In a moment of synchronicity, Jungian psychologist James Hollis’ Tracking the Gods: The Place of Myth in Modern Life fell into my hands just while packing for my final October Diamond Approach retreat in Colorado (after 18 years with this spiritual community).
Written over 20 years ago, it fit all my packing qualifications, being light, thin (150 pages), and paperback. Little did I realize how heavy and en-lightening it would be (although you really can’t lose with Jim Hollis). While describing the modern erosion of “myth-consciousness,” Hollis writes that there is “no greater testimony to the collapse of mythic connection than the death of God.”
I don’t think anyone reading this will be offended, nor even misunderstand the term “death of God.” For Hollis it “means that the mythic center that held culture together has lost its power,” and goes on to say that we can speak of the death of God in a number of ways. In fact, notice how prescient this next quote is, written in 1995: “The cultural death of God occurs when the mystery is subsumed by cultural values, confused with, for example, nationalism or racism, or misused in the ratification of the powers of the establishment.” It’s like he predicted 2017 America.
He then quotes Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard’s remark: “The God which can be pointed out is an idol, and the religiosity that makes an outward show is an imperfect form of religiosity.” How much more true that seems today than 100 years ago when Kierkegaard was being vilified for such rhetoric.
And that, in part, explains why we need such organizations as The Burkhart Center: to revitalize that mythic center and “re-enchant” the universe, as Richard Tarnas so cogently refers to our task today.
Relating more directly still to the vision of The Burkhart Center, however, is Hollis’ description of the “psychological experience of the death of God:”
The psychological experience of the death of God is recast millions of times in the lives of individuals who feel no vital contact with the numinous, no matter how desperate their yearning nor faithful their attendance at a putative religious institution.
My entire adult life has been dedicated to the recognition that there is a “spiritual” reality that is both integrated with “physical” reality and informs and [literally] “fleshes out” that reality with wholeness and in love. Remove the spiritual from the physical and you get the deadness of the world we live in today, as Hollis notes above. Remove the physical from the spiritual and you get a “spiritualized” form of religion dissociated from true Reality, only concerned about some form or other of “getting to heaven.”
But as the mystical paths of all spiritual traditions have recognized and experienced, “contact with the numinous” is not only possible, but an everyday experience. These mystical paths recognize, however, that we are cut off from that lived reality, disconnected from our true nature, the true Reality.
What we offer at The Burkhart Center are very small, and hopefully, very large ways to reconnect with our true, or divine, nature. And this doesn’t happen by ignoring the physical reality, but by diving in the deep end* and exploring the inner nature of our mental, physical and emotional being—what many traditions call the “soul.” Therefore, we find that offering various opportunities, practices and resources for “Nurturing Mind, Heart and Body” in safe, sacred spaces where individuals from all traditions, or from no tradition at all, can make themselves more available to the Divine Love that is the Ground of our Being. I love how Christian mystic James Finley puts it: “We stack the deck in our favor,” he says:
We tend to show up for sunsets. We see to it that we do not miss that quiet moment alone in the morning on the back porch with a cup of coffee before the hectic pace of the day begins. …For it is our situation as human beings that we are powerless to produce by our efforts that union with God that alone fulfills our hearts. But what we can do is freely will to make ourselves as vulnerable and receptive as possible to the influx of grace.
“The critical test,” says Jim Hollis, “is whether a person is linked to mystery and is somehow transformed by it.” Through The Burkhart Center we hope to assist people to experience and pass this critical test, “to make ourselves as vulnerable and receptive as possible to the influx of grace.”
Shalom,
David
*Right now “we are diving headfirst into the shallow end of the pool,” says Ken Wilber, in his big, new book that you can’t even carry to a coffee shop much less on a plane: The Religion of Tomorrow (hardback, 772 pages, when you read the footnotes as I do). Wilber writes that by having “no ultimate Truth,” Western society “throws its hands up and awaits technological advances to address any really severe and persistent headaches.” Instead, he says:
We are diving headfirst into the shallow end of the pool, and encouraging all of our fellow citizens to do the same as fast as they possibly can. It’s mass suicide…and to make matters worse, we’re proud of it! Proud that we are wallowing in relative truth and that we adamantly maintain that there is no ultimate Truth anywhere anyway. But ultimate Truth is not something that can be rationally demonstrated or proven.
Wilber is correct. It can’t be proven rationally. You have to experience it—you have to somehow regain that “vital contact with the numinous.”
