do find myself contemplating these images frequently. You can use Luke's teaching to contemplate your own present life situation, with its complications of family, friends, work , play and even perceived enemies. Or how it might apply regarding your attitude to various misjudged, maligned and marginalized persons and groups in our communities , nation and world. And as you bring your own complicated life into contact with these images of an ultimate nature of God, Luke's images can still have a profound and living impact on how you sort things out. Perhaps we can consider we each have these elements within our most inner life. We are at times the younger son with all his youthful exuberance that always comes crashing down. We may also be at times the extravagantly compassionate father capable of embracing all that life brings, both joys and sadness, without making exacting demands on others and life. And perhaps still alive in us is that older grumbling brother, unable to open up to the explainable nature of how life happens and thus at times unable to either weep or laugh, but only to judge and grumble. We are not likely just one of these but all of them in the complicated packages we refer to as 'you, me and us.'

That DAMN PILLAR OF SALT.... February 5, 2016

       

This is what can happen when I take a four mile walk. Things come to mind. This is a nearly 72 year old man, with barely a foot in the outside world, reflecting. Most people who search for truth  likely  have experienced in their past 'holding in their hand' what  they  trusted was the 'pearl of great price'. It may have been our church , or the Bible or a personal relationship. It seemed near perfect. But as we further experienced it that pearl showed its serious flaw. At some point we may have recognized it was even dangerous in some ways  to our well being. We may have become aware that we had projected onto that 'pearl' what we needed it to be rather than seeing it objectively for what it really was. In the case of the church we may have, with very solid reasons, left it trusting we would find something better. The more we had invested and trusted it as the true pearl the more we are tempted to 'look back', as if to assure our self we did not 'sell our inheritance for a mess of pottage.' We may question that if we were on the right track why more people did not do the same as we did, but most didn't. This is the scenario of Lot being warned to 'not look back' at his home town, but to only look forward. But Lot's wife did look back. So we may be tempted to use energy looking back to our broken pearl but the result can be to become a pillar of salt?

… But should that happen to us that is not our ending. There is much symbolic value in salt. Maybe this is the work of being the 'salt of the earth', that which keeps every one from going off on a totally separate way and leaving behind no form or structure for a culture or community to even exist. So we should not condemn the pillar of salt but still, if given a choice, it is not likely what we would choose for our self. We'd like to find a way to not be somewhat still mesmerized by what we once were so sure was our 'pearl of great price.' So our prayer and longing can intentionally become to keep 'following' the new path we have set out on and not be looking over our shoulder at what is happening in that place so formative and important in our past.

You can see how this same dynamic can happen with respect to a personal love relationship. What seems to be the perfect person in time shows his/her fuller humanity. One finally may see that again she has projected onto that person, whose hand they hold or with whom one has related at a much more personal level, one's inner dream that no mortal could live up to. One may then intentionally rearrange their expectations and allow this very much fantasized relationship become a real one where practical love becomes a trustworthy cement for the long haul of human partnership. The dissonance though  may be so great that one realizes it would not be wise to continue in this relationship for either person's long range well being. So one departs with  sadness but may ,like with the church, be tempted to look back, to second guess their previous decision and consider returning.

But there is even a more complicated situation the path of the searcher may lead to. This also is spoken of in sacred story, ancient myth, and contemporary novel and film. What if one actually did come to hold in their hand their 'pearl of great price'. That is the longer they lived with it the more true and bright and not disappointing it became. This person, as it were, held the pearl in their hand, touched it , smelled it, tasted it but before they could eat it , chew it up and internalize it the pearl was snatched away by nature, leaving one separated from what they intuit they can never find a replacement or equal. Now what does this person do? Do they intentionally not 'look back' to their momentary yet solid and full experience of the 'pearl of great price'? There are three aspects that I think that person would be most wise and true to consider: 1)They definitely should not repress that mountain top experience as if it never happened. It may be easier and less suffering to repress it, to convince themselves it did not have the value they had assigned to it. That it  like the first scenario,  was  'only' a projection and something more 'realistic' and fulfilling  will be  found by moving forward. So that is something such a  person should not do but which  will likely be their greatest temptation and the conventional advise, "Get over it."  2) This person must , while treasuring that past experience, which they intuit will never be  equaled or excelled, find the will to nevertheless move on to the future, step by step, following the flow of life. This, even if it seems only a surface path and does not have near the brightness that was experienced in the presence of the 'valued pearl' which  is only now kept alive by memory. 3) They can intentionally take this uneasy path forward 'hoping against hope' that in some different form or way  history might repeat itself , at least in this one incidence. But second time arounds can never be demanded by the mortal. There was only one transfiguration experience. This  situation has always been the province of the gods or of what Christians call providence, God's will or maybe fate.

I think there are many historical persons whose lives have left some record that they found themselves in the psychological/spiritual situation I have tried to describe just above. And it was only after experiencing their 'pearl of great price' and being separated from it that their creative work came out of them. It was only during the suffering of the separation from their treasure find  or their vision of the 'pearl' that whatever opus they actually brought to their peers or to humanity quite naturally 'came out of them'. It is a creativity like  that of  giving birth after a long hard labor.  It potentially  is the birth of a 'new creation.' Only out of their completely unplanned  grieving separation, after which they nevertheless kept moving forward with an irrational hope in tension with their treasured  'pearl' experience, did their naturally occurring sacrifice bring  an outward creative manifestation. I recall the phrase  regarding Jesus that , 'it was for the joy set before him' that he , with grace and meaning, 'endured the cross despising the shame.'   Jesus and others who, after finding their pearl of great price,  unwittingly found themselves sacrificing, in their mortal life,  their highest joy by living without it. This was not something which  developed directly  out of any conscious plan or  their will to do any great thing for humanity, but simply the natural living out consciously ones strongest longings for that which they had personally found  of greater value  than anything they would have ever imagined stumbling upon. It was , 'like a man plowing in a field, who came upon a treasure. He straightway went and purchased the whole field  so that he might secure the treasure for himself.'

I will offer one  more historical example of this that was made more clear to me in an 'active imagination' process. Active Imagination is a very natural kind of technique that Jung discovered partially  by reading the Christian mystics  and which he believed helped a person to , as it were, to make  intentional contact with the Collective Unconscious. Active Imagination is more direct and can gain faster results  than is experienced waiting for dreams to bring such information. In it one is encouraged to  speak directly to any characters that appear in the fantasy as if they are fully real.  And to accept the spontaneous responses that come in any conversation that develops. Obviously, from our Western perspective,  one can feel quite foolish in their first attempts at this.

Active Imagination Dante Alighieri March 30, 2014

My first time to sit by my pond this spring began with me taking the trip to the 'depths' through imagining dropping into the earth to the bottom of the pond. I arrived quickly at the familiar now  dimly lit vaulted cavern with eight doors equally spaced around the circumference. All of this is the same as many of my Active Imaginations. This time I went here specifically hoping for an encounter with Dante. I was not disappointed. Immediately he appeared in the center where I was seated on a green stone chair. He wore a black  hooded robe typical of the Medieval  poets. His thin tall torso and sharp facial features were like I have imagined and seen in paintings and sculpture. He spoke in deep tones from a face that was welcoming and serious. He greeted me:

Dante In Paradise

D: Hello Jim Hibbett. I have been aware that you have considered conversing with me for some time. I am glad. How did I get your attention?

J: In Florence, Italy January 4 I heard you mentioned often and was quite taken by the statue of you in front of the The Sacred Cross Church. Since then I have become aware that much of your work comes out of your interest in love and perhaps seeing that human love had not reached its potential in your day in a way that was a common experience of people. That remains a disposition I carry, so I was drawn to hearing more of your story and of your work that I might better grasp what it may mean today to help love become more conscious and more highly developed among us humans.

D: I hear you and am interested. Please go with me to a more comfortable place.

He then led me through one of the arched doorways. I noticed engraved around the stone arch four words for love-the Greek Agape, Eros, Phileo and Caritas a Latin word for love. We then entered a bright ornate room that looked much like an Italian church side area, but with nothing that marked it particularly Christian. It could as easily have been a Roman temple room. He invited me to sit down on a comfortable couch at one end and, taking off his hood, he sat at the other end only a few feet away.

J: Before we venture into this I'd like to say how profoundly I feel connected with the array of love words on your entrance door. Do you think many words are needed to reach a fuller understanding of the deepest nature of love? Also I feel a need to confess that I am a far more common person regarding intellectual and aesthetic capacities compared to you. Yet this question and theme of love I so strongly identify with.

D: Yes. Love, because it is of the most importance also has the deepest meaning of all ideas or experiences. You do not need to apologize for your place in the world. When a person becomes a well known intellect and contributor to the common interests like happened with me, they are seen as distant and different than ordinary. This keeps their work from seeming applicable in practical ways to the average person. So I am glad for you that all your life has been lived on the more common path for your life's setting.

J: Thank you for that reassurance.

D: Now, how do you wish to start our talk? If you go a direction that I do not think is time well spent I will tell you.

J: Then I will ask, did you find that love for woman, or a woman, was at the heart of your discovering whatever is most important about love and life?

D: You have begun at the right place I can see. I may say at the start my love experience of Beatrice Portinari was my life time obsession. Without that reality at my center I am very sure you would have never heard of me. My family decreed when I was twelve years old that I would marry Gemma Donati which I did when I was twenty years old. But, as much as I would wish it, married love was never the high and soul capturing experience that my love for Beatrice remained from the time I met her when I was ten years old and she was two years younger. I only saw her a few brief times in my life and knew she tragically died when she was twenty four years old.

J: In your day was it somewhat scandalous for a married Christian man to carry such a love for a woman who was married to another man? Was this a problem for you?

D: I was lost at finding a way to justify the reality in my heart. I knew profoundly that the caring love and appreciation I had for my wife and the inspirational , spiritual love that obsessed me regarding Beatrice were two different kinds and experiences of love. I considered pursuing, with its likely tragic consequences for everyone, Beatrice in an open way. But something deep within, I must say a voice of God, declared that my love for her was not to ever be a part of my outer life, but was to be the central inspiration of my life, my passion and my writing. And this is how it was?

