for what it

A beautiful day at the beach last summer. I played around with my camera and did some watercolors. Jami photographed me expatiating at length on subjects common and recondite. I was intrigued by my shadow.

and why not

A blog is a kind of journal, and when you've attained the selectivity of readership I have (whittling it down to none), the freedom gained is to write anything and display images - for no reason at all. Here I've recapitulated images from the summer while we vacationed on the Isle of Palms. We found a little frequented place on the beach and I had fun with exposure settings on my camera. I had my books and watercolors with me. 

I thought about posting on facebook an observation, or more a question, that If when people speak about God they usually are speaking about themselves - are they not (we me you I) speaking about ourselves even when we're talking about others. Jung seems to say so, and perhaps Lacan concurs in a few places. I might say that we are always speaking about ourselves except when we actually speak about ourselves. When I speak about myself, I wonder that the need for my ego to defend itself isn't at its strongest here. Indeed the ego's need to defend itself could explain a lot of what we say about others (we throw all that stuff about ourselves onto them - that poor idiot driving too slow in the left lane, the cashier who talks too long to the customer in front of us).

So when I'm speaking about myself, that's the one time I'm not actually talking about myself. That seems thoroughly Lacanian. One of his memorable lines to me is the description of how we can't talk about ourselves - even as we intend to - to an other - or that we might talk about ourselves but then we're not actually talking to (speaking with) this other person (usually the therapist, but it could be anyone). 

I was stalled in an interview one time by some old coot who insisted that I hadn't told them What I wanted to do. And the truth is, I don't. My whole life has been framed in doing what others want me to do (while at the same time, I have to admit that I've only done what I wanted to do - most embarrassingly in staying too long with a church that took way too much from me; and most embarrassingly in delaying finishing my library science thesis's completion). 

various images

Can't remember what I planned or didn't plan to write. Still looking for images of the two paintings I'm donating to the Child Spring gala. Instead here are some images gleaned while searching. Note the postcard for a now defunct Panama City, FL hotel. In its place, as near as I can tell, is a very large hotel. Gone are the days North Georgia families would descend on the beach, playing skee ball and devouring cans of Charles Chips. 

even still more facebook posts collected

I'm purely baffled when people demonize the government - government is an expression of the people and their good faith toward each other. Government is also a protection against the bad faith of people too often expressed in envy, greed and sloth. Those who say that they want a government small enough to drown in a tub, are covertly expressing their animus toward people and society under cover of a straw man argument.

wonders how many baseball players named Coffee have existed: "Coffee grounds out to pitcher" "Coffee creamed by bean ball" that sort of thing.

thinks of Roy Blount's joke about two southerners discussing churches: one says "Do you believe in infant baptism" and the other reponds "Believe in it? Hell! I seen it done."

thinks of ways to improve Moby Dick: introduce the character "Bartelby, the harpooner", change titie to Moby Dickinson: the Diving Belle of Amherst.

thinks that there's not enough time, that every moment of time is too precious to spend being reactive, nurturing resentments, ranting ad nauseum. Every day in the hospital I see people in distress, nearing their limit, grieving - and it seems, that there is no time to waste in any endeavor but love, in any position but in hearing and speaking to our mutual wounds.

observes that the word "maverick" will soon be given over to an entirely ironic connotation."That horse I rode at the fair was quite a maverick."

ponders that the original Maverick was an unbranded horse, but was still owned, albeit the more insidious for concealing its true condition.

ponders names for a sports franchise in Yemen: yemini crickets.

even more

from 30 nihilistic nocturnes: heroine tracks down Shadow in the labyrinth of the unconscious - note doves circling around in a dust-moted beam of light - the imprimatur of quality cinematography

Though our eyes, through practice, fairly gauge the size of objects and locate them in space, we lack a comparable organ that through exercise would evaluate the real size and location of interior objects - hence we too often cower before the minutia of our psyches - granting overwhelming power to presences and doctrines that are long since passed.

