The First and the Last Word

In the same way that tides ebb and flow, I’ve learned that my faith life can display the same kind of movement. There are times when God’s grace is surely at “high tide,” and I’m drinking from a fire hose with dreams and synchronicities abounding. Those times are heady and seductive, leaving the “low tide” periods that much more dry and distressing.

As someone who’s struggled with depression off and on throughout my life, those periods of low tide sometimes leave me wondering if God even remembers that I’m here. I’ve often joked with friends that I suspect, at times, that God may have “lost my file,” as if there’s a cabinet with manila folders all neatly labeled with each of our names in permanent Sharpie markers.

I’m just emerging from one of those dark times, and it’s been quite a rough patch.  So it surprised even me when I found myself making an impassioned declaration of faith in class the other day.

I had given a presentation where I talked about process theology’s view of Christ as “creative transformation” and Jungian psychology’s journey of “individuation” toward the archetypal Self, highlighting the ways in which I found both systems of thought complementary. I talked about Jung’s idea of the “collective unconscious,” and how it is from this shared unconscious that is both within and beyond our individual psyche that the symbols in dreams emerge, symbols that often have a “numinous” or sacred quality. Many of us who do active dream work know without a doubt that those dreams can be, in the words of Bob Haden, “letters from God.”

A fellow student asked if Jung saw this “collective unconscious” as divine, and if Jung believed in a divine “being” or not. Since Jung tried to limit his discussion to the psychological aspects, it’s not easy to pin him down on that question, but Jung did say to a BBC interviewer that he didn’t believe God exists, he knew God exists. Still, I struggled to clearly answer the question.

But then I said, “look, I don’t know what to say about the collective unconscious, but what I do know is that there’s something bigger than me that loves me.”

That, my friends, was a moment of pure grace.  

In a chapter on “wonder, love, and praise” Bruce Epperly writes in Tending to the Holy that Charles and John Wesley had a “lively sense of grace” and believed that “grace was the first and the last word of Christian experience.” (p. 22)

It was a wonder to me when those words came out of my mouth after the despair I’ve felt in the last year. Yet I think Charles Wesley was on to something when he penned these lines to his hymn “O the Depth of Love Divine”:

Sure and real is the grace, the manner be unknown;
only meet us in thy ways and perfect us in one. L
et us taste the heavenly powers, Lord, we ask for nothing more.
Thine to bless,’ tis only ours to wonder and adore.

 

 

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Saving Sophia

In Christ in a Pluralistic Age, process theologian John B. Cobb, Jr. builds a strong case for understanding the Logos as “creative transformation” and using the term “Christ” to indicate the incarnation of the Logos in creation. In popular usage, “Christ” seems to be understood merely as Jesus’ last name rather than as a descriptor of either his role or his impact on his followers. But Cobb asserts that “’Christ’ does not designate Jesus as such but refers to Jesus in a particular way, namely as the incarnation of the divine. It does not designate deity as such but refers to deity experienced as graciously incarnate in the world.” (66)

He draws from the artistic world to illustrate how Christ can dynamically move from a strictly external image to an internalized force, but insists that it cannot only be in art that this is true. “If creative transformation is Christ,” he writes, “it must be discernible in all life.” (63) In discussing creative transformation and novelty, Cobb talks about a “continuing restlessness in the human race” that leads us toward “spontaneity, growth, and self-transcendence.” (69-70)

Most of my adult life has been characterized by this “continuing restlessness,” and over the last several years, my process of discerning God’s call for me in that restlessness has been through a Jungian practice of dream work and examination of synchronicities, or meaningful coincidences.

There is a vibrant movement of Christian dream work that has developed through the work of Joyce Rockwood Hudson (author of Natural Spirituality: Recovering the Wisdom Tradition in Christianity) and Rev. Bob Haden (an Episcopal priest and Jungian analyst), both of whom are primary organizers for the annual Haden Institute Summer Dream Conference in North Carolina. This movement stresses the role of Divine Wisdom as the voice of God speaking to us in our dreams and through waking life synchronicities.

And so when Cobb describes Christ as incarnating the “cosmic principle of order, the ground of meaning, and the source of purpose,” (71) identifying this power only as “Logos,” I must disagree somewhat. In the Christian New Testament tradition, the word Logos is used primarily in the Gospel of John. In the Prologue to that Gospel especially – but generally in the New Testament – everything that is said about the Logos was already said in the Jewish tradition about Sophia (in Greek, Hochma in Hebrew), or Divine Wisdom, typically personified as feminine.