J: This sounds like a very sad love story Mr. Alighieri?

D: I know. It is sad but I think also the kind of spiritual situation that results in a man reaching places of a spiritual nature deep within himself. And out of that to be able to offer back to God and to culture gifts that would have never been born without such suffering love. I know the 'Divine Comedy' would have never happened from me if it were not for the passionate love I unashamedly carried for Beatrice. She was the center of the inspiration from which all that I expressed poetically came. When I wrote I knew without question that it was 'she' who guided my words and who brought the strong emotions and images to my heart. I still cannot explain nor do I understand this horrible yet divine mystery of love. I thank you for this opportunity for a dead man to try to express these things to the living.

J: I am very honored. Did you keep a strong connection with your wife Gemma all your life?

D: She and my children were as important to me as wife and children were to any man I knew. When in exile for nearly twenty years my wife and children remained in Florence. I kept in written touch with her to the extent possible with the help of friends. I did the same with my children. She died there and my children eventually joined me in Ravena where they were near me and a great comfort the last years of my life. My daughter was named Beatrice at my request. This is all I can say. I am a strong supporter of marriage as a way for a very important kind of love to exist and in which for children to be raised. But, often to my dismay but to my surest knowledge, a typical married life was not to be mine as one who carried this kind of inspirational spiritual love for another woman. I can't say more about this that would make it more understandable, even to myself.

J: Did you live with a sense that you really knew Beatrice Portinari since your personal communications with here were so sparse?

D: At the time I was living I don't think I was conscious of what you are asking. Since then I have continued to try to understand this. Such occasional communications with the living like this have helped me. I think I would now have to say that the Beatrice figure that inspired me had to be a personality that was contained within me and not in actuality the human Beatrice whom I hardly knew. That is hard to my pride and sad for me to acknowledge but I can see that it must be more the truth. I can only assure you that the inner world love I experienced with her was all these engraved words and more. It was the faithfulness of Agape, the caring of Caritas, the warm friendship of Phileo and the incomparable ecstasy of Eros all alive at the same time and consistently over a life time. I question how often such a level of love has been yet so fully experienced in human life like it was in my heart of hearts. I ask continually of the dead here if they have had such an experience.

J: Mr Alighieri, I think that such spiritual dynamics of our inner lives are beginning to be more understood in present times than they could have ever been in your day. You seem to have learned so much about yourself in the kind of insight you have just stated. One last question: Can you imagine the day in human history when the kind of inner love life you experienced with Beatrice could become the outer love life experienced in marriage with a real life woman? That a man might see in the real woman in his life the 'goddess image'(and she the 'god' in him) you experienced with an inner woman? And that they still both relate mutually and equally attending to the details of a normal outer life together?

D: What a wonderful vision for humanity, leading to nothing less than the 'love of the world' which our Lord is said to have had. To love and be loved in that full way I can only say would create humans who had a compassion and appreciation for all other people and all things and would make it 'on earth as it must be in heaven.' I can envision nothing grander for humanity than that.

J: Thank you very much for this conversation Mr. Alighieri.

D: Thank you for coming Jim. I'm glad you feel you have interest in and something in common with what my life was all about.

Dante stood up and warmly said, “ Jim Hibbett. I wish you well in the mysteries of love and life. Buonasera” . With that it became pitch dark , he was gone and I was instantly again sitting by the pond.

MYTH IS NOT A BAD WORD.... February 2, 2016

A  'progressive' Christian thinker tells his audience that the statements of Bible myth are not literal, thus not true;

The garden of Eden wasn't a literal garden.
There are no such things as talking snakes.
God didn't want Cain and Abel's sacrifices.
Kangaroos didn't hop from Australia to the Middle East to get on a wooden boat.
God didn't want Abraham to murder Isaac.
Suns don't stop or go backward in the sky.
God didn't command multiple genocides.
God didn't murder Onan for "pulling out."
God didn't murder a dude for non-consciously trying to help catch the ark of the covenant.
The Suffering Servant isn't a proof text that God killed Jesus.
Nobody is going to burn in hell forever.
Jesus isn't coming back for blood and vengeance.
Christians aren't getting raptured.

Deal With It...... 'Annoyed.'

Adam and  Eve

I fully understand the 'annoyance' expressed in how many have come to believe some of  these abhorrent things as literal  history, which is  surely  misguided for our times. But I do not think we do the Bible or life any honor by dealing with the nature of myth the way implied here. First the Bible is primarily mythical story, even material like the man struck down for trying to hold up the falling Ark is mythical and symbolic. What we as modern science affected people usually  do with the reality of myth in the world is to say it simply is not true and there is nothing real or helpful about it. That attitude ignores that 'understanding ancient people's perception ' is recalling that  they took the myths of their culture as the 'voice of God'.  That is something we need to understand about them and their myths. Also we fail to appreciate myth by saying the obvious- it is not literal material history nor does it reflect materialistic science discoveries of our age. All living myth is of this nature and always has been. And if we are in need of new myth it also will not be literal story, though it most assuredly would not force one to discredit genuine science. One thing is certain to the people that had it--- myth was true. It was the truth at the vey foundation of their reality. It was more true than history or science is to us now. The living myth is true inwardly, spiritually and today psychologically. With our knowledge of the nature of myth and its symbolism, today we can be conscious that myth is forming us whereas in ancient times it was just the way it was and there was little chance that one could sit back and 'see' the work that myth was doing in supporting and guiding human life. To the ancients it was clearly the gods that made most everything happen. That was the truth. We have gone the other extreme and think everything that is real is conscious to us. This hubris is a weakness of a  significantly more conscious humanity. Both education, wrongly used, and the lack of it can increase our arrogance toward myth, the real story of humanity. But a fuller consciousness  would lead us to be much more humble and myth would no longer be a bad word or something about things not true.

