Part 3 (2/2)

You will lie awake at night wondering how this could have happened to you. Jehovah is unfathomable.

You will be sustained by faith that the court ultimately won't punish you unjustly. Jehovah is sometimes merciful.

(It's worth repeating that Jehovah is just an ill.u.s.trative example-one could have subst.i.tuted Zeus or Indra.) Because his role is to protect, the G.o.d of stage one fails when the weak fall prey to illness, tragedy, or violence. He succeeds whenever we escape danger and survive crisis. In the mood of triumph his devotees feel chosen. They exult over their enemies and once again feel safe (for a while) because heaven is on their side.

Reason teaches us that aggression begets retaliation-we know this undeniably, given the tragic history of war. But there is a wall between the logic of the new brain, which is based upon reflection, observation, and the ability to see beyond bare survival, and the logic of the old brain. The old brain fights first-or runs away-and asks questions later.

Who am I? ...

A survivor.

At each stage the basic question, ”Who is G.o.d?” immediately raises other questions. The first of these is ”Who am I?” In stage one ident.i.ty is based upon the physical body and the environment. Survival is the foremost consideration here. If we look at biblical history, we find that the ancient Hebrews could survive in a harsh world much more easily than in a purposeless one. The hards.h.i.+ps of their lives were many-it took persistent, unending toil to raise crops from the land; enemies abounded; and being in the middle of a much larger nomadic culture, the Hebrews were caught up in one migration after another. How could this life of bare subsistence be reconciled with any sort of benign G.o.d?

One solution was to make him a capricious and unpredictable parent. This role is played out with great dramatic conviction in the Book of Genesis, which spends far more time over the fall of Adam and Eve than on their creation.

The first man and woman are the ultimate bad children. The sin they commit is to disobey G.o.d's dictum not to eat of the tree of knowledge. If we examine this act in symbolic terms, we see a father who is jealous of his adult prerogatives: he knows best, he holds the power, his word is law. To maintain this position, it is necessary that the children remain children, yet they yearn to grow up and have the same knowledge possessed by the father. Usually that is permissible, but G.o.d is the only father who was never a child himself. This makes him all the more unsympathetic, for his anger against Adam and Eve is irrational in its harshness. Here is his condemnation of Eve: I will increase your labor and your groaning, and in labor shall you bear children.

You shall be eager for your husband, and he shall be your master.

Eve has such a reputation as temptress that we forget one thing-she is not overtly s.e.xual until G.o.d makes her so. Being ”eager for your husband” is part of the curse, as is the pain of giving birth. The rest of family life will have to bear the sentence p.r.o.nounced upon G.o.d's son: With labor shall you win your food from the earth all the days of your life.

It will grow thorns and thistles for you, none but wild plants for you to eat.

You shall gain your bread by the sweat of your brow, until you return to the ground; for from it you were taken.

Dust you are, to dust shall you return.

This entire scene, which ends with Adam and Eve driven in shame from paradise, also divides a family, shattering the intimacy of the preceding days, when G.o.d would walk in Eden and enjoy himself with his children. But if paradise quickly turned into a faded dream-we are not far from the time when Cain kills his brother Abel-the lesson sank deep: humans are guilty.

They alone made the world harsh and difficult; on their heads falls the blame for the agony of childbirth and the backbreaking toil of eking out a living.

The Genesis story came about two thousand years before Christ and was written in final form by temple scribes, perhaps a thousand years after it originated. Women had been subjugated to men long before that, and the rigors of farming and childbearing are as old as humankind. So to arrive at the G.o.d of stage one, it was necessary to argue back from what already existed.

When they asked, ”Who am I?” the earliest writers of scripture knew that they were mortals subject to disease and famine. They had seen a huge percentage of babies die at birth, and many times their mothers perished as well. These conditions had to have a reason; therefore the family relations.h.i.+p with G.o.d got worked out in terms of sin, disobedience, and ignorance. Even so, G.o.d remained on the scene-he watches over Adam and Eve, despite the curse put upon them, and after a while he finds enough virtue in their descendant Noah to save him from the sentence of death placed upon every other offspring from the original seed family.

Another irony is at work here, however. The only character in the episode of Eve and the apple who seems to tell the truth is the serpent. He whispers in Eve's ear that G.o.d has forbidden them to eat of the tree of good and evil because it will give them knowledge and make them equal to the father. Here are his exact words after Eve informs him that if they eat of the forbidden fruit, they will die: Of course you will not die. G.o.d knows that as soon as you eat it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like G.o.ds, knowing both good and evil.

The serpent is holding out a world of awareness, independence, and decision making. All these things follow when you have knowledge. In other words, the serpent is advising G.o.d's children to grow up, and of course this is a temptation they cannot resist. Who could? (The famed authority on myth, Joseph Campbell, points out that at this time the wandering Hebrew tribes had moved into a territory where the prevailing religion was based on a wise, benign G.o.ddess of agriculture whose totem animal was the snake. In a complete reversal, the priests of Israel made the female the villain of the piece and her ally a wicked serpent.) Why would G.o.d want to oppose such a natural development in his children-why didn't he want them to have knowledge? He acts like the worst of abusive fathers, using fear and terror to keep his offspring in an infantile state. They never know when he will punish them next-worse than that, he gives no hope that the original curse will ever be removed. Good and bad actions are weighed, reward and punishment are handed out from the judge's bench, yet mankind cannot escape the burden of guilt, no matter how much virtue your life demonstrates.

Rather than viewing the G.o.d of stage one harshly, we need to realize how realistic he is. Life has been incredibly hard for many people, and deep psychological wounds are inflicted in family life. We all carry around memories of how difficult it was to grow up and at any given moment, we feel the tug of old, childish fears. The survivalist and the guilty child lurk just beneath the surface. The G.o.d of stage one salves these wounds and gives us a reason to believe that we will survive. At the same time he fuels our needs. As long as we need a protector, we will cling to the role of children.

How do I fit in? ...

I cope.

In stage one there is no indication that humans have a favored place in the cosmos-on the contrary. Natural forces are blind, and their power is beyond our control. Recently I saw a news report about a small town in Arkansas flattened by a tornado that struck in the middle of the night.

Those who had survived were awakened by a deafening roar in the darkness and had the presence of mind to run into their bas.e.m.e.nts. As they surveyed the wreckage of their lives, the dazed survivors mumbled the same response: I'm alive only by the grace of G.o.d.

They did not consider (nor express out loud) that the same G.o.d might have sent the storm. In crisis people seek ways to cope, and in stage one, G.o.d is a coping mechanism. This holds true wherever survival is in peril. In the worst ghetto areas ravaged by drugs and street crime, one finds the most intense faith. Horrible situations stretch our coping skills beyond their limits-the random death of children gunned down in school would be an example-and to escape complete despair, people will project beyond hopelessness, finding solace in a G.o.d who wants to protect them.

What is the nature of good and evil? ...

Good is safety, comfort, food, shelter, and family.

Evil is physical threat and abandonment.

An absolute standard of good and evil is something many people crave, particularly at a time when values seem to be crumbling. In stage one, good and evil seem to be very clear. Good derives from being safe; evil derives from being in danger. A good life has physical rewards-food, clothing, shelter, and a loving family-while if you lead a bad life you are left alone and abandoned, prey to physical danger. But is the picture really so clear?

Once again the family drama must be taken into account. Social workers are well aware that abused children have a strange desire to defend their parents. Even after years of beatings and emotional cruelty, it can be nearly impossible to get them to testify to the abuse. Their need for a protector is too strong-one could say that love and cruelty are so interwoven that the psyche can't separate them. If you try to remove the child from the abusive environment, he is deeply afraid that you are s.n.a.t.c.hing away his source of love. This confusion doesn't end with adulthood. The old brain has an overriding need for security, which is why so many abused wives defend their husbands and return to them. Good and evil become hopelessly confused.

The G.o.d of stage one is just as ambiguous. Twenty years ago I read a poignant fable about a town that was perfect. Everyone in it was healthy and happy, and the sun always shone on their doorsteps. The only mystery in the town was that every day a few people walked away, silently and giving no explanation. No one could figure out why this was happening, yet the phenomenon didn't end. We finally discover that a single child has been trapped by his parents in the bas.e.m.e.nt, where he is tortured, out of sight. Those who walk away know this secret, and for them perfection has come to an end. The vast majority don't know, or if they do, turn their heads the other way.

Fables can be read in many ways, but this one says something about our stage one G.o.d. Even if he is wors.h.i.+ped as a benign parent, one who never inflicted guilt upon us, his goodness is tainted by suffering. A father who provides with great love and generosity would be considered a good father, but not if he tortures one child. Anyone who considers himself a child of G.o.d has to consider this problem. Much of the time, as in the fable, it is papered over. The need for security is too great, and in addition there is only so much we can cope with at any one time.

How do I find G.o.d? ...

Through fear and loving devotion.