In her groundbreaking text She Who Is, Elizabeth A. Johnson summarizes the connection between Jesus and Wisdom in this way:

The Prologue to [John’s] Gospel, which more than any other scriptural text influences the subsequent development of Christology, actually presents the prehistory of Jesus as the story of Sophia: present ‘in the beginning,’ an active agent in creation, descending from heaven to pitch a tent among the people, rejected by some, giving life to those who seek, a radiant light that darkness cannot overcome (Jn 1:1-18). (Johnson, Elizabeth A. She Who Is.  10^th Anniversary Edition. New York, NY: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2002, 96-7)

According to Johnson, Christians in the first century, in trying to communicate “the saving significance of Jesus, ransacked the Jewish religious tradition and the surrounding Hellenistic culture for interpretive elements. Along with Son of God, Son of Man, Messiah, and Logos, the tradition of personified Wisdom was ready to hand.” (95) She continues,

What Judaism said of Sophia, Christian hymn makers and epistle writers now came to say of Jesus: he is the image of the invisible God (Col 1:15); the radiant light of God’s glory (Heb 1:3); the firstborn of all creation (Col 1:15); the one through whom all things were made (1 Cor 8:6).  Likewise, the way in which Judaism characterized Sophia in her dealings with human beings, Gospel writers now came to portray Jesus: he calls out to the heavy burdened to come to him and find rest (Mt 11:28-30); he makes people friends of God (Jn 15:15), and gifts those who love him with life (Jn 17:2).  As the trajectory of wisdom Christology shows, Jesus was so closely associated with Sophia that by the end of the first century he is presented not only as a wisdom teacher, not only as a child and envoy of Sophia, but ultimately even as an embodiment of Sophia herself. (95)

I think it’s crucial that we not lose this rich tradition when we speak of Christ and the Logos.

 

 

 

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What Good is Your Theology?

In a 1959 interview with the BBC, Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung was asked if he’d grown up believing in God, and he answered that he did. The interviewer then asked if he now believed in God. Jung responded that the question was difficult to answer. “I know,” he said, “I don’t need to believe, I know.” We might ask what he knew and how he knew it. Of course I can’t speak for Dr. Jung, but I believe he meant that since he’d personally encountered God – since he’d had direct experience of God – his experience replaced “belief” with more concrete “knowledge.”

A deeply important part of my spiritual journey has been the practice of dream work and the examination of synchronicities – those occurrences in daily life that seem to be meaningful coincidences – along with other kinds of inner work based on the psychology of Jung and those who work in his tradition. I’ve also – like many Jungians – used myths, fairy tales, and sacred wisdom stories to show me where I am in my journey, as they reveal archetypal patterns of life and the psyche. This kind of psycho-spiritual practice has led me to experience a God who…

• speaks to me personally through dreams and powerful synchronicities
• reveals meaningful stories to me when they are most helpful
• is moving me through refining fire for transformation and healing|
• calls me to my true path or destiny just as God called Abraham, Jacob, Mary of Magdala and others.

Though one can see similar divine encounters in the stories of God’s people revealed in Christian and Jewish scripture, this is not the kind of God that is described by the traditional or classical Christian theology that was so heavily influenced by Greek thought. Traditional theology describes a God who is:

• Wholly other; who cannot and does not interact directly with humans except through supernatural revelation and that kind of thing stopped when the last page of the Bible was written,
• Absolute Ruler, Unchanging, the Unmoved Mover, and not influenced by humans’ situation or sufferings,
• So offended or dishonored by human sin and error that humans are therefore separated from God by an unbreachable chasm,
• No longer reachable by direct experience of “regular” people no matter what early Christians experienced,
• And, that our personal experience of God should not be trusted because there’s no way to “know” or “prove” that we are encountering the “real” God as God is in God’s self

Who is the God you know? And if you don’t feel that you know God, which God would you put more trust in – the Unmoved Mover, or the God who knows your deepest troubles and who calls to you, personally, as “deep calls to deep” in that still, small voice?

Many in the church would have you believe that the only theology that is “right” is what has been handed down for centuries in our tradition. But as Bruce Epperly reminds us in his text Process Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed,

Postmodernism cautions us that all theology is concrete, situational, and time bound. Postmodern theologians warn us that universal theological statements are abstractions that can be both oppressive and irrelevant to flesh and blood human beings… [on the other hand] Process theologians affirm that people can still tell a universal story, but…this story is grounded in experience and perspective and must be open-ended and liberating. (p. 1)

Each one of us has our own theology, and we are engaging in theological activity “whenever we try to discern the meaning of our lives, fathom the reality of suffering and tragedy, and discover our place in the universe.” (p. 2)

The question is, does your theology help transform your life and your heart? Does your theology open you to experiencing the Living God so that you can say you know God exists? Does your theology free you from whatever binds you?

If not, what good is it?

 

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Sacred Places, Sacred Dreams

I found my outer home when I was 46 years old, but even before that, I’d found my spiritual home.  This week, I’m fortunate to be able to reconnect with both while here at the Kanuga Conference Center in Hendersonville, NC to attend the annual Haden Institute Summer Dream Conference.

Kanuga Conference Center, Hendersonville, NC

I moved to the metro Atlanta area shortly after I graduated from college and lived there for 25 years before I ran away to the mountains in 2006 to experience life in a small, rural community that I’d loved visiting for many years. Despite having been born and raised in NJ, I knew as soon as I found the 100-year old farmhouse for rent that I’d come home. The house was surrounded by eight acres of gorgeous land with pastures, woods, a creek, a lake, and a completely picturesque barn up on the hill. Though its perfection was marred slightly by its close proximity to a busy road, I grew to love that house and believed with all my heart that it loved me too.

It wasn’t just the house, but rather the whole region that spoke deeply to me. The landscape itself felt sacred and my soul settled in there in a way it had never settled before. Spaces seemed to open up inside of me that breathed freer and sighed more deeply than was true in any other place in the world that I’d set foot.  Western NC is a landscape cut from the same topography – tapping into the roots of the Blue Ridge Mountains – and so it feels much like home as well.

I’ve been living in southern CA since last July, and though it’s a good place to be, and I know it is the right place for me to be right now, it’s not the place my soul likes to put its feet up and kick back with its eyes closed. It’s not the place where I feel most rooted.

The joyful icing on the cake is that I am here this week in NC to join with about two hundred or more seekers to talk about our dreams and our relationship with the Sacred. The people who come to this gathering know or at least suspect that there’s more to those night visions than the looking-glass-world flotsam and jetsam that appears at first glance. Those of us who’ve been turning over dreams and synchronicities like archeological treasures for a long time know that there are deep veins of wisdom and grace running through them if we’ll only take the time to look.

At a time in my life when I wasn’t sure I could even remain a Christian because I’d become so disgusted with the public expressions of the fundamentalist and politically power-hungry religion that was masquerading as Christianity, a friend brought me a different kind of archeological treasure – a book by Joyce Rockwood Hudson called Natural Spirituality: Recovering the Wisdom Tradition in Christianity. In this book, Joyce showed me how the Jungian psychology that I’d felt so resonant with could be integrated with my Christian tradition in a way that brought life to it again. I knew I’d found my spiritual home.

I’m here at Kanuga until Friday, and my plan is to take as long and deep a drink from this Living Water as I can possibly manage, and to take as many long, loving looks as possible at those mountains before I leave here; at least enough to last me until next year.

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Contemplating Your Dreams

What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then? ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I love dream work. I don’t even remember when I began working with my dreams, although I know that I began my love affair with all things Jungian after reading Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. That book and her audio series Theatre of the Imagination are truly banquets for the soul. I’m glad I still have a car with a cassette deck so I can keep listening to Estes’ evocative voice and entrancing storytelling while driving. But I digress; we were talking about dreams.

Dream work is commonly done in Jungian psychology, and it is based on the idea that our psyche is made up of both conscious and unconscious aspects. Jung believed that the unconscious held information of which we were not yet aware, but which could be life enhancing and important for our well being. In addition to our personal unconscious, he believed there was a transpersonal collective unconscious which holds the kinds of archetypal patterns that come to humanity in dreams, fairy tales and wisdom stories or myths. He believed that there was a pattern of wholeness in each psyche that he called the Self, and that this Self could use the symbolic language of the unconscious to speak to us through dreams.

Rev. Jeremy Taylor, a Unitarian Universalist minister and author, believes that all dreams come to us in the service of health and wholeness. I personally believe – and have experienced – that dreams are a language that God uses to be in dialogue with us, to show us love and to give us guidance. Tuning in to our dreams, I believe, helps us tune in to God’s purposes for our lives.

I’m currently in a doctoral program at Claremont Lincoln University, and taking a class in Teaching Contemplative Practices. Last night, I led our class in a contemplative practice using dream work. Though I’ve led groups before in dream work – where the whole gathering works together on one dream at a time – but last night’s practice was different, more meditative. I suggested that this practice could be almost like a kind of lectio divina, where the dream is approached as a sacred text. After the participants reviewed their dream in their minds, and then wrote down the images and the associations they held for each, I invited them to hold all the images in front of their minds’ eyes and contemplate them like an icon, like a window to the Sacred, opening themselves to any message that the dream may have come to offer. Finally, we paused in silence and gratitude for the dream and the Dream Giver.

Many of the participants shared that they’d had an “aha” moment of new insight into something related to the dream. Certainly, those kinds of insights can be just as sweet as any rose with which we awaken.

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