Charles Victor on Religion

Great expectations: the Advent of Christ

Posted on December 6, 2025 by admin

In Advent we read from the prophets of the peace and good things the time of the Messiah will bring. In this world that is always in some sense weary, the season gives us scope to look with hope. “He gives strength to the wearied, and strengthens the powerless.” There is, of course, more to the prophets’ preaching. They do tell of the need to repent of wrong before God and others, and to follow God’s holy commands that we might taste of his life-giving goodness and mercy. They tell also of a redeemer who will suffer for the sake of all. But we tend to leave those passages to Lent.

In this season that leads us into Christmas it is as easy to be caught up in those cheerful visions of a Paradise revisited as it is to succumb to the scrumptiousness of frosted gingerbread and the glittering of holiday parties. We concentrate our focus upon the promise of the desolate places become fertile, of the crooked made straight, of our God becoming a beacon to all peoples, of peace on such a scale that lion and lamb, justice and mercy coexist in harmony, and where “there will be no hurt, no harm.” In this new world of untrammeled grace, of creative-most life, the blind will see, the lame walk, and the poor will be no more. Indeed, the Jungian in me would hail this world of well-being and the felicitous coexistence of opposites as symbols about the integration of the powers of soul toward the making of the whole and holy individual. They are symbols set out by the psyche that man might allow soul to come into possession of its truth. They are visions of the grace within in quest of materialization in the life of the individual and world. In the dizzying clamour of the season and in the superficial reading of such texts, however, it would seem this world of harmonizing takes place with the nod of God’s head. That is not how it works.

Somewhere in time man decided he could play at being God. Man leapt from differentiating pleasure and pain, to being able to sit in moral judgment upon them and adjudicate this is good, this is evil. Man’s self-consciousness made an evolutionary expansion to moral-consciousness. Man suddenly had an inner reflective voice. He found he had a con-science. He not only saw something he wanted and took it for himself. He not only encountered possessiveness. His possessiveness made him feel himself opposite others. He felt himself to be other. He suddenly understood the psychological tensions within his sexuality and tried to cover it. He sensed himself disjoined from Life and Meaning. No longer could he look God in the face or walk in the cool of the day with him. In one evolutionary step man became disoriented from that eastern garden, from his fellow travellers, from his Source and End, and from his parameters of community and communication, from his Alpha and Omega. With that the world around man begins to fall to pieces, and man scurries to collect, identify, and protect this bit and that as his own. Man created for himself a new centre of being. He hid himself behind an ego and lost sight of his soul and hold of his God. Without a God to centre him, he spun evermore out of orbit, out of control, and devised all manner of distractions to disguise the guilt of his venture into a solitude, a solitude ever restless by the loss of its true sociality.

But God, ever bounding with creativity, ever embracing himself and the world of his making in love, had a plan to make straight that crooked path. He would walk with disoriented man. Man trotted out the history of sin. God plotted out the history of salvation. God would challenge the power of ego with the power of soul, and in the fulness of time, as it were, with his own Soul. God would send the manifest of his very self to reorient man to his truth, his centre, his soul, his indwelling divine image.

In the fulness of time the Messiah did come. He was not exactly what people expected or wanted. The blind did see, and the lame did walk, but not all of them. He told those who would hear him that the poor would always be with them. They thought that “always” meant some brief time. They thought he would oust Rome, and restore a sovereign Israel. They thought locally. God thinks globally. They thought in terms of history. God thinks in terms of eternity. The Messiah, the Christ of God, did not snap his fingers and make everything a flowering garden of wonder and ease, because as God, the Son of God, he is not a magician but a creator. He created a world in time and space, a world that evolves. He came incarnated into that world, and shared in its pains and its dying. He instilled in it the power to die in him. He instilled in it the power to live in him, and so perhaps his greatest miracle was to create disciples.

We, his disciples, perhaps do not often consider the miraculous nature of our discipleship, but it is there as its very root. It is a grace given, a grace accepted in the humility of faith. We are Christ’s continuity at work in time and space. He charges us: “heal the sick, cast out the demons, proclaim the good news of God’s love for this world.” Wheresoever you find dis-ease, discomfort, distress, disorientation, darkness, or disregard, challenge it, address it, fix it that all men in all times and in all places might encounter the creativity and love of God. Work to free this world from its bondage to its self-interest. Labour and pray to liberate it to its true soul. Unencumber this world from its weariness and unveil for it the truth of man: behind all the pretense and posturing of fear, shame, anxiety he has still the breath of God in his depths, he has a soul of love, an image of God within awaiting.

