Feminist Mysticism and Images of God

A Practical Theology

Dr. Jennie S. Knight

• Publisher: Chalice Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780827210509
• eBook ISBN: 9780827210516
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Feminist theologians often claim that "women's experience" is their starting point. However, most feminist theology is remarkably void of analysis of particular women's experiences of imaging God. In this book, Knight provides practical recommendations to help people transform images in the context of religious practices.

What difference does it make whether we picture God as an elderly white grandfather, a nurturing African American mother, or a stranger on the bus?

Jennie Knight says our image of God affects how we see ourselves, how we worship, how we treat one another, how (or whether) we work for justice, and a host of other life practices. But after years of knowing intellectually that God transcends a specific human type, Knight still struggles to make an emotional connection with God in different forms. She suspects that that struggle is why many seminarians who wrote papers about thea/theology abandon nontraditional God images once they hit parish ministry, perpetuating the practice of seeing God as a European male on a throne and all the accompanying problems that such imagery creates.

Knight believes that personal and critical reflection in the context of a supportive learning community, combined with experiences of diverse images for the divine in worship, can lead to profound changes in self-image, relationship with the divine, and agency in the world. This book aims to demonstrate why and how this transformation is both possible and necessary.

The popularity of The Shack, The Secret Life of Bees, Joan of Arcadia, and other works with nontraditional God-figures reveals a culture ready to embrace God in many forms. Knight examines how the church can do the same.

1

Psychology and Imaging the Divine

Images of the divine are not static pictures. They are an essential aspect of every person’s spirituality and faith. They function in complicated, unique ways in each person’s psyche. Psychological theorists have argued that each person’s image for and corresponding relationship with the divine are shaped profoundly by her formative childhood relationships. Therefore, theological discussions about images of God are not merely theoretical exercises. They engage the core psychological formation of each person. In addition, formative relationships take place within a larger culture. The values placed on gender roles, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and economic status in turn affect and interact with family dynamics in particular ways depending on cultural location and factors unique to each family.

Thus, the exploration of the psychological dynamics involved in imaging the divine must include attention to these cultural factors and their implications. Recognition of the psychological formation of images is a crucial step in helping people move beyond the limitations that those images place on their self-images, relationships with others, and relationship with the divine. Even if images are essentially positive, they are limited nevertheless. An integral part of the process of moving through images involves recognizing these limitations and then affirming those images that paradoxically both do and do not represent a larger, mysterious whole.

Images for the divine, self-images, and images of other people are profoundly interrelated. Psychological theorists have developed diverse schemas to explain this interrelatedness, and while each theory provides helpful insights, questions remain unanswered. No answer is complete. Each is a helpful tool to explore the mystery of the human experience. Therefore, in this chapter I weave psychological theories into a tapestry of diverse but mostly complementary understandings of selfhood, human relationships, and relationship with the divine. From this base, I add to this tapestry by exploring the impact of race and gender on the formation of the self, relationships, and images of the divine. Thus far, the psychological theorists who have explored images of the divine have largely neglected these significant aspects of psychological, relational, and spiritual formation.

Interrelated Representations

The God-image of each person is unique. It is influenced by the theology and images of the divine offered by religious institutions, but it is not determined by them exclusively. Rather, it interacts with them in complex ways, depending on the individual. Psychoanalyst Ana-Maria Rizzuto analyzes the case studies of four inpatient psychiatric patients in order to explore the development of their images of the divine and how those images function in their lives. Her case studies demonstrate that a person’s God-representation can become an obstacle to the positive development of her self-representation, her faith, and her relationships with others.