If the G.o.d of stage one is double-edged, providing with one hand and punis.h.i.+ng with the other, then he cannot be known only one way. Fear and love both come into play. For every biblical injunction to ”love the Lord thy G.o.d with all thy heart, all thy strength, and all thy soul,” there is a counterbalance. The injunction to ”fear the Lord” is expressly stated in all faiths, even the faiths supposedly based on love. (Jesus speaks quite openly about the evildoers who will be ”cast out with wailing and gnas.h.i.+ng of teeth.”) What this means in a deeper sense is that ambivalence is discouraged.

Peace of a sort rules in a family where the children are told simply to love their parents but also feel secret anger, hatred, and jealousy toward them. The ”official” emotion is only positive. An outsider may call this a false peace, but to the insider it works. But has negativity really gone away? It takes a great deal of growing up before one can live with ambivalence and its constant blending of dark and light, love and hate-this is the road not taken in stage one.

A friend of mine told me a touching story of the day he grew up, as he saw it. He was a protected, even coddled child whose parents were very private. He never saw them disagree; they were careful to draw the boundary between what the adults in the family discussed between themselves and what they told the children. This is psychologically healthy, and my friend remembers an almost idyllic childhood, free of anxiety and conflict.

Then one day when he was about ten, he woke up late one night to hear loud noises from downstairs. He felt a chill of fear, certain that some crime was taking place. After a moment he realized that his parents were having a loud argument. In great consternation he jumped up and ran downstairs.

When he entered the kitchen he saw the two of them confronting each other.

”Don't you lay a hand on her, or I'll kill you!” he shouted, rus.h.i.+ng at his father. His parents were bewildered and did everything they could to calm the boy down-there had been no violence, only an angry disagreement-but even though he eventually grasped the situation, something deep had changed. He no longer could believe in a perfect world.

The mixture of love and anger, peace and violence, that we all have to live with had dawned on him. In place of certainty there was now ambiguity-people he once trusted completely had showed that they possessed a darker side. By implication the same holds true for each of us and, by extension, for G.o.d.

Everyone must face this conflict, but we resolve it in different ways.

Some children try to preserve innocence by denying that its opposite exists; they turn into idealists and wishful thinkers. They show a strong streak of denial when anything ”negative” takes place and will remain anxious until the situation turns ”positive” again. Other children take sides, a.s.signing all the anxiety-provoking traits to a bad parent while labeling the other as always good. Both of these tactics fall under the category of coping mechanisms; therefore it comes as no surprise to find how much they invade religious belief in stage one, which is all about coping.

The good parent-bad parent solution takes the form of a cosmic battle between G.o.d and Satan. There is abundant proof in the Old Testament that Jehovah is willful and cruel enough to a.s.sume the role of bad parent by himself. Even a man of t.i.tanic righteousness like Moses is deprived in the end of being able to enter the promised land. No amount of fear and love, however you mix them, is enough to satisfy this G.o.d. His capriciousness knows no bounds. However, if this portrayal is unacceptable, there must be an ”adversary” (the literal meaning of Satan's name) to take the blame away from G.o.d. Satan appears in the Old Testament as tempter, deceiver, stealer of souls, and the fallen angel Lucifer, who through pride tried to usurp G.o.d's authority and had to be cast down to h.e.l.l. You could say that he is the light gone bad. But never once is he described as an aspect of G.o.d. The division between the two makes for a much simpler story, as it does for a child who has decided that one parent must be the good one and the other bad.

The other coping strategy, which involves denying the negative and seeking always to be positive, is just as common in religion. A lot of harm has to be overlooked to make G.o.d totally benign, yet people manage to do so. In the family drama, if there is more than one child, interpretations become fixed. One child will be absolutely sure that no abuse or conflict was ever present, while another will be just as certain that it was pervasive.

The power of interpretation is linked to consciousness; things can't exist if you are not conscious of them, no matter how real they may be to others. In religious terms, some believers are content to love G.o.d and fear him at the same time. This duality in no way involves any condemnation of the deity. He is still ”perfect” (meaning that he is always right) because those he punishes must be wrong.

In this case faith depends on a value system that is preordained. If some ill befalls me, I must have committed a sin, even if I didn't have any awareness of it. My task is to look deep enough until I find the flaw inside myself, and then I will see the perfect judgment G.o.d has rendered.

To someone outside the system, however, it appears that an abused child is figuring out, through convoluted logic, how to make himself wrong so that the cruel parent remains right. In stage one, G.o.d has to be right. If he isn't, the world becomes too dangerous to live in.

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