#138. Sacred Ritual in The New Creation Story

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ARCHIVE. For a list of all my published posts: 

http://www.sammackintosh.blogspot.com/

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Blog entries beginning with #101 are not essays but minimally-edited notes and reviews from the files I've collected over the last few decades. I no longer have the time and energy needed to sort out and put together into decent essay-form the many varied ideas in these files, but I would like to share them with all who are interested.

If you have questions and think I might help, you're welcome to send me a note: sam@macspeno.com

Post #138 is the third of three collections of thoughts and reflections based on the only book I know which deals explicitly with what the Christian Church looks like in the Big History perspectives of the New Cosmology.

The book is The Holy Web: Church and the New Universe Story by Cletus Wessels (Orbis Books, 2000). The author is a Dominican priest, pastor and theologian in the Midwestern United States.

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1) Cosmic Evolution, Ritual and Spirituality. Because the individuation process is the continuation, at the level of personal consciousness, of the world’s evolution, spirituality is a major component of the story of the universe. And ritual is a major aspect of spirituality.

Spirituality is growth and development (personal transformation) in terms of inner consciousness and self-awareness; ritual is the primary means for intentional growth and development.

It is precisely by way of ritual that the energies, power and forces that make up the individual are contacted and owned. How important it is, then, to understand how to contact and own them. The spirit-powers are contacted via the Vision Quest and are “owned” via some form of a vision “dance.”

Obviously the churches should be fostering spiritual transformation, but we simply can’t expect much of them anymore.

2) Our Ritual and Spiritual Roots. Spirituality is finding God in all things, especially in one’s own emerging self. The truest self and God, the sacred/numinous, are not distinct realities. Ritual is essential for the emergence of a planetary global community.

Our Paleolithic ancestors experienced the numinous in all things, all the time; especially in the hearth fire and the communal forms surrounding it. Art, music, dance and language, all evolved for ritual communion with the spirit powers. Ritual especially was focused on sex and death, but on transformation generally: reproduction, the beginnings of sexual maturity and burials.

Institutional, organized religions emerged after the Paleolithic Hunting Culture and the Neolithic Matriarchy. They are coincident with Patriarchal Civilization and are, apparently, a necessary step in the differentiation of religion, but they are now no longer what’s needed or appropriate.

Jesus went way beyond the institutional religion of his time. He obviously knew the numinous from within, and recognizing the dangers (of inflation) involved.

He has a tremendous impact on his followers. They used Jewish imagery to make sense of his impact on them: they saw him as the Second Adam, the Suffering Servant, the Passover lamb, and especially as the one who was anointed (appointed) "Lord of All."

Everything that the “numinous” refers to was understood to be contained in Jesus. Western culture summarized that by saying he was God in the flesh. Nowadays, the problem is that those experiences should not be made exclusive of the rest of the world’s religious experiences.

Similarly, ritual is not the exclusive property of the church. It is essential-- a prerequisite!-- for the Earth’s planetary global community. And this is why it’s important to see the story of Jesus in the context of the universe’s story; Jesus is the exemplification of-- not an exception to-- the way the cosmos works.

3) Our need is to be as attuned with the earth and “all our relations” as Jesus was. We are to know, as he did, that we are part of, and responsible to, the cosmic process. We especially need to be conscious of the fact that the paschal process is intrinsic to the cosmos.

While it isn’t clear that this was Jesus’ understanding, at least in such an explicit form, it most certainly was precisely the understanding of his followers. “This is the way the world works: even the worst that can happen is a means for fullness of life in communion with God.”

The universe supplies “supporting evidence” that we can trust it; despite appearances, the cosmic process is going to work out well. That this is a part the New Universe Story, and finds expression in chaos theory, is a new insight.

So then, in a way, is the idea that the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus is not a unique event of history so much as an exemplification of the normal functioning of the cosmos.

This insight really does change things in terms of theology, in the sense that the salvation effected by Jesus does not have to be understood as some form of blood payment to an avenging God but, rather, as a radical shift in consciousness, the most fundamental ontological change possible.

It can be understood as a breakthrough, an alteration of the morphogenic field, and thus as effecting everything. But also as being in harmony with everything, not as something uniquely added as an exception or even a contradiction to the way reality works. How wonderful to celebrate the Passover Seder each year!

4) Psychological insight: If cosmology is psychologically a projection of our coming to conscious awareness, individually and as a species, then a sense of the pleroma and parousia must be the projection of the other end of the same individuation and cosmic process.

The evolutionary process is, from the beginning, a spiritual as well as a physical process. Formal institutional religion is only a temporary stage in human evolution, one which we as a species now seem to have outlived.

We can ask, then, will there be a church beyond the Church? Can we look for a globally present sacramental and servant community, as a continuation of the Christian tradition, but sociologically non-structural, more along the lines of how Buddhism is set up? (Some study of those social arrangements by sympathetic sociologists would be helpful.)

I think that is precisely what the universe is asking of us, that’s where things seem to be moving. But it will have to be far more inclusive than what we’ve known in the past.

5) Details About Ritual: Ritual is our “grandmother tongue.” Its goal is transformation and empowerment. Education is a by-product.

Like everything else, ritual can be evil. It can empower to negative, destructive behavior. This would be possible if the “owned” empowering images are destructive. Obviously these images are not the Divine energies.

Or are they, but misunderstood? The problem of evil persists at the most profound levels! Would the universe present an individual with negative empowering images? That really doesn’t seem likely, but psychological terms, it would be negative images coming from the unconscious. And surely the unconscious isn’t always “benevolent.” Or, again, is it?

Is that very thought yet another aspect of patriarchal fear of the unconscious? Clearly, there can be psychological damage just as there is physical damage. I’m thinking just now of Annie Dillard’s demand of God, “What’s with the kids without faces?”

6) What Ritual Is. Ritual really does seem to have a two-fold purpose: empowerment to be who and what we are as individuals (“particle”) and communion with all our relations (“wave”). Ritual, too, manifests the wave/particle duality of quantum theory.

Becoming aware of the sacred ‘always and everywhere’ is a radical shift in contemporary consciousness. “Sacred” is what’s meaningful: what empowers each of us to be who and what we are, and to be in communion with the Rest. Quantum duality there, too!

