We have been taking a look at the wisdom of one of Richard’s (Rohr) favorite teachers (and mine), who has a heavy influence on the book The Universal Christ. Richard introduces us: “Carl Jung (1875–1961), the famous Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, was highly critical of his Christian heritage because he did not find much transformation—what he called 'whole making'—in the Christians he knew. Instead, he saw a religious tradition that had become externally focused, moralistic, and ineffective in actually changing people or cultures. His own father and five uncles were Swiss Reformed ministers, and Jung found them to be unhappy and unhealthy men. I am not sure what his exact evidence for this perception was, but clearly it was disillusioning to Jung. He did not want to end up like the religious men in his life.
Yet Jung was neither an atheist nor anti-Christian. He insisted that each of us has an inner “God Archetype,” or what he termed the “whole-making instinct.” The God Archetype is the part of you that drives you toward greater inclusivity by deep acceptance of the Real, the balancing of opposites, simple compassion toward the self, and the ability to recognize and forgive your own shadow side. For Jung, wholeness was not to be confused with any kind of supposed moral perfection, because such moralism is too tied up with ego and denial of the inner weakness that all of us must accept. I deeply agree with him.
In his critique of his father and uncles, Jung recognized that many humans had become reflections of the punitive God they worshiped. A forgiving God allows us to recognize the good in the supposed bad, and the bad in the supposed perfect or ideal. Any view of God as tyrannical or punitive tragically keeps us from admitting these seeming contradictions. It keeps us in denial about our true selves, and forces us to live on the surface of our own lives. If God is a shaming figure, then most of us naturally learn to deny, deflect, or pass on that shame to others. If God is torturer in chief, then a punitive and moralistic society is validated all the way down. We are back into problem-solving religion instead of healing and transformation.
Wholeness for Jung was about harmony and balancing, a holding operation more than an expelling operation. But he recognized that such consciousness was costly, because humans prefer to deal with the tensions of life by various forms of denial, moralizing, addiction, or projection” (TUC 84,85). Elsewhere Richard reminds us, “the only perfection available to us, is the ability to accept ourselves as imperfect.”
Friends what do you think of Jung’s theory? Can we shift from trying to be "good," to trying to be "whole"? Do you notice the inner desire to live in denial? Have you experienced the traumas life influencing you to Push That Stuff Down, and live in perpetual PTSD? Have you experienced this “whole making instinct” at work in your own soul? How can learn to live in a way that trusts that instinct more? How can we help others and ourselves to get more in touch with it? How can religion help or hinder this process? How can we live with both our supposed good and bad, and that of others?
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