Regret

To regret: Should we forget or remember?

The definition of regret is to feel sad, repentant or disappointed over something that has happened or been done, especially a loss or missed opportunity.  I was thinking about that a couple of days ago when I overheard a conversation at a coffee shop.  A woman was saying to her friend,  “I have no regrets, I have lived my life to the fullest and don’t think I’ve missed anything.”  She went on to tell how she had left two marriages and two teenage kids in Europe. She had started a new life in America, married her boss to  become a legal permanent resident and settled down for her retirement.

To me, it sounded as though her “No regrets” meant, “I don’t want to remember all the horrible mistakes I have made in my life.”   Not remembering, not having regrets leaves no place for redemption. As a young man in my twenties I went on a motorcycle adventure with a classmate on a trip to Alsace Lorraine. We came to a small town tucked away in a big forest between rolling hills. There was a museum inside an old stone tower which had once been the town’s jail house. My friend and I went to check it out and one of the exhibits made a deep impression on me. There was a large wooden cross leaning against the wall. The wood was oily from a preservative coating and it smelled of old varnish.  A sign on the wall told the story behind the big cross. 

That story began a hundred years ago when a local farm hand had killed a young woman in a fit of jealousy. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Upon his release from prison, he had a heavy iron ball cuffed to one of his feet for the rest of his life.  If that weren’t enough, he took it upon himself to carry around a large heavy wooden cross wherever he walked. He regretted the harm he had done and sought penance by voluntarily suffering as long as he lived. 

For some reason, I always come back to this story. Was he supposed to “get over” the harm he had caused another person? Too often we hear the same attitude from progressive therapist or counsellors. This seemingly new age philosophy is about getting past the pain and getting on with your life. Some actions are not forgivable and regret is a healthy way of staying on track with what we either failed to do or missed or the harm we caused others.

Germany hopefully carries regret over the mass murder of innocent Jews, as should Serbia from slaughtering over eight thousand of young Bosnian men in Srebrenica, just to mention regret on a collective scale. Regret has a direct connection with remembrance and is crucial for the ability to change. Not a change into a “Getting over it” but to an honest willingness to live with what we have done or not paid attention to when we should have. There lies the true healing of the tormented psyche, the ability to carry our own trespasses and regrets as a conscious knowledge of who we also are. To remember and not to repeat.  

Hvem er egentlig "De nye danske?"

Det nye højreorienterede politiske parti, De nye danske, er alt andet end nye. Hvis de virkelig var de “nye danske” så ville de stå frem som et parti af medlemmer med blandet etnisk baggrund. De virkelige nye danske er på trods af intolerancen på Kristiansborg nemlig mennesker som er kommet her fra hele kloden i håb om at leve i fred og finde arbejde og leve side om side med de allerede herboende danskere. At tale om et “Hvidt” Danmark er simpelthen et racistisk synspunkt som ikke hører hjemme i vores Danmark af i dag. Vores land vil aldrig igen blive som det var i halvtredserne, gud ske lov! Det er vildt overraskende at der er en samfundsdebat om “Hvad det vil sige at vœre dansk,” noget som jeg troede kun hørte hjemme i den nazistiske propaganda før anden verdenskrig. 

At vœre en rigtig Arie, en dansk dansker eller en œgte tysker!!!! Det betyder så at en person hvis far eller mor kom fra Somalia ikke har en chance for at sige han er dansk selvom han måske var født og opvokset i Gentofte kommune. 

Det at han ser chokoladebrun ud og ka li at spise ged istedet for svinekød er imod hvad “De nye danske” kalder for etnisk “rent”. Al forandring er selvfølgelig ikke nem. Det er vanskeligt for de fleste danskere at tolerere når deres naboer på villavejen har en anden opfattelse af “Hygge” Og “Gud i Himlen”hvoffor sœtter de ikke lys i vinduerne den 4 maj? Hvis man er dansk statsborger skulle det vœre nok til at kalde sig dansker og ikke skulle vœre tvunget til at kunne li frikadeller eller kransekage for at blive accepteret i det danske samfund. At modsœtte sig forandring er at modsœtte sig selve livet, den drivkraft som hjœlper os fremad. Danskerne kan og vil, med eller uden deres vilje leve i et multi etnisk samfund for det er simpelthen den vej verden drejer i øjeblikket. Hvis vi skal overleve som samfund må vi vende os til at rage mindre til os og dele mere. Vi må vende os til at verden forandrede sig og at det er OK. 

Is God inside out, or outside in?

I grew up being introduced to Christianity through the Danish State Lutheran Church. I went to Sunday school with my sister and I sang in the children's choir. I learned that God was a man and I prayed to this all male father god in the Lord’s Prayer over and over again. I was like most other children my age. I wanted to know everything. The answers I got were sometimes puzzling but I accepted them since my parents told me “it was so.” As I started school the teachers told me “it was so,” and when I was put into a private Catholic school because my parents did not believe in the public school system, our Jesuit teachers told me “it was so”. 

