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Greek religion was a set of stories belonging to the entire community, rather than a set of well-bounded statements about ultimate moral and philosophical values … Within the common Greek culture, then, was an urge to understand and create a systematic structure of sacred knowledge which ordered everyday life.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, in Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years
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If you want to understand why we are in the mess we are in, why the state of affairs in our nation are troublesome (indeed self-destructive) you need only know that those who would command our attention have no idea of our inheritance – the place Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews played in the development of Christianity and, in turn, Western Civilization.
You see we license all manner of poorly educated public personalities to speak to us without them knowing much at all about who we actually are.
Yes, we listen to people with no claim on our attention but that we listen because they are presented to us on television, in the media, among the intellectual or celebrity or political class, and the “special pleaders” who push one or another foolish idea or idiotic claims.
In short, we have an extreme deficit when it comes to the wise and broadly read, experienced and insightful whose knowledge runs to our origins and the process of human development dating back two thousand years before Christ.
Think I am wrong? Ask youself who among our public figures might be able to explain the connection between Greece, Rome, the Hebrews and the development of Christianity and the laws, institutions of governance in the West or identify the distinctions and similarities between Greeks, Romans, Hebrews and Christians when it comes to the Divine and our relationship with God or gods.
When is such a fundamental conversation ever been expected of those who seek to lead or “share” with us their opinions and desires for radical change?
Get serious. Those on the public stage subtract from the sum of human knowledge when they speak. This, of course, is taking its toll on us and our long term existence.
Shalom.
In the long course of my life I have come to realize that the disorder I have encountered is virtually always the product of an unexamined journey, an unexamined life.
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The Lord, your God, has blessed you in all your undertakings; he has been concerned about your journey through this vast desert.
Deut. 2:7
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Journey is one of the great themes in Scripture. Think of these journeys – the journey of Abraham, of the Jewish people to Egypt or Joseph and Mary to Egypt, Jesus to Jerusalem and St. Peter and St. Paul to Rome.
Our lives are a journey with a lengthy story that attaches to us as each day comes and the weeks, months and years accumulate. Here is the question: Have you looked at your journey? Come to understand its elements, what themes the journey has assumed?
Have you grown in self-understanding and done so without being trapped by the trendy ideology of the moment?
Have you sorted your past out in reference to the grand journey narratives of human history? In short, have you examined your life? Have you grown in maturity and come to understand the nuisance of life and its journey? Have you discovered faith in the process and abandoned the contemporary and fleeting discourse that has no historic root – no universal truth and hence little application to life in contemporary secular culture except that in conforming it deceives?
A journey examined is intended to connect you with the length and width and depth of time and the mystery of human existence and its Divine nature.
Shalom.
Observation and Prediction – First, this: the American economy grew 3.2 percent in the first quarter of 2019 even with the shut down of the federal government. With a smaller, less intrusive government we’d likely have healthy growth year in and year out.
Second, this: Joe Biden is such a loose-cannon campaigner that his time on the public stage will discredit him and Old Bernie Sanders as both will be deemed, by today’s Democrats, as “old white men” whose time has long since passed. Conclusion – the Democrat candidate will be younger and more “out there” as to public policy, and “life style.” Expect division and strange ideas to be spinning it the air – the kind of ideas that will make Donald Trump look “mainstream.”
We cannot reach faith by reasoning … We can prepare for it by reflection, by longing for it, and by pleading for it. But it can only come as a gift. Once it has been given , life assumes a new direction.
Thomas Keating, in The Heart of the World
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You have heard it said that “seeing is believing” but I say it is precisely the opposite: believing is seeing.
Yes, look around you. Listen to what you hear. Are those who command public attention offering anything rooted in faith? The likely answer is “no.”
In what they say what do they see? In what they say what do they believe?
So why would you listen to those who do not believe? Who showing no faith, possessing no convincing insight seek that you might follow them? Advance their ideas, fetishes, fanciful fictions? Who lacking belief cannot see?