Moses' Burning Bush

Also myth says in symbolic language what it 'means' to say. If it says a god asked for a sacrifice or a serpent spoke that is what it means. To honor the meaning of myth we are not at liberty to say that it did not mean to say what it said. The myth's non literal imaginative images are the essence of its power. To demythologize a myth is to destroy its life and its power to effect consciousness. A myth's power is not the power of reason and rationality that modern folks so idolize, or at least claim to so closely live by. The myth comes from a source too 'other' and too 'authoritative' for the mortal conscious mind to decide what to take and what to dismiss. It was statement, primarily in image and story, that defined the nature of creation and of the person's place in it. That is how important it was. It gave a collective structure of meaning to a whole culture for a very long period of time. A myth provides what is needed evolutionarily for a culture's cohesion ,or potentially in our day for all cultures world over, for some long period of time( Some say the power of a collective myth depletes after about 2000 years). Some, including Rene Girard teach that ancient living collective  myths were the conscious creation of humanity as an excuse for violence. Psychological evidence does not support this low value of myth. The same mythical scenarios exist across all cultures  and times and still frequently occur spontaneously in the dreams of modern people. Myths are not best accounted for as conscious  human creations but are what humanity has always experienced and called a 'voice of God.' They have been the avenue of what all religions call  'revelation.'  They 'come' from unconscious sources, today we can choose to  call that source the  Collective Unconscious with its  creative archetypes.

Mary And The Angel

Myths seem to be spin offs of many but some finite  number of general scenarios that are at the very foundation of the collective human psyche.   (There is nothing new under the sun.) C.G. Jung refers to these myth forming presences or lattices  as archetypes. They are in us all. They make culture possible. These story based structures spin these stories in such ways that they form foundational stories that are precisely what is needed for the evolutionary stage that exists in a culture.

So it is never accurate to look at an ancient living myth as if it were just teaching persons things that are always and forever 'false'. It taught what was the 'needed foundational' mythic story or truth for the time. So we can rage that Biblical myth is dominantly patriarchal as if that should have never happened. We even build up some strong resentment toward the myth for it is so out of tune with what is needed now. This is like being angry at our great grandparents for not having cell phones. The time had not come. Evolution's ways are not always pretty or even moral from our present day evaluation. We can rage that there 'should' have been sexual equality from the start. (The truth is there always was an archetype of sexual equality that may even have appeared slightly at times but it was not a central  pillar of any major culture's myth of the past several millennia if ever.) This low view of myth shows just how we ignore the whole scheme of scientific evolution when it does not meet our bias. We biasedly want to think God was always there saying what was eternally true and humans just never listened. We forget that the myths were the voice of God for ancient people. So all of nature and the mind of God as it exists is part of an evolutionary process. Not just the biological and physical parts but all of it including the development of the mind, conscious and unconscious. There is really  no grounds now of imagining some outside perfection that was fully known to itself from the start. Our  awareness of scientific evolution needs to become part of how we think of God in post modern times.

Jesus Walking On The Water

But no mythical spin or arrangement of these archetypal motifs lasts forever. They are all evolutionary based. When a myth begins to wane in its capacity to hold meaning for a culture that culture moves into times of major crisis and there necessarily is much chaos. A myth of a particular form has died and only another more appropriate myth can take its place. No human can demand or create a new myth. It must arrive in an evolutionary way over a period of time. This is the same nature as the Jesus expression that 'thy Kingdom Come' —not demanded or willed into expression but only yearned for. Western culture has surely been in such a myth dying time for at least a hundred years. During such times many persons will in panic insist that the dying myth is still relevant and is forever unchangeable . Others will involve themselves in many kinds of deconstructions showing that, by modern consciousness, the myth is no longer truly relevant and able to meet the culture's new needs for an expanding consciousness. It can be that some new arrangement of a previous myth can become the new living myth, but this can't be known and certainly not demanded. If a new living world myth were to emerge that participates in a Jesus or the Christ  type image it would  necessarily have to be recognized as not being an image of only one major religion, Christianity; but what is also found mythically in other major religions. Otherwise the Christ image  serves, as it very much does now in some of its forms, to divide the world. Myths before have been primarily felt in local cultures, but because the world is now so small a tribal myth will no longer meet the evolutionary survival and consciousness raising needs of humanity. We hopefully are moving toward a world wide myth. It will have to honor science and  it will also need to honor what we know of the deep human psyche. This means it will honor the Unconscious, the psyche from which all myth comes.