Ritual is a wave/particle duality: its two-fold purpose is empowerment of individuals to be who/what we are called to be and communion with all our relations.

7) “The Mystery is always and everywhere giving itself.” This means not “just” in the details of everyday life, big and small, meaningful and seemingly insignificant, but in the totality of each person’s individuation process, as well as in human cultural evolution and in expanded global awareness of the planet as a whole both culturally and ecologically.

But also in the whole biological evolution process including its basis in planetary and geological evolution, in the very formation of the planet along with the rest of the solar system, as well as the formation of our galaxy, the local group of galaxies, and the whole cosmos.

What’s really needed here is poetry to try to capture all this in some clear way. The above statements need to be made into a hymn. But also to be expressed in art, and music and dance, etc.

8) Practical Aspects of the Recovery of Ritual and Spirituality. The images in which the Mystery is giving itself to us are precisely the only ones available for us to announce/proclaim and own. As a way to begin, the talking staff council may be exactly the right form to start with.

Some form of vision quest is a preliminary practical need in the process of recovering ritual. Our most important need to know what empowering symbolic images are being offered to each of us as individuals.

We also need, of course, to understand what’s meant by empowering images, symbols, visions.

      

The sacred us to be found everywhere. The question then is, In what images is the Mystery giving itself to us? It is our job to be willing to make the effort to be sensitive and responsive. Sensitivity is the quest for vision, responsiveness is dancing it on the earth before the assembled people.

9) Ritual and Personal Responsibility. It is because the evolutionary process continues precisely in individuals, via ‘individuation,’ that, as Jung says, “The salvation of the world depends on the individual soul.”

Each of us ‘counts.’ Each must be sensitive. Each must make the effort.

What a powerful way to say, “Your life is not trivial.” (And such understanding may be the essential content of ritual initiations.)

My own focus on self-awareness was apparent from a very early age.

It was fostered by Merton, Teilhard and Jung, and given practical help via monasticism and the liturgical movement. They both were the best helps available, that I knew of, then.

I was also exposed to, could see the great value of, NA traditions, thanks especially to Joseph Eppes Brown and Joseph Jastrab. He helped me get started with the concrete experiences.

And I did have a science background, too. It was specifically focused on evolution-- cosmic, planetary, biological, anthropological, cultural.”

I’m especially grateful that I was able to teach sacramental theology at SJU and to do all I've been able to in terms of promoting ritual-- in family life, small gatherings, churches and men's groups.

10) This book prompted a meditation-poem which I've called "The Momentous Act and His Role in It."

The “momentous act” needed to heal the world at this crucial point in human history is Percy-with-the-gross-phallus embracing the Christ. The religious tradition is never going to embrace the phallus. It will be the other way around: somehow, the phallotokoi will offer forgiveness to the religious tradition for its having demonized the sacred phallus.

I’m not clear whether it's the embrace or the forgiveness which is the momentous act. Percy-with-the-gross-phallus embracing the divine energies of the universe? Or, forgiveness of the religious tradition for its demonization of phallus? Probably both; and, probably, it’s really just one act.

      

In any case, it is not phallus which is to be liberated but the whole dualistic religious tradition, the institutional church and the secular culture which comes from it. It will be liberated from its separation from earth, healed of its alienation from matter, and reconciled with what it has considered evil: the feminine, the unconscious, “chaos,” especially the body and its genitals.

And this forgiveness of the institution by the numinous which it had demonized is somehow the work of the phallotokoi. This is an intuition I can almost not even get into any words, let alone good and satisfactory words.

But the forgiveness will be clear and strong evidence of the Kingdom, the basilia. It is a new proclamation of the gospel when the phallus says to the church, “Fear not!”

This is a momentous act, indeed! The demonized numinous knowing itself as, in fact, epiphany of God. It is a complete reversal of the Fisher King’s groin injury: the healing-recovery and affirmation of what had been lost for a hundred centuries. And it changes everything.

And some of us are called to do the needed imagining which will affect the "morphogenic fields" and allow phallus and maleness and manhood to once again be known as sacred. This is the idea of the “rainmaker,” one who “does what he does by being what he is.”

      

This one has been called to a rainmaker role. He does it via the sacred pipe, when he owns his vision by “smoking” it in a mandala of images, his ‘owning’ dance. He influences the morphogenic field surrounding sacred manhood by permeating it with the image of sacred phallus, an ‘owning’ of phallus as theophany.

This “breakthrough” is the only way out, the only way to break the evil spell.

       

This what he is called to, and what he did in his VQ III vision dance. It includes making bears and radiating phallic awe and wonder. It is what he does in this retirement contemplative stage of his life.

He is called, empowered, grounded and protected to enjoy good things, share them with others, and tell his story; especially to enjoy with others their good. That, now, is his earth-walk.

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#119. The Church and Earth-spirituality

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ARCHIVE. For a list of all my published posts: 

http://www.sammackintosh.blogspot.com/

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Blog entries beginning with #101 are not essays but minimally-edited notes and reviews from the files I've collected over the last few decades. I no longer have the time and energy needed to sort out and put together into decent essay-form the many varied ideas in these files, but I would like to share them with all who are interested.

If you have questions and think I might help, you're welcome to send me a note: sam@macspeno.com

Post #119 is about the enormous gap separating Church and Nature.

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These notes date from Feb, 97. About a moving book named DANCING BETWEEN TWO WORLDS, Jung and the Native American Soul, Fred R. Gustafson (Paulist Press, 1997)

1. Gustafson is a Jungian analyst and pastoral counselor in the Chicago area. He describes our current cultural situation as one of great fear and sadness: fear of the earth/body/primitive psyche; sadness at its loss. Also characteristic is our alienation from one another and projections on to NAs, Blacks, women, et al.

The Christian church bears much responsibility for separating its God from the earth, as well as for the resulting damage to the earth and the destruction of peoples close to it.

But we need not be discouraged. It's only recently that we've become aware of all this, and things are beginning to turn around.

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2. What we need, he says, is to build in our hearts something like the NA Ghost Dance or the Vietnam Memorial in DC, so that we can continually acknowledge our sadness and grief, and to pray for a New Day.