I have never been particularly prone to be a follower. Neither have I been bound to the plain of reason alone. No, life evolves in each of us as lessons, challenges, setbacks, sufferings, betrayals and unexpected insights and gifts. My point? We are called to the path of belief by all that happens to us, all that we encounter and observe, feel and decipher in the good and the bad.
In my life believing has given me sight, the capacity to see in depth, in dimension that allows for faith to be known and experienced, for confidence to fortify, and patience to be supplied to all things. And this sight has given me the capacity to think far more creatively and act more wisely and decisively than one might expect. In this, fear is dispatched and opportunity takes its place.
The wise and cunning person is the faithful person, so too the insightful and decisive one in our midst. Humility is present in them just as calm is. The best among us put ourselves to the good task, the good objective – not for themselves but for others, strangers, those yet to be born and those already gone.
The self-serving neither see nor believe but oh, they talk incessantly and many among us foolishly listen. I have never been one of the foolish listeners. In this I have tamed being alone quite easily and enjoyed the fruits of belief as faith has grown.
Shalom.
The more powerful and independent consciousness becomes, and with it conscious will, the more the unconscious is forced into the background. When this happens … the conscious structure (is) detached from the unconscious images.
Carl Jung, M.D., in Collected Works, 13 Alchemical Studies 3.
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What Carl Jung is telling us in these words is that we are less whole and more prone to function poorly and erroneously when our conscious mind and the will that flows from it is a mighty (although incomplete) power that stirs us (unbalanced though we are) in what is likely a wrong and injurious direction.
Making this plain in normal terms, if one is divorced from their unconscious realm they will operate at far less than an optimum level. I hazard to say that it appears that many a political person, professional and even pastors and others function in precisely this way.
Think about it. How many people do you know who impress you as being in their acts, discourse, thinking and disposition as possessing a whole and complete development and the stability that flows from that wholeness? My guess is: not many.
Jung comes to this from having taken a very serious look at Richard Whilhelm’s excellent book on Chinese Taoism entitled The Secret of the Golden Flower published in 1933 from which Jung began to see in a comprehensive way the form of psychic wholeness.
In short, what Whilhelm did with this discussion of Taoism is provide many of the same symbols Jung encountered in working with the dreams and fantasies of his patients. He saw in this the symbols in the psyche’s process that led to human wholeness. A most significant development!
Where does this leave us today?
Probably here: we do little to equip ourselves to understand the nature of human existence and the quest for human wholeness … and as a result in daily personal life and in the world of mass communication we are left to encounter a whole lot of people who are far from healthy development and stability. Indeed, we counter all sorts of people who push their ideas and desires without themselves possessing anything close to a wholeness that might give them modest “authority” to claim being heard and much less followed.
The moral of story: you are made for full development – and stay away from those who are far from that destination unless you want chaos, confusion and calamity.
Shalom.
Boys and girls, lads and lassies – it all comes down to the search for the Divine which requires you to come to know fully who you are … in that task you find God. Remember Christ said: pick up your Cross (the life you have been given) and follow me.
Postscript – For those with interest, I recommend Curtis D. Smith’s Jung’s Quest for Wholeness: A Religious and Historical Perspective.
The intellectual and moral virtues perfect the human intellect and appetite in proportion to human nature, But the theological virtues do so supernaturally. (Emphasis added.)
St. Thomas Aquinas, in Summa Theologiae
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When do you ever hear a public figure, or a cleric for that matter, suggest that intellectual and moral virtue (talent, attention or focus) serves only to perfect human nature while theological virtues introduce one to a larger reality – that which goes far deeper than intellect and appetite? The answer: never.
Public chatter is devoid of depth and, at that, not particularly useful. Rather it sets a very small frame of reference and excludes so much frontier that its value is less than positive given that fact that it leaves out more than one needs for full human growth and development.
In a word – public discourse does at least as much harm (probably more) than good.
That said – do you not think it is a wise idea to equip yourself with some familiarity with the theological virtues? Why be less whole and ultimately mistaken by being poorly informed by those in public discourse who are themselves ill-equipped to offer any significant insights worth our attention?
Think about it.
Shalom.