For her analysis of God-images, Rizzuto draws on Freud’s theory of the parental imagoes. Freud argued that children create internal objects (called “imagoes”) to represent their parents in their psyches. Rizzuto disagrees with Freud on many of his uses of this theory in interpreting religion and God-representations. For example, she criticizes Freud for his assertion that the paternal imago alone formed the God-representation. However, she uses the concept of imagoes as her starting point for discussing the way that a child develops internal representations of her parents, herself, and the divine. She argues that her patients’ God-images were formed out of various relationships, usually with one more prevalent than the others. Significantly, she found that her patients formed their God-images not only out of the “parent in real life” but equally out of the “wished-for parent and the feared parent of the imagination.” Thus, imaging the divine involves creativity as well as memory.¹

This final point is crucial. Each person is constantly involved in a process of balancing experiences and representations within the psyche. It is an ongoing process of transforming representations so that people can establish a psychic balance that will make them “psychologically viable people in the real world.”² Representations can change at different moments in a person’s life. A variety of factors influence the changes, including psychologically defensive maneuvers, need for the idealization or devaluation of a particular person, changes of the representation due to a continued relationship with that person, and changes in the representation caused by changes in a person’s self-representation. Changes in self-representation lead to a reevaluation of representations from the past and a modified understanding of those primary people in present life.³ The dynamic reworking of object-representations is central to mental life because of the interrelationship between the self-representation and object-representations.

Because of this interrelatedness between self-representation and object-representations, a person would “go crazy” if he or she tried to destroy a representation. Once a representation has been coded in a person’s memory, it can only be transformed and reworked in the light of changes in a person’s life and self-representation.⁴ It is for this reason that a God-representation cannot be destroyed. If a representation is associated with negative, distressing emotions, it can be defended against through repression or other defensive maneuvers. If it is repressed, it can be worked through during the processes of free association and transference in psychoanalysis. If this does not occur, however, one may experience personal loss.

Rizzuto explains the consequences this way: “If massive repression of objects and the corresponding self-representations takes place, the individual may experience loneliness, emptiness, a fear of losing oneself, a fear of being abandoned, or when it is expressed in bodily metaphors, of having a hole where the objects supposedly belong.”⁵ If a person’s God-representation has been formed out of a matrix of painful relationships with parents and other caregivers and in relation to a negative, painful self-representation, it may remain unavailable even during analysis. A person can then experience a sense of emptiness, a hole, where God should be, yet she may continue to repress the God-image because it is experienced as a negative, painful presence when it does come into conscious experience.

The most mature level of object-representation occurs when a person is capable of “playing” with her or his representations. This capability is called “maturity of memory.” When a person reaches this capacity, she has integrated a healthy distance between her “present sense of self” and her internal objects. She then has the freedom to play with her internal images.⁶ The ability to “play” with an object representation creates freedom in the relationship with the actual object. Even though in real life a person may not actually do everything enacted in playful fantasy, the freedom of her internal “play” with her self-representation and her representations of others can enable her to explore new ways of being in the world. Theistic religion is experienced precisely in the psychic space where “play” occurs. It is the transitional space between internal psychic experience and external objects.

This discussion of the God-representation as an object-representation that can be played with could easily attract the criticism that the reality and existence of God is not being taken seriously—that these claims are irreverent, even blasphemous. However, theology cannot afford to avoid the issue of individual representations of the divine. If we are to place the claims of psychoanalysis in serious dialogue with theology, we must recognize that each individual relates to the divine from within his or her particular self-representation and representations of other important people in their lives. The representation of the divine that she creates will reflect both positive and negative aspects of those representations combined with cultural or traditional, institutional representations of God.

Conflict

A child’s adaptation to her cultural and religious context can be achieved partly through the creation of a God-representation that is in harmony with the “official” cultural representation of God. However, if a child’s (or adult’s) God-representation does not coincide with that official representation, “the private and the official God provide endless potential for maladaptation and for raising family tragedies to a cosmic level.”⁷ In addition, suffering can be caused when the two representations coincide too closely. For example, a patient named Daniel Miller created his God-image almost exclusively from the representation of his domineering father. The God that was offered to him through his Jewish faith was “unfortunately too similar” to his father. The religious education that he received did not help him to lessen his fear of this Father God.

Rizzuto recognized the tension and wariness this created for Daniel: “Under such circumstances, it was impossible for him to have any wish to be involved with a God who offered nothing to alleviate his longing for a protecting and loving adult who would listen to him and appreciate him.”⁸ While Daniel longed for a different image of God, one that was compassionate and loving, he could not permit himself any emotional contact with that new understanding of God. He was too afraid of encountering his old God-image, particularly the painful feelings associated with his father. He could not tolerate being disappointed by God in the same way that he had been damaged by his relationship with his father.

