FOR THOSE WHO DON'T LIKE THE WORD "GOD", TRY "GODDING"

Words are wonderful. They allow us to know and experience so much more than we could without them. However, like plucked fruit or flowers, words nearly always go bad. That is the case with the word "God" for some in our modern world. A few of us have lost the ability to believe in or trust a particular religious depiction of God, yet we have not lost a sense of the Presence of “something” divine. We could say that we still enjoy the celestial flowers and fruit, but not after they have gone bad in the religious container.

In C.S. Lewis' book, Till We Have Faces, the protagonist named Orual comes into a temple and sees a newly completed statue of a beautiful young goddess. The priest informs Orual that the marble image represents a woman who "has only just begun to be a goddess. For you must know that, like many other gods, she began by being a mortal". Orual asks him, "And how was she godded?" The priest then tells the story of how a mortal was "godded".

I like Lewis' word, "godded". It implies the result or end of a process which we might call "godding". I find myself these days, when asked if I believe in God, saying that I trust in "godding". I then go on to explain that I view every internal and external life experience to be part of the "godding" process--of making each of us immortal, of being made into the image and likeness of God. I see "God" as a verb, a dynamic process of movement--a sacred wind (Holy Spirit) blowing across the landscape of my soul sculpting the topography from mortality to immortality, from a generic human to a unique personality.

Many do not know that all of the deities in human history began as verbs, or by godding: Zeus as thundering. Aphrodite as beautifying. Vishnu as rescuing. Kali as destroying. YAHWH as being. Satan as opposing. Allah as qu'raning (reciting). And so on. I am here imaginaing the Gods as verbs, active participants in the human soul-making endeavor. This earth is the realm of godding, with an aim toward making each human godded or god-like. That is the purpose of this planet.

I also like that Lewis' priest tells Orual "the story" of the young woman's godding process, of "how a mortal was godded" over many years of lived experience. In the New Testament Paul writes that “We are becoming God’s masterpiece...a letter written to be read by others...” The word “masterpiece” is translated from the Greek word poiema, the origin of our word for “poem.” Great poetic and artistic masterpieces are created line by line and stroke upon stroke via a skilled artisan over time. John Keats calls Lewis' "godding" process, soul-making. The Apostle Peter says the purpose of this godding process is that we "may participate in the divine nature by escaping the decay caused by selfishness" (II Peter 1:4). The godding process turns human mortality into immortality, finitude into infinity.

But how does one have faith in “something” like this? What do we call it? How do we trust it? How do we address it? Answer: As a verb. Or rather, we perceive God as divine action in every moment. The “Word” is not the audio or visual symbol, but the archetypal “___ing” -- the process, the actor, the agent of “____ing”. I can no longer merely intellectually believe or trust in “god,” but in Godding. 

Try ceasing to view God as a noun, or name. All nouns are frozen verbs, captured actions. Just as we are human “be-ings”, so to the divine is divine “be-ing”--action, process, an active Presence Who is not merely present, but presencing behind and through all that is present. Now there is a metaphysical mouthful, or maybe New Age mumbo jumbo--but you get the point. Divinity is a verb. With Lewis, I call it Godding.

Our current myth of the Big Bang may be the result of Godding. All movement is Godding--cosmic, psychological, relational, emotional, political, historical, scientific, etc. Each human is a kind of mini version of the Big Bang occurring in his/her psyche. Each soul is in the process of inventing, birthing, adventing, mating, hunting, eating, digesting, defecating, warring, thinking, feeling, willing, building, creating, living, dying, rebirthing, resurrecting. 

My primary religion then is “ingism” – or what I choose to call soul-making, psycho-poeisis, or what the Eastern Orthodox Church calls theois, the art or skill of godding. Each of us, like the deity in C.S. Lewis' story is in the process of godding with the aim of being godded, or made into a immortal be-ing.