God was a father and the prayer went : Our father who art in heaven…Clearly, God was pretty far away and the first creation to reach heaven was a dog named Laika. As a child, I believed that the stars were angels and I would sit with my mom and wave to them. Later in my teens, I projected my longing for God unto the statue of the holy virgin in my parish  church and lit candles. In my twenties, I spent a lot of time in a small Cistercian monastery and experienced for the first time the voice of the holy, which did not come from outside, but from a combination of both the outside and the inside. I experienced a glimpse of the numinous sitting in silence, and by listening to that silence in quiet meditation.

The traditional projection unto a God “out there” creates a real psychological problem which wasn’t solved until the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung came up with a new paradigm, a new way of incorporating God into our individual reality through what he called the Collective Unconscious. He figured out that this great spirit which we called God was actually not somewhere out in space separated from us, but inside our minds creating our innermost Self. Jung even concluded that God was not gendered as a man but was completely unimaginable working through our deep psyche. Christ in Jung’s universe became more than love, he became the human holy, suspended between good and evil in the center of the cross.  Jung’s message was that if we in our consciousness communicated with, or tried to understand this greater Self of ours, we could actually achieve a higher consciousness and understanding of, what the Christian church called God! Up until the revolution of modern psychology brought into life by Freud and Jung, God remained what Jung called : a projection of our imaginations. This projection was brought on by religion and had kept the Christian faithful in complete separation from the inner understanding of the holy. In fact, it is my belief that the church most often has taught people obedience instead of teaching them how to explore. Understanding how Jung unfolds and opens up Christianity, makes it again possible for me to access the mysterious, because it is no longer “out there” but it is in myself, in the dreams I have and in the being that I am, walking on the surface of this planet. It is up to me to discover the universe inside of me which does not need to be held prisoner by a projection. This is where the real story not ends but begins. Carl Jung is a universe in himself to be explored over and over again. He was no saint and did not claim to be one. His ideas were not meant to start a new religion. Religion to Jung meant dealing with the archetypal forces and processes of the psyche. Jung was purely out to explore the numinous and our relationship to the great mystery of our souls. I believe that he got as close to an answer about this as anyone has so far. His writings clearly tells the story about a God who is not separated from us, but who is everywhere, outside as well as inside our own personal universes. This is why, when Carl Jung was once asked if he believed in God his short answer was “I don’t believe, I know.” His own understanding and gnosis, his Anima-Sofia was enough for him to exist in harmony with the Numinous. 

The archetype of miniature making.

Did you know that the famous rock star Rod Stewart spend a lot of his time building miniature railroad landscapes? He does, and he is just one of millions of people on this planet who looks at the world through miniatures. There are clubs for miniature Fairy Gardens, and people like, Matthew Albanese who create fantastic sceneries, all in model scale to make stunning life like photos as if it was all real. 

From antiquity Cyprus goddess clay figures to First Nation Kachina dolls, human beings simply have a fascination for the small scale. There seem  to be an archetypal need for us to scale things down in order to understand them. I remember my own fondness of the medieval miniature model city in front of the Copenhagen City Museum as a child.

 The display which was outside the building ( see picture ) was on my way to and from school. I would stop and gaze at it almost every day and imagine myself living in or walking the streets of the old city just by looking at the model display. The Copenhagen display however was tiny, compared to the later big model cities of Rome or Shanghai.

 Is it because the tiny worlds makes us feel like Gods? Is it a matter of feeling in control or just a matter of understanding a larger context by minimizing it? I believe it is a little bit of both. When the early people of my country Denmark created a model of a horse pulling the sun, they understood the concept of the “Sun-wagon”. The sun clearly moved because it was pulled by a horse named Hrimfaxi. 

I, like many other people have my own miniature displays at my home in form of Ikons, crucifixes and Buddha statuettes. Little reminders of much larger concepts. They are the small scale items which leads my thoughts to something much bigger such as the Numinous which so huge and is beyond my understanding. By looking at them though, I get a glimpse, an idea of the real thing.

Joe Hill as the rebel archetype

Most of us know a story about a rebel;  someone who singlehandedly takes on an entire army and either dies for the cause or gets away with it. Jesus, of course, comes to mind even though the major religions downplay his rebel side because the establishment does not want its followers to be rebellious. But there are other archetypal rebels we remember. I think about Joan of Arc, the French farm girl who led her countrymen into battle.  Andreas Hofer who was a Tyrollean rebel fought for freedom against Napoleon’s occupation. He is remembered in the famous song, In Mantua Im Banden. There is the Greek female rebel, Laskarina, who successfully fought the Ottoman Empire in 1771 and in my own country I remember the stories about Gøngehøvdingen, a Danish rebel fighting the Swedish occupying army back in 1658. 

