Greetings, Dear Ones,I am returning once again to meditating upon David Tacey's The Darkening Spirit,an exploration of Jungian spirituality and religious life. In chapter four, which Tacey calls, "Jung and the Prophetic Life," I believe he is making a useful distinction, but using misleading terms to identify the two "sides" he seeks to distinguish.
Tacey describes Jung as a prophet, speaking on behalf of a God who no longer comfortably inhabits the narrow confines of institutional Christian life. He explains, "...what the Church calls God is not a description of his [God's] character, but an interpretation of his nature. As an interpretation, it is relative, not absolute, and thus liable to error and correction." It is the role of the prophet, both in biblical history and in the present time, to call attention to what Tacey calls "the provisional nature of religious discourse," and to point beyond that provisional interpretation of God to the Divinity that transcends but still speaks to the human condition.
In contrast to that prophetic task, Tacey posits the role of the priest, the keeper of the "human culture of God" which has come to take literally the institutional constructs of God, "forgetting that their symbols and myths are inadequate and transitory attempts to contain the infinite."
While I have not yet read what Tacey has to say about the future of Christian religion, I think his use of "priest" and "prophet" in this passage has the effect of externalizing a process that, like the notion of God itself, is better understood as an internal process of the psyche. We can certainly point the finger at priests and ministers of various denominations and accuse them of being gatekeepers and institution-bearers, and on the other hand embrace the self-proclaimed prophets who call for reform in the name of the Transcendent One. But that strikes me as too simplistic. What is perhaps more fruitful is to ask ourselves (myself, in this case) where we have bound the infinite God in our small container of belief. In what ways is my God too small? Is God male? Is God powerful? Is God only concerned with some people, and not capable of loving others? (That would mostly be people I can't find loveable.) In what ways have I encased God in an institution of my own assemblage, regardless of how "prophetic" I want to believe myself to be? And then, in what ways is God breaking those containers apart? How much bigger does God want to be than the categories and descriptions and interpretations that I want to place around God?
What then becomes challenging is finding a sense of community in which to explore this ever-expanding sense of who God is and how God may be active in the individual psyche and in the world. Tacey is right in so far as it is common for many churches to have a set theology of God which they don't want challenged. Many of us who seek more deeply, who desire a genuine encounter with a Transcendent God, or who cherish a more immanent experience of the Divine, find ourselves adrift and alone. Here is where I cherish my community of Lindisfarne, for whom "All truth is God's truth," and with whom I can raise all sorts of questions and hear many points of view.
I am grateful for Tacey's exploration, and will keep on reading to see where he goes. In the meantime, I will be trying to open doors, not on institutional churches, but on the container of my own prejudices about God and religion, hoping for a moment of prophecy now and again to join the transcendent to the immanent, and both to the human.
Blessings, Beth
P.S. Image at the top is by David Hayward at nakedpastor.com.
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