THE JESUS STORY CONTINUED

HIDDEN MIND REVEALED

Continuing the Jesus Story

Search for the Real Parents of My Soul

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 30, 2015

This was first written in my thirties, fresh back from a disturbing and revealing experience in South Africa at the time of apartheid in that country.  This now finds me in my eighties.

South Africa was disturbing, not only because of the draconian practice of apartheid or separation of the races by the Afrikaner government, but this practice compounded with the slim white minority (20 percent) totally controlling the lives and livelihood of the black and brown majority (80 percent).

Imagine a rather idealistic young man with his young family who had risen out of modest circumstances being treated like colonial royalty.  Then add to this seeing the hidden side of his own white society and culture, as well as being introduced to the hidden side of his own mind.  It proved shattering as he thought himself strong, and found himself fragile, and this sense has never left him.

He came home to the United States a broken man, resigned his promising career, suspending himself and his family in an ambivalent economic limbo, while he spent his days reading books, playing tennis, freeze framed in this modus operandi for two years, then once nearly broke, going back to school for six years, changing disciplines from the hard to the soft sciences to earn a Ph.D.

The straitjacket world of the corporation and all its institutional antennae would never again have the same hold on him that they had had previously.  That included his Roman Catholic faith.

He was no longer affluent, but poor; no longer a person of distinction and achievement, but one of the rank and file.  He was, however, free, freer than he had ever been, free to make choices, free to fail, pick himself up and try again, free not to care or too care too much, free to return to his modest roots and make connection with the person he had left behind.

He discovered in his eclectic reading, Krisnamurti, and his theosophy, a man who seemed to speak to him in his dilemma:

The hidden mind is far more potent than the superficial mind, however well-educated and capable of adjustment; and it is not something very mysterious.  The hidden or unconscious mind is the repository of racial memories.  Religion, superstition, symbols, peculiar traditions of a particular race, the influence of literature both sacred and profane, of aspirations, frustrations, mannerisms, and varieties of food, all these are rooted in the unconscious  (Krishnamurti 1963).

From my earliest memory, I have been schooled to think of God in general and my Roman Catholicism in particular in painfully subjective and absolute terms.  Through education, and experience, this proved a myopic view of my situation and a condition that discouraged me from exploring my hidden side. 

It was a strange feeling to discover that I had tunnel vision as if I was looking through the wrong end of my telescope.  From this aspect, reading widely if not always wisely of the major and minor religions of man, from the animism of the tribes of South Africa to the esoteric mind games of the parapsychologists, I felt my Roman Catholicism superior to these more primitive preoccupations. 

Moreover, were I not a member of the only true church established by Jesus Christ?  This I had heard from birth on, never questioned, but internalized with full confidence that it was true.

It found me an engaged student and participant in all things Catholic: from religious attendance at mass every Sunday and Holy Day, and weekly Confession on Saturdays and Holy Communion on Sundays from elementary, high school and through college. 

Then as a husband, father and tither as a young adult, I followed the Ecumenical Second Vatican Council (1962 and 1965) while Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI reigned in Rome.

Before that, I was an altar boy at St. Patrick’s Catholic Elementary, winning the Christian Scholarship and the Latin Scholarship medals in eighth grade for excellence in those disciplines, in a word, I was a receptive Catholic sponge.

By a matter of serendipity, I would have the occasion to visit with Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen at the Shrine of Fatima in Lisbon, Portugal, and to be part of a US military audience with Pope Pius XII and Pope Paul VI. 

Through my military and executive careers, I would have an opportunity to visit many of the great Cathedrals in North and South America, Europe, the Middle East and South Africa, many described with eloquence by in The Mind and Art of Henry Adams (1957) and Henry Adam’s Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1905).

From 1956 on, I have had the privilege to observe Christian edifices from splendid opulence to ravishing neglect across four continents, writing something of a polemic of these observations in a 1970 book titled, The Silent Sentinel Speaks Out, which happily a Catholic publisher Paulist Press rejected.  It was written when I returned from South Africa to the United States in 1969.

During the 1990s, extensive research was conducted with a dozen visits to my hometown of Clinton, Iowa with the purpose of writing a book about what it was like to grow up as a preteenager during the Second World War (1941-1945).  That book was published as In the Shadow of the Courthouse: Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel (2003).