All of these men or women have something in common with Joe Hill. They were led by the archetype to greatness through personal dedication and suffering. Joe Hill was a farm boy from Sweden, born in 1879, who escaped hunger and misery by emigrating to America with his brother Poul in 1902. His original name was Joel Emanuel Hillstroem, but he chose to call himself Joseph, and later in the States, just Joe Hill. As a laborer, he traveled around doing all sorts of odd jobs. He discovered a talent for poetry and songwriting and soon became involved in the labor movement. He was wrongfully sentenced to death in Salt Lake City in 1915:  the trial and his execution by firing squad turned him into a folk hero. It should be mentioned here that Utah is the only state in the US where the firing squad is still used to kill people sentenced to death. 

Songs were written about Joe Hill. Earl Robinson’s song, I Dreamt I saw Joe Hill Last Night is still a galvanizing labor song where the energy of the archetype comes to life, transforms people’s hearts and transcends the minds of the masses. This is especially true in this verse in the song:

                                                                                    From San Diego up to Maine

In every mine and mill

Where workers strike and organize

Says he, You'll find Joe Hill

Says he, You'll find Joe Hill

It’s a connection to the biblical saying of Jesus in Matthew 18:20. Wherever two or three gather together as my followers, I am there among them. Even the trial against Joe Hill seems to mirror the story of Jesus in that Joe refuse to defend himself against the murder charges. In the end, it is the political establishment which decides that Joe has to die because of their dislike of his labor union activities. Joe dies in front of the firing squad and his ashes are sent in small envelopes to union organizations all over the world. His mission has been fulfilled. His final words are Christlike, he says: 

My will is easy to decide 

For there is nothing to divide

My kin don't need to fuss and moan

"Moss does not cling to rolling stone"

My body? Oh, if I could choose

I would to ashes it reduce

And let the merry breezes blow

My dust to where some flowers grow

Perhaps some fading flower then Would come to life and bloom again.

This is my Last and final Will. Good Luck to All of you

 Joe Hill

Trailer for my article in the Assisi Journal on Gender and Psyche

In search of the Genderless Numinous

I grew up with Christianity. My roots are a mixture of Danish Lutheranism and the Catholic catechism. I was baptized Lutheran but converted to Catholicism by the time I was 18. The understanding that God is male and all-loving was pretty solid in both traditions. Not only was God gendered but so was, of course, his son and the third member, the Holy Ghost.  One could have hoped for a female gender representation for the Holy Spirit, but you have to go south of the Mediterranean sea to find acceptance of the Holy Spirit being female. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the spirit has a feminine pronoun and is called Shekhina. The Greeks left it neutral but Syrian Christianity in the Gnostic writings holds on to the feminine, as stated in the Gnostic acts of Thomas: 

Holy Dove that bearer the twin young;

Come, hidden Mother;

Come, thou that art manifest in thy deeds

and dost furnish joy and rest for all that are joined with thee;

Christianity moved north and away from the Mediterranean countries early on, and  in the King James version, in the New American bible as well as in German speaking countries, the Holy Spirit is a he!  This leaves us with three male gendered God-images of the Christian faith. On the margin of all this masculinity is the image of the Holy Virgin Mary, although she is definitely not a part of the Trinity. The most common imagery we have of the Trinity is that of three male figures or of two men and a bird! I’m not sure how to relate to that image. Somehow I find the latter a bit comical without trying to be sacrilegious.

As a child, I always wondered who God’s wife was. I still do. How could God be gendered? How could the constellation of the Trinity be all male? How could Jesus not be allowed to have a wife and why was the Holy Spirit a he? It is no wonder that the Inquisition had free hands when they started burning women on the stakes before and after the Reformation. The last woman to be judged a witch in my own country was burned at the stake as late as 1693. She was a farmer’s wife and her name was Anne. The male dominated faith of Christianity turned out to be disastrous for the female gender as well as for the male. Why this need to gender your god in the first place? What is the point other than domination? Kenneth l.Becker quotes Jung in his book "Unlikely Companions" P21, Quote: The Christian eta has thus necessarily developed its doctrinal notions of the all-good God, the all-masculineTrinity, the archetypal moral hero and savior Christ. End of quote. Even Jung knew that the overwhelming masculinity of the Christian Deities was a set up for humankind.  The gods of the European antiquity were often hermaphrodites. Agdistis, Aphrodite, Tiresias, The bearded goddess from Cyprus, and in Asia, Lan Caihe as well as Ishi Cori Dome, the transgendered Japanese deity who brought the sun into the world. 

If it were the case that Christianity at some point had reversed its course and had reinstituted the feminine at the same level as the masculine in its God image, it would be comforting and make sense. Unfortunately, this is not the case. We are still in 2016 and dealing with a Trinity of all male expression and concretization which will continue to devastate the relationship between the sexes and the gender pattern we live by. How can the universal feminine come into balance with the masculine when the image does not exist in our God (Gods)? I live with a schizophrenic relationship with this all male religion which has shaped my beliefs for a whole life. I feel a certain powerlessness and deep sadness that this is so. My only refuge is in the Jungian study of depth psychology which opens a door for me to a genderless numinous. Or as Marie Louise Von Franz express it, that which brings us to our knees is God! Not as a he or a she, but as a genderless numinous.