Surprised by God at my Table
For the past twenty five years, my ex-Catholic husband and I have celebrated the Passover with a Seder, the ritual telling of the story of Exodus which is accompanied by special food, wine and story. I have presided at Seders with five people and with over 150 people. I have sat next to the very old and the very young, but I have never sat next to God. Or rather, God never revealed Godself to me. It wasn’t an apotheosis, there were no rays of light or angels singing, no drama or bells or whistles. What happened was simple, profound and mysterious. I looked around our table of eight adults and realized that this was the first time in all these years that there were no children present. At that moment, the tears flowed from a deep well of sadness and I was aware of the presence of a deep and powerful mystery. As Marie Louise von Franz says in the Way of the Dream: “God is that which sweeps us off our feet, overwhelms, inspires reverence, awe, fear and a sense of something greater than ourselves”. What I understood is that the story of Exodus is a living reality in our souls. It is an archetypal movement from the ego’s slavery to complexes and collective values that kill the soul to liberation through pain, suffering and exile. This is when the God sat at my table, when I realized that this mysterious journey of the soul has to be told to us over and over again, starting when we are children. We need to know from the beginning of our growing awareness that life is cruel, unjust and difficult. We need to know that there is oppression and evil in the world that is out to destroy us. And, we need to know that there is a way out of oppression into a new land of milk and honey, the way is hard, yes, but it is known and we are in good company. While the children may not understand the profundity of the story during the first part of life, the repetition and the rituals prepare the way for the task of the second part. What we understand later in life, is that the oppression is internal, the complexes are our Egypt, the slave masters that bind us to impossible tasks in their possession. To leave Egypt is to leave the world behind and enter into the desert exile, and endure suffering in our encounter with the God. James Hollis, in his lecture at the Assisi Institutes’ In Search of Soul and Spirit seminars, reminded us that the task of the second part of life is to find our personal authority in relationship to that which is greater than ourselves (April 1, 2013). His description of the process of coming to a more mature spirituality mirrors the Exodus story. We get stuck by the archaic fears of our childhood, the complexes that keep us frozen and sabotage the ego’s forward movement. To become a mature adult, to find our souls, we must go through the desert to get to other side. There we reclaim our selves, finding greater courage, resilience and strength, we learn that by facing our fears we can be guided by the dust storm during the day and the pillar of fire at night. We are not alone, there is a greater force that can guide us if only we take the first step out of bondage.
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I was surprised yesterday to receive a phone call from my very excited mother. She was thrilled to tears that ‘we’ had a new pope from Argentina. I could almost see her 82 year old self jumping up and down for joy. I, however, was a bit taken aback. We are Jewish.
But we were both born in Argentina – and it seemed that regardless of religious affiliation or belief, regardless of the fact that Argentina protected Nazi perpetrators of genocide, my mother was caught up in the field of nationalistic pride. I would have thought that the millennial experience of diasporic Judaism would trump one generation of being Argentine, when I saw the images of people all over the world celebrating this Argentine cardinal turned Pope, I began to have other inklings. Jung, in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, speaks to the powerful force of the unconscious to compensate for the one-sidedness of the time or epoch. He says: And epoch is like an individual, it has its own limitations of conscious outlook, and therefore requires a compensatory adjustment. This is effected by the collective unconscious in that a poet, a seer or a leader allows himself to be guided by the unexpressed desire of his times and shows the way, by work or deed, to the attainment of what which everyone blindly craves and expects –whether this attainment results in good or evil, the healing of an epoch or its destruction. (166). So perhaps my mother was actually expressing something a bit deeper than nationalistic pride, she may have been possessed by the possibility of a change in the collective itself. Dr. Conforti, in his blog radio program, spoke about Jung’s excitement when the Virgin Mary was taken into heaven. Jung saw that as the elevating of the previously repressed feminine into the Church. We may be entering a new phase of psychic balance in the world, or at the very least, it is clear that Psyche is doing her damnest to bring us into equilibrium. While the Church will continue to espouse dogma that keeps it in line with patriarchal rules and regulations, it is clear that here is a man who is very closely aligned to the feminine values of relationality, care and nurture of the oppressed, who admonishes priests for not baptizing babies born out of wedlock. His life, as we know it for the moment, is a testament to living close to the earth, to matter, to the Mother, whose ego stance seems to be aligned to service to the highest values expressed in the gospel and not to ostentation and external expressions of power. It remains to be seen whether he will be able to resist the forces of the Church which will seek to constrain him to ‘live’ into the proper role for the Pope, a role shaped by two millennia. Will his humility be deep enough and his ego strong enough to carry the function of God/dess without being annihilated by the projections of the curia? I don’t know, but I will be praying for him and for all of us. After all, he is an Argentine. Jung, Carl G. (1993). Modern Man in Search of a Soul. San Diego: Harvest. We have been brought to our collective knees in grief, shock and sorrow by the lastest irruption of violence against the most innocent and vulnerable among us- kindergartners and their teachers. Pundits and politicians will continue to discuss gun control, the balance between rights and freedoms, how to add more cops to schools, how to prevent