IV The Human Experience of God at Turning Points: A Theological Expose of Spiritual Counterfeits

[With apologies that the version of Blogger for Mac doesn't do accents or even italic]


But what happens when we try to capture the vision, when we turn it into a commodity? One paradigm shift is from spatial thinking to linear thinking. There was a nice illustration of this shift in the New Yorker, except that the author is describing the shift the other way round, from linear to spatial thinking, which is the movement in conversion. Gene is an astronomer:

"In his mind’s eye, Gene holds a peculiar vision of the solar system, and it is not any solar system that I had ever heard of. In schoolbooks, the solar system is pictured as a series of flat concentric circles centered on the sun, each circle representing the orbit of a planet. In Gene’s mind, the solar system is a spheroid: a dynamic, evolving cloud of debris, filigreed with bands and shells of shrapnel, full of bits and pieces of material likely to be pumped into long ellipses and tangles, and wobbling orbits, which carry the drifting projectiles all over the place--minor planets that every once in a while take a hook into a major planet, causing a major explosion." [“Dark Time” by Richard Preston, The New Yorker, October 26, 1987, p. 72.]

To link this shift of persepective with the city/desert image, linear thinking tends to emerge in the city, and spatial thinking tends to emerge in the desert, the simplest reason being the difference in the ways our vision is focused by each environment, just as it is focused differently by the lane between hedgrows, and the open landscape.

The importance of spatial thinking cannot be overemphasized. We recently have shifted from a mechanistic to a contingent view of the universe, and we live in an age when scientists are naming newly-discovered particles “blue” or “strange”. It is ironic that hard science, as opposed to academic theology, has taken the lead in understanding the need to balance spatial thinking and linear thinking; poetry and hard logic. They are not mutually exclusive. And we need to think hard about what new theories, such as so-called chaos mathematics, have to tell us about theological method, for the method we use determines the sort of God with which we end up.

There isn’t any reason we can’t have the desert in the city, that is, that we can’t have spatial thinking as the primary, inarticulate, poetic, subliminal matrix within which linear thinking plays. But everything about the city tells us that it is oh-so-much easier if we just settle for linear thinking, following our noses along tightly logical lines, consuming or rejecting what immediately appears in front of us acording to the limited criteria that it is in front of us, and it makes us feel good or not.

Linear theology leads to such absurdities as so-called natural law that has nothing to do with the way God in fact made the universe. Among other tragedies, this so-called natural law has not only spawned the ecological crisis, it continues to ignore new information from microbiologists about the androgynous, multivalent sexual continuum within which all humans live, and in its denial has condemned a whole segment of the population. The homophobic seem unable to perceive that in addition to condemning people of same-sex orientation, they are also condemning God for making the world according to the divine wisdom instead of according to their pinched human prejudices. It is the pain of this prejudice that has created the AIDS epidemic in Europe and America: in the West, a large measure of blame can be laid right on the doorstep of the churches and their presumptuous claims to know the mind of God. And that Christianity has made us deathly afraid of our bodies almost goes without saying.

But there are even deeper reasons for us to be conscious of spatial and linear thinking. These two kinds of thinking represent two models of power, and each of these models of power leads to maturity or immaturity, salvation or a dead end, love or fear, and to each are tied attitudes that link death and power. For this reason alone—and there are many others—we need to get rid of the terms "spiritual director" and "spiritual direction" once and for all. The nuances of these terms immediately set up a hierarchical model in the unconscious that predisposes the relationship to dominance, co-dependence, and immaturity.

In the hierarchical model of power, linear thinking predominates. While linear thinking is necessary for survival, it is appropriately used only as a handmaid to spatial thinking. Because linear thinking creates a hierarchy of ideas, it is exclusionary and inherently dualistic. Thus, no matter how well-intentioned, linear thinking cannot reflect the God of unity and communion, since in order to process ideas, it must make fluid notions into static objects for the purpose of ranking and grading. By positing God, by turning God into object, it drains both life and engagement from that which it is examining—and God in essence is life-enhancing and in ungrasping relational engagement.