2013/05/24

Religion in need of therapy

Do you know how psychotherapy works?
    One of the common techniques is to identify some neglected, seemingly long-forgotten, often suppressed personal memories, and bring them up and process them in the open. It is important because we often only pretend we have forgotten, while the issues linger behind and strain our lives, just like things swept under rugs make walking on them quite difficult. Good psychotherapy is like cleaning under these rugs. If participants are diligent and honest, this simple technique can have a surprisingly cathartic, liberating, healing effect.
    Why am I writing about this in the Friday Message? Because the Revised Common Lectionary prescribes for us this Trinity Sunday a biblical text from the book of Proverbs (chapter 8) which can help us identify and deal with a bunch of baseballs hidden underneath the hallway rug. 
      If we want to live our faith honestly and without constant tripping, if we want to live and understand our Judeo-Christian faith in joy, we need to bring this text up, and process it in the open with all honesty. It can help us understand, process and deal with some unfortunate yet deeply rooted features (flaws) of our religion (results of ancient suppressions), such as deep-rooted misogyny, or seemingly unavoidable tension between faith and science, and last but not least our religion’s alienated relationship to nature. 
      This Sunday we will take our religion to therapy, we will do some under-carpet cleaning. We will attempt to take those baseballs out, with the hope that the path of our faith will become easier. And perhaps, later, we might even have some fun, go out and enjoy game of ball.
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In this (following) blog entry called "Lady Wisdom" is an attempt for an objective translation of Proverbs 8:22ff and an abbreviated reflection of its importance for the health of our today's religion.

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