During that research, five Catholic churches and schools were razed as the Davenport Dioceses had been forced to downsize radically in the wake of the sexual abuse scandal of Catholic priests across America, which costs the Catholic Church hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in reparations to the victims. 

St. Patrick’s church, rectory and school were demolished with the intention of building a senior adult center on the real estate.  That was more than a decade ago.  The naked land stares at passersby with these beautiful edifices now only in old timers’ memory.

With it being 2015, and me in my eighties, the sense of the Roman Catholic Church has never left me, although I no longer attend services, no longer make visits as I once did routinely, no longer make the “Sign of the Cross” when I pass a Catholic Church, and no longer see organized religion as important in my life, or me important in the church’s.  Like a father’s voice that never leaves your head, the church has never left mine.

As society has become increasingly secular, and the church with it, I have found myself becoming more attentive to my hidden side where my spirituality resides.

In renewing this Search for the Real Parents of My Soul, the church has faded into the secular shadows but strangely, the Jesus Story has not as it has come to fill the spiritual void. 

Dutifully, I have surveyed many of the tens of thousands of views on the Jesus Story, incorporating samples here, rereading academics in psychology, psychiatry and sociology who have taken positions on Christianity and on Jesus in particular, all to gain a more meaningful and authentic perspective on the Jesus Story for me. 

With sociologist and economist Max Weber as my guide, I have conducted this journey through the social psychology of religion only to discover it is actually the religion of social psychology.  To wit:

The sociological study of religion is relatively recent.  Auguste Comte (1798- 1857), credited with being the father of sociology, was one of the first to direct attention to what may be called the sociological problems of religion.

Some scholars in this field did, however, allude to religious beliefs as myths, and hence wrote as if the truth or falsity of religious statements were of sociological concern.  This was the case with Richard R. Tawney’s book, “Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.”  He saw the Protestant Church, in particular, as having uncritically and unfortunately advance the cause of capitalism.  The conclusions reached in his study do make value judgments about religion.

The question, however, is whether he wrote as a sociologist or a moralist.  A similar question may be raised with regard to Max Weber’s “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.  There seems to be little doubt that Weber was unsympathetic toward many of the allegiances which Protestants had demonstrated.  Are such expressions of antipathy sociological conclusions, or philosophical conclusions, or are they simply part of Weber’s autobiography? (Wells 1962)

Besides Wells, Elton (1963), Samuelsson (1961), C. H. and K. George (1961), W. S. Hudson (1961) and R. W. Green (1959) have wondered in print about this problem.  Now, we have Pope Francis I who sounds much like them only as something of a scold from the perspective of institutional Catholicism as a social psychologist if not a social psychiatrist and moral philosopher.

His Supreme Eminence became pope in March 2013 when Pope Benedict XVI resigned unable to cope with a church that didn’t behave as he would like, not to mention the scandals and dysfunction at the heart of the church.

While the popular Pope John Paul II resembled the arrogance and charisma of St. Paul in his ministry, Pope Francis I reminds one of servant leadership more in the unscripted style,  spontaneity and humility of Jesus. 

It would appear that I’ve been looking for someone like Jesus to emerge out of the firmament.  Permit me to explain.  In my novel, “A Green Island in a Black Sea,” Dirk Devlin, the young conflicting American executive in South Africa reflects:

Dostoyevsky had a fever for the Special One, not as the Anointed Christ but as the vine to which he felt tethered.  The “God” thing was a problem for him.  Why did the Special One have to be God, when clearly Jesus was quite a man?

He doubted if he would see faith and science on a collision course but rather believed they were parallel universes.  Devlin’s faith was the heart of his imagination, science the mind of his reason.  Why should these two worlds collide?  Yet they did for the Special One whose faith was His science.  Jesus told it as He saw it and saw it as He told it, and for that He was crucified? 

The Special One had contempt for hierarchies, for pomp and circumstance, for grand costumes and exalted pretense.  He wore his badge of lower class like knighthood.  Devlin wondered why this had not survived in his church.

The Special One was a rebel, an outsider, who despised the herd mentality.  He formed a community of dregs and sinners.  What would the Special One think of the church in his name? 

