Alright, let’s get honest. My psychology is pretty warped. It wasn’t till I spent 7 years being largely silent that I realized it. Before that, I could have blissfully, plausibly denied it, but denial’s like a childhood garment that an adult rediscovers and tries on. Neither for the adult nor for the garment can the clock be turned back, and it’s impossible to ignore how ill-fitting and conspicuous it is. My thinking is both dualistic and dysfunctional, and it changes how I hear church language. Just like dysfunctional children come from larger, dysfunctional families, dualistic believers come from dualistic institutions.
Regarding dysfunction, I’ve spoken about it before: I live in a body that doesn’t work, and came from a home that had its problems. Being numb and stuffing emotions became my default setting. I became addicted to crisis, in part because it was a staple in my upbringing, and in part because it was a way to feel something (anything) other than numbness. What began as a form of keeping myself safe became a way of moving through the world. My childhood need for safety became the need for control common to adult children: it became an inability to allow problems time to be solved. It became a resistance to collaborating with even the most well-meaning of others.
At a certain stage, my needs for security and approval moved fluidly from parents who couldn’t suffice them to a religion that couldn’t suffice them. At the time it happened, I didn’t know those needs were there, and I didn’t know my expectations of fulfillment were out of whack. I had a child’s understanding of both, that expected total fulfillment in this life, when it was, in truth, only available in the heavenly jerusalem. But it should be said that both religion and parents are, to a child, transcendent authorities. All theological concerns are endowed with greater importance by the transcendent authority to which they’re connected.
So long as questions have transcendent answers coming out of denial is always risky business. Let me break down for you some of the theological concepts that have, because of dualism and dysfunction, concealed real misunderstandings.
Attention and Focus: Normal people give stressful situations their attention for a limited time, then step away from them. Dysfunctional people continue to stress when the stressor is gone: it’s a trait called hyper-vigilance, an ultimately harmful equation of attention with force. In my adult life, I’ve struggled to be present to my responsibilities when necessary, to step away from them when I can.
God and Devotion: Like St. Paul, I made a God out of my ideas about God. Ultimately, I divinized my ego. Devotion to that God was the ultimate, unknowingly selfish act: rather than uplifting the mind and heart to God, I turned the will inward toward myself, and it aggravated previously underdeveloped Obsessive Compulsive traits.
Authority: Dysfunctional people have dysfunctional relationships with God. Drug addicts treat God like he’s a drug—a source of consolation and need fulfillment that either succeeds in fulfilling expectations, or fails at it. Codependents treat God as they do their close associates, dissolving the boundaries of the ego until what’s left is a mess of enmeshment, of care-taking, and of legitimate needs bypassed in the name of “sacrificing for God’s sake.” What would have been ideal is two individuated beings (us and God) communing across the boundaries of self. What would have been healthy is limited giving with the genuineness of one who knows his limits. But for dysfunctional people, alas and alack, no dice.
This leads to all sorts of confusion. Is “Authority” speaking from the scriptures? Is “Authority” inside us? The answer rings with a traditional Catholic “Both/And” statement. Authority speaks from both the scriptures and our hearts. However it’s also a “Yes/But” statement: yes, God speaks from the scriptures, but he doesn’t excuse us from separating out his voice from the prejudices of the human writers. Yes, the voice of God is inside us, but it isn’t our ego, not even our egoic plans for spiritual advancement.
Those who wonder about the question of authority should examine what they mean when they say the word “Should.” Dysfunctional people often claim their plan of action “should” be followed, with a certain amount of anxious insistence. But a functional, not to mention contemplative perspective predictably asks the following questions: If the authority is coming from scripture or conscience, how nuanced and informed is the perspective? If it’s coming from experience, how detached is the person from the emotional content of the experience? If it’s coming from a church hierarchy, how broadly knowledgeable is the person on the range and the history of hierarchical perspectives. Perspectives that are nuanced, detached and knowledgeable are the ones that most smack of healthy, nondualistic influences.
Grace: Dysfunctional people think grace is a drug dispensed by the God they’re dependent upon. In fact, rather than an all-holy heroin, grace is more like methadone. It’s the ability to live with less, to tolerate our separateness from God, to downplay our even our most pious manipulations until his own action makes itself miraculously apparent.
If the misunderstandings of dysfunction were the end of the story, we could count ourselves lucky. But we have dualistic consciousnesses as well, and many of our highest ideas simply slap graffiti on the cracks in the wall. It’s worth recalling the remarks made in July 24’s “Why I’m a pluralist, and other Travelogues.” Transubstantiation and Divinization both seek to overcome the dualism, between substances on the one hand, between creator and creature on the other. As far as “the list of words we only need because we think dualistically” is concerned, the following could be added:
The Image and likeness of God/ becoming like God: To give importance, as our first parents did, to “becoming like God” is to neglect the importance John the Beloved later gives to “being with God,” and both neglect the importance the Christian East gives to “becoming God.” Ultimately these three concepts narrate the journey from completely fractured, to healing but fragile, to restored and healthy again. It is important for Christian believers to ask, when they use “image and likeness” language, if their true meaning isn’t subtly caught up in the dualist “being like God” when the term, spoken with a unified consciousness, means something more like “becoming God.” I would rather be God in slightly uncomfortable quiet than “be like God” and be able, easily, to verbalize it.
Cataphasis and the deposit of faith: In via positiva or Cataphatic spiritualities, words and concepts play a positive role in creating peace of mind and rest in God. The deposit of faith is an accumulation of things about the truth of which we can be fairly certain, owing to 2 millennia of heavenly confirmation. A dualistic mind automatically a confuses the concept of God with the Godhead itself, the deposit of faith with the trust faith required of those who truly possessed it. A dualistic mindset forgets that cataphasis eventually yields to apophasis, images to imagelessness.
All of this is simply to say that language can conceal wounds that silence uncovers. And language about the divine does this more completely than most.
Silence, and contemplative experience, is a large part of the solution to all this. In silence, falsehood is safe to admit: attention is decoupled from force, God from ego, authority from narrow-mindedness, and the detachment of grace from the addictiveness of the world. In the contemplative experience granted by consistent meditation, it’s possible to cut out the steps our dualistic mindset has imposed on us. The shortest route between God and us is a non-path, whereon we realize that we are what we sought to be like, that when we are truly with ourselves we will find the one we’ve sought all along. The Heart Sutra says form is emptiness, emptiness is form. The Tao says “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.” The Catholic Church has said that too, that words are only ghostly approximations of silence, the Logos only a finite version of the Infinite Mouth it came from. To the degree that we listen, perhaps we have a chance to hear this for ourselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment