Jesus Coming Alive Within Us (Easter 2012) 'What distinguishes biblical theology from myth is the vital discovery of the personality and individuality of the god-figure as well as of every individual human being; but only when this discovery integrates the plethora of archetypal symbols in the deeper layers of the human psyche, rather than repressing them, will it preserve its humanity and truth.
' (Eugen Drewermann: Depth-psychology and Exegesis I, p.
138 - my translation) At communion we can make Jesus, and what he stands for, a part of us by partaking of the elements of bread and wine.
But as long as everything that Jesus represents is understood incompletely ('through a glass darkly') or purely intellectually, we will not grow, because we have not understood his purpose within us at the deepest emotional level.
This opaque understanding needs to die, like Jesus on the cross.
Until it does, we cannot integrate his way of living into our conscious selves.
Such an integration, when it occurs, will allow us to live in completeness, in a 'resurrected' way, by experiencing what Jesus stands for 'face to face'.
His virtues of compassion, understanding, gentleness and peace, hitherto more or less foreign to us, will have then become a part of us and we can join him in his resurrected state: 'Even so in Christ shall all be made alive'.
Perhaps a 'letting go' is not active enough for integration to occur.
I prefer the idea that death means transformation of the old self through the destruction of the power, or reversal of our neglect, of split-off parts of the psyche; this allows their integration into the conscious personality, and the appearance of new attitudes in a more assured, insightful, positively-oriented Self.
I have written in a previous book about other forms of this integration: 'Some Gnostics saw the sacred marriage as an acceptance by the feminine soul of the male thought, the progeny being insight or understanding.
This corresponds to the new state achieved by conjunctio in alchemy and the integration of male/ female elements of the unconscious into the conscious personality described by depth-psychology.
The process entails not only more consciousness of self but also more consciousness of one's place in the overall scheme of things, in a word, insight.
The sacred marriage symbolism is beautifully described in Thomas' Gospel, a gnostic text found in the 1940s at Nag Hammadi: Jesus said to them, "When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same...
then you will enter (the Kingdom)".
' Later on I wrote: 'Wagner's Parsifal story combines (a) the Buddhist philosophy of self-development through understanding of the power of the instincts and an ever-increasing ability to balance them, within the personality, against conscious elements which no longer need to be projected, with (b) the outwards-turned Christian religion of grace received and transmitted as compassion, which makes it possible for us to understand and bear suffering through the transcendent redemption which Christ can bring to us in this present life.
' But the Christian message need not remain external.
We can learn consciously to understand our shadow instincts ('knowing our darkness') whilst maintaining or enhancing our freedom from their total control over our actions.
And where our instincts for good are underdeveloped, Jesus' suffering and purposive death on Good Friday, like the 'eternal feminine' Gilda's deliberate death in Rigoletto, can reawaken and integrate them into more fully-lived, waking lives.
As I put it in a poem some years ago: Arise, awake!/The flowers are gold!/Fulfil, burst open the seed/That dies alive within!/Create a mighty tree,/Strong, bold/Rooted, tall/Nourished by the earth, the dark,/Stretching to light,/As gossamer span/Escapes the chrysalid death,/The womb, the tomb;/And tree or butterfly,/Human or flower,/Stand bright/Amid green vastnesses,/Alive and breathing free!
' (Eugen Drewermann: Depth-psychology and Exegesis I, p.
138 - my translation) At communion we can make Jesus, and what he stands for, a part of us by partaking of the elements of bread and wine.
But as long as everything that Jesus represents is understood incompletely ('through a glass darkly') or purely intellectually, we will not grow, because we have not understood his purpose within us at the deepest emotional level.
This opaque understanding needs to die, like Jesus on the cross.
Until it does, we cannot integrate his way of living into our conscious selves.
Such an integration, when it occurs, will allow us to live in completeness, in a 'resurrected' way, by experiencing what Jesus stands for 'face to face'.
His virtues of compassion, understanding, gentleness and peace, hitherto more or less foreign to us, will have then become a part of us and we can join him in his resurrected state: 'Even so in Christ shall all be made alive'.
Perhaps a 'letting go' is not active enough for integration to occur.
I prefer the idea that death means transformation of the old self through the destruction of the power, or reversal of our neglect, of split-off parts of the psyche; this allows their integration into the conscious personality, and the appearance of new attitudes in a more assured, insightful, positively-oriented Self.
I have written in a previous book about other forms of this integration: 'Some Gnostics saw the sacred marriage as an acceptance by the feminine soul of the male thought, the progeny being insight or understanding.
This corresponds to the new state achieved by conjunctio in alchemy and the integration of male/ female elements of the unconscious into the conscious personality described by depth-psychology.
The process entails not only more consciousness of self but also more consciousness of one's place in the overall scheme of things, in a word, insight.
The sacred marriage symbolism is beautifully described in Thomas' Gospel, a gnostic text found in the 1940s at Nag Hammadi: Jesus said to them, "When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same...
then you will enter (the Kingdom)".
' Later on I wrote: 'Wagner's Parsifal story combines (a) the Buddhist philosophy of self-development through understanding of the power of the instincts and an ever-increasing ability to balance them, within the personality, against conscious elements which no longer need to be projected, with (b) the outwards-turned Christian religion of grace received and transmitted as compassion, which makes it possible for us to understand and bear suffering through the transcendent redemption which Christ can bring to us in this present life.
' But the Christian message need not remain external.
We can learn consciously to understand our shadow instincts ('knowing our darkness') whilst maintaining or enhancing our freedom from their total control over our actions.
And where our instincts for good are underdeveloped, Jesus' suffering and purposive death on Good Friday, like the 'eternal feminine' Gilda's deliberate death in Rigoletto, can reawaken and integrate them into more fully-lived, waking lives.
As I put it in a poem some years ago: Arise, awake!/The flowers are gold!/Fulfil, burst open the seed/That dies alive within!/Create a mighty tree,/Strong, bold/Rooted, tall/Nourished by the earth, the dark,/Stretching to light,/As gossamer span/Escapes the chrysalid death,/The womb, the tomb;/And tree or butterfly,/Human or flower,/Stand bright/Amid green vastnesses,/Alive and breathing free!