from an unpublished apocalyptic cookbook: "she whisked in on Ole 666, battered, promiscuous with milk and flour - when the rolls are culled upon her, isle bee da."

crazy the way I find myself, trying to do things by myself, as if I could solve my problems on my own - like trying to open the door at the top of the stairs with both arms full

Growing up as a child, I was treated to countless preachers focusing on my internal state - where there was guilt aplenty to be mined. If this seems to be what you are encountering, I encourage you to ignore them: they are simply pushing buttons for easy results. Do not go forward - let them play 70 verses of "just as I am". We are called to a life of love and service exemplifying grace. Stirring up guilt; talking about hell; talking about the end of the world- isn't grace and it's not love and it's not service. Be kind to your wounds and the wounds in others.

I believe most revival services could qualify as a form of child abuse - child abuse by loving, well meaning (though some people perhaps get a sadistic kick out of it) people who think they are sincerely expressing the gospel.

 A child confronted with the claims of the typical revival sermon - that we're vile, sinful creatures that sin just by looking in the mirror, sin without even knowing they're sinning, and were born sinful to top it off -They believe they're inherently bad because an adult up front is telling them they're bad - they have not developed defenses against bull shit that adults have. Instead they grow up with the cognitive dissonance that the loving God hates them - hates them for something they can never repair. You can imagine the emotionally crippled adults this kind of thing develops.

 It just hit me this morning, the words for what bugged me about the whole thing growing up. Children have no defenses on the outside - but also on the inside. They simply believe whatever adults tell them. And even after the outside is strong and can defend itself, the inside is left undefended. And it occurred to me: this is where a lot of the emotional damage I feel comes from - before I could defend myself. How many other people must be feeling this, carrying this. While the adults doing it think they're being tough, delivering the 'truth' of the gospel. That's bunk. In any other context, a parent seeing another adult manipulate a child like that would fight back - but since we're all sitting in good clothes in a pew on Sunday, that makes it OK.

Jami and I, talking about our five year age difference: 
Me: Do you remember Jack Benny?
J: No.
Me: Do you remember Red Skeleton?
J: Oh sure, on Sanford and Son. 
[hilarity ensues]

This from my friend, Tricia Dillon Thomas: "I'm asking your permission/telling you that I'm using you as an illustration in my sermon tomorrow about Solomon's wish for wisdom: "I have a friend Fred who is an artist and a preacher. And when he finally brought those two gifts together, his sermons painted our imaginations with riches words could never find. I think if Fred painted wisdom, it would be with oils so that the canvas would be bumpy from the globs of paint smacked down on top of one another… where the ending of one image leapt to the side for the beginning of another. And it would be abstract and full of colors. There would be moments of harmony in the colors, except every once in a while you’d see a bright yellow or red streak that looked out of place, except when you started to really pay attention, you noticed it actually helped tie the whole piece together."

considering how some children are given their first name from the mother's or grandmother's maiden name, I wonder how different my life would be if I were King Wise. King Wise would get things done.

more facebook aphorisms

I am notoriously slow moving. I easily forget what I'm looking for and it takes me a while to extrapolate "obvious" angles and conclusions. I once had a library professor tell me that I don't think well on my feet. True. Often I must simply sit down or lounge of the couch.

there are people and places in the past for who the verse "let the dead bury their dead" applies. What are these people and this place doing, still living in my head. Old times there, really best forgotten.

When I was young, I was part of the test marketing of "A Charlie Brown Lent". I recall the music was catchy, the theme was later reworked into "Send in the Clowns". I only remember Linus telling Charlie Brown (exasperated that Snoopy was organizing a pilgrimage to Santiago Spain, a Lentapalooza tour), "Lent isn't just about giving up Charlie Brown; Lent is a time we can be quiet and gather our forces for opening day."

stentorian voice with strophic form overlaid with grainy images mouthed pious sentiments of homecoming-achiness: corn without a maze meant so very little much

patience - a step, a little thing done, and the next - I can not pick up all of life at once, but pieces, even so small as a seed, a speck, may be moved ahead, like a painting

My grandmother Stallworth, upon taking a biscuit off the serving plate while she still had a biscuit unfinished on her plate, would exclaim, on realizing this, "Company's coming hungry." Have any of my other friends encountered this superstition?

