More on spiritual incest

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Continuing the theme of spiritual incest, an old bromide from my youth was, “He who lives by himself and for himself will be spoiled by the company he keeps.”  This is relevant to groups and certainly to churches and denominations.  A church that overly emphasizes  the “come ye out from among them and be ye separate” theme can find themselves pathologically alone to the extent that they have no relevance to the world at large.  They are suddenly lost in “a world of empty self relatedness.”  (Paul Tillich)  And since mental illness is a reference problem, they technically are mentally ill.  A case in point is the infamous Westboro Baptist Church of our present day world.

I would like to offer a quote from an Ibsen play, Peer Gynt, which so eloquently illustrates this “empty self relatedness” that Tillich mentioned.  This is the superintendent of an insane asylum describing the constituents of his facility:

Its here that men are most themselves, themselves and nothing but themselves sailing with outspread sails of self. Each shuts himself in a cask of self, the cask stopped with the bung of self and seasoned in a well of self. None has a tear for others woes or cares what any other thinks….Now surely you’ll say that he’s himself.  He’s full of himself and nothing else, himself in every word he says himself when he is beside himself…Long live the Emperor of Self.

The language is a bit stilted, being centuries old, and it describes individuals.  But the lunacy portrayed here is also relevant to groups who have so isolated themselves, so turned in upon themselves, so violated the law of exchange with the outside world, that they have essentially sold their soul to the devil.

Dangers of Spiritual Incest

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Incest was a common theme in the clinical word that I did as a counselor.  The incest always reflected pronounced family dysfunction, always gravely influencing each member of the family even if they were sexually abused themselves . Incest is about power and control and often occurs in families who are isolated in some respect from the local community, be that a perceived isolation or something more concrete such as geographical or socioeconomic factors.

But incest is also a term that can be applied to groups as a whole.  Some groups can function as an incested family and be similarly inverted, turned-in on themselves with minimal reference to the outside world.  Usually this internal reference is perceived as a virtue and in fact reference to the external world is not only discouraged but is often demonized.  The world is perceived as dangerous and threatening, “evil” if you please, and contamination by this world is a constant peril.  (I feel strongly that this is often an element in the home-schooling movement though certainly not in all cases.)

I would like to focus briefly on what I call “spiritual incest.”  By this I mean the tendency to isolate ourselves in groups who believe just as we do and to discourage any dissenting beliefs.  In groups like this “doctrinal purity” is inordinately emphasized.  And there is nothing wrong with purity of any sorts but when it becomes an obsession it always leads to problems.  For example, when the “doctrinal purity” demon is unleashed, it tends to never end.  Once there is a “house-cleaning” and the miscreants are expelled or “churched…to use an old frontier term…the demon remains.  So, a few years later, there arises a new doctrinal dispute and once again another “house cleaning” is necessary and the ritual is enacted again.  For, this is tremendously rewarding to be on the side of the pure and know that you are “cleansing the temple”, that you are “standing firm for the truth that was once delivered unto the saints”, etc., etc.  I know.  Been there.  Done that.  Gosh it was fun.  I felt so pious.

Oh the shame of motives late revealed, and the awareness of things ill done, and done to others harm which once we took for exercise of virtue.  (T. S. Eliot “Four Quartets”)

(HISTORICAL NOTE: Historians have noted that this quest for doctrinal purity, especially in the 19th century on the frontier, created our “denominational society” as churches routinely split over picayune doctrinal disputations, giving rise to new churches and denominations)

Hermeneutical Integrity

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One of my new friends in the blog-o-sphere sent me some interesting and provocative thoughts re my discourse of nakedness in the book of Genesis. He is well versed in Hebrew etymology and shared some nuances of the Hebrew word “naked”, noting that its meaning varies slightly from place to place in Genesis 2 and 3. If you are interested, I suggest you check out his blog, “Of Dust and Kings,” on WordPress.com. He is a very thoughtful young Bible scholar and pastor.

This gentleman’s observations remind me of why I love words—they are such treasures. And it is no accident that the Judeo-Christian tradition values so greatly the word and that in the Christian tradition Jesus was the Word incarnate.

I read somewhere years ago that words are “repositories of meaning.” As we focus on key words…especially in literature, and even more so in sacred literature…and begin to explore their hidden treasures, they can speak volumes to us. But, I must say, this is always an intense hermeneutical endeavor. It involves being able, willing, and humble enough to understand the hermeneutical enterprise and in so doing realize that we have to avoid the pitfall of mining the literature to merely prop-up our preconceptions and biases.

