Come Forth!

As I wrote some weeks back, I’ve had several pressing matters on my mind that needed to be gotten out in list form so that I could see what psychic matter I’ve needed to deal with. Sometimes I find that my inner life resembles a hall closet that catches this and that until it’s a jumble of stuff that isn’t where it belongs. I begin to feel the jumble and have to get it out onto a list or into written form so I can map my journey or face the consequence of jumble: chaotic confusion and loss of the Way.

One of the things on my list was the issue of launching or separating, because I have some adult children who are doing that in various stages and ways. Some do this gracefully, and some not so much. Some pretend to be individuating gracefully and graciously, but the nature of their pushing–which is away-from—is not the same as the individuating that begins with a bona fide call to adventure and a serious taking-up of a journey. Pushing against something is not the same as kissing it good-bye and walking away with a knapsack over one’s shoulder.

Neil Sedaka recorded a great song called “Breaking Up is Hard to Do,” which illustrates some of the pain of separating:

Don’t take your love away from me
Don’t you leave my heart in misery
If you go then I’ll be blue
‘Cause breaking up his hard to do

Remember when you held me tight
And you kissed me all through the night
Think of all that we’ve been through
Breaking up is hard to do

They say that breaking up is hard to do
Now I know, I know that it’s true
Don’t say that this is the end
Instead of breaking up I wish that we were making up again

I beg of you, don’t say goodbye
Can’t we give our love another try
Come on baby, let’s start anew
‘Cause breaking up is hard to do

“Don’t say that this is the end, instead of breaking up I wish that we were making up again.” Sad. But the truth of the matter is that individuation is (look at the word) an individual, solitary process. We are born into the collective, and we are raised among collectives, and pressed into service (sometimes) by collectives, but eventually we have to stand on our own two feet, hear the call and heed it, and go off on our own.  The funny thing about this process is that a person can appear to have done just that—gone off on his own—and still be tied just as strongly as ever to Mum’s apron strings. Reacting-against-Mum is to be enslaved to Mum. Reacting-toward-Mum is to be enslaved to Mum and the Collective of Mum. Objects are not as they appear in the mirror, if the mirror we’re holding is self-made. And so we go out into the world and I’ll be darned if we don’t often spend the first decade after moving out doing exactly what we would have done had we stayed at home: fight Mum and Dad, the image of Mum and Dad, the collective metaphors of Mum and Dad in all their various forms we encounter in collectives. We blame them, we blame God, we blame the church, we blame school, but the whole time the only person to blame is ourselves, for having failed to heed the call and for having recoiled out of fear and for burying our treasure in the ground, as Christ said some would.

We’re that ungrown, unused seed that Heni commented about.

So I’m going to try to write about this, using the personal and the theoretical and trying to express how people get saved. For no collective is ever saved. Only individual human beings are saved and called and presented in their wholeness before a throne of grace, divinely begotten, called, and ultimately consumed. And then, after all that, returned to a collective where they demonstrate for others what it means to be a human being who answered the call and is himself or herself, whole and entire.

finding the spiritual center

When Jesus met the whore at the well as recounted in the fourth chapter of the Gospel of John, she told him, “I have no husband.” His answer was, “You speak the truth, for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband.” Jesus is showing this woman how you can have many husbands and none, for he is indicating through the metaphor of her own life just how lonely her collectives have been, just now not-loved she is, and just how unmarried and alone she is, in the midst of all her sexual dalliances and collectives. Living in the midst of that community and drawing water at a common well, this woman is alone.

As they talk, she persists in her collectives, moving from not-married to not-belonging. “You Jews,” she begins, “You Jews worship at Jerusalem, and say it is the center of the world for worship of God (I have no center, no God, no world place I can call my own, she means, but if I were a Jew like you, maybe I would know myself as you seem to know yourself, and then maybe after that I would find a center place of worship, and maybe after that I could find God, and finally belong and become beloved). But Jesus, always true to the call of his own true self and his own intimate oneness with the Father, Jesus does not take the racial cultural collective better-than-thou bait. No, Jesus says, “Ah, but….”.

But the day is coming, he says. When? Why, whenever you consider that Jersualem is not the place, any more than all the other places were the place, not Jerusalem or Mecca or Rome or the spot where the Buddha sat. The place is here, right here, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” The word is nigh you, in your mouth and in your heart. You have no need of anyone to teach you. All of that, right there in the Bible. But it’s everywhere else, too, everywhere you look. Because God didn’t leave us without a witness, he didn’t leave us as orphans, he said “I will come to you.”

Individuals are lost, and individuals are found, and the truth comes to individuals for appropriation. We are born into and raised in collectives, and we come out of them. Eventually we are called back into the collective, but not to live with the group mind. We are called to return and to give the only gift we have to give, which is ourselves.

Yet the journey is one we make on our own, alone, and we are always and ever alone until we look around and see that we have, and always have had, a traveling companion. We have our true selves from the moment we are conscious. We  also have the divine, creative, loving, intelligent being whom we call God or the Divine or by some other name, the One Who Calls. And if we do not believe in that One Who Calls because we have our fingers in our ears, having confused the Caller with the despised Collective that can never give us life, well… God help us, for we’ve thrown the baby out with the bath water and it should come as  no surprise that all we have left, having done that, is the collective worship of economics and politics, along with our distractions and entertainments, to make us feel alive when, in fact, we are dead still.

But even as we die and lie in the tomb, a voice calls come forth!

And it’s the coming forth that is the beginning of individuation.