New Scientist's figure of 107.7 billion people who have ever lived is with me every day: a reminder that there is little difference between the very great and the very least - whatever difference might be manufactured now, soon is smoothed out in the thin line of history. The key for me is finding contentment in the small things of my life, that some kindness is discovered and lived in.

facebook aphoristic statuses

the bulk of advice is worthless - usually a person's autopsy of some living moment somewhere they'd heard a rumor of of an assertion made, offered in an authoritative albeit hopeful manner as a salve for some futility life has blessed you with.

Parmenides, now there was a thinker - there was a time you could walk up in the middle of the day and have a conversation about something he'd said.

finds losing or gaining an hour's sleep irrelevant - has always enjoyed the novelty every year - wonders what adding a third time change [perhaps adding or subtracting half a day on alternating years] might be like.

just passing through, a spot, a bit of sun, something to eat, someone to love, a nice drink, then in Pound's words, quick eyes under earth's lid. Try to do the best with it. Try to savor enough of it.

a man with time on his hands and blood in his ticker
the sun in his eyes and a fire in his belly
uncertainty principles his wounded psyche
and runs ahead a pace

synchronicity - like a levitation over a pool - the things we try to make language do - the passing of what I might be saying behind what is heard where meaning slips in a gap, a parallax, like the libration of the moon, at once disclosing more than all available surface while holding back ... something unknown unknowable.

filling in the blanks from memory: the past suffers being reshuffled, reimagined, reorchestrated - perhaps because memory, which seems so absolute, is more a sieve, a net through which passes the small trifles composing actuality, leaving us a semblance, the odd things caught in the net, which having lost their trifling context, can no longer adequately explain each other or themselves.

cars abandoned in the yard - eternally "being worked on" - symbolize something more at large among people - a kind of collected mechanical inertia. They all await an impetus, that great collision of fuel and spark that activates and directs force in a necessary direction. People can be like that and we may judge them, projecting our own inertial drives onto them, or we may help them.

a private joke I've had since we lived in Durham was a fictitious memory of a Food Lion add from the 70s, where a man in a poorly made lion costume, visible stitching, undersized head, would punctuate his spiel with a half-hearted "ROHRRRR" and a punchless punch of an arm across his chest. Of course, no such commercial exists, but I seem to have a memory of something like it.

sometimes, when I'm drawing, I'll start falling asleep, which is annoying - I think to myself, "who falls asleep while they're drawing? It's embarrassing, unheard of." Sometimes I will have done part of a figure in a tiny, 1/8th inch square. Like when I'm falling asleep, I'm actually getting smaller. Such that the act of sleep is falling through the quantum fabric, leaving behind the tiniest of signs.

In 2006, when I had a show at Sycamore Place, a woman came in and, looking at my work, said, "you seem to be in a lot of pain." I assured her that that was no longer the case.

Deleuze recommends being an experimenter, rather than a critic or judge - for the sake of creativity, to make connections, to speed the line of flight. The judge is the fascist. But what to do when people are addicted to judging, to criticizing, to disconnecting? Be the change. The line of flight across the plane of immanence.

Jung writes that other people's solutions to problems, while perhaps correct, are not therapeutic - we need to discover our own answers and ways of answering. For instance, as a chaplain, people don't want you to solve their grief (doing so takes even the reality of their grief from them) - what is sought is some affirmation of humanity, some kindness, some presence.

