And the cries and struggles to come to term with the kind of world we live in continues.

O.K.! That's for introduction.

WE HUMANS AS VICTIMS OF WHAT WE CALL "GOD": JUNG'S UNDERSTANDING OF "GOD" HAVING TO DO WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF FATEFULNESSES AND TRAUMA

Now! If the events of 9/11 were the immediate impetus for what I have prepared for our gathering, the content of what I have prepared is an exploration of the meanings of these words of Dr. Jung's:

To this day "God" is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions, and change the course of my life for better or for worse.

To this day "God" is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions, and change the course of my life for better or for worse.

GOD

All right, we start with the word "God" "To this day "God" " . One thing is sure, throughout his writings Jung invariably uses the word God to describe immediate experiences and never some Being in the sky or an entity. He all but cries out:

Why have I come to take God for granted? Why do these philosophers pretend that God is an idea, a kind of arbitrary assumption which they engender, when it is perfectly plain that he exists, as plain as a brick that falls on your head? Suddenly I understood that God was, for me at least, one of the most certain and immediate experiences. (CGJ, MDR, p.62)

God is no longer miles of abstract space away from you in an extra-mundane sphere. This divinity is not a concept in a theological textbook, or in the Bible; it is an immediate thing, it happens in your dreams at night, it causes you to have pains in the stomach, diarrhea, constipation, a whole host of neuroses...If you try to formulate (the experience of the deep unconscious), to think what the unconscious is after all, you wind up concluding that it is what the prophets were concerned with; it sounds exactly like some things in the Old Testament. There God sends plagues upon people, he burns their bones in the night, he injures their kidneys, he causes all sorts of troubles. Then you come naturally to the dilemma: Is that really God? Is God a neurosis? ...Now that is a shocking dilemma, I admit, but when you think consistently and logically, you come to the conclusion that God is a most shocking problem. And that is the truth, God has shocked people out of their wits. Think what he did to poor old Hosea. He was a respectable man and he had to marry a prostitute. Probably he suffered from a strange kind of mother complex. (Visions Seminars, pp. 391- EFE, p. 66)

I remember Him, I invoke Him (when I am) overcome by anger or by fear (and) I involuntarily say: "Oh God." And that happens when I meet somebody or something stronger than myself.

(God) "is an apt name given to all overpowering emotions in my own psychic system, (which) subdue my conscious will and usurp control over myself."

We exist in a creation that transcends us in every direction Just as God has been described as transcendent and unknowable, a trauma is an event which transcends our capacity to experience it. Whether a divine being really exists or not, the psychological fact remains that we tend to experience traumatic events as if they were in some sense divine. ( p.4 & 1) (italics mine)

THINGS

To continue. This "God" is experienced in all those "things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly". What "things" we ask? There are of course the natural phenomena of life earthquakes, tornados, floods, fire all sheer acts of fate, phenomena which we humans do not basically cause, "though how we treat our fragile eco-systems has some effect on activating them.

But to Jung, "God" is as well experienced in the trauma which those things produce in us, in "all the overpowering emotions which subdue my conscious will and usurp control over myself".

And there is a third set of "things" in which God is involved in the all too familiar human actions with which we are daily being confronted terrorism, child abduction, rape, murder, and of course all manner of drink-and-drug-induced accidents and their traumatic consequences, which, don't forget, the perpetrators as well as their victims experience.

And now a most important and difficult distinction: where do these roiling emotions come from? When we become angry or fearful or frantic and the rest, our tendency is to blame ourselves, as if somehow we create these emotional reactions. Jung's thinking is clearly otherwise, namely, that those emotions are at base givens and as such can be attributed to "God" Himself. "Man's suffering does not derive from his sins but from the maker of his imperfection, the paradoxical God", says Dr. Jung. (CW 18 por.168)

This used to be a shocking idea for me, yet when I began work on this material I recalled an incident at Virginia Seminary in which my theology professor, Dr. Cliff Stanley, fifty years ago, passionately cried out in a lecture, "My friends, God is acting in the hand of the murderer as he plunges a knife into his victim's body!" I didn't understand at all what that meant then, but I never forgot it. But what I conclude now is that Dr. Stanley meant is exactly what Jung is saying the capacity for murderousness, for example, is a given in human experience, and as such an act of "God".

Lyall Watson, a biologist and naturalist, adds support to this notion by grounding these violent emotionst in our very genes. He says:

Everything Jungians believe about the shadow that it is dangerous, disorderly, fugitive, distasteful, sensual, stupid and lacking in spirituality is true also of the genes. Every time we laugh when someone slips on a banana peel, it is the shadow showing. Every time we take pleasure in the pain of a rival, it is a genetic pleasure. Each time we become impulsive, display exaggerated feelings about others, feel humiliated, find excessive fault, display unreasonable anger, or behave "as if we were not ourselves", we are seeing the genetic shadow in action. . .It is not the devil who is to blame, but that part of us that operates its own agenda, ruthlessly ignoring the possibility of suffering and very real pain for the rest the moral contained in the Book of Job is that natural authority (in this case an unusually vengeful God) can be tyrannical and overpowering (and) also a blind one that is too unconscious to be moral History has confronted us squarely with our own demonic capacities. Like Faust finally coming face to face with Mephistopheles, we have been forced to concede that the mask he wears bears features very much like our own. He is us, and neither evil nor we can be redeemed. We just are; and we very clearly are the products, for good or evil, of our biological evolution. (from Dark Nature: A Natural History of Evil, Lyall Watson, 283,269)This is, I think, a particularly important matter to be clear about since our Judaeo-Christian tradition in the myth of the Fall in the Garden - holds us to be entirely responsible not just for eating the forbidden apple but for our built-in tendency to do just that. Parenthetically, this is why many of us have long ago re-imagined the Fall story to mean that it is exactly our sin which frees us from that infantile unity of remaining innocently in the Garden, the price for which, yes, is being uncomfortably responsible for ourselves.

God is the name by which I designate all things. . .WHICH CROSS MY WILLFUL PATH VIOLENTLY AND RECKLESSLY

We've described the "things" to which Jung is referring; what, then, do we make of the impact on us of those things "which cross my willful path violently and recklessly"? The main feature of the traumatic events which can at any moment befall us is their very violence and recklessness, both in what actually happens but even more in their emotional impact. And to make it worse, this archetypal violence and recklessness runs straight into our own willfulness, provoking a mutual reaction. As Jung says in Answer:

These experiences come upon man from inside as well as from outside, and it is useless to interpret them rationalistically and thus weaken them It is far better to admit the affect and submit to its violence than to try to escape it by all sorts of intellectual tricks or by emotional value-judgments...The point of the whole proceeding (is that) the violence (of God) is meant to penetrate to man's vitals, and he must succumb to its action. He must be affected by it, otherwise its full effect will not reach him. But he should know, or learn to know, what has affected him, for in this way he transforms the blindness of the violence on the one hand and of the affect on the other into knowledge." (Answer, para 360-62)

When I was a student at The Virginia Seminary, an unforgettable experience happened to me. I wandered one morning into the chapel, and from the back I noticed a classmate, Bob Coleman, kneeling at the altar rail and in a paroxysm of desperate fury he kept crying, again and again, "God, damn you! God, damn you! God, damn you! Of course I immediately retired, and never mentioned the incident, but I often wondered what possibly could have provoked such deep and angry and desperate emotions in him. My conclusion now is that in one way or the other "God" was his problem, and it was to that "God" that he addressed himself. A further mystery in all this, but I suppose a clue too, is that after two years of fruitful work in a parish of Japanese people, Bob was sent home for intensive psychotherapy, and one day hung himself!!

On the wider mythical level, there's the figure of Job himself which so preoccupied Jung over the years. I've often identified with him in his despair and anger at Yahweh for the violent and reckless treatment Job received at his hands and is courage in standing up to Him.. Listen to Job's words: "He crushes me with a tempest, and multiplies my wounds without cause; he will not let me get my breath, but fills me with bitterness though I am innocent, my own mouth would condemn me; though I am blameless he would prove me perverse...If I wash myself with snow, and cleanse my hands with lye, yet thou wilt plunge me into a pit, and my own clothes will abhor me I loathe my life. It is all one; therefore I say, he destroys both the blameless and the wicked. When disaster brings sudden death he mocks at the calamity of the innocent".

Then there are Jung's words about Job in his own mythic work Answer to Job. His introductory words bespeak the extent to which Jung was almost beset by the Job story. First he tells us that what he is going to say is not "a cool and carefully considered exegesis that tries to be fair in every detain, but a purely subjective reaction (which he hopes) "will act as a voice for many who feel the same way as I do, and to give expression to the shattering emotion which the unvarnished spectacle of divine savagery and ruthlessness produces in us." And then he says,

The Book of Job...provides a picture of a God who knew no moderation in his emotions and suffered precisely from this lack of moderation. He himself admitted that he was eaten with rage and jealousy and that this knowledge was painful to him. Insight existed along with obtuseness, loving-kindness along with cruelty, creative power along with destructiveness Such a condition is only conceivable either when no reflecting consciousness is present at all, or...is very feeble...A condition of this sort can only be described as amoral. CW 11, Answer, para 560)

I suppose the most shocking way one could put all this contemporaneously would be to say, "Look what God did on 9/11 God in 19 of his human beings were acting out of their God-given natures", (as were, of course. those who were their victims and the victims survivors). It's a dreadful thing to say in that way, but it is c ertainly makes vivid what Jung means about this dark side of what he calls "God". Of course that doesn't free those perpetrators from responsibility; it just locates that responsibility farther down the road, so to speak. What putting it that way does, however, is to not blindly brand them as pure evil, but allows for the possibility that under certain circumstances we too might act that way as well. Mei Lai certainly demonstrated that.