this tragedy from “ever happening again.” Perhaps change will come, most likely not. What is needed is to bring consciousness to the archetypal constellation driving the escalating violence we have experienced in the last forty years. I was thinking about the way we understood Kent State. The same way we understood Pharaoh and Herod ordering the massacre of the young. The archetypal ruling value attempts to destroy the new emergent regime, the powers that be, the world of the fathers and the status quo, authority and dominion are to be maintained. The new energy which gets constellated and called into being when the kindgom is ill and has become evil must be redeemed by new life. The orders go out: destroy those who would overthrow the old ailing regime. What makes the tragedy of Newton Ct so horrific, is that the ruling value is hidden. It is not wearing a uniform and hiding behind orders, it is not decreed by a higher power. It is the young killing the young. It would seem as though chaos were the ruling power. But I don’t think so. It think it is the shadow king in our collective psyche, that power which has slowly but surely been growing in the dark as it purports to serve the needs of the collective. When political platforms and policies cut services to the most vulnerable in the name of efficiency and financial constraints, the shadow king grows in power. When the ruling values do not include care and responsibility for everyone, especially those who cannot care for themselves, the shadow king amasses his forces and sends his young minions to destroy the innocent. There will be much talk and discussion in the coming months about this tragedy, how we can live with it, what needs to change, what we can do. Perhaps that is our greatest hope; by bringing it up into the light of consciousness and awareness, it can no longer hide. Dream Pattern Analysis
I recently completed a Dream Pattern Analysis certification process that changed the way I view and work with dreams, images and symbols. According to Jung, Conforti and others in the analytical community, the Psyche expresses itself in images and symbols that are universal and unchangeable by human experience. The Collective Unconscious or the Objective Psyche, that which is the matrix of existence seeks to express itself in meaningful ways for the individual. Each image has to be looked at for its specific attributes, proclivities, way that it behaves in the natural world. Depending on the context, we can accurately translate the meaning from the image if we stay with the image. The problem is that we cannot always understand what we are being told because the images seem too chaotic and subjective: we ascribe our own personal meaning to what we experience. There is really nothing wrong with associating our experiences to images and symbols, but we can truly miss the mark if we stay with what we think we know versus really looking at what the image really is. For example, if a snake appears in your dream, we can make any number of associations with snakes. Freudians will assume it is a sexual allusion to the male genitals, others might go with the meaning of transformation or healing. But if we look at the snake and begin to ask questions about the snake, we might find out that the snake is a garter snake in the garden and not a boa in the bedroom. There is a huge difference between the two. The first is a natural occurrence which is consistent with how things are and the other is a dangerous situation which does not occur in the natural world. The context of the garden tells us that we are in nature, that snakes belong out there and that garter snakes perform an ecological function. All is well. The bedroom, on the other hand, is a person's most intimate space, not only for intimacy with a loved one, but where one goes to sleep, to re-charge, where one is the most oneself away from others. A boa constrictor not only does not belong in a house, if it is there, it is saying that something very dangerous that could crush and devour one has entered one's psychic space. The appropriate response to that is to run! And then ask the question: What is in your life that is so dangerous, so close to you that can obliterate you? In addition, we would want to look at the dreamer's response to the boa. Are they aware of the danger? In this case, we could ask what one's feeling about the boa is in order to determine whether the dreamer has an appropriate attitude toward the image or if it is dissonant. If the dreamer says something like a boa is an incredible exemplar of power and potency, they might want to see the boa in the bedroom as a symbol of their own power. What is missed is that a boa in bedroom represents extreme danger and would point to the dreamer's naivete when dealing with others in intimate spaces who pose a real threat to the dreamer. In addition, it could also point to the dreamer's illusion that they possess those attributes to compensate for a sense of powerlessness. The rest of the dream would provide more information. On the other hand, if the dreamer says that boas are dangerous and that they were scared of it, that tells us something different. Since they are not ignoring the danger, then we would want to look at what is in their lives that they know is dangerous and needs immediate attention. There are many other aspects to this image as well that would reveal more about the dreamer's life. Questions to ask would be: what does the dreamer do when she/he sees the snake? What happens next? how does the dream end? This is a very beginning look at how I am learning to approach dream images or any image that comes up in counseling sessions. Since images are the way that Psyche communicates, it is a good idea to get as close to the objective meaning of the image as we can. When we research how a particular image actually is in the world, a bear, a bee, a shoe, a glass, we can come very close to the meaning it holds for the particular person at the particular time. If there is a bear in the winter eating honey, we know that something is off! Bears hibernate in the winter and there is no honey. So why this image? Is the dreamer engaged in something where the timing is way off and the resources are missing? This way of approaching images is exciting and exacting work. It takes time and discipline and curiosity. If you are interested in learning more, go to assisiconferences.com |
AuthorDr. Silvia Behrend is a Certified Pattern Analyst, educator and mentor Archives
May 2020
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