 I bought Blanchot's book Infinite Conversation to keep me company, now right now, I have ready at my finger tips, an infinite conversation, and what a genuine blessing it is. I don't know if Blanchot would have liked me, but I feel that there would have been plenty of time.

nothing is easy. Blanchot writes that the answer is the question's adversity. A quote I have seen reading Bion on group dynamics - where he translated the sentence as the question's disease. No matter: put it that the question (existence, purpose, where are the keys) becomes questionable when provided with an answer. Not that we live in a world without answers, just not very good ones.

just writing away

I try to understand more every day. Lacan's goal, Freud's goal, Jung's goal - and most other goals in therapy are for a person to learn how to live with the facts of their life. Most of the big signs of approval offered by society are limited. Even for people who attain recognition, wealth, whatever - the time of those is fleeting. Ecclesiastes has so much right. The best thing an individual can do is recognize what is theirs in their life - and live that life - not as an other might direct, nor for some talisman of validation.

The facts of our lives can be uncomfortable - they may not square up with a narrative of triumph, an overcoming of adversity, or even being understood. I wonder at the places I remained at - the times I seemed to be stopped. It is embarrassing to say, "yes, this place was where I wanted to be."

I also wonder at how blind to circumstances I can be. I told my friend Bob the other day, using the metaphor of the running game, that most of us seem to run to darkness. That frustrating thing you see watching a football game where the running back takes the handoff and runs right into the line, just stopping there. Well he was supposed to find and opening - that's where the hole is in practice. Practice has gotten him there. I suspect that most of us are like that. Running where we think the hole is supposed to be. Well meaning people: teachers, pastors, mentors, family, friends all told us to run there - that's the way the play works out, they might have said. Instead we find ourselves running into a wall. The gap closed when we arrived.

If our lives were something we viewed on the screen, we'd find the new hole, the new opening. We would have run the play right - or, finding the gap closed, we'd power our way through - just keep those legs moving, stay low, don't let them stand you up. And it is to no avail. We haven't the strength or preparation or skill to break through.

Sometimes I've seemed to break through the line and gain some ground. Most often on what I consider broken plays, I find open field before me. The day typically is not like that. The day is mostly the ineffectual scrum - the scrimmage of forces around me that evince neither up field nor down field. Just mud and exertion and exhaustion at each step. If I ask my neighbors what they see - they see the same as I.

looks like

When I was taking a photograph from Green's of the buildings toward Atlanta, this guy, homeless perhaps, walks up to me and tells me where I can find a better view. He didn't ask for money. He was articulate and knowledgeable. I doubt that I'm going into the building he suggested and trying out the view: I don't like being confronted by strangers and people with badges. I'm a low risk person. Still I've been known to take risks. 

The thing is, I wouldn't suspect someone who looks like this to be helpful - much less engaging. But there you have it. I say this in conjunction with how people respond to paintings, especially portraits (which might be photos as well). The other day I saw a picture of Walker Percy and someone had captioned it "a face that knew despair." My immediate thought was, "you say this because you know something of Percy's life and that the Moviegoer is composed around the theme of despair." I don't know if a group of 50 viewing dust jacket photos and painted portraits would arrive at this same conclusion or the same conclusions (49 percent say despair 30 percent say dyspepsia 21 percent say contentment, or some like as that). Rembrandt's Man with a Magnifying Glass elicits similar captions. All about what people think they see in a face. 

I question whether what we learn from these captions and assertions is anything about the subject; instead I think we learn something of the viewer. Why do they make the judgment they do? What draws them to the particular emotion or spiritual state they claim to see? In the case of Percy, is this a romanticization of despair? I know that I certainly care more about faces that evince despair - If I can say that about them (even though my evincing is unjustified). I associate melancholy with creativity and despair with Kierkegaard (and Percy) and an honesty about existence. 

I mused earlier about how clouded our idea of God is with our projections. Here I muse that even our view of other people is clouded by projections. In turn, they don't really know us. What a world where at every corner we are faced with illusion more than fact. I say Illusion not in the sense of immateriality - you (my imagined reader) and I are hard, tangible objects, as biologically present as anything else in the universe. Instead I think Lacan's categories of Imaginary, Symbolic and Real are helpful here. The world we construct is symbolic and this world is constructed over against the real. The real at every step threatens to overwhelm the symbolic. Individuals have problems where they cannot fit themselves into the symbolic, so they construct  an imaginary relation with an Other - another person, the name of the father (which is a symbolic conceit - not some name of an actual father - but the symbolic force of the office of father). So we finesse our way through life in a fantasy - a fantasy where we "please" the other and are given a symbolic place - a place secured against the devastations of the real.

