1 Christian Alchemy and the Big Two-Hearted River

THE CROSS OF LIGHT

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Christian Alchemy and the

Big Two-Hearted River

A two-hearted river.

A river with intuition on one bank and hopefully, logic on the other.

Where did this two-hearted river flow?

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It flowed here.

85% complete.

Kind of crazy.

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How did it get there?

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And why should you care?

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To answer that question I had to answer this question. Who is my audience ?

Initially and naively, my answer to that question was: “Everyone, of course!”

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As I reached the point of putting the final touches on this presentation, I finally had to make decisions and clarify what this process was and is about.

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This presentation is still for everyone. Yet practically speaking, the presentation contains three fundamental premises.

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Premise #1: In life, at some basic level, there is ‘much

more going on than meets the eye.’

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Premise #2: “There’s a new tribe arising…”

“… A tribe of people drawn together by

choice, not circumstance. A tribe united not by race or geography or history, …”

“…A tribe that has rejected the old idea of “us and them” and replaced it with the profound realization that there is only “us”. A tribe that knows we are all one.” - How Long is Now, Tim Freke pg. 7 12

Premise #3: Carl Jung articulated numerous

valuable and penetrating insights into the Christian religion and its symbols.

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There you have it. If you are even remotely open to these

ideas then please continue.

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Through this slide show I will attempt to recreate, as authentically as possible, my travels. Keep in mind that due to time and space constraints, much must be left out.

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In retrospect, it was as though the journey had begun on land. Thus…

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The hike

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The first 32 years on the trail. In 24 words or less, no less.

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Time on the trail.

First, life was very good to me. Then it was not so good. Then mostly good and some bad. Then addiction. Couldn’t stop. Despair…

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I found myself on the brink of a cliff, with nowhere to go and nowhere to hide. The trail, and my life, it seemed, were coming to an end.

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A paraphrase of author Eve Ensler:

I was dying but couldn’t figure out why.

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Then surrender.

It was as if I had then stumbled backwards off the edge of the cliff. Either that or the rock had given way beneath me. Either way, the analogy is descriptive as it illustrates how little conscious, critical intention was involved in my decisions. I was desperate.

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Somehow, I landed in something like a raft.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the raft must have been moored at the head waters of a kind of river.

Thus began…

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The Float Trip

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A chain of events then unfolded which helped me to realize…

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…that I was going to have to change how I traveled. Life was different. I was on water now. I needed new skills and new perceptions. I was beginning a life in “recovery”.

There would be more struggle. More growth. I would be: S-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d.

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A little ways down the river, quite unexpectedly, I experienced a tremendously profound moment - a speck of a glimpse of the eternal and my place in it.

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As transformative as that experience was, I had not been on the river for very long.

Again, due to time constraints, I will need to leave out many details and pick up the story of the journey at a point eleven years downstream.

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I contacted a spiritual mentor, Ray Dykes, a retired Presbyterian minister who lives in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

He challenged and supported me in clarifying my ideas and feelings regarding what I thought God was and wasn’t.

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Undoubtedly, many books might suffice, but after working with this book by Dr. Dykes, Personal Faith with a Passion - How to Know What You Really Believe, the water level began to rise and the current picked up speed.

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It was probably an odd place to start but…

…for whatever reason I have long enjoyed card tricks. I have dozens of gimmicked cards and card decks at home. So with the imagery of playing cards packed in “my backpack”, I started to think along these lines…

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If “God” were to be symbolized by a playing card, which card

would it be? ARCHETYPAL “GOD” ARCHETYPAL “GODDESS”

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Ace of Hearts

The king and queen made sense, but an ace seemed “higher” than both.

An ace is beyond gender.

It implies “one-ness”.

And clearly, the hearts imply “love”.

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God of the Old Testament

This is about as close to humor as I get in this presentation.

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Jack of Hearts

Embarrassingly enough, because of my “mystical” experience (the speck of a glimpse of the eternal and my place in it) I thought of myself, at the time, as being a “jack of hearts” in the spiritual hierarchy.

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I came to my senses and realized that grandiosity was at work. I must be way down at the other end of the spectrum.

Perhaps a two…

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Or a three.

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Three of hearts as Trinity

The three of hearts, brought to mind the idea of the Trinity.

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I was already heading right into some very turbulent water. The Trinity is a huge concept.

The many-tiered Trinity Falls.

This may not have been the only way, but this is how I navigated through its chaotic waters.

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The first tier of Trinity Falls.

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My father was raised in what was then called the Christian church, and my mother was raised in the Methodist church.

I was raised in Ethical Humanism, attended Unitarian Universalist churches as an adult and also consider myself a cultural Christian. I was therefore generally familiar with the idea of the Trinity. However, this doctrine was packed way down at the bottom of my “backpack”. Consequently it did not have much meaning for me.

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“Equivalent” terms.

After more reading, I came across these terms. They were more “accessible” concepts for me. I think this was because…

Creator = Father Uniter = Son Revealer = Holy

Spirit

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Creator. Uniter. Revealer.

