Soul & Psyche 4: The New Sacred Awareness

David Tacey concludes his exploration of Jung, spirituality and religion with a short chapter which examines Jung's struggle over time to define his relationship with religion in general, and Christianity in particular.  It was in every way a vexed and painful relationship, covering two thirds of the twentieth century, a time in which religion and the life of the spirit were in great flux, certainly in the West, and arguably around the world.  We are living with the consequences of that flux today as the world writhes with the pain of racial, ethnic, and religious conflicts.  I think there are connections to be made, and I will attempt to make some of them here.


Tacey describes eloquently the disconnect which exists today between what he calls "the soul" and "the religions," that is, what the human soul needs for its nourishment, and what mainstream religious denominations are presently offering.  "The soul longs for poetry, myth, metaphor and imagination, but the religions remain literal, historical and absolutist in their claims.  The soul needs religious experience, that is, a direct transformative encounter with the numinous, but religion is unable to deliver this, preferring to offer dogma, doctrine and creeds. ... The ethical frame of Western religions is too narrow for the soul to experience its reality and to facilitate the integration of opposing forces in the psyche." (The Darkening Spirit, p. 144)

I believe he has put his finger on an essential truth here.  There is a deep disconnect between what the human soul, heart, and psyche need, and what the structures of religion have been able to provide.  Too often the truths of religion are cast in the absolutist, historicist terms that our post-Enlightenment age demand -- that the printed words of the Bible are "literally" the Word of God, that Muhammad "literally" rose to heaven from the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem -- and the results of absolutizing and literalizing these beliefs leaves both souls and bodies bleeding in the streets.  The demands of religions that beliefs be held without question, without even meditating on what a particular belief might mean for human life, creates communities of shared ideologies, but not whole, transformed, reconciled human beings. 

A colleague and I were talking about the intersection of religion and politics in world affairs yesterday.  On the surface, religion would appear to be the presenting issue behind many of the conflicts taking place around the world, certainly and most obviously in the Middle East, where a particularly virulent strain of Islamism is wreaking havoc on anyone in its path.  But even here in the United States, claims of "religious freedom" are used to mask more subtle forms of violence targeted against women and the poor.  There is something deeper going on, and I think denial of the soul and its needs is close to the heart of the problem.

Tacey proposes a three-fold process of spiritual growth: first inward, to truly know the self in all its dimensions, then vertically, to know the Divine in the form of a person, force, or being which is vastly more than we can imagine, and finally horizontally, to reach out in compassion and service to the world and all of its inhabitants.  Up to now, churches have typically emphasized the second step, usually to the rejection of the first, and occasionally including attempts at the third.  Too often, though, the church's real aim has been its own self-preservation, to the neglect of the essential process of soul- development.  That doesn't need to be the case.  Christianity is nothing if it is not a faith in the power of resurrection.  Religious life can (and I believe will) be transformed, and this template provides the basic road map by which to do it.  There is much that must be added to this bare framework, and disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, sociology, and theology should be tapped to flesh out various aspects of this process. But ultimately, I believe that only by engaging in exactly these steps will we find ways to relieve the suffering within and around us.

Could it be that insistence on the literal truths, the dogmas, the conformities of behavior that has characterized religions in recent centuries has drained them of their life- and soul-sustaining energies?  Can we begin to imagine a religious environment that fearlessly reclaims those energies and open up new ways of imagining the sacred -- the "new sacred awareness" that Tacey speaks of in his conclusion -- ways that are deeply inclusive, not just of women, but of the whole human tribe in its troubling and glorious variety, inclusive of many ways to imagine and encounter the Divine, without needing to call some ways "wrong," since, truly, none of us here know which way is "right," if there is indeed a "right" way to know God.

I'd like to imagine that new sacred awareness coming into being.  I don't know what form it will take, but I suspect the form is much less important than the essence, or that we take up the endeavor.  There is so much suffering in the world just now.  Will you walk with me?