What you’ll learn
We all know that painful feeling of being at war with ourselves, and we are constantly on the lookout for ways to make ourselves whole. But some of our most common ways of striving for wholeness are dead ends. There’s codependency (a betrayal of wholeness), envy (a hankering for wholeness), workaholism (a barrier to wholeness), and perfectionism (a faux-wholeness). In this work of spiritual and psychological integration, Wilkie Au and Noreen Cannon weave together insights from Jesus and psychiatrist Carl Jung and show that faith and psychology, far from being worlds apart, bring genuine transformation when they move together.
- Spirituality and psychology are intimately intertwined, and we miss something critical when we tear one away from the other.
There is a temptation to divide psychology and spirituality and keep them separate, discrete domains that do not interact. “Finding wholeness is a psychological conversation, and becoming holy is a spiritual conversation,” some seem to imply—or even explicitly and vehemently declare. Some Christians see psychology as a hindrance or even a threat to spiritual development and becoming like Jesus. Other people prefer psychology and are deeply suspicious of formal religion after hearing stories of abuse and manipulation, or even experiencing that in their pasts. “Psychology is better off without spirituality,” they conclude.
In the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Mark’s account of Jesus’ life, we find a story where the spiritual and psychological converge and converse quite intimately. Mark tells a story of Jesus and his disciples encountering a demoniac from the region of Gerasene. He lived in a graveyard and no one came near him. The name he gives provides a window into how internally fractured he was: Legion. There was an army of presences within him until he had a moment of encounter with Jesus. People from the town were terrified to see him “clothed and in his right mind.” Whatever had him divided in his person, Jesus brought inner unity and clarity.
The story suggests that wholeness mattered to Jesus as well as holiness. Wholeness was not a psychologist’s brainchild—it was God’s. The God-given “urging of the heart” we have to be made whole, to become totally ourselves, tells us something important about the heart of God.
God wants to be incarnated in each of us in a unique way. As the love of Jesus brings greater wholeness to a person, that person’s inner catalogue of enemies becomes shorter and shorter. But our enemies are not just external. So often, the things we hate and reject in others are the very things we hate and reject in ourselves. This creates blocks in ourselves, with others and with God. But as we befriend hidden parts of ourselves that we hate and treat as enemies, we will find that the catalogue of self-hatred will also become shorter. We will feel increasingly integrated as we accept more and more of those inner parts.
Even though Mark’s account does not offer us an origin story for “Legion” the Gerasene demoniac, we do see the effects of self-imprisonment and profound fragmentation. This lack of internal cohesion left the man vulnerable to spiritual subjugation. Even if we never end up chained to tombstones and cutting ourselves open in a Near Eastern graveyard, each of us has experienced some form of rejection, abuse, or wound that has left us fragmented.
The example of Jesus and his invitation to each of us is to become whole and holy, repairing the psychological and the spiritual. One side without the other is incomplete. –Thinkr
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