The Cracked Veneer

I was recently revisiting Jung’s book ‘Introduction to the Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy’. In that book, Jung writes:

‘The Church   assumes, not altogether without reason, that the fact of semel credidisse (having once believed) leaves certain traces behind it; but of these traces nothing is to be seen in the broad march of events. Christian civilization has proved hollow to a terrifying degree: it is all veneer, but the inner man has remained untouched and therefore unchanged. His soul is out of key with his external beliefs; in his soul the Christian has not kept pace with external developments. Yes, everything is to be found outside – in image and in word, in Church and Bible – but never inside. Inside reign the archaic gods, supreme as of old; that is to say the inner correspondence with the outer God-image is undeveloped for lack of psychological culture and therefore has got stuck in heathenism … Too few people have experienced the divine image as the innermost possession of their own souls. Christ only meets them from without, never from within the soul; that is why dark paganism still reigns there, a paganism which, now in a form so blatant that it can no longer be denied and now in all too threadbare disguise, is swamping the world of so-called Christian civilization.’

I find this an extraordinary picture. Perhaps the language is rather rich and dramatic, but it expresses Jung’s experience of patients, who display a veneer of Christianity, but who show no signs of inner transformation. Too few, he writes, have experienced ‘the divine image as the innermost possession of their souls.’ I find myself to be reticent in claiming such experience. It seems to me that there is always the danger of seeking to believe that my faith is somehow genuine, whist others have not reached the degree of faith that I have found. My reticence lies in not believing that I possess the divine image as much as I should, nor in thinking that I make a particularly good job of being a disciple of Christ. At the same time I am wary of those who fight their corner on the basis that their view of Christianity must be right and everyone else is either misguided or, at best, a second class Christian. Yet it must be possible to write of what it means to possess the divine image, not particularly as an expert (which I would never claim to be) but simply as someone who knows what it means to have one’s soul infused with that image and seeks to share something of the reality of that experience.

I claim to be an orthodox and biblical Christian. I was brought up within the Church and both scripture and the rich tradition of the Church has shaped the person I am. That tradition, through the ongoing worshipping life of the Church, and particularly the sacraments and the witness of Scripture, has brought me to discover the reality of the risen Christ. Such things as scripture and tradition are the veneer of the Christian faith, which have held that faith before me and defined its life. But it has led to a deeper reality. Strange accounts from the pages of Acts, of divine wind and tongues of fire, have moved from being a rather odd story to being a lived out reality. I have experienced the wind of the Spirit and I know what it means to have had my heart set on fire with the love of God. It came to me through the experience of contemplative prayer and it so changed me that my favourite aunt asked what has happened to me, for she could hardly recognise me as the same person. Indeed it was life changing. Not only did I experience the divine image as the possession of my own soul, it altered every perspective I had on life. It levelled every relationship I shared, whether with friends or with anyone who might have been my ‘neighbour’ at that moment in time. Whether Monarch or beggar in the street, each of us was a sinner needing God’s love and redemption. At the same time each of us was so precious that Christ gave his life for us. There was here an extraordinary truth that could only bind us together in a fellowship of those who knew what it is to be loved, forgiven and set free.

All of this changes perceptions of the place of scripture and tradition. They become seen for what they are, which is the scaffolding of faith. Without the scaffolding of the ongoing tradition of a worshipping and praying church, and without the witness of scripture, I would not have found my faith. Yet faith, if it is to be a matter of being infused by the divine image, needs to deepen and grow. To follow scripture and tradition is to be governed by law. To be infused by the divine image is to live by grace. There is a contrast here which can be illustrated by considering the task of the preacher. If scripture and tradition are The Faith, then the task of the preacher is to engage in a process of exegesis with any given text. The skill of the preacher will lie in the scholarship that she brings to the exercise and the way in which she relates that text to the experience of life. But if faith has become a matter of finding the divine image as the innermost possession of my soul, then my task as a preacher is to speak from the heart of that inner experience. The authenticity of my preaching lies in the integrity with which I speak of that which I know in my heart. Scripture and tradition remain the scaffolding that provides the language both to interpret my experience and to preach about it in any meaningful way. We might also call both scripture and tradition the veneer which presents the outward appearance of The Faith, but what must be spoken of is that which lies within. Otherwise all that is presented is a veneer.

  

There is a negative consequence to all this, which I offer without wanting to pass judgement on fellow travellers in The Way. If the scaffolding of scripture and tradition are taken to be The Faith, then they have to be defended, for a broken veneer makes the whole edifice worthless. The interpretation of this particular piece of scripture must be defended at all costs, otherwise all scripture falls under suspicion. The integrity of scripture is everything. The same is true of the sacraments. ‘Sacramental assurance’ becomes an issue. There is no room for even the slightest shadow of a doubt as to the validity of the sacraments. So it is that the scaffolding of scripture and tradition have to be fought over. The Church becomes obsessed with defending what is a veneer. What people hunger for, but perhaps cannot so easily define, is to discover what it means to find the divine image as the innermost possession of their souls. What they see in the Church, they recognise as all veneer. But I argue for something different, which is to present a cracked veneer to the world. Perhaps scripture sometimes gets it wrong. Perhaps sacramental moments can be experienced without the presence of a priest. In truth, you need to look not AT the scaffolding (or veneer) but THROUGH it to discover the authenticity of lives lived in possession of the divine image. The validity of a woman’s ministry as a bishop (to give but one example) will flow, not through whether she has fulfilled the exact requirements of scripture and tradition, which somehow determine the validity of her orders, but rather through the way in which God’s grace flows from a soul, which knows what it means to possess the divine image, and a life which is given to serve Christ in such a way that that grace is given to others. The challenge we face, as the Church, is to value both scripture and tradition as part of our equipment, but to so live as people who possess the divine image in the innermost place of our souls that we can dare to strip aside what is veneer and present what is a treasure beyond all value.