Let me further suggest that Godding is not the same as "unicorning" or belief in unicorns. The human experience of Godding arises from an innate human compulsion--unicorning does not. Unicorning is recognized as a fantasy constructed from the realities of horses and horns, but the existence of such a creature is known to be a fairy tale. Godding is not in the same category. Just as beautying, justicing, truthing, loving, etc. exist a priori, so is the ubiquitous human compulsion toward Godding. Transcendent qualities like Beauty and Justice are ontological entities--as real and common as grass and rocks—that is why they cannot be willed away or forgotten. Justice or fairness is a good example: Crowd in front of a man in a supermarket line and he will be compelled to justicing. Truth is another: Lie to a woman about something personal to her and she will be compelled to truthing. Tell that man or woman that there are unicorns or tooth fairies, and they will think you teasing or insane. Unicorns and tooth fairies are not in human consciousness like truth, beauty, justice and godding. That is why atheists are so obsessed with un-godding--just as a criminal is obsessed with wiping out justice. These eternal, archetypal entities may be annoying, but they are not made up by the human mind.

I see godding not as metaphysics, but middle-physics—the link between physics and metaphysics—the link between nature and cultural religion. 

Godding is what compels humans in every culture to find Gods or ultimate authorities, religions, rituals, stories and other “sacred” phenomena. But Godding is different than God. To speak of God is like taking a photograph of Godding, freezing an isolated frame of the dynamic movement Itself/Herself/Himself. 

Godding is the divine equivalent of William James observation that human thought is a "stream of consciousness," always moving; Heraclitus' flowing river into which no one can step twice, always re-positioning.

Our modern world is transitioning into something not yet known--a new kind of godding. Of course many of the old frozen religious nouns and plucked religious flowers are still vibrant and thriving for many people—and will continue to be so for some time. But for those who can no longer trust or believe in a particular "God"--you might want to say you believe in "godding".

Freezing the Infinite in a System: C.S. Lewis's Critique of Anthroposophy

Before C.S. Lewis made a decision to become a practicing Anglican Christian, he was engaged in thinking about spiritual and psychological matters--matters beyond objective, rational literalisms. Lewis protested the temptation to be drawn into the certainty of metaphysical and occult "systems of truth" with their established categories which froze the infinite. One might wonder if his eventual strong adherence to orthodox Christian theology belies his wariness of freezing the infinite. Here is a letter Lewis wrote in 1926 at the age of 28. In this letter he chastises Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophical system of metaphysical certainty:

"No one is more convinced than I that reason is utterly inadequate to the richness and spirituality of real things: indeed this is itself a deliverance of reason. Nor do I doubt the presence, even in us, of faculties embryonic or atrophied, that lie in an indefinite margin around the little finite bit of focus which is intelligence—faculties anticipating or remembering the possession of huge tracts of reality that slip through the meshes of the intellect. And, to be sure, I believe that the symbols presented by imagination at its height are the workings of that fringe and present to us as much of the super-intelligible reality as we can get while we retain our present form of consciousness.
 
My scepticism begins when people offer me explicit accounts of the super-intelligible and in so doing use all the categories of the intellect. If the higher worlds have to be represented in terms of number, subject and attribute, time, space, causation etc (and thus they always are represented by occultists and illuminati), the fact that knowledge of them had to come through the fringe remains inexplicable. It is more natural to suppose in such cases that the illuminati have done what all of us are tempted to do:—allowed their intellect to fasten on those hints that come from the fringe, and squeezing them, has made a hint (that was full of truth) into a mere false hard statement. Seeking to know (in the only way we can know) more, we know less. I, at any rate, am at present inclined to believe that we must be content to feel the highest truths 'in our bones': if we try to make them explicit, we really make them untruth.
 
At all events if more knowledge is to come, it must be the wordless and thoughtless knowledge of the mystic: not the celestial statistics of Swedenborg, the Lemurian history of Steiner, or the demonology of the Platonists. All this seems to me merely an attempt to know the super-intelligible as if it were a new slice of the intelligible: as though a man with a bad cold tried to get back smells with a microscope."

Science and Religion: Two Instruments for Seeing Reality

Science and religion are two methods, or two instruments for looking at similar life phenomena--one is like a microscope (science) examining the details; the other is like a telescope (religion) examining the larger picture. It is very important to see that "reality" is never found by any single instrument. "Reason is the organ of truth, imagination is the organ of meaning," said CS Lewis. Both reason and imagination are equally valid and useful organs for experiencing, examining and explicating reality. Both instruments must submit their dogmatic convictions to critiques. Einstein famously said, "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." ("Science, Philosophy and Religion: a Symposium" 1941.)