Perhaps his most essential point is that we need to re-imagine the Christian story along indigenous lines: to re-think religious attitudes that separate us from ourselves and the earth. With the help of NAs and of modern science, the goal, he says, is to be able to say "All my relations!"

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3. Limiting the idea of incarnation to Jesus blocks the more profound truth of our own divinity. And denying spirit and life to matter puts the human ego at the center of the universe; it makes human consciousness to be "un-consciousness of the consciousness of nature." (And people will forever fight about whose anthropocentric view is more correct.)

This problem is especially seen in the large numbers who can no longer go to church and yet have no wish to give up their faith-views. (They are not apathetic, he says, but frustrated and sad.) If body/ matter/ nature/earth is life-less and spirit-less-- even evil-- the brunt of the resulting projections is borne by NAs, Blacks, women, and our own bodies. The resulting sickness of soul shows itself in drugs, anxiety, battered children, "useless" elders, et al.

There is no spirituality of any worth not connected to the earth. Humanity is part of nature; nature includes the human. Our great need is to re-think , re-claim, re-imagine a living relationship with earth, if we are to feel at home on the earth, to believe matter to be holy, and to be committed to healing the sufferings of the earth.

The source of western religion's lack of sense of God in matter is the negative imbalance of masculine over feminine found in patriarchy.

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3. The 1990 movie, Dances With Wolves, is an expression of our culture's slowing making its way back to a relationship with land/earth/nature.

      

The movie begins where many end: not with the establishment of a hero, but with a movement beyond the hero. Dunbar gives up the hero stance; he has little choice: it is about to be taken away when his foot is to be amputated. American culture since the 60s has begun to move beyond the hero, seeing its heroes injured by their misuse of power.

Dunbar goes to the frontier, the liminal place of confusion but also of transition to new awareness of life and self. A negative reaction to the challenges of the transitional is to fall back to the familiar, predictable and conventional: becoming dogmatic and fundamentalist, a form of inflation where the ego/culture always right.

Neither to move beyond the hero nor to fall back to fundamentalism is to end in the suicidal madness of the commander of the fort Dunbar is sent to (who "shoots himself in the foot, pisses in his pants, and doesn't even know that his soul is gone").

      

The need is to find the land, its rhythm and harmony, and our relationship to it: to accommodate ourselves to it. The recently widowed woman, "Stands With Fist," is an image of the anima/soul of the land that we need to relate to if we are once again to become human. The land/ nature/ body/ is feared as dark, bloody and dangerous; and is not recognized as source of meaning and value; but it itself can draw us back. The entry place is acknowledgement of our woundedness.

The rest of the movie is the unfolding of the individuation process. Dunbar dances naked, with spear-thrusts into the fire, in a holy dance of acceptance of his primal soul, and "goes native." After that, when taken prisoner to be executed, he has "nothing more to say" to his captors. A new socio-cultural division is emerging: those who love the earth and seek the sacred vs. those who have forgotten the earth and have no regard for it.

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4. The task of each today, and the whole culture, is to reclaim the earth as living and soul-filled, and to redeem our inner, primal, indigenous self.

There is no spiritual life of any worth that is disconnected from that primal self and mother earth. For western religions, earth/nature/body has been the enemy, because it is seen as the carrier of death.

The author recounts a dream of being in a church half naked and wearing antlers ("a crown given by the earth itself"), and being told by a priest in full clerical garb that there is no room for that sort of thing in the church.

Gustafson says the church needs to redefine its practice and language to better reflect what its really wants to stand for, which he sees as compassion-- compassion in the fullest sense-- full identification with and an embracing of the earth.

The question is not whether or not, but with what attitudes, we should adopt NA ways. Essentially, he says, we should be silent: avoid talking, especially hyper-verbal explanations of everything, rather than experiencing things in themselves.

He says we need to be especially careful about being overly enthusiastic, and tells of a time when he was preparing a sweat lodge for some group that he especially wanted to show off to and impress. As he was about to enter the sweat lodge he stepped on and broke the stem of the sacred pipe--the second pipe he broke that week.

Also essential is that we take personal responsibility for our spiritual life, something which our culture certainly does not encourage. And we need to know that once we get on the right road, the culture has little tolerance for integrity and authenticity and will try, as it did with Dunbar, to imprison us.

He also makes the point that neither science nor technology is the enemy.

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5. What is the enemy is "dimming the stars," taking an anthropocentric view that gives ego more importance than it deserves.

He mentions the dangers involved in letting our little lives become the whole universe. We need to study the psychology of primitives (since it is ours), and to know that we belong to all of creation; we need to know that the universe wants us to exist (and has a unique role for us!).

The chapter also has an important section on suffering, death, and the "give away" as also being part of life.

      

Gustafson feels that the growing numbers sensitive to the sufferings of the earth are in fact the voice of the earth itself, and that we can contribute to the earth's healing "simply" by connecting with it.

The book ends with a section on beauty and dignity, and a quote from Jung: "The decisive question for a person is: "Are you related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of your life."

Good stuff!

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#116. The Cosmic Evolutionary Process and the Individual

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This is the 16th in the series of blog entries I began with #101-- a collection of notes, essays and book reviews from my files all dealing in one way or another with the emerging new religious consciousness. They are mostly things I've written over the last decade or two to clarify my own thoughts but which I would like to make available for anyone who might be interested.

Post #116 contains notes and reflections on an essay I discovered "accidentally" (if there is such a thing) which helped me put good words on my understanding of how each individual's personal development is a participation in the evolution of the universe.

If you have questions and think I might be of help, you're welcome to send me a note: sam@macpeno.com

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Richard Taras, "The Transfiguration of the Western Mind" in CROSS CURRENTS, Vol XXXIX, Number 3 (Fall, 89) Reviewed Aug, 1990.

A friend of Anne's from MN sent her this article as a follow up to a conversation they had back in July when she was out there. I mention that to explain how I came to see it; I wouldn't usually be reading CROSS CURRENTS these days.

The article claims to be a philosophical, specifically epistemological, analysis-- in contrast to a religious or psychological understanding-- of the current "transfiguration of the western mind."

The author's main point evokes Hegel, Kant, Jung, Stanislas Graf and Rudolph Steiner. He says: some recent developments in depth psychology have "immense relevance" for solving some our most urgent and fundamental epistemological issues. I haven't been looking, but this is the first time I've seen any attempt to integrate academic philosophy with Jungian perspectives. It would seem to be yet another breakthrough.