A sentiment as fine as any romance of a snowy Christmas creche you well may say, because that task is more than global. Even that everlasting continuity of disciples called the church cannot accomplish that for all times and places. Perhaps not, except that the head of that community of disciples is Christ, the Son of God, its centre is the eternal Father, and its very animation is the Spirit of God. We are not but a few abandoned in time. We are an unfolding history animated in, by, and through God. Despite all our limitations, shortcomings, and failures, God and his sovereign plan will prevail in the end. That is a matter of the faith, the hope, and the love that propels us forward.

“Not all are apostles, not all preachers, not all interpreters of tongues.” No one of us can do all things. Not all are called to create great curative enterprises. Not all are called to lead institutions of church or state. Not all are called to move the tides of history. But all are called to be aware of one’s heart, and mind, and soul, and world—be it something wee or grand. We all are called to manifest the grace and graciousness of God’s love set within. We each have our spheres of influence and care, and we each are called to be awake to the world around us and its needs. To be full life needs to be not only examined but informed.

The reach and the task of discipleship is for us each something unique, and it may at times seem daunting, but it begins and ends in resting in the grace, the light, the life-giving power of God. We gather in prayer and sacrament to be immersed in that power, to be exercised in that power. It is only by resting in God, allowing God to be God, that we can hear and know where God wants us to be, what Gods wills us to do. We can complicate that because we tend to fall prey to the seducing glances of our own reasonings and passions. But when the world pressed in upon our Lord, he went off to be alone with God where he could find the silence wherein God acts to reveal a man to himself.

We ought to make no expectations of God. It is never in our power so to do. Let us be content to trust in God whose Son has made us his disciples and who will lead us where he wills. So we go with him to Bethlehem, to the plains by Tiberius, to Bethany, to Tabor, to Calvary, to Emmaus, to the scriptures that hold them, and to the Sacraments that hold him. And there we kneel, we pray, we con-form, and we simply allow ourselves to continue to fall into his love for us each and for us all. In that love the way is seen, the strength is given.

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We have no sin (1 John 1:8)

Posted on November 16, 2025 by admin

I apologize for the sensationalism of the title and editing. Had I quoted the full verse, you may not have continued with this page, for having sin is not something this world wants to hear. St. John knows that, and so he tells us plainly: “If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves.” Sin is not a topic in vogue. Perhaps if it were, this world might not be where presently it is. Indeed, sin does not want us to talk about it. It prefers we be kept in the dark. Yet, in this forum my postings on sin have been amongst the most read.[i] Could it be a prurient interest flowing from the fascination the dark and evil hold for us? Why else would our mythic mother, the happy Eve, who had everything one could wish for stop to talk to slithering Satan ever wrapped in his darkled mantle?

Before I say more about sin, allow me a word about Carl Jung. In his analyses of the psyche he discerned levels or orbits of power. Among them was one he termed the Shadow. It is the reality of our constitution wherein is deposited, consciously or not, all those aspects of ourselves with which we would prefer not to deal, to bring to light. But only in bringing them to light, only in understanding their hidden power over us, can we harness that power into the creativity of our selves. In 1 John 1:5 we read: “God is light and in him there is no darkness.” But light can cast a shadow when something obstructs it. If we are called, by both God and the psyche he has created, to be transparent in all we do and say to ourselves and to the world, we need to be realistic enough to say we are not. Transparency—in all we do and say and are—is an ideal. Thus, we all have a shadow side to us, and we know it. Only the most hubris filled heart can deny it. But in that denial it needs be explained the raison d’etre of psychologists and psychiatrists whose labour is to reveal it.

If we are reading our scriptures sequentially before we ventured into St. John’s first epistle we would have read St. James’. There, sounding rather like Buddha, he speaks of desire as leading to sin, and sin to death. But desire is natural to us. We are not abiogenic and self-sustaining entities. We have needs, and needs pulse out desires. But desire, like unto any type of pulse, can go awry. Ask anyone wearing a pace-maker. St. Augustine, who loved to play with words and sounds, compared cupiditas and caritas. Caritas, most often translated as charity, but better understood as devoted care, is the desire natural to man. By it man is opened to his true needs: God and the panoply of world as God’s gift. Cupiditas, cupidity, is its corrupted form. It is not open towards others or things. It is acquisitive. As Martin Buber would say, it treats others and things not as venerable, not as relatable, not as a Thou, but as objects to be had, collected, used. Because it is a disorientation, it can rouse an attitudinal dilemma such as that the writer of Ecclesiastes bemoans when we speaks of all his toils and accomplishments as vanities. And where does that bemoaning bring him other than to a despair. Man can glory in his work and accomplishments, and shout them to the world, but as long as they are just objects he has set in orbit around himself to robe himself in his own self-glorification, they will always have a hollow ring. And, yes, some are so vain as to be content in their vanity, their hollowness.