Ascension Of Jesus @ 1520 CE

None of this psychologically/spiritually grounded view of the whole proves there is not an ultimate fully conscious mind which created and is 'in charge' of the archetypes. No one can say anything like that with any certainty. Maybe some persons presently cannot imagine God any other way? I surely do not see how anyone can demand that it be either way. My personal view , which I find in strong harmony with scientific evolution, Quantum Physics  and depth psychology is that God can be understood, which of course is never fully possible,  as the mindful energy of the archetypes from which all that has been or ever will be is generated.

DANGERS AND TREASURES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS...January 22, 2016

A good number of people are aware that the work and writings of C.G. Jung were very helpful to me during my rather frightening mid-life transition some thirty years ago. In those confusing times some of the writings of Jung happened into my circle, and in them I found a voice that seemed to speak richly  of the 'hope of light in the darkness'. This of course is a central archetypal kind of theme in the Bible as well. But the ways I had been taught to understand and use the Biblical material had not let me see the parallel  message and experience there. Only afterward did I see the threads of hope I saw in Jung's work, often including much Biblical reference, were there all along in my own heritage, just buried to deep for me to access.

During the intervening years in my work as licensed  'clinical professional counselor', ordained pastor in the United Church of Christ, Hospital and Hospice chaplain and as a science/math teacher for high school freshmen at risk, Jung has continued to challenge and inform me. This has been in the most comprehensive and specific ways of any writer or journal-er of my acquaintance. I have come to see Jung is speaking of collective realities that do not just pertain to the individual but regard the whole of life and humanity. He is not the only one who has ever addressed the whole.  I am very grateful for the work and legacy he has left. He is presently being re-evaluated in light of his family publishing what is called Jung's Red Book six years ago. It is a painstakingly recorded account of his most personal experiences with what he coined the Collective Unconscious. It is giving a new insight into the origins of his most creative written works and fresh insights into his most inner life.

Here I simply wish to share one of the insights of Jung that is so relevant and timely to our times of extreme cultural transitions in America and world wide. He made clear that the content of the Collective Unconscious when it occurs as direct personal experience is both a gift beyond measure but also, depending on the level of human consciousness that receives it and perhaps fate, a great and threatening danger to the survival of the individual, the human species and of the planet. 

One place where this danger is described by Jung is in his close observation of the life and genius of Friedrich Nietzsche- German philosopher 1844-1900. Friedrich Nietzsche was a very rare genius of his day who apparently made unprecedented contact with our human Collective Unconscious content and whose ego unfortunately in the end was overwhelmed by it. He did what Jung so warned himself and others of..... to not identify personally with the mesmerizing numinous content of the Collective Unconscious. To do so causes first an unconscious inflation of the ego, of one's too high an estimate of his conscious self; to the extreme of thinking of oneself as, or nearly as, God. This can result in total insanity. Anyone who visits a hospital psychological ward would hear those who do not just talk about God and Jesus intently but truly think they are such. More functional people are under the same kind of unconscious influence and are our cultures' megalomaniacs. 

This can sometimes be seen tragically happening with highly charismatic celebrities, public leaders, politicians and dictators. Rare ones like Nietzsche, their ego-  both as strong, creative, genius and tender as it is- has been completely lost, drowned eventually in the flood of the Collective Unconscious which represents all that is,has been and can be. But Neitzsche was able to leave behind some of what he discovered in the depths.

Jung entered his years(roughly 1915-1930) of the Red Book experience fully aware of this danger and he took precautions. He had an objective trusted person to debrief with after each encounter and he had a strong daily routine of family life and of seeing several patients. (He gave up most of his teaching and professional posts during these years.) He says he often, to retain sanity, reminded himself that he "was only Carl Jung who lived at 330 See Street in Kusnacht, Switzerland and he repeated aloud the names of his wife and children." 

He faithfully wrote down his nightly fantasies, commented reflectively and embellished it all with calligraphy and paintings(The Red Book or Libra Novis as it exists now.) He had to keep clear that the themes and figures of the visions or fantasies, though a part of him and his psyche, were 'more than' and 'other than' his personal conscious ego. Such experience would help explain what lies at the foundation of all formal world religions as the experience of a 'voice of God. ' Yet these religions arrived powerfully in the past without the objective understanding we can have of them now through the arrival of depth psychology. It offers us proofs of the Unconscious, beginning with Sigmund Freud at the beginning of the twentieth century. 

Jung's personal experience and objective description of such natural phenomena of the collective human psyche is central to his very unique contribution to human knowledge. Knowledge based on recorded experience that I suspect has yet been barely appreciated and benefited from. His seminars on Nietzsche show how he recognized and understood the genius of that man's work. I've tried to read Zarathustra a few times. It is a highly creative and predictive lens into the evolving human situation or our times.

A strong collective danger, in times of major transitions, is always that a large narcissistic fearful part of a culture can identify with a megalomanical leader and live through him. By following vicariously, without critical challenge, his self perceived 'god almightiness', taking him as a long awaited hero who will save us all.  This part of the collective culture will be unconsciously drawn to such a person as if by a strong magnet. The result can be a Hitler-type of destructive collective phenomenon. There may be now a good number of such "I am God" persons around the globe whuch masses of persons are attracted to, giving⁹ their unquestioning full allegiance . 