Science typically utilizes rational and empirical approaches yet borrows heavily from imagination; religion typically utilizes intuitive and emotional approaches yet borrows heavily from reason. It is not an either/or situation, but rather one of emphases. There are as many dogmatic scientists as there are dogmatic religionists. There are many brilliant scientists who experience a rich religious life, and many spiritual theologians who experience a rich rational life. The famous philosopher Alfred North Whitehead shocked his rational audience in the 1920s when he told them that modern science would never have come into existence without the Christian theological cosmology which began with the idea of a reasonable Creator in His rationally ordered universe. (See chapter 10 of Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas). Whitehead noted that the vast majority of the early great philosophers and scientists were practicing Christians who sought to understand the mind of a reasonable deity. This idea of a reasonable deity is not and cannot be found in the Eastern religions which worship Nature as divine--one does not experiment on or question the Natural Gods. And of the Western religions, only the Christian religion stresses "orthodoxy" (ideas) over "orthopraxy" (actions) as in Judaism and Islam. In other words, the Christian emphasis on beliefs and ideas provides a matrix for evolving thought and a rational exploration of a reasonable material universe, even if the ideas develop slowly and receive censure or resistance from the ecclesiastical powers. The Christian "system" of orthodoxy (right ideas) has a built-in default setting that returns it to conversations about beliefs and ideas.  That is why Communist, Islamic and other ideologically frozen territories have been and continue to be terrified by the Bible and free theological/religious discourse. Whitehead makes it clear that one's mythology sets the trajectory of cultural consciousness, discoveries and inventions. This is also significant for politics--something which our Western international policy makers ought to take into account before they try to export democracy or import socialism. 

Our modern academic ignorance of religious, philosophical and psychological big ideas are the bane of our Western education and social institutions. Politicians, journalists and business owners once had an education in the Humanities. Now they learn techniques without the examination of philosophical foundations or an exploration of meaning.

It is important to remember that both science and religion appeal to the innate human compulsion toward certainty, security and order. Every human child is born with equal drives to suckle, walk, talk and seek self-, social- and cosmic-assurance in a world of chaos and fragmentation. The human psyche naturally and autonomously requires and is motivated to acquire assurances of security and order internally and externally. Humans are congenitally meaning-making creatures in a world without human meaning. "Culture" is the result of this congenital condition. 

Such psychological assurances are most often pursued, defined and defended in human personalities largely unconsciously and uncritically during the first 20 years of life. These assurances are acquired ideological stances that meld with the personality and become what seems an unalterable identity of security in a hostile and dangerous world. Many in the West have called this acquired secure identity the "ego". This compulsion toward the solidifying of a specific self-identity most often occurs in the late teen years, but it is not uncommon to experience radical ego-shifts as one matures--sometimes quickly as in a conversion experience or gradually via a lifetime of assimilating new experiences and ideas. The most intractable are those who cannot or will not openly examine a perspective outside of their current secure "identity-stance". This inability or unwillingness to seriously consider differing points of view is often complicated by perceived or real threats to tangible aspects of ones identity—like losses of vocational livelihood, peer bonds, family connections and a sense of internal cognitive harmony. Change feels like death. Tolkien captures this experience in The Hobbit as Gandalf the Grey tries to enlist Bilbo Baggins in an adventure to other worlds outside “The Hill”. Bilbo, seated on his porch, blowing smoke rings, ensconced in his cozy hobbit hole in the ground replies, "Adventure? Nasty uncomfortable things, make you late for dinner."

Religion and science are frequently hobbit holes. Leaving them, seriously leaving them, in order to deeply explore other worlds causes distress and discomfort—making one late for the usual ideological dinner they have been eating for decades. No wonder Jesus said, “Strait is the gate and narrow is the way, and there are few who find it.”

Can There Be Absolutes in an Age of Relativism?

A friend from Pacifica Graduate Institute asked the question: "Is it possible to hold to a particular way of viewing the world, in our case a Jungian Depth Psychological perspective, and not be a narrow minded reductionist bigot?" This is a a great question for our modern, internet, era. We have access to so many different points of view--can we possibly choose one and stand on it solidly? Can one be a Christian, Jungian, Freudian or Buddhist, Democrat or Republican, in this pluralistic world? Here is my response:

Just because one chooses and uses a particular lens by which to view and apply the myriad phenomena of myth, philosophy and religion, does not ipso facto make him/her an ignorant ideological reductionist. It does make him/her an informed ideological reductionist, but these are two very different positions. It is my view that every human is one or the other.

