u/1AMthatIAM

While not technically Gnostic, Jungs ideas very much were Gnostic in spirit. Here is a sermon on Psalm 14 and a psychological approach to it given at our church on Sunday.

A Gnostic, a Christian, and a psychologist rarely read the same book the same way. But there is one reading where all three converge...

I was thinking, what if I read the Bible not as a rulebook or a history to defend, but as a living symbol. A collective dream the human species has dreamed for three thousand years. A Rorschach for the soul. Read this way, the text stops being about people long ago and quietly becomes about you.

The psychologist sees the figures as parts of the self. The mystic sees a door made to be walked through, with gnosis waiting on the far side. The believer finds not less than faith, but more, the Word made alive in an actual life.

Psalm 1's righteous and wicked are not two kinds of people. They are two states of one heart, the rooted day and the dry one.

Not backward into literalism or old cosmologies. Forward, into the depth where all three meet.

Here is the inkblot. What do you see?

#TheLivingSymbol #DepthPsychology #Jung #Gnosis #ChristianMysticism #ProgressiveChristianity #Scripture #Psychology #Soul #poetry

Sharing an idea I am working through...

This Sunday's sermon, "Learning to See Again: A Gospel of Partial Sight," sits where scripture and depth psychology meet. 

We'll spend time with the prophet Jeremiah, who could not see in himself what God saw so plainly, and with the quiet, distorting work that fear does on the way we see ourselves.

If you are drawn to the work of Carl Jung, to the long conversation between faith and the inner life, or simply to the question of why we are so often the last to recognize who we really are, this message is for you. 

Most of us are praying to a god we made. Not on purpose. We just had to make sense of God before anybody asked us if we wanted to. So we built one out of the materials we had.

Mom's voice.
Dad's voice.
The youth pastor who told us to be afraid of ourselves.

The version of God somebody handed us before we could ask whether it was actually him.

That god is real. He just is not God.
This Sunday at UCC Southbury, we sit with the verse most of us think we know. You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

Free from what?
Free from the god you constructed.
Free from the script you were handed.
Free to believe what you see, and not what you have been told to see.

Bring your wounds, your questions, your doubts, your foggy glasses. In this message we will clean them together.

#church #christianity #mentalhealth #uccsouthbury #southburyct #religioustrauma

Most people think the resurrection is about seeing Jesus clearly.

One of the Gospels says otherwise.

Two disciples walk with him for miles and have no idea it’s him.

Not because he’s hiding. Because they can’t see yet.

If you’ve ever felt like there’s more going on in Scripture than what’s on the surface…

If you’re curious how faith, psychology, and your actual life might belong in the same conversation…

Or if you just want to hear a sermon that admits we don’t always see things clearly…

Come and see.

For the past few years I’ve been exploring the overlap between Jungian psychology, early Christian mysticism, and symbolic interpretations of the Bible.

I recently put together a book that tries to express Christianity as a living symbolic system of psychological transformation rather than primarily a doctrinal system.

Some of the influences include:

• Jung and the symbolic life

• Edward Edinger’s work on the Christian archetype

• early Christian mystical texts

• the idea that religious symbols point to inner transformation

The project grew out of my own attempt to reconcile traditional Christianity with depth psychology and the symbolic approach to religion.

Curious what people in this community think about this kind of approach.