. . . WHICH UPSET MY SUBJECTIVE VIEWS, PLANS AND INTENTIONS AND CHANGES MY LIFE FOR BETTER . . .

The consequences of God's crossing our willful paths violently and recklessly are that almost all our "subjective views, plans and intentions" are knocked galley west. When the fates of God befall us all the goals towards which we were moving, the joys of friendship and love and good health and prosperity we enjoyed, everything is turned upside down, inside and out. We are usually just prostrated by such occurrences, sometimes for a very long time. Yet, somehow it is given to us to begin to take our lives up again, in however changed a fashion. Jung would call that "givenness" the working of a capacity in us which he called the transcendent function, a capacity originating in our depths which enables us to transcend our present states. I suspect each one of us here has more than one story to tell of such a nature.

One such instance comes to me from a conversation with the grandfather of a hopelessly brain-damaged grandson, Preston. He told me how horrified they all were initially about this child, particularly since the father of the child would not marry their daughter and knowing its damage beforehand from sonic tests, the mother of the child could have had an abortion. Yet when push came to pull the mother would not hear of it, and now, a year later, this child, all but brain dead, has trans-formed the whole family, especially the grandfather. With tears in his eyes he said, "I'm an agnostic. I don't know what I believe, but in spite of my initial hope that the child would be aborted, and then when born, would die soon, all I can tell you, Brewster, is that that child has brought a joy and a love into my life that just overwhelms me."

"Shit happens", yes, indeed, but there's no telling what wonders can come from it, given one's ultimate attitude. That's the key, of course: our attitude toward what crosses our paths makes all the difference, and not only to us but to "God". And I must say that my most recent re-imagining of my image of God is that the capacity of us humans to transcend all that seeks to overwhelm us, from within and without, is a large part of what "God" is for me.

OR WORSE

Then, finally, there are those lives are changed by what crosses their willful paths violently and recklessly for the Worse! That is, they are just unable to recover from the trauma which has swept over them. There are of course many factors involved in such a worsening, but one thing we know is that the traumas which fatefulness activate in us can so consume us with anger and despair and hopelessness that our egos just won't move aside, can't move aside. And we may become overwhelmed by it all and just give up. We all know people who have fallen into that state suicide, yes, drink, yes, but perhaps almost worse, collapse and withdrawal.

One's attitude toward people in such situations then becomes one of resignation, and we thing, and sometimes say it just isn't going to work this time around for them if we have another shot at life on this planet as the reincarnationists say, then that's what's going to have to happen. There's no blame, but there is a great sadness to it all.

And a propos of this, Jung says this:

It is the task of the conscious mind to understand these hints [from the unconscious]. If this does not happen, the process of individuation will nevertheless continue. The only difference is that we become its victims and are dragged along by fate toward that inescapable goal which we might have reached walking upright, if only we had taken the trouble and been patient enough to understand in time the meaning of the numina that cross our path. (Answer, para 746)

"God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans, and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse."

And to summarize:

For Jung the word "God" refers not to an external force or being, but to those events which are seemingly unbidden and thus "fateful:" and those violent and reckless emotions which are capable of upsetting our views, plans and intentions in all kinds of ways, and, 12 indeed, have the capacity to change the course of our lives drastically, sometimes for the better, but sometimes for the worse, depending on how we respond.

WHO BY THE TRANSFORMATION OF OURSELVES BECOME AGENTS OF GOD'S TRANSFORMATION

"Depending on how we respond". That's the key to the whole matter as Jung saw it: we human beings are the key to the transformation of the dark traumatic powers of God as Self and to the activation of Its light forces as well. Looked at in this sense, what I'm talking about, (and more importantly what I hope Jung is talking about!) is not the transformation of an external "God" figure up there, but a change in the stuff of human nature itself, which if it were possible would in turn amount to a transformation of God as well! How is that for an undertaking?

In Jung's language, the stuff of human nature consists of archetypes whose images give rise in us to the whole range of feeling, thought and action. Archetypes are, he said somewhere, the images of genes, so basic are they. So what we're talking about is a ground change in our human nature, affecting our genetic structure as well, and thus a very long evolutionary development.

But such changes are possible because they have always resided in our deep unconscious depths waiting to be recognized and realized. The dark and the light forces reside in us, often hidden deep in our unconscious depths, waiting for some of us at least to confront the dark forces and activate the light ones. I find such a notion particularly fascinating.