Typically the symbolic is sorted out of the real. The real is all there is - or at least in relation to the individual's perspective. And that relation is like this: think of "all there is" as a library of unmarked uncataloged books. The infant is distressed at such a thing but adults come along and open these books and show how to understand, label and catalog the contents. As the individual leaves off being an infant she begins to catalog some volumes for herself. Traumas occur when new volumes arrive than can be cataloged - previously cataloged volumes are mis-shelved or have their markings removed. At some point an individual may ask herself, "where am I in this symbolic world? Is this world created by me or for me by others? Are the books adults cataloged for me actually cataloged correctly? What is "correct"?" and so on.

What Lacan deals with is how the subject exists (and here Jung says something very similar, which may seem curious), and his claim is that the subject exists as an object of fantasy. The ego itself is a fantasmic or imaginary construction (made for others, especially The Other) and a source of frustration (others don't appreciate how we've constructed ourselves - and we did it to please them, those others, The Other - why is mom angry at me? why is God angry at me?). Hence therapies that attempt to bolster or cure the ego fail - they don't arrive at the issue of the individual, which is located at the border of symbolic and real, and identified as a symptom thriving on joissance powered by fantasy.

And it is in this area of fantasy that therapy happens. (I'm bypassing the role of the signifier here: suffice it that  in terms of therapy, focusing solely on the signifier leaves things in the realm of the imaginary. Lacan even indicates that suggestions from the therapist only serve to substitute one signifier for another - the symptom remains in place) The goal is to understand what your fantasy is in the first place. Since the fantasy (not your daydreams or something fantasized, necessarily) is mostly unconscious (we might say, it's the life we've lived to please the other, The Other, any other - look I did this for you, why don't you understand?) the fantasy must be constructed from the content of dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue, bungled actions - like a puzzle. The goal is to see yourself as an actor in your own drama (one might say, see where you are in your own library) and begin to act with some flexibility or introduce flexibility into the fantasy, the life drama. It is this act of acting in the symbolic, not the imaginary, that loosens the symptom's hold on joissance and unbottons the symptom, draining out the joissance, the anger, what ever is in there. Life becomes more livable - or one is able to live with the facts of one's life.

on making and unmaking

I think I've described my idea of "The disassembly of God" - how it was spurred on by a sermon where a preacher used a scripture for completion of the temple to describe raising money for a gym. It was a very conservative church - the kind of place that has successfully engineered an iron-tight assurance that they've acquired the best rooms in heaven [more godly than God]. I should say, that this assertion is simply the outgrowth of being certain about oneself but not about others [because they meet in different buildings and have different kinds of worship]. What is striking is how heretical - or I should say sub-heretical [because Marcion Valentinus Servetus - all those guys could care less about building a gym and would never mistake a gym for the Solomonic temple]- a church like this is. Or I should say out of touch with Church history and the narrative force of the gospels. 

My idea for the disassembly of God - besides the delight in the catchy title - was for an experimental space and experimental worship. Somehow the business of knowing God and hence loving God - that is finding God Love - would be a matter of removing accretions. The problem as it seems to me now is the persistence of the signifier. The subject (that's you and me) are constantly being wound up and played. We do not know it, seldom recognize it. Think of it as the light motif of the human condition. Just notice that changing labels doesn't change emotional reactions: buttons are still being pushed.

It's inescapable that  people have an ultimate ground of being - believer and unbeliever both. No one gets out of the cage, as it were. This holds me in place. I know more about what I want than what I desire.  The way I see of constructing God is much like a painting. It is the paint and surface that tell me more what will happen and how it will come out. The painting is not the result of what I want. The painting happens. I trust that God happens as well. It is a matter of seeing through the dust thrown up by others. 

