A personal path toward a poetic basis of mind...

This scribe “feels” like a newbie swimmer in turbulent, unpredictable, oscillating and even eddying waters with whirlpools and tree roots, rock outcroppings and the occasional creature, each of them far more innate to and comfortable in these waters. A gestalt-type of depiction for these waters is the swirling, iridescent and magnetic force of what Hillman calls “archetypal psychology. What I am learning is, first, that everything I tried to learn, even to master, as a student, teacher, free-lance journalist, athletic coach, and basic student of piano is as much a ‘trap’ from a epistemological perspective as it is a harness that held me in check while attempting to both perform and to ‘fit in’ with whatever the situation, institution and politics seemed to require. Tonsilitis led to a tonsillectomy; a separated shoulder led to aluminium pins and then physiotherapy; clouded eye lenses resulted in synthetic replacements. A pulled Achilles tendon was, according to medical sources, not amenable to formal treatment, nor were   arthritis-imbued joints.

And on the other side, that interior life that wakened one day back in the mid-eighties, to the question, ‘What the hell is driving me to sixteen-hour days, obsessive ambition to generate activity, to find new ways to write marketing and public relations copy, to drive enrolment and to function as a ‘change-agent’ in a small-to-medium sized educational bureaucracy?” Peggy Lee’s song, “Is that all there is?” kept ringing in my head. It seemed to me that I was deeply embedded in a pursuit of applause, compliments, results that were validated by others, and at the same time, I was (and still am) highly impacted by negative criticism, especially if and when it comes from people whom I consider important, relevant and intimate. There had been hints of such sensitivity, or perhaps vulnerability, before the mid eighties.

Once, in a television interview with the then local member of Parliament at the time when the people of Alberta specifically and the west generally were complaining vigorously about the “bilingual Corn Flakes boxes.” They saw no justifiable reason why they should have to read French on their boxes of cereal. Although I strongly disagreed with their bigotry, and specifically noted my disagreement on air, prior to my question, I nevertheless wanted his response.  “What can and will the federal government do about the attitudes of the people in Alberta concerning French on their Corn Flakes boxes?” Having no interest or need, apparently, to consider the question relevant, appropriate or worthy of a response (hence not to dignify it), he uttered words that suggested, ‘the question is ridiculous’ to my ears. As the moment occurred barely half-way through a twenty-minute interview being conducted by both the station’s New Director and myself, I literally and metaphorically ‘froze’, psychically extricated myself from the interview, while remaining ‘on camera’ and bolted from the studio, to retreat to a recording booth at the radio station two doors down the strip mall. Shaking from both embarrassment and frustration, a little anger and disappointment, not because  asked the question, but because it elicited such a response. I was fully aware that the local member was a strong supporter of the French language and the French fact in Canada, and was adamant that bilingualism was necessary to move Canada forward, a position with which I fully concurred. What I was not even remotely conscious of, however, was the intensity and the abruptness, and the apparent arrogance of his ridicule, not of me, but of the question. It was barely five minutes after seeking refuge in that booth, when the door opened, and the MP entered, with a full-throated apology for his behaviour in the interview. Since that moment, I have read, watched and listened as the national debate unfolded, and in some ways continues today, if differently, as the nation attempts to bridge issues of language and culture with those of economics, politics and nation-building.

Sensibilities, both to the larger situation, as well as to my own personal ‘feeling’ component, have been linked from a very early age. When, in grade thirteen, I asked a question in history class about the way the United Nations had/was/and would likely address a particular situation, the teacher’s response, to my lasting chagrin went something like this: “We do not have time for such questions; we have to prepare for final examinations!” Barely, seven years later, while teaching in that same history department under that same ‘head,’ I begged the principal to be relieved of the ‘curriculum’ which landed in my mail box each Monday morning, with a foolscap sheet listing the chapter and paragraph headings from the prescribed text, for the coming week, based on a text on modern European History. When asked what I would like to ‘do’ in place of that lock-step, memory-based, fossil-grounded pedagogy, I replied, “I would recommend a new approach in and through a study of the United Nations itself, based on a text of papers and essays that, in a scholarly manner, dig into the importance of the United Nations.” His immediate response, “Do it!” For this I am forever grateful.