The purpose of this whole reduction/irreduction discussion is to warn the uninformed bigot that he/she ought to inform his/her bigotry. As I see it, all humans are bigots by the given condition of our self-limitations: "bigot" being a derogatory term applied by the French to the intolerant Normans, coming from two words: bi = by, and got = god, meaning something like, "This is the way it is, by my god (lens)!". A bigot is one who sees the world through his/her theological or ideological lens. There are conscious bigots who see they have a carefully chosen lens, and unconscious bigots who have no desire to peer through the lens of another. I have yet to meet anyone who is not one or the other. I'm sure the French would not have considered themselves bigots, but clearly they were, to the Normans! This is true of every religious or philosophical position, no matter which side of the aisle one is on. I have personally met as many uninformed liberal bigots as I have uninformed conservative bigots. Of course I am in the middle, which makes me a superior bigot.

In other words, one may seriously examine other perspectives re. myth, religion and philosophy--and still openly hold to a personal ideational and working weltanschauung. In addition to providing a depth psych. weltanschauung, the classes at Pacifica Graduate Institute attempt to broaden our horizon of world views. By the end of the religious studies course, the student ought to know what people like Comte, Durkheim, Weber, Marx, Berger and Stark think of a sociological approach to religion; how Freud and Jung view religion as primarily psychological; and how people like Kant, Schleiermacher, Otto and Eliade view religion as an experience of the sublime/sacred/holy; how Feminists, Black Liberationists and others re-vision religious phenomena, etc. But having an open mind does not preclude taking a particular position based on a persons current understanding of the material--or the material's understanding of the current person(ality). That is what makes our cohort, and life in general, so damn fascinating and frustrating. We are a bunch of expanding bigots--reduced irreductionists.

My main problem with most of the so called post-modern, academic, "open minded irreductionist deconstructionists" is their tendency to level the playing field to the point of being intellectually and practically useless and bland. We see this in the current politically correct blasé culture--an approach which is ironically very reductionist. In 1943 C.S. Lewis coined a term for the "open minded" educators who denied the possibility of finding Truth in a "reductionist" Platonic sense: he called them Urban Blockheads (The Abolition of Man). The derogatory term denoted their disingenuous crusade for absolute subjectivity (sic)--replacing True universals with personal and cultural "truths"--each to his/her own truths. They were urban (educated elitists) blockheads (brainless) because they denied the ubiquitous evidence for universal Truth. Only hicks from Bumfuck, Arkansas believe in universals. Lewis argues that humans generally intuitively gravitate toward similar epistemological and aesthetical universal Truths (like Beauty, Justice, Courage, etc.) by which to live. Jung saw himself as an empiricist in just this way, a scientist of psyche seeking universals without apology.

An archetypal perspective suggests, to me, that one ought to rigorously and openly explore each and every mythical and religious paradigm, yet not be afraid to land on Big Ideas that cross cultures--the Greek Logos, Hindu Rita, Chinese Tao, Hebrew Hokmah, Christian Christ and Muslim Sharia. The various particular systematic philosophical or theological formulations of each of these perspectives may not be 100% True, but each intuitively knows and seeks Truth as a real possibility. There is a sense in which all good science reduces research in the direction toward the "more-true" theories or conclusions through meticulous examination. Why apologize for moving from the exploration of irreducible phenomena toward truer reduced theories?, providing that one continues to re-search and re-vision.

Finally, I like the phrase, "non-exclusive particularism" which is sometimes employed by theologians when discussing pluralistic religious and mythological perspectives. This idea suggests a couple of things: first, that one may seriously examine and come to deeply understand other points of view, excluding none, allowing each to have its own clear voice and contribution to the human enterprise (informed irreduction). Secondly, non-exclusive particularism suggests the utility and necessity of consciously choosing a particular foundation upon which to stand in order to see and act in the world (informed reductionism). Jung always emphasized that good research brings one back into the world with a particular ethical view and moral position "to be lived". The notion of anima mundi recognizes the importance of taking a solid stance in the world. I think most Global Warming and non-Global Warming advocates are pretty particular about where they stand--and many in both camps are even exclusive!

Subliminal message: [Al Gore and Sean Hannity]