People do not always create their God-representations exclusively from their father images. However, the official representation of God as a dominant father can have negative consequences, both for those like Daniel, whose images coincide with their religious education, and for those whose images do not coincide with their official religious or cultural contexts.

Even when one’s official religious context teaches that God is loving rather than domineering, a person’s familial context can cause her to create an internal representation of God that conflicts with religious teachings. For example, a woman named Bernadine experienced God as her enemy because she was unable to believe that God loved her. She had experienced herself as unlovable in relation to her parents. Rather than accepting the painful reality that her parents had been woefully inadequate in their care for her, she preferred to maintain that she was unlovable. Her religious heritage had taught her that God is loving; however, she could not accept that God loved her. She held in tension a belief that God loved other people yet could not love her. Therefore, while she longed for God to love her, she was unable to accept any grace from God because it would jeopardize her self-understanding as unlovable.⁹ This would force her to face the unbearable realization that her parents were incapable of loving her. Bernadine’s example demonstrates that a God-image can be altered to support an untenable self-image and false images of others if it is experienced as psychologically necessary for survival.

Patterns of Relationship

As these case studies show, images of God and a person’s self-representation are part of a complex web of relationships. For this reason, James Jones argues that Rizzuto’s theories focused too much on the individual psyche and too little on relationships. For Jones, the self is composed of relationships. A person’s relationship with the divine is central in the formation of the self. Rather than focusing on “pathological individuals,” he chose instead to look at neurotic patterns of relationship.¹⁰ An inherently relational self is made up of particular patterns of relationship. It is these patterns of relationship—with the divine and other people—that must be examined and transformed, rather than the representations.

The approaches of Jones and Rizzuto are both necessary and complementary. His emphasis on affective patterns of relationship is indeed a helpful and necessary complement to Rizzuto’s sometimes obscure and confounding theories of internalized objects. The most fruitful discussions about imaging and relating to the divine can take place in this intersection between intrapsychic images and interpersonal relationships.

Jones argues that patterns of transference, as enacted with a therapist, reflect the essential patterns of relationship that a person has learned in primary familial relationships. The person enacts the same affective, relational patterns with the divine. One’s image of the divine is thus shaped by one’s emotional God-relationship.¹¹ Rather than simply focusing on an image of the divine, Jones argues that a person’s “affective bond with the sacred” serves as a person’s “transferential ground of self.”¹² For example, he says that a child who experiences herself as guilty and unworthy because of her relational patterns with her parents will ground that sense of herself in an image of God as judgmental and wrathful. On the other hand, a person who feels loved and secure will ground that sense of security in an image of God as loving and forgiving.

In order to understand a person’s image(s) of the divine, one must start by understanding his internalized relationships and then investigate how that person’s relationship with the divine is resonant with those relationships. In looking at these patterns, one must ask, “What has been projected? Is God critical, mirroring, unresolved meaning, or symbiotic?” To understand the relational patterns with the divine and how a person’s image of the divine functions in that relationship, one must look to religious practices as well as abstract beliefs, asking, “What inner relational patterns go into our devotional exercises, meditational disciplines, and philosophical theologies?”¹³

Because God is the “repository of what is most valuable” to the person and because transference is a person’s “most fundamental pattern of interaction and meaning-making,” her relationship with the divine will disclose her primary patterns of relationship and transference. In other words, one can use her relationship with God to understand her “larger relational world.”¹⁴ Jones argues,

An experiential image of sacred reality grounds our sense of who we are: the child who feels secure grounds that security in a caring God; the child who feels guilty and terrible grounds that sense of self by reference to a wrathful God; the child who feels estranged envisions a distant deity or dreams of a compensatory, warm and tender selfobject God.¹⁵

Through focusing on a person’s patterns of relationship with the di...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Psychology and Imaging the Divine
• 2. First Story: Theresa
• 3. Christian Feminist Spirituality
• 4. Second Story: Julie
• 5. Inclusive Language Is Not Enough: Imagining the Divine, Religious Experience, and Thea/ology
• 6. Third Story: Rosalyn
• 7. Exploring the “Sacred Imaginary”: The Black Madonna and Her Representations
• 8. Fourth Story: Marie
• 9. Practices for Transformation
• Notes
• Index