But psyche, the soul, is no sluggard. It does not drop into ennui or rouse to despair as an end in itself. It does so to reveal the self- and world-wastefulness of cupidity, and to push towards the human righteousness of caritas, of devoted care. It wants to realign the psychic level, the spiritual level, upon which life is moving. It wants to reveal to the ego-driven man of many masks, personae, and shadow that the creative light that man truly needs, and therefore ought to desire, is not the possession of people and things, but the integration of self into the full range of one’s internal powers, and the giving, the sharing, of that self with others and the world in community.

Sin has gotten a bad name. We think of it muchly as murder, theft, lying. We forget it is something far worse. We do not see how deeply it holds onto to us, spins us in its orbit. We omit from consciousness that it is foremost about the worshipping, the con-forming to, false gods—gods of wealth, power, control, influence, prestige. It is from these false gods and their lack of charity, that all manner of falsehoods arise. We become self deceived not enlightened. We spin out of the proper orbit of creativity of self and world, out of orbit of care and integrating power. We spin out of our proper orbit around God who is Light. We spin into the darkness of self-absorption, eating up everything in our path, and slowing killing our-Self in gluttonous cupidity. St. James says it well. Desire grows into sin, and sin into death.

But we gather in church, we sit in prayer because we do not believe desire needs to be dis-oriented. We believe it bears the power of self correction. It bears an orientation to the creative, to the grace of the Creative One within. St. Augustine says desire was made in us primarily for God, for “our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” St. Paul tells us the great moral dictates—starting with the ban against false gods—were given that we might be confronted with our inability to perfectly live up to them, to prepare the heart and mind for the revelation that we need the grace of a power greater than our everyday world-navigating and too often world-weary selves, “a power working in us that can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.” We need a power to keep us in proper orbit, and that power is the God whose name is Love. Thus again it is St. Paul who tells us: “Whatsoever be your goals, make to be loving the first and highest of them all.”

When, by that we do or that we fail to do, we walk not in “Thy holy ways” we sin. But when we sin “we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous one.” On his cross, in his distorted body he reveals to us our distorted souls. In his rising out of death he offers us his unbounded life. God, the Son of God, atones for our disorientation. In so doing, in that cosmic tone of a God-man’s dying, he draws us back into the orbit of love. He makes us partakers of that love, which love alone creates this world, redeems this world, sustains this world. Yes, we sin, but sin does not define us, God does.

[i] Cf.: Occidental Ideas, Part 8, February 2014; Spirituality, Part 5, May 2017; Sin and Sinfulness, September 2023.

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“Do you love me?” -reflections on a gospel narrative

Posted on October 24, 2025 by admin

A few days ago the second lesson at Evening Prayer was from the 21^st chapter of the Gospel according to St John. It is among my favourite passages of scripture. But I have a problem with the translations of it. There is in the original Greek something that the English translations fail to transmit. Confessedly translations always fall short. The King James Version is excellent in keeping the idioms set out in the Hebrew and Greek. However, that often means some degree of exegesis is required to make the text comprehensible to the present day. Many newer translations convey the meaning at the cost of the original idioms, and therein the flavour of the culture in which the text was created. In John 21 two specific Greek verbs are consistently translated into one English verb, and I am at a loss to understand why this is the case.

The ancient Greeks understood there are varied types of love from the acquisitive and desirous to the altruistic, and they had distinct verbs for them. In the gospel narrative under consideration love is used to translate both φιλέω [phil-e-o] and ἀγαπάω [aga-pe-o]. Phil-e-o is properly used for a love characterised by friendship. The relationship is reciprocal, and marked by familiarity and a willingness to stand by or stand with another. Aga-pe-o is used for an unconditional love. It need not be reciprocal. It is a pure, no-strings-attached giving of self to another. It is a state of being unreservedly “for-you.” [i]

I make no pretense of being an authority in either scripture or Greek. Whatever facility in Greek I may have enjoyed sixty-plus years ago has regrettably faded from my head. I am left with little. However, I do remember a delightful evening in the mid-1960s spent in the company of a man who was considered a biblical scholar of note and an expert in the Johannine corpus. He disserted upon the distinction between aga-pe-o and phil-e-o as used in John’s 21^st chapter. Yet, several years later, when he published volume two of his commentary on the gospel, he decided translating both verbs as love was justifiable on the basis of the rest of the work. However, chapter 21 is a late addition to a text that had already been edited several times. The member of the Johannine school who produced this chapter may have written in the spirit of the Johannine tradition, but that does not necessitate that he was bound to every nuance of vocabulary used by his predecessors responsible for the first twenty chapters of the text. Unconditional love and friendship are not the same thing, and one does not purposefully select differing words unless one is trying to make a point. The point—in the Greek text—is made. It simply is not translated into the English.