What caught my attention was the author's insistence that "something is really is going on outside the mind as well as inside." Namely, that the cosmic process itself proceeds, at the human stage of evolution, by way of archetypal forces. And that it is in the co-incidence of these forces (which would be operative whether or not a given ego existed) with the inner development of an individual that the individual is energized (empowered). And our part, he says, is called forth by the cosmos itself (and is for the purpose of the cosmos' self-realization).

As Thomas Berry pointed out (and I see how significant a point is it in this context): in feminine/goddess religion there is perpetual but not permanent change. No transfiguration. No real development or evolution, so that nothing really matters (in the sense that the continual changes do not make any long-range difference).

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There are several things of great interest here! One is the author's insistence that this is not psychology or spirituality but philosophy. (The theme of this issue of CROSS CURRENTS is "Philosophy and the Human Future.") If so-- if it is philosophy-- it certainly seems to be a return to philia-sophia in the original sense. And perhaps marks the acknowledgement of Jung, finally, in the last holdout against modern psychology: the philosophy department.

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A second thing of interest is that the author is describing what I recently delighted in finding named within another context: the phrase "innerward physical transfiguration" that caught my attention in (a month-long period of reflection which I called) "my 30-day VQ."

I was delighted because it perfectly described what I've been feeling recently (with the content of the feeling being that it's been going on for a number of years now): that something is going on inside myself and something is happening outside, at the same time; and that my task at the moment is essentially to wait for their coming together. (It's nice to have one's symptoms described accurately!)

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The third item of interest was the author's description of how the coincidence occurs, of the archetypal forces of the cosmic evolutionary process and the individual: "a recognition and union with the universal in the particular." That's epistemological language, to be sure; but it's also simply another description of the ritual process: the awareness of and an identification with sym-bol, for empowerment. This was exciting because it makes totally clear how ritual in general, and the VQ especially, is the very process by which the cosmos realizes itself. And it stresses how important is the inner/spiritual growth of even the seemingly most insignificant individual. Profound stuff!

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Tarnas has a good description of archetypes: "autonomous patterns of meaning that inhere in and structure both matter and psyche." From a sociological-cultural viewpoint, he says, paradigms emerge when they are "archetypally appropriate." And the indication of their appropriateness is precisely their numinosity! So cosmic evolution takes place from both within and without at the same time. (See final note, below.) As I see it, new data, new tools (when I first wrote that I wrote "new doors"!) "arrive on the scene synchronistically as new assumptions and presuppositions emerge from many minds simultaneously, from the collective mind."

What's happening in our time is that relatedness/connectedness archetypes are breaking through after a long period of alienation. The cosmic struggle/death/rebirth process is "culminating before our eyes."

He means (in psychological and more precise language) that the human psyche, primarily ego consciousness-- and that understood essentially as the Thinking function-- having identified itself as masculine and all else as feminine, even the other aspects of consciousness, let alone the unconscious psyche and the non-psyche cosmos-- is finally sufficiently differentiated that it can begin to seriously think again about relating to the Rest.

The author sees this as a hiergamos. (But this, it seems to me, makes the same mis-identification the Western mind has made: to still see things from the point of view of the Thinking function in its mis-identification of itself as only-masculine and of all else as only-feminine. I.e., in his main insight the author reproduces the problem.)

That's not so much to emphasize that he's wrong as to say that there is yet another step in the mind's (i.e., in the conscious Thinking function's) coming to self-awareness: the recognition that the All, too, is masculine, as well as feminine. (And this is, as Gene Monick has shown us so well, the only real source of that courage needed to truly effect the hiergamos.)

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In any case, a final quite valuable thought from the author: that "the new"-- what the transfigured Western mind is currently being opened onto-- "can not be grasped before it arrives." I want only to add that this is no less true on the individual level (not just on the cultural level). And that keeping this point in mind, for anyone undergoing "inward physical transfiguration," somehow makes the waiting a little easier.

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A note with regard to Tarnas' idea that "Cosmic evolution takes place from both within and without at the same time." It means that the cosmic evolutionary process is in essence sacramental. And the recovery of that cosmic sacramental process is simultaneously a recovery of authentic masculinity. My "two facets" are shining all the brighter!

I see the recovery of the shamanic/sacramental vision as a (maybe the final?) step in the awakening (in the late 19th c) of humanity to the cosmic evolutionary process and (in the mid-20th c) to its role in it.

At the human level, the cosmic process is intrinsically sacramental; ritual is the means of our empowerment to participation in the evolution of the universe. And we will recover the sacramental/ritual process of empowerment simultaneously with the recovery of an authentic grounded masculine spirit. Ritual empowerment simply isn't a possibility for those who would deny sacred phallos.

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#48. Do We Have a Future?

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When I started this blog to share my thoughts about the convergence of science and religion, one of the first things I published was a report to my fellow high school graduates on the 50th anniversary of our graduation. It's in post #3.

The reunion planning committee had asked everyone, attending or not, to send notes about what they've been up to in recent years, to be published in an anniversary booklet and given to all who attended the reunion or sent in a report.

What I had been "up to" was an increasing awareness of the convergence of science and religion, specifically with regard to the question, “What is our place in the vast scheme of things?” I'd been thinking about that question for sixty years, and since my retirement in 2000 I’d given a good bit of time and energy to thinking through my understanding of it and how it might be expressed clearly for anyone else who might be interested.

I still continue to find fascinating what many of the front-running scientific thinkers, psychologists and religious writers have to say about "where we fit in." Although each uses very different words, they all seem to be saying something similar: that we humans are an integral part of the evolving universe and that we thrive in a dynamic relationship with the cosmic mystery.

I expressed it this way in post #3: "The Mystery behind the universe gives itself to us as the world and ourselves, guides and directs us, gathers us as individuals for all time and from the four corners of space into a wondrous Celtic knot and into a global community of diverse peoples, and promises our completion and fulfillment and the persistence of our relationships in the in-gathering of all beyond the passing away of things."

It's that last part of the statement that I want to explore in this post.

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Probably no aspect of western religion is more subject to ridicule than the idea that we have a future "beyond the passing away of things."