Only some critical mass of advancing human consciousness can prevent this from happening. Is there enough of that in America and the world right now is a big question mark. Our civic institutions, churches or Sacred texts taken as specific answers can't save us from such a tragedy, but only some critical mass of individual humans' evolved capacity for just enough suffering consciousness which can be the new and necessary 'savior.' This is what Jung was getting at and warning of as best I can understand him. His strikes me as likely a most timely contemporary voice among us at our very critical historic moment. 

*I apologize for getting so serious without warning. It would be comical if not so real. So even the most serious issues have some humor attached. 🙂 Here is a letter from Jung on the influence of Nietzsche, written shortly before Jung's death:

To the Rev. Arthur W. Rudolph
January 5, 1961.
It would be too ambitious a task to give you a detailed account of the influence of Nietzsche's thoughts on my own development.
As a matter of fact, living in the same town where Nietzsche spent his life as a professor of philosophy.
I grew up in an atmosphere still vibrating from the impact of his teachings, although it was chiefly resistance which met his onslaught.
I could not help being deeply impressed by his indubitable inspiration ("Ergriffenheit").
He was sincere, which cannot be said of so many academic teachers to whom career and vanity mean infinitely more than the truth.
The fact that impressed me the most was his encounter with Zarathustra and then his "religious" critique, which gives a legitimate place in philosophy to passion as the very real motive of philosophizing.

 
The 'Unzeitgemiisse Betrachtungen' were to me an eye-opener, less so the 'Genealogy of Morals' or his idea of the "Eternal Return" of all things.

His all-pervading psychological penetration has given me a deep understanding of what psychology is able to do. All in all Nietzsche was to me the only man of that time who gave some adequate answers to certain urgent questions which then were more felt than thought.

Max Stirner, whom I read at the same time, gave me the impression of a man who was trying to express an infinitely important truth with inadequate means.

 
Over against him the figure of Zarathustra seems to me the better formulation.

Those are the main points I could mention about Nietzsche and his influence on my own development. If you have any further questions and if their answer is within my reach, I am quite ready to cope with them.
Sincerely yours,
C.G. Jung



*http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-lachman/why-jung-is-important_b_2664409.html

GOD WAS NEVER PERFECT.... December 31, 2015

This triggers a laugh because it places an unexpected contradiction before us. It is a contradiction with much truth. It is worthy of a healthy  laugh that our Good Book is so full of the opposite. Yet there is I think something here that the general public, religious and non religious alike, still must learn about that which is God. By God I think we are conscientiously cornered to say it must be what is everything. I mean where everything that is, has been or can be , is located in potential. But my hunch is that in that original everything is included  "racism, sexism, homophobias , violence and sexual frustration" along with some things worse. This would fit why all our  religions about God and gods, along with the facts of human history, are full of this kind of disappointments.

It seems likely  now the more conscious human species is  where what is truly good and what is truly bad has to  be sorted out.  And with advancing human consciousness this has become far more complex than most of us have let ourselves acknowledge. It  has now become the task for finding potential answers from  an expanding human consciousness. There is not a God back there somewhere which was only good and perfect. God evolves into a humane, responsible and loving consciousness only to the extent that the conscious human creature does.  This has never yet happened in any  consistent collective way, ever. It is true that untold numbers of us glimpse such a discriminating consciousness in our 'image of Jesus'...who  was, by the way, human from all reports. But we still then turn right around and say Jesus is the same as a perfectly good eternal creator God that existed always before.(The eternal God must surely be 'perfect' in the sense that it is Whole , including within it  all that is , known and unknown,  but not as a clearly differentiated  morality or ethics. That requires far more consciousness than must have been  present at the beginning).

I see the clinging  more orthodox images for God  as most likely a gigantic  post-modern blockage  of an ever evolving revelation  of God. It appears we humans are going to have to find our way and the courage to question some  outgrown images of God if we are to achieve what we apparently are  assigned  to accomplish. This is where evolution is now.

So it seems  to me we humans, or at least a great number of our species, must give up there ever having been any past perfect God, or as perfection being the quality of  the ambiguous  'mind' present when creation began. That quite a-moral powerful presence at most must have had  a dream of  being a fully  loving self and  creating a lovingly conscious species . But all our evidence points that such mature effective  love was not a completed perfection then or even  fully imagined. And that same somewhat  conscious  creative  'mind' either intuited  from the start or later painfully  learned that only the increased consciousness of the creature, combined  with the hazy dream of the creative God mind,  could make either of these dreamed for  ' intertwined consciousnesses' become a reality. The beginning was at best  a dream for mature effective love  to be  realized as the natural character of life  and  being in the real world. If we humans  can manage to give up the flawed  notion of a past perfect God, without caving into the absurdity that there was no mind at all, then we are more likely to help  usher in the level of consciousness needed to keep evolution moving  toward love of  the planet and each other rather  than our present observed trajectory  toward  destruction of both self and the planet.