In the Greek of chapter 21 Jesus asks Peter: Do you unconditionally love [aga-pe-o] me? Peter replies: I am your friend [the verb is phil-e-o]. This seems reasonable. In John’s gospel, the night before Jesus is executed he tells his disciples that henceforth he calls them friends. But much has happened between that evening and now. In a sense a new reality has begun, a new heaven and earth are on the horizon. This is a new day. Jesus has just issued an invitation to breakfast. In the narrative span of the gospel this is the last recorded encounter of Jesus and the disciples, and Jesus is raising the bar in his relationship with Peter. Thus, for a second time Jesus asks Peter: Do you unconditionally love [aga-pe-o] me? Peter again replies: I am your friend [phil-e-o]. But now Peter, being his irascible self, is getting a tad hot under the collar, and Jesus knows it, because in John’s gospel the divinity of Jesus is always front and centre. He knows everything that is happening and going to happen, and if he wills to do so, he can control it, manipulate it. Jesus makes a move. He comes down to Peter’s level. He meets Peter where he is comfortable. Jesus asks: Peter, are we friends [phil-e-o]? Peter rather heatedly replies: You know everything. I am your friend [phil-e-o].

Jesus always meets us where we are. But as is always the case, he is not done. He is, as St. Paul marks, a life-giving spirit. There is nothing static about him. Peter and Jesus move on together. Jesus then issues his challenge: “Follow me.” Jesus is always one step ahead of Peter, and of us all. That is part of his Risen reality: “He goes before you.” That is why the disciples never immediately recognize him. He is out of focus; he needs to be discerned. Now, lest Peter not see into the future where the following of Jesus will lead, Jesus offers what seems to be a cryptic message. Peter will be led to a place he would rather not go. He will die for Jesus. One thinks of St. Paul to the Romans: “Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die.” In my mind’s eye, as Peter hung upon his cross and felt death enveloping his body, he looked to his Lord and at last met him on his ground. He said to him: “[aga-pe-o] Unconditionally, I love you.”

There is something about death here to consider. How often have we experienced one dear to us turn as death comes to the body and say: “I love you”? There is something there. It is as if as we experience the body fade away from us that we are freed to see into the soul, to see the soul, to see there the image of God, the image of Love, to realize our soul is love, the essence of us is love, and so we must pass it on before death comes. “I love you” to one near and dear is a reaching out to eternity, to the creativity and giving away of self that is eternity. It is a committal. Blest are the dying who have one to whom to say such. It is the capstone of a life shared and given. It is in such a moment that Peter becomes not simply a disciple, not just a friend. It is in this moment Peter becomes the saint.

St. Peter, pray for us.

[i] The essence of this is rehearsed in the apercu: on John, Reflections on a Vision, February 2016.

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Comments on Reality

Posted on October 15, 2025 by admin

It was recently told my writings would indicate I do not take the items of religion as realities. I was a tad taken back by that, but then I suppose one needs to define what one means by reality. I have no intention to wade into the sea of opinion and considered dissertation that constitutes the history of philosophy whose pendulum is always swinging a course from skepticism to empiricism, to realism, to idealism, and back again. Confessedly, like every -ism man concocts, they each have a contribution to make to the dialogue that is the world. They are all perspectives. Their truth is partial, dependant upon a coign of vantage. The whole picture that they try to paint escapes them if for no more complex reason than the totality which they attempt to confine is beyond our grasp. Yet, we are driven to grasp at it, understand it, define it. Whether one like it or not, we are seemingly constituted to look at physis, and hunger for some type of comforting, completing idea, some type of meta-physis.

What is this hunger, this need, this compulsion, this pulsing for completion? I am of a mind to call it psyche. Furthermore—if not in fact—at least in feel it is eternal and everlasting. It is, as it were, a concentration and inspissation of every possibility awaiting expiration, a nothingness and an everything slumbering. It breathes out potentials, and out of them realities. I am not conjuring either a physics or a metaphysics. If anything, I am making note of the psyche, the soul, the spirit within, espying the world within and without, and opining that as it is within, so is it always. Psyche, which for the moment may be taken as coextensive with soul or spirit[i], is the groundwork of reality.

Psyche, as sheer hunger, need, compulsion, propulsion, has made the world. It is in the world, but not of the world. It is affected by its spinning out of the world, but it is in itself, of itself, always pure compulsion. The internality of that compulsion has of itself and in itself an, as it were, systolic and diastolic movement that is of itself and in itself the dynamic of the compulsion. In that purity of compulsion it is propulsion. It expresses itself. Our reality of things visible and invisible is that expression. It is here there exists the platform upon which we have set out our envisioning of a creating deity. A theologian might be wont to say it is here that God implants in man the groundwork for receiving, for being able to receive, the revelation of himself as the Triune God.