Because of the body-soul dualism inherited from Greek philosophy, western religion's idea of an after-life became such a mockery that people simply stopped thinking or talking about it. Many took an agnostic position, saying "I just don't know, and there doesn't seem to be any way any of us could know." But that's not very interesting. If you enjoy thinking about science and religion, agnosticism is simply no fun at all!

The dualistic view that comes from the static perspective of Greek philosophy is that persons have a permanent component that survives the decomposition of the body-- an immortal soul that persists after death because it was created to be immortal. In this view, escape from the world is the goal of human life.

Nineteenth-century scientific rationalism, with its reduction of the world to its material components, took the opposite view-- there is no soul, there is no immortality and only annihilation awaits us.

In a static worldview, either escape from the world into an after-life or our total annihilation seem to be the only possible responses.

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In dynamic worldview, things looks a bit different.

As Claude Tresmontant observes in his Study of Hebrew Thought (which I described in post #39), the "evolutionary metaphysics" of the Bible's wisdom tradition recognizes that "it is the nature of being to be continuously evolving." This dynamic view of the world is the basic understanding of the post-rationalist scientific view as well. Indeed, as I spelled out in post #38, the evolutionary worldview originally comes from the Hebrew experience of the Exodus.

In the evolutionary perspective, the question "Do we have a future?" becomes "Does the evolutionary process continue?"

The question isn't whether there is a direction to evolution. Direction seems clear enough; in the dynamic perspective, we easily see that the matter of the cosmos has evolved on Earth into biological life and eventually-- by way of mammalian and primate development-- into human beings, conscious persons.

We also see, although it's still a bit difficult in our individualistic society, that there is one more step in that sequence: beyond our individual development there is also our communal relationship with others. Science calls it "culture."

So, in the evolutionary perspective, the question is whether the dynamic sequence-- fourteen billion years of evolutionary development from stars to living things, persons and human communities-- is a dead-end in the long run.

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In its various forms, this is probably the most radical question we can ask. Is the universe meaningful? Or is it absurd? Do we have a future? Or is annihilation-- separately and together-- what's in store for us?

We know that once we did not exist and that we have come into existence out of apparent darkness and nothingness. Even dualistic religion and rationalist science agree on that.

But in the evolutionary perspectives of post-rationalist science, we can also see that we are part of that evolutionary process. We see that we have been gathered "from all time and the four corners of space" and that, out of the resulting complex chemical and biological components, our personal awareness and communal consciousness have emerged.

The question still remains, however, whether in the long run the process a dead-end. It's not a question science can answer. There's no empirical evidence.

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And yet almost every culture in the world has some understanding of our existence beyond death and of a reunion with those who have gone before us.

An in-gathering of some kind is imagined in almost every society: Abraham's Bosom, Happy Hunting Grounds, Heavenly Paradise Garden, a meeting with ancestors in the next world. Every culture envisions some kind of communal reality for humans after death.

C. G. Jung says that, in working with his older patients, he found that their unconscious psyche always acted as if it was to continue, even with persons who were expecting to die soon. He says that our deepest Self continues to presume and act as if it will persist. The psyche doesn't have any sense at all of an eventual annihilation.

Teilhard has an interesting comment about this. He says that if we didn't think we have a future we wouldn't even bother to answer the telephone. Today he'd probably say we wouldn't bother to check our e-mail!

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So, is there a way to make sense in our contemporary situation of the question "Do we have a future?"

I think the quaternary perspectives which I've spelled out in a number of previous posts can be of help.

I said in post #46 (Convergence?) that the best way I know to describe the distinction between science and religion is to say that science is about the anthropos-cosmos relationship, while religion is about the anthropos-theos relationship. And one way to state that difference is to use the imagery of the four directions on the Medicine Wheel which I spelled out in earlier posts: "Science is a primarily a Gold Eagle and White Buffalo expression of our conscious minds, while religion is primarily a Black Bear and Green Mouse activity."

In Jungian language we can say that science operates by way of the perception function called Sensation and the judgment function called Thinking, while religion, in contrast, operates by way of the perception function called Intuition and the judgment function called Feeling.

An easy way to summarize those concepts is to say that science looks at details and the sequential flow of things, while religion looks at the big picture and the inter-connections between everything.

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In four recent posts I used those quaternary perspectives to spell out the four-fold imagery of the anthropos-theos relationship contained in the Bible's wisdom literature. I called those posts Evening Wisdom (#42, Sophia as Architect), Morning Wisdom (#43, Sophia as Guide), Noonday Wisdom (#44, Sophia as Gatherer) and Midnight Wisdom (#45, Sophia as Provider).

I think the question of whether we have a future can be asked in terms of these wisdom perspectives, specifically in terms of the perspective I've called Midnight Wisdom.

As I spelled out in post #45, the sages among the Hebrew shepherds and farmers used agricultural imagery to describe this aspect of the anthropos-theos relationship. They pictured Sophia as vegetation (a tree, plant or vine) to describe Divine Wisdom as a source of food, shelter and protection, providing for the existence and life of the children of the Earth.

In that same post I mentioned that just as in the hunting culture of the Plains Indians the buffalo is understood to quite literally give itself for the life of the people, in these agricultural images Sophia is also understood to give herself so the people might live. She especially provides the food, shelter and protection needed in the dark of night and the cold of winter, the time and season specifically associated with North on the Medicine Wheel.

Like the North's White Buffalo, the mystery behind the universe provides us with what's needed for survival and the fullness of our lives. And as I said in post #45, "Contemporary scientists, cosmologists, theoretical physicists, psychotherapists; Orthodox and Catholic theologians; followers of ancient traditions such as Taoism and of teachings going back to Paleolithic times-- all are attempting to express the same insight."

There's one more aspect of Midnight Wisdom which needs to be mentioned here: the Sensation function's focus on details. Just as in the New Cosmology we see that it's a distortion of the cosmic process to exclude anyone or any thing from our care, so we can see that in terms of Sophia as Caretaker, nothing should to be overlooked in the long run, no one left out.

With all this in mind, we can re-word the question about whether we have a future in terms of Sophia as Protector, Provider and Caretaker: Will Divine Wisdom be consistent in the long run?