“Creator” is a more gender neutral term than Father.

It also seems more expansive and less human being-like in form and that is more resonant to me.

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Creator. Uniter. Revealer.

The term “Uniter” as well, felt more descriptive of what Christ must have been or symbolized. There was no question that a sense of being “united” with something larger than myself had occurred.

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Creator. Uniter. Revealer.

…through my recovery and “mystical” type experience I had an emotional and cognitive connection to the term ”revealer”. It felt as if something very deep had been revealed.

This passage from the play A Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neal, beautifully describes this extremely elusive experience:

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“I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater that my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way.” “…Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see - and seeing the secret are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone lost in the fog…”

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That is such powerful writing.

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The second tier of Trinity Falls…

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…could be approached esoterically as: “three-ness”.

“One-ness”. Symbolized as a point. Mathematically, a dimensionless geometric element that exists outside time and space.

“Two-ness”. As matter comes into “being” (perhaps like a big bang) it produces duality. Subject and object. Thus, separation now exists.

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“Two-ness” (dualities) which arise together:

Hot Cold Spirit Matter Wave Particle “We” “Me” Female Male Un-manifested Manifested Intuition Reason

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“Three-ness”. Simultaneously, out of this separation is manifested the idea of the third, or all natures of relationship between all pairs of separated things.

This could just as well be “the 10,000 things”, or a “multiplicity”.

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The “third” is then any and all points along the continuum between any two extremes.

x y

cold hot

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“Trinity” or “Three-ness” is therefore also meaningful as a metaphorically relational number.

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The third tier of Trinity Falls. Jesus.

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Clearly, I have avoided talking specifically about Jesus.

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I had spent a great deal of time trying to figure out what was true about Jesus and what was not.

Even whether or not he was an actual historical person.

I felt like I had been frantically paddling in circles, trying to make sense of all of the passionate, yet tremendously divergent perspectives and possibilities.

The problem was that these arguments seemed to require that first and foremost I be an historian and/or anthropologist.

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I finally came to a resolution that allowed me to float further downstream. I will address that briefly, later in the trip.

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Other have undoubtedly taken different routes down Trinity Falls, encountered more tiers or travelled a different branch of the river altogether. But I had made it in one piece and needed to paddle into an eddy for a minute and take a break.

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Pause… Breathe… That’s long enough! Here comes more water.

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I didn’t know it at the time but the churning waters of the idea of the Devil, lay straight ahead…

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I learned that, “Satan, transliterated from Persian into Hebrew, means ‘the tempter’”. - Personal Faith with a Passion, Ray Dykes pg. 135

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That term, “the tempter”, seemed more descriptive of my experience and a much less emotionally loaded term than the “devil”. Being tempted is what struggling with an addiction can “feel like”.

I was struggling with powerful internal forces of desire, ego, resistance and a hundred kinds of fear.

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The “devil” again seems to be a metaphor which describes real drives, emotions, desires and states of being deep within our psyche.

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So clearly, I needed a fourth heart, to represent the idea of the “devil”. The heart symbolically could not be red but had to be dark or black.

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3 red and 1 black

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There is however, an oft-repeated phrase in addiction “circles” in which people describe themselves as, “grateful recovering alcoholics”.

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This phrase implies the principle that acknowledging directly the pain and consequences of alcoholism, addiction, “trouble” or suffering in general, opens up a new way of being in the world. This had certainly happened to me.

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3 red + 1 black with inner red

Therefore, an inner red heart must lie hidden at the core of the “shadow”. Small “consciousness” is embedded within large “unconsciousness”.

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The outline of the river thus began to look like this…

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Father = Creator

Son = Uniter

Holy Spirit = Revealer

Devil = Adversary

Tempter

“Unconsciousness”

Resistance

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This brought up the idea of “sin”. I paddled around this intellectually

and culturally difficult term for quite some time.

For most of my life I had not found the term to be very useful. So it was very helpful to learn that “sin” in the Greek language, was originally an archery term which meant to “miss the mark”.

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Sin in this sense seems synonymous with the Buddhist term “hindrances”.

Like blockages. Or to continue with the river analogy, our responses to the rocks, rapids, and logjams etc. that we encounter. The obstacles in one’s path that can make the life journey so difficult.

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“Missing the mark” includes the many ways our behaviors and thoughts “miss the mark” and the many ways in which we are on the receiving end of the poorly or well-aimed arrows of others.

I want to be careful to not minimize the term. These obstacles can be unimaginably challenging.

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The term “devil” had lead to the term “sin”.

“Sin” had lead to the term “evil”.

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Like “sin”, I found the term “evil” to be very problematic.

It is another very “loaded” term. It’s obviously complicated, but for what

it is worth, I currently perceive “evil” as meaning something like: actions or non-actions that are a result of profound “separation”, or profound “unconsciousness”.

This definition helped me with the following quote.