Psyche, as expression, has a voice. The very interplay of things visible and invisible is its voice, its natural voice. It is a creative dialogue. It is in that sense an economy, a regulation of management. As far as it is an economy of living powers, it is an eco-system. But it is a system always in evolution. The power to judge, to differentiate upon the basis of pleasure or pain, good or bad, mine or yours is part of that evolution. It predates the coming of man, but in man it pivots. It becomes not simply critical but self-critical. It creates a crisis. Judgment becomes conscience excavating the soul, digging into the soul, digging out of the soul notions of justice and mercy, heaven and hell. Here are set out the myths of a golden age that ruptures, of a primal fault-line at the basis of humanity. The differentiation that is rooted in the very pulsing of psyche, which is expressed in every tension that causes the cosmos to pound, evolves to a place wherein trust can become faith and hope, affection and bonding can transpose to love.

This new depth of judgment is not a power humanity has learned well to wield. It finds man striving to understand the tensions within himself, and to reconcile them. It discloses man to himself as caught in an awkwardness, a naïve angst of trying against the folly of self-centeredness to move out of the centre, to acknowledge the different, the other, and to accept the other as integral to self.

In this internal dialogue which seeks to formulate and perpetuate man, man needs to heed the voice of psyche. It is there to continuously create him, re-create him, and propel him into wholeness. Psyche speaks to man of his needs, and directs him in the paths of righteousness. It does so in its own language of dreams, visions, symbols. Theses words of the psyche, of the soul, are expressions of that primordial pulsing and hunger to be. They express the reality that has caused the reality of all things visible and invisible. Where are these symbol-wrapped and vision-bearing words of psyche writ out for all to see and hear? They are in the rites, creeds, doctrines and spiritual disciplines that mark the core and the edges of our existence. These are not non-realities. These are the living expressions of the very, and in a sense, the only reality upon which all items “being” stand.

We are simple creatures of a complex nature, more simian than sapient. We naively take the world of our experiences as concrete when it is in fact no more than a working construct created out of our sense data. If physics is to be believed, reality is a mass of pulses and waves spinning about. It is we who decide what is substantial and the how of that substantiality. We decide this amassment of pulses and whirls is a piece of wood, and hard, and red, and fragrant. To another species it might be as invisible as is ultra-violet light to us. The world we trust as reality is merely reality “for us.” We make it up out of what we are. What we are at root is psyche, a pulsing propulsion seeking to self-express.

We are soul, spirit, creating self and world, and trying ever—whether we obey it or not—to reflect the image of wholeness and creativity set in us as the very essence and grace of us. It is not really the case we bear the imago Dei, the image of the holy and creating God, we are the image. That is our reality. That is reality—whether we are observant of it and obedient to it or not.

Religion with its rites, doctrines and disciplines exists to bring us to the remembrance of that. Religion is psyche, soul and spirit speaking. Its words are not to be taken literally but spiritually. They are expressions of self, of creativity, of the power to be, indeed, of the Power that allows “to be.” In that they are not so much true as truth. In that they are beyond the rationalizations of the mind they are ever creating. We cannot understand them because we stand in them, in their creating dynamic. By living in them, by simply allowing them to be the space within which life has its depth and breadth, we thrive and grow into wholeness, graciousness, wisdom. They are, in a sense, elemental particles giving nourishment, direction and meaning to the pulsing out of psyche, soul, spirit. Thus, when I speak of items sacramental and sacred as symbols I speak of them as embodiments of a primal reality more real than our ever-transient reality they seek to forward into wholeness, into holiness, into the Holy.

[i] Cf.: “My soul magnifies the Lord…,” December 2021.

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A Communion of Saints

Posted on August 24, 2025 by admin

There was a time in life when I was young, naïve, and not a tad stupid. I could see no point in the remembering of saints or the celebration of a saint’s day. Part of that may have had root in my introversion, and the fact that, resultant of that disposition, I had no functional community about me. When I moved from the Roman church to the Anglican I had something of the zeal of the reformers. I looked upon the cult of saints with not a little suspicion. I still retain a caution for I think it easy for some to slip ever so comfortably into a frame of mind wherein devotedness to a saint or the saints in general can lead into shielding our Lord and Saviour from his immediacy to the soul. It is that subliminal attitudinal shift, and not devotedness to the saints themselves, that is contrary to both gospel and faith.

We remember the saints because we are members with them of the singular congregation that is the church which spans the centuries from those first friends and disciples to the friends and disciples of Christ that fill the seats about us today. We are a community. It is our obligation to be a community. It does not matter that we are not all of one type or disposition. In the reredos of the parish to which I belong there are depicted a number of saints. They are a diverse group—warrior, scholar, mystic, ascetic, prophet, preacher, executive, skeptic. Each of them had their dominant sides. Some were seemingly stern and commanding. Some were seen to be gentle and kind. But they were not “types” anymore than any one of us is simply a “type.” They were human: multifaceted, complex, fallible, frangible. Correction! They are human because death does not erase our humanity.