“The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility. And humility is endless.” (T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets)

Clinical dimensions of “nakedness”

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(Yesterday’s posting was about the subjec of nakedness in the book of Genesis.) The notion of nakedness and vulnerability is also relevant in clinical work. In one of my first cases as a therapist, a young man in his thirties had recurrent images of nakedness in his day to day life, often looking down to see if he was wearing his pants in public. He knew this was “crazy” but he also knew that it was clinically significant. He also quickly saw that this disconcerting imagery was related to several significant recent losses in his life—he had become estranged from his family, he had serious doubts about his childhood faith, and he has resigned from his job. Furthermore, he was feeling estranged from his friends. He had been cast adrift in his life. He had shorn the trappings of the middle class life that had been bequeathed him and he felt vulnerable, he felt naked.

The clinical work involved helping him to embrace this nakedness, to avoid the temptation to immediately “prozac’em”, and to explore the depths of his despair.
It amounted to holding his hands figuratively, allowing the grace of God to envelop him, and to facilitate rebirth. I offered comfort and direction as this young man dwelt for a while in what T. S. Eliot called, “the breakage, in the collapse of what was believed in as most certain, and therefore the fittest for renunciation.” Metaphorically speaking, I was a midwife. Or, a metaphor I like even better, I was a witness to a death, burial, and resurrection.

The theme of nakedness is so relevant to the work of a minister. Frederick Buechner in one of his books (and the specific title escapes my memory) wrote of the need of a minister to find the temerity and courage (and grace) to first “disrobe” his congregation before he could “clothe” it with the Grace of God. He explained that God’s Grace only comes as one is disrobed of his/her pretenses, illusions, false gods, and hypocrisies and that a minister who is not willing to address this facade cannot offer any genuine Grace. Without this disrobing there is only an easy believism that really doesn’t believe anything, there is only a religion of convenience. And, I might add, no minister can accomplish this task if he/she has not been disrobed himself/herself and does not experience recurrently from time to time.

The Illness that we Are

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In the book of Genesis the subject of nakedness is introduced to us.  Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit and felt naked, exposed, and God fashioned for them a fig leaf garment and hid their nakedness.  The Bible said that this garment hid them from their sense of shame.

Art in recent centuries, and movies in recent times, often includes the image of the nude woman, caught unawares, covering her breasts with an arm and/or her privates with a hand.  Most men also have had dreams or fears of that horrible feeling of being caught nude in public, being exposed, being vulnerable.

I think this fig leaf represents the function of the ego in human culture.  It is a contrivance that hides us from our nakedness.  It is a persona that we can present to our community and to the world and not have to show to them the frail, frightened vulnerable creature that we are in the depths of our heart.  And this ego consciousness is very important as without it there would be no “world” as we know it.  For without it, we would be teeming multitudes of quivering flesh and could not function as a culture.  We would not be a world.

But this ego consciousness has become a monster that is run amok and threatens to destroy us.  Instead of acknowledging our frailty and recognizing the frailty of others, we have organized into armed camps the purpose of which is to barricade ourselves behind piles of “stuff”.  Or, to allude briefly to one dimension of the problem, in our country we have isolated into ideologically-armed political camps, each camp unwilling to recognize its own vulnerability.  We are guilty of the sin of misplaced concreteness, “We chase the shade, and let the real be.” (John Masefield)

But as individuals we cannot correct the ills of the world. The only “illness” we are responsible for is illness that we harbor. But we can discover that as we address that illness in our own heart, as we “wage the war we are”, we will be a bit of an antidote to the collective illness that threatens us.

“We’re not getting out of this thing alive”

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Lewis Thomas, in Lives of a Cell, discoursed on death from the viewpoint of a biologist. He noted, “At the very center of the problem is the naked cold deadness of one’s own self, the only reality in nature of which we can have absolute certainty, and it is unmentionable, unthinkable.  We like to think…we can avoid the problem if we just become, next year, say, a bit smarter.”