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John Shelby Spong wrote, in Why Christianity Must Change or Die, ”It is true that evil is not hard to find in human life, but it cannot be the defining and ultimate characteristic of our humanity…

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…Yet if the Christianity of the future does not take evil seriously, or if it cannot adequately explain the origins or acknowledge the depths of evil, then it will also not finally be an interpreter of human life. For evil is surely a part of our story. But so is human goodness. I suggest that they are intimately linked.”

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I am very grateful for having been raised with a “liberal” religious worldview.

The problem was that “liberal” religion for all it has given me had not been able to respond very well to my struggles with addiction.

Because I had not been able to “think” (in the sense of a “chain of reasoning”) my way out of my “broken-ness”, I began to wonder about the limits of “reason” alone. 78

In her article, To Pray without Apology – Why Martin Luther King Wasn’t a Unitarian Universalist, author Rosemary McNatt quotes Dr. King: “…Liberalism failed to see that reason by itself is little more than an instrument to justify man’s defensive ways of thinking. Reason, devoid of the purifying power of faith, can never free itself from distortions and rationalizations.”

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Reason is a great thing, but we should not rely solely on our intellect.

“Rational” can easily become “rationalization”.

“Faith” is a very difficult term. A great deal of time could be spent discussing whether it is the best term, in moving forward, to use or not. Regardless, “reason” seems to need a balancing complementary principle.

Regardless, quite unintentionally, the art-symbol incorporated a structure based on “4”.

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The Quaternity Tributary

Much later, I would learn that that pattern was a quaternity, a basic or archetypal structure based on the number 4. I was quite surprised to learn that the quaternity often occurs, according to Jung, in a ratio of: 3 + 1

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Another example of a quaternity.

XX XY

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Quite proud of myself, I showed “the card” to a close family member. She was un-moved.The symbolism had no meaning for her. At some level I knew she was right. More work would need to be done.

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So, with the playing card theme having taken me into a “backwater”, I paddled to a nearby island.

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On the island I found…

Hearts 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12+13 = 91

Clubs 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12+13 = 91

Spades 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12+13 = 91

Diamonds 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12+13 = 91

91+91+91+91 = 364 = days in year 364 +2 jokers = 364 + 1 + 1 leap day = 366 52 cards in a deck = 52 weeks in a year 13 cards per suit = 13 lunar months

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That was certainly interesting. After eating lunch I paddled to another

island…

Whereupon I came across this term from a book by Tim Freke and Peter Gandy…

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1

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The term, The Cross of Light, was the “bearing” I had been looking for. I felt certain I knew in which direction the main channel lay.

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I had often felt very frustrated by what I perceived as the divisive nature of American Christian leadership and their almost singular ability to avoid ideas of love, compassion and common ground.

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The idea of hearts and light incorporated with the cross seemed to be a meaningful way to get to the core of what I thought Christianity was supposed to be all about.

I briefly toyed with the idea of not using the cross because it had been “done before”. I wanted to create something unique.

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Although no other ideas had come to mind and it might have been a bit lazy, I am grateful for the realization that the point of all of this was not to be “creative” per se, but to serve some larger purpose. Perhaps this could help to bridge the gap with those Christians whom I admired yet often felt deeply disconnected.

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How to combine hearts and cross?

This “scribbling” shows my initial attempt at combining the hearts and the cross.

My daughter and I sat together as we tried to figure it out.

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A cross made of hearts

It then occurred to me not to place the hearts on or around the cross. The cross needed to be constructed of the hearts themselves.

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Thus the first computer graphic design looked like this.

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I needed to “eddy out” for another moment.

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Ah! A little spring. I took a closer look.

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The paired hearts resembled the numeral 8.

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

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The number 8 as mobius strip

The mobius strip.

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The number 8 as an analemma

‘8’ is the same shape that the sun traverses, as observed from one given point, over the course of one year. This time-lapsed photograph traces out an analemma.

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Infinity symbol

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The number “8” and Gematria

Gematria is the ancient practice of assigning a number value to each letter of the alphabet.

I had it pointed out to me recently that the Greeks didn’t have numerals, as distinct from letters, as we have today. They used letters with an assigned number value. Numerals haven’t always “just been around”. Numerals, as such, were a later development.

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I’d always felt a little uneasy about the concept of Gematria and thought it a bit of a stretch. But it recently occurred to me that we frequently come across this idea.

Roman numerals. Although not Greek, Roman numerals

are letters!

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In Greek Gematria, the word Jesus is often (but not always) rendered as:

IESOUS

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Gematria and IESOUS and 888

I E S O U S 10 + 8 + 200 + 70 + 400 + 200

= 888

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8 8 8

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…therefore each “arm” was changed from 2 pairs of hearts (88) to 3 pairs of hearts

(888).

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I want to be careful about number and letter connections because they can get complicated and a bit far-fetched if one is not careful.

Although this is not the resolution to the Jesus-Trinity dilemma that I talked about earlier, it does resonate as an interesting and potentially meaningful correspondence.

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That was a big day. Time to sleep. End of Day 1.

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