The saints of that reredos stand on their pedestals and rise in layers above the high altar. In the Lady chapel the statue of Mary stands upon a plinth that raises her far above anyone’s head, and as her face is turned upwards she becomes all the more transcending. If the saints are our fellow congregants why do we put them upon pedestals? Yes, most of them we know because their devotion to Christ and church have caused us to look up to them as exemplars of faith. But they are not, as it were, in some space above us. In the narthex a statue of Christ towers above those who enter. Yet, he is the one in whom God has elected to be the fullness of our humanity, and to be is our midst. Here we are faced with the limitations of art. A picture, or a pedestal, may be able to say a thousand words, but there are times when more than a thousand are needed. Creating a sacred space is an art. However, once the work of art has been created it becomes to a certain degree something concrete. Therein it potentially becomes as delimiting of the whole truth as doctrine when it becomes doctrinaire. The depiction of any reality can never be confined to one point of view. This is particularly true when the matter is the spirituality that is the heart and soul of reality. The creeds and great doctrines are terse outlines we need to stay within, but within those boundaries there is almost endless room for the reflection of layering, shapes, shades, contours and colours. Were this not the case all theologizing would have ended with the letters of Paul, and structures for worship and celebratory rites would never have evolved. Putting Christ and his saints “up there” because he is our Lord and they our exemplars is a valid move. But we cannot leave them there in isolation from the fact that they are in their very holiness “humbled,” literally down to earth, and so with us. If Christ is with us until the end of time, if Christ as Emmanuel is God-with-us, then so too are the saints whose lives are hidden in his.

There is that wonder-stirring verse from the Epistle to the Hebrews that we so often use to begin prayers on the feasts of saints: “Seeing that we are encompassed by so great a cloud of witnesses…” We are wrapped in the company of the saints. Whensoever we pray we are at one with the saints who are in ceaseless and devoted care for the world and the church, in worship evermore con-forming themselves to Christ, in adoration evermore falling into the love that is God. There is no solitary prayer or moment of devotion. One Spirit speaks through all prayer. One Spirit binds all that pray, binds all them that turn, even in silence, towards that ineffable power that upholds all creation. We are never alone. We are the Body of Christ, a community of many parts, many roles, many facets, many centuries moving through time and space, but ever and forever one being.

Without this holy community Holy Communion becomes but a ceremony. The sacrament exists to make a real and relatable community. That does not mean everyone needs to be on intimate terms with everyone else. But we each and all need to be open towards one another, care for and about one another. In the doctrine of the Trinity the Father and Son know and care for one another such that they breathe out the dynamic of love that is the Spirit. It is a community of persons bounded in living knowing and devotion. If the church is to be something more than an institution it requires that same dynamic. It needs to reflect that divine dynamic. Only when communion and community combine, only when Holy Communion is allowed to create a holy, as holistic, community does there appear that dynamic that makes church a visible, vivid, and vivifying presence of God in the world.

The parish is the cell in which that dynamic, that spirit, that Holy Spirit is meant to take root and manifest. It is the time and space in which that cosmic sweep of God’s devotion to his creation has the human scope and scale to become sanctified humanity constantly coalescing and adapting to the outpouring of his grace, his presence in the world for the world. In this endeavour, this mission, we were joined not only one to another but to that singular sweep of disciples gone before us in ceaseless devotion to God and his work.

In my parish church we gather in the choir everyday for morning and evening prayers. Often there are only a few occupying those seats. Most of us know each other at least by name. Most of know at least by name the saints upon the reredos or the saint whose feast we might be keeping. And we ought to do better at that because we are a company, a companionship rich in history, rich in salvation’s history. We rightly remember the needs and cares of one another in our daily prayers because we care for and about one another. We rightly ask the prayers of the saints because they are our companions, our fellow congregants, our friends more certain perhaps than any on this shore. We rightly give thanks for them because by the light they have manifested we are helped along our way. We rightly honour the saints of history because we are called to be saints with them in eternity.

I am given to ponder what this world might be were every Christian soul to keep in mind that we are surrounded by saints ever there to aid us in our journey, ever in the presence of Jesus Christ reaching out his hand to heal us and guide us.

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A note on the Trinity

Posted on July 30, 2025 by admin

As an aside to a response I causally said: “Jung did not really understand the doctrine of the Trinity.” That merited the rather shocked reply: “Do you really want to say that.” After a reflective pause I said: “Yes.” The reader may, in consideration of my age, take that as sapience or senility.