We have the notion that, “Oh, well. We can figure this out and get beyond it. It just won’t happen to me.”  We are guilty of what Ernest Becker called the Denial of Death. In his book with that title, he argued that that civilization was organized for the purpose of denying our mortality, that it is a complicated contrivance designed merely for burying our head in the sand regarding our eventual demise, our eventual return to the dust from which we are created.  (I like Hamlet’s bemused observations about us being merely worm food.)

So, what do we do with this problem?  Well, we wrestle with it as best as we can.  Here, in my daily perambulations, you get some glimpse of one person’s doubt and insecurities…and hope…regarding this issue.  A key source of hope for me has been to realize that death is merely part of life and that death is an issue that can be addressed before the actual physical death.  By that I mean that we can die before we die, that the real issue in our fear of death is the fear of the ego’s death, and that we can let the ego die long before our physical death.   Irvin Yalom argued decades ago that those who fear death fear life and only through the death of their ego can they embrace life and live life to the fullest.

James Hillman had a relevant belief re suicide. He was a Jungian therapist and he shared in Suicide and the Soul re one client who was suicidal. He told the client…and I paraphrase…”So you want to die.  You come to me and I will help you die. But, you have to promise me that in the meantime you will not physically harm yourself.”  Hillman believed that the suicidal impulse was often a misguided impulse from the heart, that the wish to die, if handled delicately and with spiritual guidance, could be the doorway to eternal life.

Resting in His Grace

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A friend of mine in the blog-o-sphere has entitled his blog, “Resting in his Grace.”  I was reading his post this morning and the title itself spoke to me as a friend of mine is currently experiencing first-hand a powerful manifestation of this grace.  My dear friend, “KW” is dying, and he is doing so with the “grace of God” so clearly present in his life.

I should explain that KW and I grew up in a similar conservative religious environment in Arkansas.  Both of us did the obligatory “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” when we grew up and went to college and discovered there was a world outside of Arkansas.  But as we aged, we continued to have a spiritual dimension to our life and in recent years we frequently mused about holy writ from all religions, certainly including Christianity.  And in these final days and weeks of KW’s life, certain little tidbits of biblical lore have found meaning for both of us.

One of these tidbits was “grace” and I had the pleasure of sharing with him one of my favorite poems (The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry) which so beautifully conveys the grace found in the world of nature.  One line from this poem notes how animals do not “tax their lives with forethought of grief” and I think this is a fundamental dimension of grace.  We humans live day to day well aware that our life is very fragile and will come to and end sooner or later and only grace will allow us to not “tax our life with forethought of” that particular grief.

KW has battled this monster cancer for over a year now and he has wrestled with the full gamut of human emotions.  He has been very angry.  He has told me of throwing one huge fit in the backyard of his place, enraged at God. He has had “pity parties” from time to time.  He has been depressed on occasion.  But he has come to peace with his mortality and now he is comfortably ensconced in the grace of God.  It has been deeply moving to be part of this experience and this will help me immensely as I approach that point in my own life.

Get over yourself!

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There is a great story in 2 King 5 which I’ve always been intrigued with.  Naaman the leper wanted to be healed so he went to the spiritual guru of the day, Elisha, and asked for healing.  He was told to go down to the river Jordan, deep seven times, and he would be healed.  Naaman was indignant, feeling that a man of his prominence should be received more formally and a more elegant healing ceremony should be offered.  He walked away in fury.  Sometime later, he became more humble, followed through with Naaman’s advice and was healed.

This story is so relevant to the human predicament.  A man with an ailment wanted relief but he wanted this relief on his own terms. Elisha intuitively knew that a critical dimension of Naaman’s problem was ego and he knew that an appropriate step for him to take was to humble himself in some way.  And, he also knew that this relief needed to entail action. Elisha knew that going down to Barnes and Nobles and buying the latest self-help title was not enough.  Naaman needed behavioral intervention.  So, he simply sent word to Naaman to go and dip into the river Jordan seven times.  (By the way, he didn’t even meet personally with Naaman to send this message, a further “indignation” to this man’s ego. He merely sent word through a messenger.)