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In asking the question that way, it's important to keep in mind just what the long run looks like:

1. The world is dynamic, not static. "Being is continuously evolving."
2. The basic sequence of cosmic evolution is "matter, life, mind." In the big picture we see that human beings are "the world become conscious of itself." Persons are the matter of the world responding to itself by way of the structures and activities of the human brain.
3. In the cosmic process there is also culture, what I called in previous posts "the other half of person." Personal relationships, human community and our union with all else are also part of the evolution of the universe.
4. The Judeo-Christian tradition at the heart of western religion originally saw itself as the growing edge of that communal developmental process. In the context of the Bible's Wisdom perspectives, western religion saw the Hebrew prophets, Jesus, and the communities of his followers as the growing edge of cultural evolution, the continuation on Earth of the communal and cosmic stage of the world's development.

Western culture and religion lost this dynamic perspective for nearly a thousand years, and because modern science came into existence during that time, science too lacked the dynamic perspective for a while. But in our day, the big picture of the cosmic process has been recovered once again by both religion and science.

Today, we can recognize not only that we are associated with the destiny of the universe, but that as individuals we each have a unique contribution to make to it, and that our communal work towards peace and justice, equality and environmental consciousness is an integral part of it. We can also see today, as never before, that precisely because war, injustice and environmental damage prevent human beings from making their unique contribution to the evolution of the world that those things are distortions of the development of God's creation.

So in asking if we have a future, we're asking not only whether the cosmic process continues but also whether we can look for something else as well-- nothing less than a healing of the fragmentation we experience in our individual and social lives.

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In Christian tradition, the word used to name this healing wholeness which our minds and hearts look for is "salvation." It comes from the Latin word "salve," a word we still use for healing/medical ointments. In Greek, the word used is soterion, from soteria (desirable things), the opposite of phobia (things we fear). The basic idea in this understanding of salvation is that, as participants in the cosmic process, we can look for the healing and wholeness of all things, that in the long run we don't need to be afraid.

So in the evolutionary context, the question of whether we have a future comes down to whether we can count on the cosmic process for that healing and wholeness in the long run.

As I said earlier, there's no evidence. Nothing from the Thinking function. And if we do have a future, we have no information about the details. Nothing from the Sensation function, either.

But while the patriarchal mentality of static dualism writes off the other two functions of our four-fold consciousness as irrelevant or even as non-existent, it is via our Black Bear Intuition that we desire "our completion and fulfillment" and it's via our Green Mouse Feeling that we hope for "the persistence of our relationships beyond the passing away of things."

These two aspects of our consciousness also come from the cosmic process, no less than do our Gold Eagle Thinking and White Buffalo Sensation functions. It is via us that the universe expects to be "salved." And we experience that expectation in ourselves as a promise. It is a cosmic imperative much like what researchers in the human sciences call the "cognitive imperative." I originally described the "cognitive imperative" back in post #10 (Overview of Biogenetic Structuralism).
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The word "imperative" generally means an urge or impetus, an inner drive, something which is unavoidably necessary, like the pull of gravity. Here it refers to how the universe is ordered, and "cognitive imperative" refers to the fact that "cognition," human consciousness, results from the way the universe works.

This is such an important idea, with regard to the question of a future, that I want to offer some examples of the "cognitive imperative" at different levels of human development.

Months before we are born, the cosmic process is active in the embryological development of our brain and nervous system. Biogenetic structuralist scientists describe it this way: "The initial development of each nerve cell (in the brain) is motivated by a cosmic imperative to be active and 'reach out,' to contact and communicate with certain other cells."

At a later stage in our personal development, the same cognitive imperative is described as "the uniquely human, hardwired instinct to link cause with effect that gave us a vital evolutionary advantage over other animal species." That sounds complicated, but it simply refers to the fact that our minds look for explanations of things. When we hear a loud noise, for example, we automatically (instinctively) ask, "What was that?" The point is that it's not only a unique aspect of human consciousness to look for reasons for things but that the source of that cognitive imperative in us is the evolutionary process itself.

A third example comes from our understanding of adult psychological development; it has to do with the inner drive we experience to bring together the many aspects of our conscious awareness. In Jungian language it's described as our need to unify the various aspects of our conscious and unconscious (the Jungian "complexes") into a whole. Jungians would say that we experience within ourselves "a strong drive toward individuation." The biogenetic structuralists put it this way: "The wholistic imperative of the cosmic life-force also wants the psyche to integrate into consciousness those until now previously excluded complexes."

The point of these examples of the cognitive imperative-- this "primal urge to know," as biogenetic structuralists also call it-- is that this cosmic life-force, this "primordial cosmic dynamis," is both the way the world works and the way our hearts and minds work. It's not just the cosmic process working in us, but-- because we are the world become conscious of itself-- the cognitive imperative is nothing less than the "primordial cosmic dynamis" working as us.

So, when we look at the question of a future in this context, we can see that just as there is a cognitive imperative, there is also what might be called an "expectation imperative." We humans-- as the universe become conscious of itself-- find in ourselves a desire for completion, an instinct for fulfillment. We're hard-wired for it.

But it's not just our own expectation-- it is the expectation of the universe itself. Via us, the created world is expecting to have a future.

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Since I started this blog two years ago to share my thoughts about the convergence of science and religion I have pointed out many times that the evolutionary understanding of the world which characterizes modern science has its roots in the Western religious tradition.

Here I want also to point out that, as unlikely as it may seem to many, even this idea that the universe itself expects to have a future has been part of the Western religious tradition from the very beginning of Christianity. Although in the context of static dualism we miss it completely, the earliest Christian writer, Paul, makes the point explicitly in his letter to the Romans.

Paul says as clearly as possible that creation itself-- the whole universe, all of nature-- is "groaning as if in labor pains in expectation of its fulfillment." The many translations are fascinating. You might like to check Romans 8:22 on Bible Gateway. I especially like the version known as "The Message." In that translation Paul simply says, "The universe is pregnant."

So, just as there is a "cognitive imperative" recognized by western science, there is also what might be called an "expectation imperative" recognized by western religion.

The universe is expecting!