Allow me to begin with a caveat. Everything we poor mortals have to say ought to be bracketed with caveats. Everything we know, as St. Paul notes, is only in part. I am aware I may be misconstruing Jung. I have read Jung’s correspondence with learned theologs who could not see Jung’s differentiation between the imago Dei and the all-transcending Holy One. They seemed to think Jung was either denying the transcendent God or equating him with the immanence of God, the evolutionary providence and grace of God within his work.

On the other hand, I feel that whensoever Jung looks toward the doctrine of the Trinity he is blindsided by a predisposition to make symbols fit into a system. He has a certain propensity to want to see things grouped as threes and fours, as triangles and squares. Three persons and the symbolic depiction of the Trinity as an equilateral triangle read to him as something lesser in power than can be represented by the number four or a square. Thus, he thinks the wedding of Mary into the Divine Trinity gives it both the balance and the power it lacks. I have addressed my objection to this in Immortality.

We humans cannot comprehend the sacred Mystery that is the triune Godhead. We can and do devise designs, concepts, images to denote it, to on one level or another of our sentient, intuitive, and sometimes intelligent structure make it tangible. For centuries, the triangular symbol has worked. Admittedly, some found it wanting, particularly in depicting the dynamic of the divine life, and thus, there came the overlay of three interlocking elongated ellipses. Still others found the symbol-design wanting in wholeness, and thus the entire devise was set within a circle.

Jung felt time and the evolution of the human spirit were pressing for something more. He regarded the triangular notion lacked the dynamic necessary to the depiction of the Godhead. He conjectured the time was upon us for the introduction of the feminine back into the notion of the Sacred. We needed to be confronted with the symbolic power of a quaternity. Perhaps he was merely more prescient than most, and understood the need for the feminine within our singular humanity to express itself. Perhaps he was too human, and caught up in his discovery of the power of alchemy’s symbolism, the geometric designs behind its chemical compounds and formularies.

I will not disagree that we need to see the femininity of the Godhead. I will not disagree that we have made God in the image of our intellect and will to the disparagement of our sentient and intuitive powers. This has been, I believe, the source of a legion of difficulties.

The failure to see the feminine within the divine may be muchly a patriarchal prejudice. The insistence of theologs to see Father and Son as proper names rather than relational indicatives bolsters this. Any being who is pure “father” or pure “son” is all about intellect and order, all about the presumedly masculine “logos [order]” without the equally presumed femininity of “eros [relativity].” But the Father who is self-generative and generates his own perfect image cannot be pure logos. Generation indicates both eros and logos. The eternal Son is spoken of as the divine Logos, as the accomplishing word. But here again, logos is not pure order and reason. It is the creative word, and creativity brims with spontaneity and relativity. We need also to consider the dynamic that arises, that is “spirated [breathed out],” between the two: the Holy Spirit. This divine personality is all about relationship, about being able to see through things and hearts, and so is wisdom, about being able to accept the core reality of things and souls, and so is love. The Spirit binds the Father and Son. It is in its joyous breath of passion that the Godhead has its eternal, spinning dance, its perichoresis. It is the Spirit who empowers the movement into creation, into incarnation. It is conceptive. But relationship, wisdom, love, conception are feminine things. The Spirit is feminine. The Spirit is the feminine face of God.

It is precisely here that Mary enters the picture. Because of her intimate connection with the Holy Spirit she is, one is tempted to say naturally, the face of the Spirit. Yet, herein resides a danger. Mary, who undoubtedly—with every Christian soul—shares co-operation with the Spirit, and in the Christhood of her divine Son, is given a singular status that no other can match. Suddenly humanity and the benefits of our singular salvation are ranked. Who can compare to Mary? She becomes the portal to heaven, the mediatrix. Thereby the mediatorship of her Son is removed from immediacy to the soul. The entire triunity of the Godhead becomes destabilised. She is due honour, but so also every soul that by the power of the Spirit says yes to God’s plan made manifest in Jesus Christ, our one mediator and advocate, our singular interface with the Eternal One before whom all saints and angels bow in prayer and adoration.

The Western mind has intellectualized God, possibly to death. We look upon our rationality as the apex of creation or the end point of evolution, and from that exalted height depict God in our image. In so doing we blithely fail to see why the prohibition against false gods leads the commandments. We claim God is all-knowing and of an all-powerful will. But is not God’s print, God’s image in all of the created order? Was it not there in the first creative command, in the pure impulse of creation to be? Is not God to be sensed in the thrust of the first particle to take form? Is not the hand of God to be discerned in the birth of the first atom? Is it not there in the churning of mountains, in the grinding weight of glaciers? Is it not there in the thirst of the first cell to replicate, in the heaving of the waves, the whirling drive of the galaxies? Is it not there in the buzzing of the bee, the prowling of the lion, the chirping of the bird? Is not God’s print to be known in the primitive, primal urge, the founding, pulsing throb to continue. This is important to note because wrapped up in all of that primal power is our intuitiveness, our palpating interconnectedness, our sentience, our sensibility, our sensuality, our sexuality. Our glorification of ourselves as intelligent and volitional beings robs God and reality of those aspects of being. Repressed or suppressed from the notion of self they manifest themselves in our bodies, our relationships, our world as all manner of ills. They cannot be denied. They will not be pushed to the side as inconveniences any more than they will be exalted to the detriment of reason and the power of will. Repressed or suppressed from our notions of the divine they manifest a God who is all about right and wrong, and with that wrath and judgement. It is a God who is all “logos,” law and order. It is a God without Spirit. Therein a feminine force needs to be found to bring feelings, mercy, tenderness, love. And thus appear Mary, her fellow saints, and the calls to the tender side of Jesus’ humanity to rectify the God-image we in the faux apotheosis of self have created.

