Bad theology is like pornography – the imagination of a real relationship without the risk of one

‘Bad theology is like pornography – the imagination of a real relationship without the risk of one.’ William Paul Young 

‘There is no more unfortunate creature under the sun than a fetishist who yearns for a woman’s shoe and has to settle for the whole woman’ (Karl Kraus).

‘In the beginning was the Relationship’ – Richard Rohr
 “While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God’s creation.” Maya Angelou

I am about to delve into that sordid subject – spirituality. In certain circles it is considered all rather grubby… This territory, spiritual territory, is fertile ground for misinterpretation. For the sake of clarity I make a distinction between different aspects of spirituality. One aspect of it pertains to our value system, for which the German word ‘uberwelt’ or ‘over-world’ is more apt. The other obvious aspect to spirituality is GOD, or the Divine.
Pyramids were built in Central America and Africa thousands of years ago on different continents at roughly the same time – how can this be? Pyramids point upwards towards God – He is the Over Lord. It seems innately human to conceive of an all powerful God who oversees us, who judges us and mets out divine retribution. So much so the Mayans sacrificed up to 250,000 people a year to their wrathful Gods in the hope of appeasing them. Pyramids represent ‘uberwelt’ in architectural form. In simple humanistic terms the top of our own personal pyramids are our values – those ideas and beliefs that transcend and inform our day to day living. This pyramidal world view is authoritative and God or values are judgemental. Values at best are ways of discerning the right path and informing how we live and what we live for. In person centred therapy therapists distinguish between the ideal self and the organismic self (that is the true self). When these two selves are too far apart people are considered to be in a state of incongruence. It is only when these two selves align that the individual is considered to be on the path to self-actualisation. Or to put it another way if we don’t live according to our values we suffer from a sense of existential guilt and dis-ease.
Maya Angelou talks of the God of her childhood as punitive and punishing. She grew up, a black girl, in the Deep South of America during the thirties and forties when segregation was the norm and lynchings a irregular occurance. The white patriarchy meant that she thought God was white because whites were powerful and God had to be the colour of power. As a child she liked the book ‘Deuteronomy’ in the Bible as, ‘the laws were so absolute, so clearly set down, that I knew if a person truly wanted to avoid hell and brimstone, and being roasted forever in the devil’s fire, all she had to do was memorise Deuteronomy and follow its teaching, word for word.’ Yet confusingly she was told by her grandmother that God was love. “Just worry whether you’re being a good girl, then He will love you.” The God she was brought up with was so conditional – I will only love you if you are perfect. Yet with time her relationship to God or the Divine became deeply relational: “While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realise and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God’s creation.” How different and more nuanced a life might we lead if we see all of creation as Divine and not merely live according to objective, hard and fast rules that can’t possibly help us navigate this messy existence of ours.
Malala Yousafzai, winner of the novel peace prize, describes a wrathful God too. In 2005 a terrible earthquake happened in her native Pakistan and the first rescuers were fundamentalists who played on the populations fears. The earthquake was talked of as Gods wrath and the cure was to become fundamentalist. ‘If we did not mend our ways… more severe punishment would follow.’ Values and God are conflated in Malala’s story and Maya Angelou’s too. God is man-made in both. He is moulded into a shape that men define. An atheist has no need to have a man made God, he just has man made rules and values without the pretence. 
The experience of the spiritual as a set of authoritative laws to live by does serve a purpose. They can be a set of moral precepts to live by. Yet these moral precepts can be a means to enforce power and control by elites. As Marx said, ‘Religion is the opium of the people’. Uberwelt, or our transcendent value system, can at best be like the sun in our own individual skies. The values that guide how we live, soak downwards permeating our lives and act as a guide to our choices and actions. That’s why I find it helpful to codify my values from time to time and it is rich work to do with clients. But these values can be crushing when we or others don’t live by them or when more complex responses are expected of us. Values sometimes bely the fact we live in a messy and complex world where the mature individual has to be open to innumerable possibilities. Simplistic answers to complex questions will never be enough.
There is also a more nebulous aspect to spirituality which is often confused with religion but does not have to be. In this more nebulous aspect of spirituality the circle or the labyrinth or mandala is more apt as a map than the pyramid form.
Personally I see Divine within and between people. As Tillich said, “There is no place to which we could flee from God, which is outside of God”. Here Tillich sounds more like the voice of ancient animist religions that believed all of creation was the Divine. God for them was in each ear of corn, in their lover, in the mighty oak, in their dying father, in the flood and in the wind. I don’t think you need to believe in any God to relate to nature as Divine. This is a spirituality that we can all warm to and be warmed by.
Buber, the Jewish theologian, expressed this when he describes ‘all [true] living as relating’. If God, or the spiritual, or the Divine, or the transcendent, or love is inseparable from our being, and others being, then God is both within and without, thus the relational is the space of the Divine.
If we can stop projecting our image of God (or Yahweh, or Wicca, or Jesus, or Muhammad, or Thor or any of the pantheon of Gods) on to God and meet God in creation through the act of openly, lovingly and truthfully relating then according to Franciscan monk Rohr, we could start a revolution. This could even be a religion for the atheists as well as the religious, as it is humanist and deeply environmental – invested as it is in the dirt of human existence and found in the palaces of nature too.
But I want to take a step back a moment and ask the obvious question – if we are all Divine and the relational is Divine, how come there is so much evil, pain, fear and anger in the world? How come there is so much separation and so little connection? How come there is so much division and not love? From my own experience as a very human human and from my client work I would say that God is there when we fight our fear and drop down beyond our fear and self loathing into love. Most of us seesaw precariously between judging ourselves and others as good or bad, good or bad, good or bad – accepting what we like and rejecting what we don’t. This is coming through very strongly in our current political discourse and thus division is growing. And this partly stems from the unwieldy pyramid view we have of the world. Hitler, Trump, Stalin and all the many evil men who had enormous followings thought they were good. 
And if ‘Bad theology [or bad politics] is like pornography – the imagination of a real relationship without the risk of one’, how can we be connected and not masturbatory? How can we enter into true relations not fantasies of relations? Put another way, ‘there is no more unfortunate creature under the sun than a fetishist who yearns for a woman’s shoe and has to settle for the whole woman (Karl Kraus)’. Maybe it’s time we settled for the whole person, or the whole of creation, as the alternative is to be like the fetishist, always focused on but one small part, ignoring or rejecting what we don’t want or like. If I only want my fantasy of what the world is then I will always be averse to what it really is. A real relationship with myself and others calls for a commitment to truth and feeling. Imagine a world where we all started to make this commitment to true relating rather than the fantasy of a relationship. Imagine if we really saw we were all in the same boat, on the same planet and that our destiny is existentially bound together…