I’m starting today by saying the thing out loud that we don’t want to say. Sometimes, at some point in your Christian walk, getting closer to Jesus is actually scary. It’s scary, maybe because you are confronting sinful habits that seem relentless, or it's scary because what does surrender actually mean? (And yes, I see you singles out there who are afraid surrender means you’ll never get married). Or maybe it's scary because God is showing something about yourself that is genuinely hard to look at.
Jung once said, “To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse.” In other words, God is interested in helping you shed the layers of yourself that feel incredibly safe but are actually not the blessing He intends for you. And if you are doing Christianity or Jungian psychology in the right way, you will have many of these moments when God asks you to take on some very scary changes, and I am here to tell you that it is incredibly REWARDING if you are willing to try. And I do mean the word try: because we don’t always get this right, but God in His holy mercy, is able to work with our tries, but He can’t work with our no’s.
So, the early Christian church had a word for this type of Christian: they were followers of “The Way.” We are going to meet them this week and see why the reward of a contemplative, surrendered path is so gratifying: for the early Christians, and maybe even more so, for us.
Where We Are
Every Sunday, I (Angela Meer) write an in-depth article for 10 weeks about one subject that bridges Jungian psychology and Christian contemplation. This current series is the Christian contemplation foundation series and we are just looking at the basics of this ancient Christian practice and what it can bring us in this day and age. The last two weeks covered how we need both Spirit and Truth (John 4), and that God operates in a numinous way to arouse us to Him. This week, we are going to look at three contemplatives:
The early church, which named itself “The Way.”
Carl Jung, who understood the interior life
And Teresa of Avila who wrote Interior Castle and established in narrative form the inner life
The Way: The Early Church’s Understanding of Following Jesus
Jesus declared in John 10 that He was “the way, the truth, and the life.” That trifecta embedded itself into the early church as a moniker, and Acts 9 records these young initiates to the fastest-growing religion as followers of “The Way.” The word here in Greek is the word hodos, which means road, and it carries an idea that we are on a journey with God, we are on a path. Which is, perhaps, an underrated representation of the Christian walk (see what I did there?). When we recognize, like the early Christians, that we are sojourning along this path, it changes how we view Christian formation and discipleship. ALL of the Christian walk is a hodos, a way, toward Jesus and toward the path He has created for us. We do not arrive. We journey. Just like Moses at the burning bush concerned with his speech, just like Jeremiah being formed in the womb (Jer 1), we are part of this grand unfolding of a narrative that has us as the center of the cosmic love story.
But…
Holding to these ideas often counters modern ideas about theology, and having your theology as a pinnacle, rather than the relationship with The Way (as Jesus), has been a crucial shift away from what the early church taught. Which is why a contemplative Christian experience returns us to this holy ordering. Christian contemplation requires a slowing down, a stillness, and it allows for us to meet God on the inside of us, just like it says here: …"your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, 'This is the way. Walk in it'" (Isaiah 30:21). We have been conditioned by the world to ignore these prompts of stillness, and a lot of times, we run away from them, unsure of what it means to fully surrender our lives to Christ. And if that’s you, keep reading.
What Jung Noticed
Jung realized that the inner “Way” was often trapped beneath layers of social conditioning (persona), patterns of control and fear (ego), and elements of our personality that we did not want to look at (shadow). If a person were able to find their way out from all these layers, they would genuinely live out their life in this world as an authentic person who was aligned with the inner “Way” within. Jung even went as far as to say that Jesus was the perfect example of someone who had become Himself completely, authentic to His calling and His inner relationship with God. I hope you are really taking that in, because that idea is a marvel to me.
Consider that Jesus wasn’t only a savior, but the example by which we become ourselves. That was in many ways what Jung was saying, and he often spoke of Jesus in this way. When we are struggling with the fear that God is asking something of us that we can't surrender, or that our walk with God is asking us to push beyond what we can say yes to, know that THIS is the greatest reward in life that God is wanting to bring us to: the idea that we can become fully, authentically ourselves. Not some copy of someone online: we can become our fullest self, our fullest measure of what we are called to, AND have a peaceful, aligned way of life. When we are fearful about what God is asking us to do, or when we are scared that He might ask something huge of us, we can trust that He will never ask us to do something that is misaligned with His authenticity living through us.
An Interior Castle
Before Jung, by several hundred years, there was a Spanish Carmelite nun named Teresa of Avila that captured Jung’s ideas beautifully. Teresa understood that the interior life was a rich place where her relationship with Jesus could be cultivated. She named that experience the “Interior Castle” because she envisioned her soul as that castle with many rooms, but Jesus was in the centermost room. Each room had challenges and obstacles that prevented her from getting to Jesus, and sometimes in her experience with God, she would have to deal with the outer rooms in order to arrive at Jesus.
Teresa did not see this as the ultimate self-improvement project that helped her gain authenticity, rather she saw it as the “Way” in which prayer, and quiet contemplation, sometimes through battles of the ego and fears of the future are fought, so that she could arrive at Christ, and achieve an authentic, loving life as a byproduct.
My Way Along into the Interior Castle
I can speak from a place of understanding these struggles intimately. I feared never getting married. I feared what God would ask of me. I feared that total surrender meant a total elimination of my personality and who I am. Nothing could be further than the truth. I actually really like seeing my own personality come out these days and not being bound under layers of ego and shame.
I have Cerebral Palsy that affects my right side and that physical difference often hindered me significantly, as I suppose Moses’s stutter did, as well. This disability taught me as a child to hide all of my weaknesses and struggles, to hide my fears, to confidently project, and a whole lot of other shame-based behaviors as well. Moving through each of these layers has been terribly hard as I put aside my old survival strategies and embrace God’s love and desire for me. I can confidently say that NO TREASURE in my life has been more rewarding than the inner life of contemplation that carries with it the promise of God excavating my unique personality from those layers.
So How Do You Face the Fears that God is Asking Too Much of You?
Modern Christianity has offered us very few ways to deal with the fears that come up in walking with God. When we tell people to have “More faith” we are only putting more shame on them, instead of seeing them healed. But unfortunately, the Church has not come up with better answers than this. This is why returning to a contemplative path is so rewarding; because we are given tools to carry these fears to God in prayer. And those prayers can be artistic, in nature, through music, by going into our interior castle, and more…it gives us a rich and rewarding place to be exactly what we are RIGHT NOW in this journey on the “Way,” not as something we think we will be someday, or should be today. Contemplative Christianity says, “No, come as you are now. Don’t hide those fears, just offer them back to Me.”
Ready to Get Going on Your “Way”?
In the paid article this week, I offer:
A walk through Teresa of Ávila's Interior Castle, room by room, and where your fears fit inside it
The Castle Door Practice: a 15-minute contemplative prayer for bringing one fear to Christ, step by step
Three short companion practices for your body, your prayer, and your journal
Four Scripture-rooted tests for telling a holy undoing from plain anxiety, with journaling questions and a seven-day tracker