When Europe was going through the Dark Ages, it was the monks from Ireland who preserved the memory of learning. They set up centers of learning all over Europe. The Irish monks re-civilized Europe. That learning became the basis of the wonderful medieval scholasticism and its rich culture. (Emphasis added.)
John O’Donohue, in Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
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It seems that we have lost our way. Despite education, and perhaps because of it, we are not particularly wise or mature, indeed we seem overwrought with disorder and disordered individuals. Indeed, institutions we depend upon barely seem to function.
I think of the recalcitrance of members of the “opposition” political party in the Congress who view their job as one of disruption – not governing. Likewise, as a Catholic, I think of the woeful behavior of my Church on the matter of sexual abuse. And, I think too of the vulgar and sick over-sexualization of our culture and the murders, suicides, addictions and deaths from drug use – each evidence, in my view, of a culture without depth of person or wisdom.
On a broader scale I witness very few in public life who convey a wisdom in their conversations. By wisdom, I do not mean, education per se but a deeper knowing – knowledge that has harmonized one’s heart, soul and head as only a fully lived life and faith can.
The wisdom of which I speak breeds courage, insight, grace, optimism, the plain truth of things, a cooperative disposition – leadership that gains admiration and respect – and maybe even a following among former one’s adversaries.
Indeed, this is what the Irish monks did for people in the Dark Ages – they restored the path to wisdom. They kept the route to wisdom alive by attending to head, heart and soul.
We face, it seems to me, a need for a monk-like effort that will restore our health and full development … without which we can be neither safe nor successful.
Shalom.
… there’s nothing more intimate in life than simply being understood. And understanding someone else.
Brad Meltzer, The Inner Circle
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When you hear the word “intimacy” in our present culture you almost always think of it in a physical context – and hardly ever as Brad Meltzer refers to it.
This tells you something significant about our culture.
It tells you that in a material culture we are far more physical than interpersonal, cordial, communal, familial, or spiritual.
Just look at the drivel that emanates from the “entertainment” industry. One denizen of that environ recently offered naked pictures of herself (ugh!) to “get out the vote” for Democrats. Go figure?
Yes, we have destroyed, or badly injured, the idea of “intimacy” (and of sexuality) by our ignorance as to what intimacy is and what an absolutely critical, indispensable role it plays in human well-being, friendship, and cordial and communal relationships with others.
Frankly, there is no friendship without the intimacy Mr. Meltzer identifies it. The health of a human being is dependent on intimacy.
We are social beings – meant to be known and to know others. We are recipients of life and hence recipients by nature for life – bound to be received and to receive others.
Likewise we are a story people. We live by narrative, learn by narrative, record narrative, gain wisdom and insight by narrative, worship through narrative.
Telling and receiving another’s story is sacred, and the bedrock of our psychological welfare and the psychological well-being of another. That is the field of real intimacy.
Yes, we are contented and feel whole when another person hears our story and accepts it, receives it, carries it in their own unfolding life.
Today we are far from the intimacy Brad Meltzer identifies.
Our well-being and survival depends on moving toward the intimacy Mr. Meltzer identifies. Short of that objective and disorder and discontent grows and grows, and brings with it homicides, suicides, adulteries, loneliness, corruptions, betrayals, hostilities, divisions, broken families and failed marriages, sexual predators, psychological illnesses, angers, addictions and depressions.
Get “intimacy” right or suffer the grave consequences. We are made for one another – far more than merely what is material and physical.
Shalom.
Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore seek not to understand that thou mayest believe, but believe that thou mayest understand.
St. Augustine, in On the Gospel of St. John
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Do we spend time “understanding” and, ironically, not knowing but more and more narrowly? Are we a society and culture that would seek to know a great deal of nothing too useful? A society that has much, and gathers minutia but not truth – truth of large things, encompassing things, deep things, lasting things, perpetual things, eternal things?
What if St. Augustine is correct – that one must first believe before one understands?
Imagine how wrong so many would be! Imagine how much time we wasted. How many people watched the wrong movie. Built their home on less than sand.
To understand – believe …
Shalom.
Spirlaw 