Imagined amends involving religious or spiritual creativity or misdeeds
The word ‘theism’ refers to all those religious traditions in which a God-being or some divine reality obliges human beings to (1) believe in a ‘supreme being’ and (2) practice ‘willing what God wills.’ A lucid description of such ‘theurgy’ has been provided by theologian Walter Wink in the passage below. Here Wink offers a concise theory of the efficacy of intercessory prayer in terms consistent with, but also opening vectors beyond, theistic traditions.
When we pray we . . . [engage] in an act of co-creation, in which one little sector of the universe rises up and becomes translucent, a vibratory centre of power that radiates the power of the universe . . .
An aperture opens in the praying person, permitting God to act without violating human freedom . . . [thus changing] what God can thereby do in that world.
Then intercession, far from being an escape from action, is a means of focusing for action and of creating action. By means of our intercessions we veritably cast fire upon the earth and trumpet the future into being.
Walter Wink, “History Belongs to the Intercessors,” Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination, (Fortress Press, 1992) pp. 298-304
By contrast, a non-theistic approach would describe agency while bracketing-out its source; deferring the issue of whether intention is grounded in or actualized by divine creativity or, rather, unaided human willpower. Our purpose here is to describe both approaches; that is, both
1) theistic, traditional or conventional religious approaches to imagining amends and
2) non-theistic, humanist or non-traditional spiritual approaches to imagined amends.
Examples of Non-Theistic, Non-Dualist or Humanist Transcendence
Contemporary metaphors drawn from the new physics encourage us to imagine a kind of ‘quantum entanglement’ as a dynamic flow that can occur when the conditions between two moments in time are optimized: the condition of willing the well-being of another being or event, and the condition of fully acknowledging either:
a) its need of love (love as willed well-being)–that is, its need as a singularity of innocence in a translucent or transparent field, or
b) its betrayal of love–that is, its ill-will entangled with innocence in an occluded or dark field of energy.
In that connection the process theologian, Marjorie Suchocki, has defined forgiveness using the following terms:
Forgiveness is willing the well-being of both victim and victimizer, with the fullest possible knowledge of the nature of the victimization.
Marjorie Suchocki, The Fall to Violence: Original Sin in Relational Theology; NY: Continuum, 1994, p. 145.
In her elaboration of that definition, Suchocki insists that this kind of forgiveness can be achieved without expressing feelings of love for perpetrators, and without necessarily embracing them into our lives or living spaces. If grace abounds, we may indeed choose to do so. But apart from warm feelings or empathy, we can deliberately will that perpetrators may experience a “transformation toward the good …even over against [our] feelings of revulsion and antipathy.”
Yes, Suchocki insists, we can “release” perpetrators in a way that effects a “direct intervention that has the power to break the cycle of violence” (Marjorie Suchocki, The Fall to Violence: Original Sin in Relational Theology; NY: Continuum, 1994, p. 145).
In these ways, moreover, we may reclaim ourselves as noble, honorable and praiseworthy human beings.
MORE COMING SOON . . .