When I was small and learning to paint, I had a teacher who insisted on taking the brush from me and finishing my painting. She'd just do it. I bloomed when the lessons stopped. I began painting my own paintings - not smooth concoctions are very artful, as it were, but filled with life, filled with the love of paint and color and line. And so it seems theologically, my experience has been with people who want to think and believe for me. These are not my strokes, not my words. This is the frustration I feel. I especially recognize it in some of the smaller, more insular congregations. That sense of insularity seems to be a clue. The non-connectivity Deleuze identifies with the fascist line of flight or the black holes of subjectivity. I've been there: very loving and interesting people desperately want to tell you what your experience with God should be like.  

Isn't it strange we arrive in this world, for a brief time, and answers to the great questions are already laid out for us. We are given commitments of country, family, belief, and sometimes career - as well as expectations of class, gender, and politics. We don't even think about them. We never say, why right handed and not left?  Or do we, and the impulse is snuffed out, either by adults or peers. 

Our egos are constructed from the larger pool of material in the self - a pool that , unused, sinks back into the unconscious where it seems to live a life of its own, sometimes erupting into our lives (and we blame it one other people). At once, with our ego, we engage with others as well as defend ourselves. Defenses for problems at 5, 10, 15 remain long after the need for them has ceased. The effect is like having men with muskets and attendant fife and drum corp march into modern combat. 

scattered thoughts

A drawing from the end page of my copy of the Book of Common Worship. Through Leviathan we gaze at the Cloud of Unknowing. I throw up a ball through the  Cloud to the figure reaching out above. Top line looks like it could also read: The Cloud O Funk in G - which would be an intriguing musical composition.

A drawing of the [so called] Fall where every thing happens at once. Note God [in the center the old man in the triangle] pulling a fully grown Eve from the side of Adam [just like in the medieval and renaissance depictions]. Behind this scene the first couple is smashing an apple in each other's mouth [note snake coiled above]. In the very background, an angel in Roman soldier gear  sends away the couple [modeled after Masaccio].

I did a long stint of drawing at Columbia Seminary's faculty forum [what's he doing up there drawing while that fellow's talking? ]. While there I finished up with this drawing of a viking ship [surely modeled on Duke Divinity's emblem, which is not a viking ship, but could easily be] where I replaced the dove in the PCUSA logo with an upside down two headed Byzantine eagle. They were talking about the emblem chosen for their quality enhancement plan. I was hoping they would choose my errant image at the last minute. Not to be though.

In the Infinite Conversation Blanchot says, "the answer is the question's adversity." 

A floating Synchronicity - I could use a bit more - but the point of synchronicity is that we can't control it or induce it. I suppose.

who are you talking to?

the big other - who is being narrated to in the Third Policeman - who is the Man who was Thursday talking to ? I find myself talking and is it to myself - that unconscious aspect of me that seems only speaks to me in the riddles of dreams and jokes - and who I speak to in my straw man rants. Who are you mad at? I probably don't even recall. I told Jami that a neurosis is a bad fix. It addressed a problem a five year old had or a 10 or 15 year old - and it remains: like a piece of code in a legacy program, it cannot be merely excised.  It is a fix whose time is past. The problem it fixed is no more a problem, but the anxieties associated with that problem call forth the neurotic symptom. Joissance is bound in the symptom by, what does Lacan say, the fantasy. He doesn't mean fantasy in terms of Walter Mitty - but the fantasy that rules my life. A fantasy that must be discovered in therapy.