Yet what Jung is particularly talking about is a change in those archetypal impulses which give rise to violence and hatred in us and inflict vast trauma on a great scale, and, those impulses which are capable of countering those violent impulses loving kindness, insight and creative power, for example. Is it possible, Jung asks again and again, that humankind can find ways to transform those darkest impulses in such ways? And his answer is a ringing "Yes", and not just any time, but particularly now, in our time, when we are faced with the greatest evils possible and thus are ripe for transformation.

Let Jung speak some here. In Answer he says:

Since the Apocalypse (of John in the Book of Revelation) we now know again that God is not only to be loved, but also to be feared. He fills us with evil as well as with good, otherwise he would not need to be feared; and because he wants to become man, the uniting of his antinomy must take place in man. This involves man in a new responsibility. He can no longer wriggle out of it on the plea of his littleness and nothingness, for the dark God has slipped the atom bomb and chemical weapons into his hands and given him the power to empty out the apocalyptic vials of wrath on his fellow creatures. Since he has been granted an almost godlike power, he can no longer remain blind and unconscious. He must know something of God's nature...if he is to understand himself and thereby achieve gnosis of the Divine (CW 11,para 747)

The only thing that really matters now is whether man can climb up to a higher moral level, to a higher plane of consciousness, in order to be equal to the superhuman powers which the fallen angels have placed into his hands. But he can make no progress with himself unless he becomes very much better acquainted with his own nature...unfortunately, a terrifying ignorance prevails in this respect... But God... wants to become man, and for that purpose he has chosen the creaturely man filled with darkness ... The guilty man is eminently suitable and is therefore chosen to become the vessel for the continuing incarnation, not the guiltless one who holds aloof from the world and refuses to pay his tribute to life, for in him the dark God would find no room. (CW 11, para 746)

Although the divine incarnation is a cosmic and absolute event, it only manifests empirically in those relatively few individuals capable of enough consciousness to make ethical decisions, i.e., to decide for the Good. Therefore God can be called good only inasmuch as He is able to manifest His goodness in individuals. His moral quality depends upon individuals. That is why He incarnates. Individuation and individual existence are indispensable for the transformation of God the Creator. We ought to remember that the Fathers of the Church have insisted upon the fact that God has given Himself to man's death on the Cross so that we may become gods. The Deity has taken its above in man with the obvious intention of realizing Its Good in man. The significance of man is enhanced by the incarnation. We have become participants of the divine life and we have to assume new responsibility, viz. the continuation of the divine self-realization, which expresses itself in the task of our individuation. Individuation does not only mean that man has become truly human as distinct from animal, but that he is to become partially divine as well. This means practically that he becomes adult, responsible for his existence, knowing that he does not only depend on God but that God also depends on man. Man's relation to God probably has to undergo a certain important change: Instead of the propitiating praise to an unpredictable king or the child's prayer to a loving father, the responsible living and fulfilling of the divine will in us will be our form of worship of and commerce with God. His goodness means grace and light and His dark side the terrible temptation of power. Man has already received so much knowledge that he can destroy his own planet. Let us hope that God's good spirit will guide him in his decisions, because it will depend upon man's decision whether God's creation will continue. Nothing shows more drastically than this possibility how much of divine power has come within the reach of man. (Letters II, p.312)

I want to end with two words from Dr. Jung first from his lectures on Nietzsche's Zarasthustra, which speak eloquently to me and I hope to you.

The ego participates in God's suffering. We have become participants in the divine nature. We are the vessel...of the Deity suffering in the body of the "servant" (a reference to Jesus) Buddha's insight and the incarnation in Christ break the chain through the intervention of the enlightened human consciousness, which thereby acquires a cosmic significance. Individuation and individual existence are indispensable for the transformation of God. Human consciousness is the only seeing eye of the Deity. (paras 336,409; Letters II, 314ff.)

The second word of Dr. Jung comes from an unpublished letter which he wrote toward the end of his life. Listen:

The problem of crucifixion is the beginning of individuation: there is the secret meaning of the Christian symbolism, a path of blood and suffering, like any other step forward on the road of the evolution of human consciousness. Can man stand a further increase in consciousness? Is it really worthwhile that man should progress morally and intellectually? Is that gain worth the candle? That is the question. I don't want to force my views on anyone else. But I confess that I submitted to the divine power of this apparently insurmountable problem and I consciously and intentionally made my life miserable because I wanted God to be alive and free from the suffering man had put on him by living his own reason more than God's secret intentions. There is a mystical fool in me that proved to be stronger than all my science...Thus I suffered and was miserable, but it seems that life was never wanting and in the blackest night even, and just there, by the grace of God, I could see a great Light. Somewhere there seems to be a great kindness in the abysmal darkness of the deity.