EXISTENTIAL/SOUL VIOLENCE
What Goya's Execution of the Rebels on the Third of May 1808 demonstrates for politics is also true for religion: we live with the threat of real and tangible existential violence. Those of us who have been on the shaming side of spiritual people know the deep and, at times, abidding wounds and injury caused by the wagging finger, the causal if not formal shunning, and the notion that our quest for God is bereft of any viable and legitimate connections to the Sacred. W. Paul Jones indicates that our goal is to help persons explore and understand their world to the point where they are able to stake their souls upon the God they encounter there. So it is that I believe our true calling as religious people is to help one another explore our differing paths, qundaries, and experiences of the Sacred so that we may be able to acclaim with Job, "I had heard rumors about You, but now my eys have seen You" (Job 42:5).
Says W. Paul Jones: "Each theological World can be a valid arena in which to live, move, and have one's being. No one World, as such, is better or more true than another. Neither can these Worlds be arranged so as to view some as elementary, others as more mature." Soul, or existential, violence occurs when we assume one World (usually my primary world) is better or more advanced than the other Worlds.
Points of Soul Violence
OBSESSIO (conundrum): the horn of human angst which gores us and leaves us wounded and bleeding.
W. Paul Jones describes the obsessios as: "…whatever funcitons deeply and prevasively in one's life as a defining quandary, a conundrum, a boggling of the mind, a hemorrhaging of the soul, a wound that bewilders healing, a mystification that renders one's life cryptic. Whatever inadequate words one might choose to describe it, an obsessio is that which so gets its teeth into a person that it establishes one's life as plot."
Failure to understand another's obsessio or conundrum is the act of disparaging another's path.
W. Paul Jones describes the obsessios as: "…whatever funcitons deeply and prevasively in one's life as a defining quandary, a conundrum, a boggling of the mind, a hemorrhaging of the soul, a wound that bewilders healing, a mystification that renders one's life cryptic. Whatever inadequate words one might choose to describe it, an obsessio is that which so gets its teeth into a person that it establishes one's life as plot."
Failure to understand another's obsessio or conundrum is the act of disparaging another's path.
EPIPHANIA (resolution): the healing balm which mends the gored soul. The "aha" resolution to the conundrum posed by the obsessio.
W. Paul Jones describes the epiphania as: "…that which keeps the function of obsessio fluid, hopeful, searching, restless, energized, intriguing, as a question worth pursuing for a lifetime. It keeps one's obsessio from becoming a fatal conclusion that signals futility."
Resolutions that differ from conclusions we personally draw give rise to many of the theological and spiritual debates we become involved in.
W. Paul Jones describes the epiphania as: "…that which keeps the function of obsessio fluid, hopeful, searching, restless, energized, intriguing, as a question worth pursuing for a lifetime. It keeps one's obsessio from becoming a fatal conclusion that signals futility."
Resolutions that differ from conclusions we personally draw give rise to many of the theological and spiritual debates we become involved in.
SPIRITUAL QUEST: the plot or "pulsating logic" between the motivating obsessio and the resolving epiphania. This is also the place where soulful violence occurs as it is assumed by many that their way into the heart of the God, through their World, is the best or only way into the heart of God.
I have loved the song She Don't Like Roses for a long time. If it speaks from the point of view of a particular World, I'll let you decide which one. What interest me here is the soul violence Christine Kane encounters in the form of bumper stickers which she speaks to as she introduces the song. I wonder if the encounter she relates following the song isn't also a form of violence in that the man seeks to insert himself into a life he has not been invited into (not to mention that he totaly misses that it's a fictitious life).
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In the article "Toward a Queer Theology of Flourishing" by Jakob Hero we find this wonderful exchange of ideas:
Grace M. Jantzen's distinction between a language of salvation and a language of flourishing is extremely helpful in naming the necessity of the latter linguistic framework when advocating a theology of growth and wholeness over brokenness and fear.
Fundamentally, the choice of the language of salvation rather than the language of flourishing both
denotes and reinforces an anthroplogy of a very particular kind. If we think in terms of salvation,
then the human condition must be conceptualized as a problematic state in which human beings
need urgent rescue, otherwise calamity or death will befall. The human situation is a negative one,
from which we need to be delivered.
Jantzen invites us to questions what the human situation might look like if instead of salvation we turn to a model of flourishing, answering: "We could then see human beings as having a natural inner capacity and dynamic, being able to draw on inner resources and interconnection with one another in the web of life, and having the ptential to develop into great fruitfulness… Whereas with the metaphor of salvation , God is seen as the savior who intervenes from outside the calamitous situation to bring about a rescue, the metaphor of flourishing would lead instead to an idea of the divine source and ground, an imminent divine incarnated within us and between us."
(Queer Religion, Vol 2: LGBT Movements and Queering Religion, pg. 148)
What Hero and Jantzen have discovered is that the role of "salvation" in the human condition is understood differently within the various Worlds; which is a marvelous and glorious understanding. What is inappropriate is the existential violence inacted when celebrating the metaphor of flourishing while disparaging the notion of salvation as rescue: basically intimating that World Three is better than World Four - soul violence against World Four citizens.
Grace M. Jantzen's distinction between a language of salvation and a language of flourishing is extremely helpful in naming the necessity of the latter linguistic framework when advocating a theology of growth and wholeness over brokenness and fear.
Fundamentally, the choice of the language of salvation rather than the language of flourishing both
denotes and reinforces an anthroplogy of a very particular kind. If we think in terms of salvation,
then the human condition must be conceptualized as a problematic state in which human beings
need urgent rescue, otherwise calamity or death will befall. The human situation is a negative one,
from which we need to be delivered.
Jantzen invites us to questions what the human situation might look like if instead of salvation we turn to a model of flourishing, answering: "We could then see human beings as having a natural inner capacity and dynamic, being able to draw on inner resources and interconnection with one another in the web of life, and having the ptential to develop into great fruitfulness… Whereas with the metaphor of salvation , God is seen as the savior who intervenes from outside the calamitous situation to bring about a rescue, the metaphor of flourishing would lead instead to an idea of the divine source and ground, an imminent divine incarnated within us and between us."
(Queer Religion, Vol 2: LGBT Movements and Queering Religion, pg. 148)
What Hero and Jantzen have discovered is that the role of "salvation" in the human condition is understood differently within the various Worlds; which is a marvelous and glorious understanding. What is inappropriate is the existential violence inacted when celebrating the metaphor of flourishing while disparaging the notion of salvation as rescue: basically intimating that World Three is better than World Four - soul violence against World Four citizens.