Surprisingly this  view of an  imperfect and evolving  God does not have to  limit or reduce a sincere person's  respect for  God. Looking for God  has had my attention for  as long as I can remember , deep into my childhood.  I  now have the impression  that God, for the unimaginable and unspeakable reality that name is used by humanity, is on the brink of  being accepted more for what God actually is and not our insistence of what  it be. And the emerging image of God  is something that remains  the most astonishing mystery of  life. The metaphor I imagine is of God being very relieved and  far more connected to humanity  to finally be appreciated for it's less than perfect but still most essential birthing aspect of all of reality, truly the  Great Mother. For love is basically accepting, valuing  and  trusting one for what he, she or it actually is and not for what we have insisted in our  human egotism  the other be. Also, I'm imagining that God has suffered mutually along with all the human suffering the world has ever known, searching along with  sincere humans to find a way to bring the  world to  a place where effective earthbound love is the natural ruling virtue of life. That wins my forever sincerest  respect. I am moved with a profound empathy for that which we call God. I'm recalling that even Jesus, on whom many have projected their positive inner  image of God, at the end asked his friends to call him their friend not master. He wanted mutual  empathy not worship. Only mutual relationships have any hope of being matured loving ones. This surely includes the Sacred-Human relationship.  The presently evolving post modern image of God, rather than diminishing God,  brings a higher and more honest appreciation of that bed rock psychological  reality. I am full of hope  there is a collective leap in human/divine consciousness  happening in our present time  regarding the meaning of God and the mutuality and interdependence between God and Human.

I'm unsure how the  quote in the picture stimulated me to this reflection but it did. Or why I would be attempting to describe such an idea on New Years Eve? Must have been the pasta and lite beer. :)

WHY OUR NATIONAL VIOLENCE? and EACH OF OUR PART IN IT? ..... December 9, 2015

Ideology is defined as “The set of ideas and beliefs of a group or political party.” -Merriam Webster.

Historic Examples of  terror arising from Christian/American Ideologies.

Following the massacres in Colorado and San Bernardino, even more intensely Americans are asking, “What can we do?” History shows that to ' just do something' regarding a social crisis without an understanding of the underlying dynamics can be worse than doing nothing. Right now it seems that government institutions, political parties, disciplines of learning and religions have different and unsure understandings of what drives so many murders in our land. Some central ideologies that are common in America include : Republican, Democrat, Conservative, Liberal , Judaism, Islam and Christianity.

These are important relatively large ideological groups of our culture. One way caring people who condemn such killing could conceivably achieve a working consensus is to focus on the destructive dynamic of ' Ideology'. This has not been such a sinister word in our culture but I think it is time to consider it an underlying dynamic of our massacres, homicides and  the dangerous social/political polarities of our nation..

We might declare war on a dark potential all 'ideologies' have in common. An ideology can be a formal religion or religious perspective, or it can be a political orientation of a group within a culture. Or it can be a superior view of ones group  based on skin  color or ethnicity.

Why and how does any ideology hold a potential threat to the common good for a safer yet diverse culture? A good number of persons holding an ideology, which is a high majority of citizens, will have some level of desire for more persons to embrace their ideology, making the culture more comfortable for them. This last sentence is the underlying danger of every ideology. Among those having such a desire still fewer of them will become 'radical' enough to attempt pushing their view and beliefs publicly, to the point of harming others emotionally or physically for the 'success' of their ideology.

A necessary challenge requiring a mature mentality is for persons of every ideology to face that their own ideology has the potential of some persons becoming so 'possessed' by its ideas to become, if not murderers , destructive of unity and cooperation in culture. This very tangible situation requires that  each ideology group  self monitor itself from thinking that 'their' group's perspective is a 'one and only' or 'only right' point of view. The fact that it is hard to so self monitor shows how urgent the need is. For we are seeing , in our country's expressions of violence, evidence that a growing number of persons now see themselves as representatives of some 'only right way' to proceed politically, culturally or religiously.

Here is a hard but glaringly necessary need. It means that persons holding to any political party, no matter how personally sincere, stop themselves short of ever concluding that other perspectives do not have something important and needed to bring to the culture , to the public discussion.

It would religiously mean for example that Christians of all stripes realize that, regarding public life, we must give up contending that 'Jesus- Christian's  human/God symbol' is the literal  rightful ruler or Lord of all people and cultures. We would need instead to see this image as a matter of one's inner private center of security and meaning, not something to impose by force or law on the outside world. To externalize this as a literal/physical ideal for all persons needs to be seen as a 'radicalized' belief(But because many believers are unconscious of the violence this projects toward others they claim and experience complete innocence.) which is destructive, disrespectful and has historically been murderously violent. It would mean that followers of Islam be convinced that any statements of the Sacred Quran not be taken as literally meaning persons who are not Muslims should be considered automatically enemies. It would mean that persons of the Hebrew faith refuse to use Hebrew Scripture as literally meaning any certain piece of geography belongs them by eternal decree.

Individuals of the major Faith Groups can decide that if they are to contribute to a peaceful world, which all surely can, such statements taken literally and physically are very divisive for a sustained culture. And are more correctly applied as the private internal symbols they actually are coming from the stories of ancient Sacred texts. These 'beliefs' apply to the inner meditative practice of faith, not wished for impositions on the whole nation or world.