When Devlin was a small boy, he went to St. Boniface Church and School, there Father Sunbrueller could not raise his rhetoric above sin or the fire and brimstone of hell.  Never did Devlin hear a single word in love about the Special One.  Jesus rarely talked about sin or hell.  Devlin wondered if the Special One would accept the seven deadly sins, or see sin as he did in terms of waste and deceit. 

“Dear Jesus,” he whispered as he thought of his life going forward with a potpourri of marginal but pressing demands, “I am younger than you were when you died.  My cross is my refusal to be predictable.  My wonder is whether my life is about over or ready to begin.” 

He waited in silence for an answer.  When none came, he got up from the pew and walked into the late morning sunlight to take on the world.

Pope Francis I reminds me now, in my eighties, of the Special One, the Good Shepherd, when Devlin, my alter ego in the novel, was but thirty-years-old.  But is Pope Francis too late to save a dying religion as well as a dying church?

His Holiness doesn’t talk in hyperbole about the world as did Pope Benedict who blamed the increased marginalization of Christianity in Western society on a collective apostasy rooted in the materialism of secular modern society. 

Pope Francis, like Jesus, was local and specific with the focus on the poor, the disadvantaged, the forgotten and the unloved. 

He refuses to blame the church’s spiritual ailment on secularism for that had no purchase with him, but on institutional Catholicism, that is, the church itself sounding much like a social scientist. 

His Christmas message in December 2014 was replete with catchy phrases that were like punches to the solar plexus as were those of Jesus in Jerusalem to the Chief Priests and Elders in the Temple who had varied from their appointed tasks.

Not commonly understood, the conclave of Roman Catholic Cardinals in the Curia dictate the church’s business and create its ubiquitous but shadowy profile.  It is from here that church’s money laundering and fraud have been traced.

Popes come and go but the Curia is immortal.  That is especially disturbing with this pope clearly the Good Shepherd, a servant to all men, but alas, living with one lung. 

That notwithstanding, Pope Francis hit the Curia where it lives, speaking of its “spiritual narcissism” and “pathology of power.” 

He also addressed the “Martha complex” of excessive activity as surrogate to doing anything meaningful.  He accused the church hierarchy of being incapable of “weeping with those who weep,” but instead acting like “lords and masters.”   

When this behavior is brought to light, the pope claims the clergy are beset with “spiritual Alzheimer’s” which leads to building “walls and routines around them and forgetting the spirit of the Gospels.” 

He attributes this to cliquishness, acquisitiveness, careerism, competitiveness, leading to “progressive spiritual emptiness.”  Because these inclinations can become habitual “many abandon their pastoral services,” restricting their indulgence to bureaucratic matters.   

The pontiff was not through in his Christmas message. 

The “theatrical severity and sterile pessimism” comes with a “funeral face” that often “attends the use of power.”   Those so afflicted, he emphasized, “cowardly use the terrorism of gossip by which to slander, defame and discredit others, even in newspapers and magazines.” 

If these people in elevated stations in the Roman Catholic Church appear to be behaving like adolescents, I can assure you from my long corporate executive and consulting career, it is par for the course.  Look at the American Congress and its gridlock and corporate America’s industrial-military-commercial malfeasance and pettiness, and you might think those in power never left the sixth grade.

Permit me a small smile at the pontiff’s scathing rebuke of the Roman Curia and the papal administration.   His remarks, although more poetic, could easily have been lifted from one or more of my books on the state of the corporation, which I call “corpocracy.” 

For this, I have been seen as “angry.”  I write of “pyramid climbers,” who are always campaigning for the next job never having time to perform their own; on the duplicity of management which is atavistic and dysfunctional, on the internecine feuding within mahogany row, on schadenfreude that ruins careers, on the cowardly “six silent killers” that handicap organizations and institutions, but frankly, in less incendiary terms than his eminence, Pope Francis I. 

Will the church hierarchy and clergy heed the pope’s words?  His papacy appears to be turning away doctrinal and institutional concerns to a bona fide interest in and loving engagement of the poor who make up most of the world’s population.  The pope’s hidden mind is showing.  Can this lead to revealing the people’s as well?

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