THIS WEEK’S POST IS WILL BE A LITTLE DIFFERENT, a little more personal than usual. Here’s why. The online course I’m offering, “Jesus and the Feminine in the Gospel of John,” begins next week (see my note below). Although I’m offering it through my local church, the course is open to the public at large. …
Transcendence – Going Deep to Gain Height
WHILE HEIGHT IS A METAPHOR FOR THE SPIRIT, DEPTH IS A METAPHOR FOR THE SOUL. Might it be possible to reach the transcendent heights of the spirit by diving deep into the soul? Could the “ascent of Mt. Carmel,” advocated by St. John of the Cross, be a soulful descent? The answer in both cases, …
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Why “Powers” and “Principalities” Still Hold Sway
ALTHOUGH MOST OF THE TIME MOST OF US DON’T RECOGNIZE IT, organizations have souls. Our ancient ancestors felt the presence of spirits everywhere, animating everything. Plato abstracted that ancient intuition into a theory of ideal heavenly archetypes standing behind all material forms. By Roman times, St. Paul and other early Christian writers could talk about …
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The Persona – the Mask of the Soul
MOST OF US STRUGGLE MOST OF OUR LIVES TO BECOME AUTHENTIC, to find and actualize our “true selves.” The struggle typically begins during the sturm und drang, the “storm and stress,” of adolescence, but no one fully quiets the storm as a teenager. If you’re fortunate, your teenage struggles lead to a relatively stable adult …
Mist on a Breeze #5
An Action Movie with a Twist Last night, as we finished watching WW 84, the latest installment in the new Wonder Woman film franchise, I felt a touch of synchronicity at play. In my previous blog post, “A Tale of Two Myths,” I spoke about murder mysteries as manifestations of the Myth of Redemptive Knowledge, …
A Tale of Two Myths
WHY ARE MURDER MYSTERY SHOWS ON TV SO CAPTIVATING? Why am I hooked on The Closer, Major Crimes, Midsomer Murders, Death in Paradise, and the like? It’s because they tell archetypal stories that re-affirm the truth of one of humanity’s two most powerful meta-myths. The “Myth of Redemptive Violence” is probably the dominant myth of …
Here’s How Jungian Psychology Feeds the Soul
EXPERIMENTAL AND BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGIES DENY THE SOUL, and psychoanalytic psychologies explain away meaning. Jungian psychology does neither. Instead, it maps out a path toward a post-critical, re-enchantment of life. In our post-Enlightenment, postmodern world, psychology should help us understand the soul, because “psyche” means “soul.” Unfortunately, experimental and behavioral psychologies ignore the soul altogether by …
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When Something Ordinary Is Extraordinary
SOMETIMES SOMETHING HAPPENS that makes no sense, but isn’t nonsense. Instead, it seems eerily significant; uncanny, yet meaningful. You know it’s just a coincidence, but it feels like a touch of enchantment, like the flow of Dao, like providence or maybe fate. A meaningful coincidence like that, according to Carl Jung, is synchronicity at work …
When He Saw Her Weeping, He Burst into Tears
JESUS OF NAZARETH WAS A HUMAN BEING. So, whenever we assert his divinity, we need to remember his humanity. The orthodox formula, for the last 1,700 years or so, has insisted Jesus Christ is both fully God and fully human. The Bible also shows us both, although the fully human sometimes can be harder to …
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Where Is Heaven?
THE QUESTION IS IRRATIONAL. It assumes the word “heaven” refers to an actual place. For more than 2,500 years, however, rational thinkers in the West have known heaven to be a mythic location, not a physical reality. Our image of heaven is a survival from a primordial model of the universe in which the earth …
Soul Spirit Wisdom 