This is relevant to a recent posting re getting un-stuck.  Sometimes a person who is hurting might have to humble himself as part of his treatment and this “humiliation” can be as simple as reaching out and seeking help. It is very painful for some to deign to make an appointment with a counselor.  I’ve known some who will schedule an appointment hundreds of miles away merely to keep anyone from happening to see him entering a counselor’s officer.  This “humiliation” can be daring to surrender and seek help with a 12-step group or going to one’s pastor or priest or rabbi and sharing openly about one’s haunts.  It can involve accepting a diagnostic label. It can involve opening up honestly with one’s mate for the first time in the marriage.  In my clinical work I have even proposed what I call “tree therapy” to some clients, instructing them to go into the forest and talk openly to a tree just to verbalize openly about what is going on in their heart.  (When I assigned “tree therapy”, I always advised them to then seek another human being to whom they could “unpack their heart with words.” (Shakespeare)

One last note about behavioral interventions.  An often used maneuver for therapists is to assign a client the simple task of going home and planting a garden or merely getting a houseplant.  This is because a key element in any neurosis or any psychological/spiritual problem is a narcissistic streak.  The pain is so intense that it becomes all consuming. It can help to simply find the energy to take care of plants and nurture them and love them.

Stuck in a repetition compulsion

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I sometimes think I should rename my blog to some variant of “Shakespeare”.  I quote him so often.  And there is no need to quote anyone else.  No one said more.

On the subject of change, he explained why we resist it so much, noting in Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy that we, “cling to these ills that we have rather than fly to others that we know not of.”  To put it in plain red-neck English, “Hell, as bad as things are, if I fool around and make changes, things are gonna get a whole lot worse.”

This is best illustrated in a standard psycho-dynamic explanation of why a woman stays in an abusive relationship.  She usually has such low self-esteem that unconsciously she feels she deserves nothing any better.  In fact, if she manages to extricate herself from one abusive relationship, she will end up in another one very quickly.  Some unfairly and unkindly opine, “Well, that is what she asks for.”  But she is merely caught in. or trapped in, what Freud call a “repetition compulsion”,  repeating a pattern of behavior which recapitulates an emotional trauma that she lived through.

Scott Peck said in The Road Less Traveled that neurosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering. He was suggesting that suffering is a basic part of life and that enduring pain from time to time is just part of life. Failure to do so is to get blocked or “stuck” in life.

The key to gaining release is always to “feel” the pain, the avoidance of which keeps one locked in a maladaptive behavior pattern. Or. to use a popular bromide, “No pain, no gain.”

More about Getting Un-stuck

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So, precisely how do we get “unstuck”?  How do we extricate ourselves from that morass of unconsciousness, that residue of poor decisions that has left our life unmanageable?

There are easy maneuvers such as psychotropic medications.  Sometimes simply being tweaked biochemically can create enough personal space for us to get out of ourselves and get beyond our impasse.  And simple psychotherapy can be very effective.  On that note, it is very important that the therapist must avoid the temptation to “fix” the client, allowing  that client to stew in his/her own juices for a while, to “work out his own salvation with fear and trembling.”  Karl Jung contended that the therapeutic frame was a crucible and if the process worked correctly, the client would “heat-up” to a boiling point and a break through could be achieved.

But, as noted yesterday with the Shakespeare quotation, ultimately we are all alone with our spiritual battles and must wrestle in solitude with our demons.  However, I feel very strongly that therapists, counselors, pastors, and certainly friends must be present to facilitate the catharsis.  I think the most important step in alleviating the “stuck-ness” is for the individual to have the humility to admit that he/she is “stuck”;  and, I don’t mean some glib conciliation to the concept of being stuck.  I mean, for example, the old-fashioned fundamentalist paradigm, “I am a lost sinner” or the 12-step “I am powerless before my addiction” or “out of control” schemata.  It is necessary to realize and feel that one is out of control and that all of the rational, ego-based perambulations one can muster up will not suffice.  It is not a matter of “figuring out” anything.  It is a matter of trusting someone…and ultimately trusting a Source, or a Higher Power, or God or, in the words of Nikos Kazantzakis, “Surrendering to a rhythm not our own.”  It is a matter of humility.  And humility comes hard to the ego.   I think “stuck-ness” like all other human spiritual maladies is an issue of the ego.

A caveat is necessary.  I don’t think getting un-stuck is a simple one-time and your done phenomena.  I think we get through one episode of “stuck-ness” and later run into another one, and another one, and another one.  That has certainly been the case with me. I think there is a sense in which we always find ourselves “stuck”…in reality, with all its limitations.  The issue is discerning which of these limitations we can live with and which ones we must wrestle with and get beyond to some degree.

I have one very readable book to recommend on the subject, How People Change by Allen Wheelis.