I am aware there will be some who will object that the print of God in the created order is not the same as the imago Dei in man. Perhaps it is not. However, it is that very imprint of creativity that expresses itself in man as the image of the divine. The rational and volitional powers in man do not exist in abstraction from the temporal flow of the creative Word. There would be in man no reason and will without there first being set into creation their foundations in pure need, urge, impulse, desire, instinct. Reason and will without these aspects of our psyche and physis are nothing more than an absentmindedness at best, hubris at worst. To look upon reason and will in God without understanding these architectonic structures inherent in reason and will is deeply problematic. It expresses an inauthentic vision of the Holy. Thereby God becomes unrelatable to everything in man that touches upon the non-rational and spontaneous.

I would propose that were there the necessity to redesign a symbol of the Trinity appropriate to the age we might look to the double helix of the DNA model. In such a model Father and Son would each be a helical power whose dynamic spin is the Spirit. Note, this is not a static system. It is the living God we seek to express. If the Logos, the Son, is the perfect image of the Father, then the Father is the Prime Logos. But this generation of the Son is an eternal action. And the interaction of the two is likewise an eternal action, and the action, the breathless breathing of one into the other is their relationship, their relatedness, their Eros. That Eros does not arise out of something other than the divine, eternally pulsing energy. Thus, there is no Logos without Eros. The passion, the flame, the sheer and sheering light of God that is the Spirit is set eternally in the very who and what of the Godhead. For man, eros and logos are ideational opposites. In God they are one reality. Man wants order, desires the surety of logos, and pines for the relational power of eros. God knows them as one, as the Logos of Eros, as the Order of Love.

It is an image. It has, I believe, possibilities. And I hasten to add, there is no symbol of the Sacred One that can stand alone. I have spoken of God as a singularity, a black hole into whose unseeable mystery we by faith fall. Scripture speaks of God as hidden in impenetrable light. Those pictures seeming stand at opposite ends of a spectrum. And a spectrum is necessary. Yet, an infinitely stretched spectrum could not capture the Divine. God always transcends whatsoever we can imagine or concoct. The issue is not to comprehend God, but to allow God to be God—the impenetrable source of us, the Mystery at the root of the mystery of us. Indeed, we need to confess that we are at base as much a mystery to ourselves as to each other, such is the depth of the living imprint, imago Dei within.

Transforming the trinity in the quaternity strikes me as moving in a very unacceptable direction. Triangularity does not make for an effete symbol. Jung’s analyses of fairy tales and countless dreams attest to this. Triangles have room to move, adapt, transform, be tangential. A square or a cube is interesting, but it is closed upon itself. It can serve as a building block, but like the circle cannot move beyond itself. It is a finished system. God is never complete, never a closed system, until his creation and his incarnation into it reach the end, until the new heaven and earth are accomplished in Christ’s placing the whole of the redeemed creation into his hands.

Modern man does not require a new symbol of God. Modern man needs to come again before the Triune God, and to find there in its supernal and everlasting form the yearnful, the creative, the nurturing, the redemptive, the impassioned, the wise, the eternally entwining logos and eros that give dynamic to every soul.

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Day of wrath and doom impending

Posted on April 4, 2025 by admin

“Day of wrath and doom impending…” Thus begins the Dies irae, the sequence hymn sung between the readings of the old Requiem Mass. It was always a moment that stopped and startled the grieving mind. The plangent pleas for rest eternal and mercy were suddenly met with the bone quivering righteousness of our feeble place before the incomprehensible majesty of the thrice holy God Almighty. Alas, we no longer sing this dirge at funerals. God knows, perhaps sadly, that we are caught up in the socially adjudicated notion that we ought no longer to mourn at funerals. Yes, a tear may flow here and there. But we are increasingly by world, and it would seem by the church as well, programmed to celebrate a life lived. Let us, they say, look to all the good of this soul departed, to all good things this soul accomplished, to all the things this soul bore, to all the trials it overcame.

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