sempre I was struck by the diocese of New York removing from the Easter Vigil the reading of Abraham sacrificing Isaac; presumably because the story scandalizes nice good people who want religion to look hunky-dory and sweet. But obviously, if God cannot work through horror and crime and sin and cruelty then He can’t be terribly relevant to this world. But this sort of religion is not for the weak. I let Jung take over:
Shahbazpur So that was it! I felt an enormous, an indescribable relief. Instead of the expected damnation, grace had come upon me, and with it an unutterable bliss such as I had never known. I wept for happiness and gratitude. The wisdom and goodness of God had been revealed to me now that I had yielded to His inexorable command. It was as though I had experienced an illumination. A great many things I had not previously understood became clear to me. That was what my father had not understood, I thought; he had failed to experience the will of God, had opposed it for the best reasons and out of the deepest faith. And that was why he had never experienced the miracle of grace which heals all and makes all comprehensible. He had taken the Bible’s commandments as his guide; he believed in God as the Bible prescribed and his forefathers had taught him. But he did not know the immediate living God who stands, omnipotent and free, above His Bible and His Church, who calls upon man to partake of His freedom, and can force him to renounce his own views and convictions in order to fulfill without reserve the command of God. In his trial of human courage God refuses to abide by traditions, no matter how sacred. In His omnipotence He will see to it that nothing really evil comes of such tests of courage. If one fulfills the will of God one can be sure of going the right way.
God had also created Adam and Eve in such a way that they had to think what they did not at all want to think. He had done that in order to find out whether they were obedient. And He could also demand something of me that I would have had to reject on traditional religious grounds. It was obedience which brought me grace, and after that experience I knew what God’s grace was. One must be utterly abandoned to God; nothing matters but fulfilling His will. Otherwise all is folly and meaninglessness. From that moment on, when I experienced grace, my true responsibility began.
The above emotions might very well have been the emotions of Abraham, “our father in faith.” And it is in general fitting that a man writing in German after the two world wars (though just to be clear, Jung himself was Swiss) should realize that evil rarely comes out of a deep rule-flouting obedience to one’s own nature, but instead out of massive pyramids of obedience which reduce the individual will to irrelevance. When the greatest evils are committed it is because massive numbers of people have merely “done their duty.”
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