Somewhere along the way, from this perspective, there seemed to be an inevitable, predictable and insurmountable tension between the immediate ‘task’ and the perceptions of that task by those in charge, with a longer, wider, more expansive vision of what might be possible, if a full range of options were to be considered. Attempting to see both simultaneously, from the perspective of at least a thought process, first, before considering the feasible possibilities, and before even accessing the emotional implications of all options, has its “up-side” as well as its ‘down-side”. The “up-side” is that there are always ideas available; the ‘down-side’ is that ‘tradition’ and what others expect from their experience, learning and vision, does not seem to be valued.

These two energies, the one based in the interior search for ‘what am I doing that seems to be so ‘obsessive, demanding, and potentially damaging?’ and the energy around the force-field that persists in seeking, expressing, advocating for and even arguing about a ‘different view’ from the conventional norm, finally collided with what can now be seen, and even then could have been predicted, as a ‘train-wreck.’

While generating marketing materials, newsletters, Smoke-less strategies, and multi-year planning documents, (really, only collating the contributions of others), I had the delightful opportunity to have lunch, in my office, with a retired kindergarten teacher from Great Britain, now a practicing Anglican clergy. She, at least two decades my senior, listened to my babbling, about whatever topics and issues seemed to be relevant during our shared time, interjected her unique and inimitable wit, and, slyly, almost inconspicuously, the notion of ‘theology’ as a potential route for next steps in my journey. She was unaware that, a mere decade-plus earlier, I had paid a visit to two schools of theology, Knox and Emmanuel, at the University of Toronto School of Theology, with the expressed intent of enrolling. When I informed my then spouse of my intention, I received this immediate, unequivocal, non-negotiable retort: If you go into theology, I will divorce you on the spot!” The subject was not mentioned, to my memory, for the next fifteen years.

The conversation with ‘Muriel’ took place in the midst of an interior jumble of both thought and feeling which sought answers for a self-sabotaging pattern as well as what I perceived to be a crumbling marriage. I had already entered therapy as one approach to sorting out my own inner life, and then proposed that both my spouse and I enter joint therapy to discern both what might be ‘askew’ in the marriage, and what we might do about it. The latter attempt at therapy terminated prematurely; the former continued until I finally resolved to leave the marriage and enrol in theology.

Never remotely considered at that time as a process of ‘saving the world’ by entering the study of theology, I was merely seeking guidance through reading, retreat, prayer, community of others interested in a similar journey, and new awareness of ‘what God might want’….as an inarticulate, and cliché and still applicable question of my place in the universe. And, in the midst of that inner voice, I now see that my words and concepts, perceptions and the identifying of those perceptions were, in a word, literal, empirical, nominal, and as far as I could rationally determine, rational and logical.

Although I had spent considerable time teaching English to high school students, including a segment focussed specifically on Greek mythology, I had barely scratched the surface of that genre. Historic literary periods, schools and the various stages of literary criticism had occupied much of both the pedagogy and the perspective of the world garnered from those readings. British culture, seen in and through the writing of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Keats, Shelly, Coleridge and Eliot, etc. as well as the occasional piece of American literature like Death of a Salesman, Catcher in the Rye, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and the memorable, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Pearl, as well as the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, were included in the curriculum. Short stories and essays, too, offered models both for reading and interpretation as well as for student writing assignments. Subsequently, Canadian authors began to figure in the mix, including Hugh MacLennan, Morley Callaghan, W.O. Mitchell, Mordecai Richler, Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, Earle Birney, Raymond Souster, F.R. Scott and many others. These writers offered both to the instructor, and hopefully to at  least a few students, windows on both their world view and their choice of language as an integral component of their respective art.