Ideological systems, political and religious (which often go hand in hand), are not inherently bad . They have been for millennia the cultural/psychological foundation for the most livable civilizations of humanity. But the world is now too small for any ideology to assert itself as superior to the others or to seek to impose its symbols literally on the rest of the culture.

If more people from all ideologies were to stand together against these underlying threats which each carries within itself, then a rational critique of ones own ideology could develop. We could also then help each other with understandable explanations when any ideology is being emotionally, if not physically, violent against the common well being of the whole culture. It seems to me if humans presently cannot strengthen individually the process of critiquing the destructive potential of all ideologies present , beginning with their own, violence in the nation and the world will only escalate toward mutual self destruction. I'm trusting that a good number of persons of every ideology mentioned above find the thrust of what I am describing sensible and critical in our present time. Perhaps a growing cross section of strong and fair minded persons is significantly greater in the nation than ones who are already, perhaps unknowingly, possessed by their particular ideology of superiority.

GOD, BIBLE, JESUS, US AND POST MODERN SCIENCE..... September 8, 2015

When anyone speaks of us humans being as God, even Jesus made the statement, it must primarily mean that the only avenue by which God has ever been imagined has come through the natural human psyche.

There is no story or metaphor of God in or out of the Bible that demands  the notion that  God came , or was revealed, to humanity except through the natural processes of the human psyche. All comes to us from within us, the mind or psyche. No reality outside of us, including God, is pushed literally or physically into our heads and we thus get an image of it ...whether it be a tree or a god. There is no other way to comprehend or to be conscious except through the natural processes of the psyche. God was never, by any normal evidence, ever anything 'outside the human' that the human discovered. It seems quite important to get clear this awareness in order for our notion of god to further develop from the ' Super being in the sky.'

This does not mean that any human is equal to God or that the idea or experience of God is always as Freud said,  'only a crutch for the weak minded'. No human has ever or can ever 'know' and thus embrace consciously the whole psyche. In fact most of the whole collective  psyche remains unconscious to any one human and even to all humanity's combined consciousness.

The part of anything can never embrace the whole but the part can be the home of the whole and so we are, in that sense, all God in potential.
For all that can be potentially known is at home within us. Philosophers have spoken of the          'Macrocosm being contained in the Microcosm.' This, if Jesus were truly a human being, had to also be true of him or else, by any psychological definition of human, he was not fully human. Of course Jesus of Nazareth must most assuredly been  fully human-- and thus  potentially  God. This reasoning does astonishingly imply at some point God and Human become the same from different perspectives. But like us, for Jesus to remain human means he also did not embrace or become conscious of the whole psyche- the  Collective Unconscious. Only his admirers claimed that status for him. And their claim need not be considered a delusion or deception  but an evolutionary psychological fact for them.

Now there have always been humans who have claimed to be God overtly or by their presumptuous
behavior and their cultures have usually recognized them, when in that state of mind,  as not healthy representatives of the human species. Jesus was no doubt a very healthy representative of our species so would have made no such claims for himself.

It was not deception by which those who after his death told and wrote about him made him to be the totality of what depth psychology now calls  the Collective Unconscious or God but a sincere natural human process we can now call unconscious projection. Everything that is or can be that has not become conscious to the human is automatically and unconsciously(without our knowing it) projected onto something in the outside world and there we 'see' what was already in us both good and ill.

We have within us an image or many images of God and, until we become more conscious of how we 'see' or imagine God by projection we unconsciously project these images of 'all knowing' and 'all powerful', 'all perfection' and 'all horrible' onto the outside, most usually as a 'person' or 'being' much like ourselves only much more of everything. Thus our unconscious determination to keep alive the Big Person, anthropomorphic image of God in the sky.

One among many ways to begin to grasp our own projection of the internal psychic God image is to explore our experience of how we projected this on to our parental figures as small children when personal consciousness was just beginning to unfold. We 'saw' them as 'extremely powerful, knowing and either very kind or the opposite.' Our parents simply were not truly as we 'saw' them but were very much our own projections. Many persons cling strongly to those original parental projections their entire life, never facing and integrating the imperfections of their own human parents. Humans become conscious of such projections and many others in varying degrees for reasons we do not know. It seems evolution of the mind pushes us to withdraw projections as much as possible so we become more conscious. The level of consciousness attained, and there are always many blind spots remaining, does not depend primarily on having superior intelligence but more likely on experiences, inner and outer, that seem to push one to doubt the conventional notion of  'common sense' reality and to intuit that there is a 'world unseen'. An underlying penetrating world  that is just as real and influencing us, mostly unconsciously, as the  biased conventional claim to see clearly the material world as it 'actually is' whether acknowledged or not. 

Finally now, in the past 100 years, the objective processes of science, which at first supported our common human confidence of the certainty of the material world being substantially what it 'appears' to be by common sense, is showing us more and more(via Sub Atomic Quantum Theory) that consciousness development in the human is the process of dropping our projections along with all other kinds of biases and assumptions in what can be a long and painful, as well as exhilarating, awakening to more and more of what is more  real and true. The maxim, " Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free" continues to be happening with us.