And it's that expectation which we experience in ourselves, via our Green Mouse and Black Bear functions, as the promise of a future. When we look at the big picture, in terms of the "Wisdom from on high who orders all things mightily," there doesn't seem to be any reason to mistrust it.

sam@macspeno.com

#44. Noonday Wisdom: Sophia as Gatherer

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This post in the fifth in my attempts to look at the Judeo-Christian tradition in the context of cosmic, biological and cultural evolution. And it's the third of four which deal specifically with the images of Divine Sophia found in the Hebrew Bible's wisdom literature. I find these images tremendously helpful in understanding the relationship between God, humanity and the world in the evolutionary context provided us by modern science.

Post #42 (Evening Wisdom) is about Sophia as the creative architect or artisan of the cosmos, while post #43 (Morning Wisdom) deals with Sophia both as director of the cosmic process and as the guide of human beings who are called to be free and creative participants in it. I've named this present post "Sophia as Gatherer" because this set of images emphasizes the role of Divine Wisdom in gathering us, in Teilhard's words, "for all time and from the four corners of space," into the unique persons which we are.

The hydrogen atoms in our bodies were formed at the Big Bang billions of years ago; the iron in our blood, the carbon in our bones and the oxygen in our lungs comes from the dust of long dead stars. Each of us has, indeed, been "gathered" from all time and space into a unique expression of the universe become conscious of itself as the human person which we are.

I've also called the post "Noonday Wisdom" because this group of images relates specifically to the South on the Native American Medicine Wheel. "South" includes daytime and summer as well as the four-fold mind's Feeling function. The Feeling function is the source of both our sense of personal self-presence and of our relatedness to all else, and it's this sense of self-presence that Karl Rahner refers to as one of our primary "existential" experiences: of being, in Rahner's words, a "person in the world."

As I've mentioned often in previous posts, we have many names for this mystery of our self-awareness: "mind," "consciousness," "experience," "gnosis," "knowledge," "episteme." And humanity's growing "awareness of awareness" is what philosophical thought refers to as "the turn to the subject." We are coming to see ourselves not as separate from the rest of the world-- not as anthropos alienated from cosmos, as dualistic thought has it-- but as, quite literally, the cosmos become conscious of itself.

And as Teilhard notes, "Seeing is being." This growth in self-understanding-- this growth in knowing ourselves in a new way, as anthropos-in-cosmos and "person in the world"-- also allows us to be in a new way.

It's that new way of being which has to do with our sense of relatedness and connectedness. We are not isolated individuals, alien to the world, as religious dualism claims, but part of the entire process of cosmic evolution. We belong to the universe; Sophia "gathers" us not only to be the unique individuals that we are but also into a communion of personal relationships.

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In our highly individualistic society, it's not easy to recognize that the personal and the communal go together. I think C. G. Jung's work especially helps us to understand this communal aspect of our personal existence.

In Jung's understanding, as I spelled out in post #29 (on The Four-fold Mind), Feeling is one of the two judgment functions of the conscious mind. It's like the other judgment function (Thinking) in that it's always evaluating what we are perceiving; both Thinking and Feeling are adaptive actions from our evolutionary ancestry. But while the Thinking function is concerned with accuracy and authenticity, always asking "Is my perception of things correct?", the Feeling function is concerned with the potential benefits or harmfulness of whatever we encounter. Feeling asks, "Is it good or bad? Can what's there help me or hurt me?"

Another difference between the two judgment functions is that while Thinking is concerned with change and newness-- with "letting go to grow"-- the Feeling function is especially concerned with stability, holding on to the past, keeping things as they are.

On the Native American Medicine Wheel, the animal associated with the Feeling function is the Green Mouse of the South, a small creature who lives close to the earth, can't see very far, and is a packrat. It's a wonderful image of all that psychologists call "affect," the Feeling function's need for holding on, for closeness, connectedness, relatedness, togetherness, communion. What a difference from the Thinking function's animal, the Golden Eagle of the East flying high in the sky at dawn!

One more contrast between Thinking and Feeling is that while air (wind and breath) is the primal element associated with east and the Thinking function, the primal element connected with south is fire. The heat of the noonday sun in summer images the power and passion which sparks our energies and fuels the life-force running through us; it's an excellent image of the warmth and closeness of the personal relationships into which we are gathered by Sophia.

In neurological terms, our Green Mouse/Thinking function is apparently based on the brain's Parietal lobe, which is specifically concerned with the relationship of objects to one another in space and especially with the spatial orientation of our bodies. Here, too, relationship is the key. At the deepest biological layer of ourselves, being person means being in relationship. Conscious awareness and community go together.

The Feeling function's Green Mouse concern for the stability of our relationships even shows up in the familiar greetings of everyday life. Although we hardly notice it, we never say to a stranger, "How are you?" Greetings such as "What's happening?" and "What's going on?" are directed to people we already know, to those with whom we already have some kind of relationship. Even the super-brief "W'sup?" is an expression of our Green Mouse/Feeling function's concern for the status of our relationships. It's asking, "Has anything changed? Is our relationship still what it used to be?"

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These thoughts are obvious once we see them, but in our highly individualistic society we don't easily put together "personal awareness" and "communion." So it's important for us to understand this "Noonday" group of Wisdom images in their own context. That context is, of course, Hebrew thought. The connection between the personal and communal in Hebrew thought is described well in Rabbi Mike Comins' book, A Wild Faith, Jewish Ways into Wilderness, Wilderness Ways into Judaism, which I mentioned in my post on Hebrew Thought (#39).

He writes about finding himself alone in the wilderness at the start of the Sabbath. "I'm in a group of pine trees by an alpine lake in the backcountry of the Sierra Nevada mountains." He lights the sabbath candles and begins to chant the Friday night service. "Alone," he says, "I am anything but lonely. As I sing the melodies and daven the prayers, my people are all around me. I don't see them, but I am with them and they are with me."

He notes that "Jews have said these very same Sabbath prayers for many centuries. All around the world, as the sun sets, Jews are gathering in their communities. We share the same ritual, the same language, the same history. We are all members of the covenant, the age-old marriage between God and the Jewish people which started with Abraham."

This "Wilderness Rabbi," as he describes himself, spells out the relationship between person and community as it's understood in Hebrew thought in three brief sentences: "In Judaism, personal salvation is not the ultimate goal. The focus is communal. It is not the individual but the Jewish people and, ultimately, the entire world that will benefit if Jews respond to the demands of Judaism."