Occasionally, too, there would be opportunity to dip into the contemporary writing of editorial writers, arts reviewers, political junkies and cultural owls like Richard Newman in the Globe and Mail. Language, specific words, seen through such critical pieces as Northrop Frye’s Massey Lectures, entitled, The Educated Imagination. This piece specifically articulated the difference between the language of practical sense that sought to divide and compare, and the language of the imagination, specifically expressed in metaphor, simile, personification that sought to unite…by connecting one thing with something else…a cat with a burgler, for example, denoting the stealth of both.

Along the way, the writing of Freud (Ego, Id, and Superego) crossed the eyes of most English instructors, as did, later the glimpses of Jung’s unconscious, anima and animus, and the process of individuation. Questions about the overlap of the psychological models with the literature, were one of the windows that seemed like ‘low-hanging fruit’ for exploration, along with the critical insights of people like Aristotle whose definition of tragedy was inevitably brought out of the closet for use in Shakespearean tragedy discussion and exegesis.

Earlier in my youth, I had attended an extremely virulent evangelistic and fundamental Christian church, where I had openly, and vehemently withdrawn from attendance following a blatantly bigoted homily against Roman Catholics. (Written about in other pages in this space.) I had also be invited to participate in a public forum on the ‘relevance of the Christian faith as part of a Lenten study session, in which I advocated for more deliberate discussion, in seminar format to foster engagement with the stories, including the language and meaning, their various interpretations and applications to individual and family life, as compared -with the top-down, unilateral and ego-driven homilies dedicated to building both dollars and bottoms in pews, as a measure of the success of the religious enterprise.

From my perspective, church was not similar to, analogous to or comparable to a business operating on the Main Street, although many of its primary leaders were deeply imbued with this approach. One of my teachers in grade twelve French, Miss Jean Craig, whose scholarship, demeanour, humility, reflection and quiet presence, seemed to epitomize the life of a Christian pilgrim. A middle-aged spinster, nuanced, specific, observant, patient, disciplined and expecting high standards, and eminently steeped in her languages, both French and Latin, Miss Craig, I later learned, was a sister to an Anglican clergy, and may also have been a daughter of an Anglican clergy. Nevertheless, irrespective of her genealogical background, she embodied, incarnated and exemplified both the discipline and  boundless ‘light’ of faith, hope and charity.

From language, to theology, to scholarship and to a personal crisis of meaning, purpose and a psychic cross-road, I finally entered seminary. And from there, with more exposure to Jung, Myers-Briggs, the psychological differences between ‘extrinsic’ and ‘intrinsic’ aspects of personal life, along with three different sessions in clinical pastoral education, one in chaplaincy, and two in pastoral counselling, I attempted to serve in active ministry.

And here, I found, a dearth of both imagination, theological exploration and discussion, a fixation on both sexuality and finance, as if these were the two most detestable sins. The turning point, from my perspective, was a ‘charge’ to the diocese in 1998, by the then bishop, reduced to what I considered little more than a recipe for a corporate annual general meeting agenda: 10% more people and 15% more money. What I publicly declared was nothing more than “General Motors religion” was not taken lightly in the bishop’s office. Nothing about how to accompany parishioners in their spiritual struggles, how to address parish tensions and conflicts, and nothing about the nature of the culture in the parish and diocese that might be impacting the life of the church. Growth, measured in numbers, people and dollars, irrespective of how that might be addressed and collaborated on, even studied with reference to both scripture and church teachings, was a starvation diet, laced, of course, with more antipathy and hatred for the LGBTQ+ community.

For the past twenty-plus years, fortunately, James Hillman’s work has been not an obsessive, but a constant reminder of how psychology has failed itself, and its failure has also seriously and negatively impacted the church, both in its hierarchy, as well as in its laity and clergy.