I assume no one is reading

Lately I've written so seldom, infrequently more accurately, that anyone coming to my blog is perhaps doing so by accident - the entropy of research and inquisition. I was thinking just yesterday about a topic, one I've toyed with often, that ponders how our symbolic world is made up our projections. The big thing here is Fichte's contention that our view of God is "only" projection. This is a serious difficulty - as listening to people who claim ortho-orthodoxy talk about God, I'm struck by how this God seems to be an extension of their own desires, their own will.
I'm not the first to notice this. It's almost a commonplace: people talking about god are talking about themselves in a loud voice. Lacan, who speaks of the signifier, might say that God is simply The Other - the voice of a parent or other authority figure that speaks through the person. When I've scored student essays I've encountered this - the unmistakable rant of grand father coming out of the mouth of the child.
This is the problem of speaking about God - that we are densely entangled in our own words and the words of others (which form most of the content of our words).
Finding my own words has been my search. I've discovered that it's easy, common, to be possessed by a signifier. I've switched one political signifier for another, only to discover that the anger remains. More than ever, I know that emotion over-rides intellect. In trying to get beyond images and signifiers, again and again I run into emotional investments.
Why am I angry, I may ask? Is it because I need the validation of an other, The Other?
Jung posits that the unconscious characters of our psyche are projected onto other people and things - that we don't see or know these people - only our projections onto them. That we are trapped in our own subjectivity.
How to get out?
Certainly the Bible might be useful, but too often the people who want to control access to what the Bible means are nearly psychotic - depending on how emotionally invested they are in America Freedom Orthodoxy. I certainly feel their frustration. The fact that they are frustrated should give them pause. A God who was not just "one thing among others" wouldn't need their frustration.
In the last few years I've come to realize that the Christianity I was brought up in is heretical. It doesn't feel like heresy while you're in it: revivals, altar calls, sermons on godless communism and some kid who had an accident before he could be saved - all seem normal at the time, but then fade. Any study of history and theology exposes them. Yet here dwells the signifier with its loyal servants, emotionally invested and ready for battle against the World.
Even as I try to write some new thing about God, I discover that I'm writing that same old thing again. Let me just say that Marcion was onto something: we must dispose of the violent Old Testament God - which is a projection onto the Jewish God of the violence that holds seemingly every time hostage. Violence is a sign of our emotional attachment.
I don't mean to disparage emotional attachments - it's what binds friends together, parents and children - it's what keeps us together as well as apart. It's only that once an idea is bound to an emotion, that idea is never let go of. It takes a lot of work - and the problem itself, lodged in the unconscious, is invisible to a person's ego. I assume that the error is in the other person (that idiot who cut in line, the person espousing the party line), the object of my violent thoughts, and not in myself, not in that part of me that is the unconscious, where this thing, this battle with The Other, is being worked out.
Already I can tell that my readers are confused by me.
When I was able to lay aside the emotional attachment to the Church I grew up in, I became attached to another Way - an evangelical belief - which led to an attachment to an Orthodox belief and finally a more fully formed Reformed belief. What I notice is that even as signifiers changed, my emotional commitments remained the same. I thought some belief along the way, some doctrinal formulation, some credal assent, some spiritual experience, would assuage the pain.This is elusive. Perhaps what I'm seeking is a more refined signifier.
I baldly say that I'm constructing God. I assert that others who are shocked at that assertion, have merely constructed God under the cover of authorities. A God though who might be authorized by authorities is less than what people hopefully mean by God: infinite eternal immutable in being power and attributes.
Test: Do you feel free or caged in? Does knowledge substitute for knowing yourself? Do you become angry at the 'stupidity' of others? Are your buttons easily pushed? Do you know what it is you want?  These are the things spirituality and faith should be aiding in positive, soul building directions. Anger, frustration, alienation - concomitant with the need to be authorized by an other point in the opposite direction. Do you find yourself in a group, and that group feeding you - as Jung would point out "inflating" you. It is typical that such a group with its power of orthodoxy (or what passes for orthodoxy) would inflate an individual's ego. That inflation of the ego is one aspect of group power, What fails to be effected is any real growth in the individual.The God put forward by such groups tends to be confining. I know. I struggled to maintain that sense of exclusiveness.
I say no more to this. I also say my faith has never felt stronger or more authentic.
One thing that makes it authentic is the realization that God must die many deaths; what dies in these deaths is not God qua God but the accretions of qualities I've projected onto the idea of an almighty Other.
That's enough for now.