In a very different cultural context, although one in which the Wilderness Rabbi would feel comfortable, the Lakota teacher Black Elk expressed this same understanding of the connection between the personal and communal in speaking of the Native American sacred pipe. "When you pray with this pipe," said Black Elk, "you pray with and for all things. The whole world joins with you. "

It's in this communal context that we need to understand the "noonday" images of "Sophia as Gatherer." It's easy to hear names for Divine Wisdom such as "lover," "spouse," "mother" or "father," "friend" and "companion" in personal terms, but we need to be careful not to miss the fact that these names describe relationships and the human-cosmic community which results from them. Again, the personal and the communal go together.

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Here are some thoughts from Hal Taussig's book Wisdom's Feast, Sophia in Study and Celebration, which I mentioned in several previous posts; they are especially relevant to the noonday and gatherer aspects of Divine Wisdom.

Taussig notes that in the scripture passages about Sophia as teacher and guide, some of which I quoted in the previous post, we have "already encountered the metaphor of Sophia as lover. This image of Sophia," he says, "grows directly out of passion for Sophia as the One who knows and creates all things. But the image itself gains so much momentum that in a number of texts it stands practically on its own without reference to the learning or creating processes."

He quotes the author of Ecclesiasticus, Ben Sirach, who in Chapter 6 urges his followers to "court her with all your soul, and with all your might keep her ways; go after her and seek her; she will reveal herself to you." The Feeling function shows itself quite clearly in this passage (also from Chapter 6), where Ben Sirach says to his disciples, "Once you hold her, do not let her go. For in the end you will find rest in her and she will take the form of joy for you."

The author of Wisdom 8 talks about Divine Wisdom as his bride. "I therefore determined to take her to share my life, knowing she would be my counselor in prosperity, my comfort in cares and sorrow... When I go home I shall take my ease with her, for nothing is bitter in her company, when life is shared with her there is no pain, gladness only, and joy."

Wisdom 8 also pictures Sophia as God's bride. The sage says, "I fell in love with her beauty. Her closeness to God lends luster to her noble birth, since the Lord of All has loved her."

Taussig notes that while few of the Wisdom texts dwell on the love affair between Sophia and the "Lord of All,” many of them in fact take this relationship for granted. It is, he says, a "common theme in near eastern mythology," where the love affair of the earth mother goddess and the father sky god results in the creation of life.

He also mentions the scene in Proverbs 8 which I quoted in post #42, where God and Sophia are creating, delighting, and playing together. And he mentions a line in Wisdom 9 which pictures Sophia and God as king and queen together.

But, Taussig notes, the real emphasis in the wisdom literature is on Sophia's relationship to humanity. She is mainly pictured as the lover of human beings.

Ecclesiasticus 4, for example, pictures Sophia as lover, mother and teacher: "Sophia brings up her own children, and cares for those who seek her. Whoever loves her loves life, those who wait on her early will be filled with happiness. Whoever holds her close will inherit honor, and wherever they walk the Lord will bless them."

Whoever loves her loves life! Even in these twenty-five-century old texts, the communal nature of being a person stands out: "Whoever obeys her judges aright, and whoever pays attention to her dwells secure. If they trust themselves to Sophia, they will inherit her, and their descendants will remain in possession of her." It's easy to imagine Rabbi Comins adding, "and, ultimately, it will benefit the entire world."

But Taussig is no less clear: "Relating to Sophia means involvement with the world." He quotes the rest of the lines from Ecclesiasticus 4 which I mentioned in the previous post in connection with what I called there the Trickster aspect of Sophia as Guide: "For though Sophia takes them at first through winding ways, bringing fear and faintness to them, plaguing them with her discipline until she can trust them, and testing them with her ordeals, in the end Sophia will lead them back to the straight road, and reveal her secrets to them."

"Sophia's central call," says Taussig, "is the call to participate in and understand the world in which we live."

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Of the four groups of Sophia images found in the Wisdom literature, I think this one is the most difficult for western people to understand. The words of Black Elk and Rabbi Comins can help us, but recognizing this communal aspect of wisdom isn't easy for us.

As descendants of the rugged individualism of America's pioneer days, we're just not used to seeing a level to the cosmic process beyond the emergence of individual consciousness; before it's spelled out for us (as I attempted in post #22) we can't even guess what "the Other Half of Person" means.

One of the reasons why this is difficult for us is that western culture has been dominated by the perspectives of patriarchy for many centuries and to a great extent we remain unconscious of those patriarchal perspectives. We take them for granted. Becoming aware of them is a major aspect of the Immense Transition we are currently experiencing.

What it comes down to is that the patriarchal mind is afraid of relationships. Western culture is afraid of our relatedness to the Earth and of our connectedness with all things. Western religion is still afraid of the relationship between men and women! The patriarchal mind has such a hard time with relatedness and connectedness precisely because it has such a hard time coming to a sense of self-awareness beyond the level of adolescent self-interest.

The "other half of person" doesn't make much sense until we value our personal selves in a mature way. Knowing our own limitations and taking care of ourselves is what allows us to know not only what's important to us but also who is important to us. Our individuality and our relatedness are two sides of the same coin.

When the fear of relatedness remains unconscious, that fear surfaces as the patriarchal need to control what is feared. We can see this fear expressed especially clearly in the patriarchal control and exploitation of women, children and the have-nots of the world by the authorities of religious institutions and the officers of business corporations, but it's also the cause of much of our racial and religious conflict and of our on-going destruction of the environment.

As we move away from the lopsidedness of western culture it is not enough only to say that individuals are important. Nowadays hardly anyone would deny that "people count." But there's one more step in humanity's growing-up process. It's coming to see that "relationships count" too, and that nothing and no one is excluded from those relationships.

It's this "other half of person," our human communion with all the things of the cosmos, that's dawning on us at this time in humanity's history. This all-inclusiveness is the very essence of the New Cosmology. And this is what Sophia calls us to. The bride of the "Lord of All" seeks to gather us into communion with All.

And once again, as with the previous two posts, the question is, in Karl Rahner's words, "Are we willing to make the effort to be sensitive and responsive?"

sam@macspeno.com