News Notebook Friday 6.18.21
Pirates, Presidents... and a Precious Attic-Monster
Happy Friday, remembering special dads this solstice weekend….
And big celebration-day greetings for our first-ever Juneteenth national holiday marking the end of slavery. The federal law was newly minted with the President’s signature Thursday after unanimous Senate and large bipartisan House passage.
It’s been very much a day-to-day news tracking week, with lots worth noting both here and abroad.
First, my coffee-spewer visual from The New York Times last Saturday morning: Pirates. Southern Baptist ones who looked like this.
across the news-scape
A main story is Joe Biden’s first presidential overseas trip, to Britain for the G-7 Conference then Summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. (The “Group of 7” nations are those whose economies are considered advanced. Russia has been excluded as the 8th since its 2014 takeover of Crimea.)
Taking these in reverse order to look first at the high-stakes Biden-Putin summit in Geneva, Switzerland, on Wednesday:
In separate news conferences after the meeting between the two leaders and top diplomat of each, both sides reported some common ground, but with clear fissures. The two did agree on putting their ambassadors back to work in their posts, a joint group to define future arms-control and on overall “strategic stability.” Putin described Biden as “a moral man” and expressed confidence in “earnest, honest diplomacy” that can change things. But he also repeated his usual messages of denial, blaming the U.S. and deflection on issues from cyber attacks and human rights violations to territorial abuses.
“I did what I came to do,” President Joe Biden said in his separate post-meeting news conference, citing his goal of creating stable meeting-ground and laying out such conflict-areas as cyber-attacks. “The last thing [Putin] wants now is a cold war. We have significant cyber-capabilities, and he knows it.”
Psychologically Putin’s statements, leadership stance and demeanor present a shadow view of Biden’s American diplomacy, yet also a chilling mirror of parts of America. Most striking were his deflections and whattaboutism — regarding cyber-hacking, human rights violations, even comparing U.S. rioters on January 6 to his political opponents who are jailed, poisoned, even disappeared for seeking democratic freedoms in Russia and areas it dominates. Ironically, this foreign adversarial leader, whose own soul’s very existence has for decades been addressed and questioned publicly by American leaders from George W. Bush to then-Vice President Joe Biden, serves as both shadow and mirror of the American soul? Chilling. (To refresh on definitions and terms you can click here.)
Looking now back to Cornwall in Britain for the G-7, these back-to-back stories running on an international stage present contrasts from newShrink’s American soul-search standpoint.
a glimpse at Biden’s Catholic faith
Here’s an upbeat take on how behavior of the American Christian-faithful, in this case the Bidens’ attendance of Mass, can play on the international stage. (It’s interesting here to hold that image of those “pirates” among some 16,000 Southern Baptists convening at the same time back home in Tennessee.) This, by all accounts diligently regular, faith-practice — I would say “inside-out,” soul level — behavior by a world leader and his wife was happily “gobsmacking” for the seaside town in Britain that just happened to be the site of the international G7 conference. And then…
a glimpse at Biden’s Catholic religion
Meanwhile, back in the states were efforts by politically conservative U.S. Catholic bishops to consider banning President Biden from taking communion in his Roman Catholic Church (because of his position that has evolved on abortion rights). This presents a vivid example of that institutional “outside-in,” what Jung termed the “small-s-self,” level of life experience. This collective doctrinal, control, rules-and-disciplines level is a needed and useful aspect for institutions and individuals. And in religious as with other life experience, it is distinct from and sometimes contrast to the “inside-out,” “soul’s code”-level of the sacred, of faith in whatever form it occurs.
Now a higher power (not that one, the Vatican in this story) must weigh in…
… and back to those Southern Baptists…
Even without the pirates, this week’s controversial convention of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, representing some 14 million Americans, has commandeered my news feed and attention for many reasons (not excluding my own direct and complicated experience as different kinds of “Baptist,” at both sublime and near-traumatizing, ends of the spectrum.) With nearly 16,000 delegate “messengers” this year’s Southern Baptist Convention, cancelled last year because of the pandemic, was the largest in 25 years and considered “a reckoning.”
Attendance surged amid controversies over:
leadership mishandling of sexual assaults,
alleged shifts “too far liberal” on the role of women in the church,
the threat of losing stalwart Black clergy and congregations over handling of the denomination’s white-supremacist roots and critical race theory on the one hand…
or on the other, losing support of ultra-conservative whites who oppose teaching any critical race theory in the church.
The pirates had been part of an emerging “insurgent” ultra-conservative wing aiming to “Take the Ship.” They sought even-more conservative stances under a popular candidate for convention president, Mike Stone of Atlanta and the far-right Conservative Baptist Network.
After Stone had led the first vote among four candidates, the pirates were overcome. More moderate Alabama pastor Ed Litton won in a runoff vote. This came amid both cheers and boos that leave uncertain many outcomes, other than the denomination’s continued staunch conservatism both theologically and politically. (Here’s a deeper look at the convention’s several current shadow themes and politics.)
The overlap of these very different faith and religion stories in this week’s news with my soul-tracking newShrink mission has been fresh reminder of the importance religion and faith had for C. G. Jung in both his life-story and the depth psychology work that emerged from it.
religion from the “outside-in” vs “inside-out”: Jung’s
The son and grandson of Swiss Protestant ministers on both sides of his family, Jung studied closely, and was deeply disturbed by, his pastor-father’s disciplined but pro forma service and sad lack or loss of faith. Jung’s concern over his father’s lack of faith greatly influenced his exploration of the depths and felt-experience of the soul and sacred that became his analytical psychology. A core principle in Jungian psychology is the religious function of the psyche, a universal striving and regard in us all for the sacred.
To refresh (from the May 30 Welcome post on the website) in Jung’s analytical psychology the “small s”/ego self (which I informally nickname “outside-in,” the level of self we all develop in youth to adapt to the world) and his “capital S” “inside-out” Self (our deepest, original soul’s code) are both levels of awareness in dynamic relationship within us throughout adulthood. Jung capitalized the soul-Self, because it is the aspect of us humans most deeply connected with the divine as we know it.
Over the doorway to his Kusnacht, Switzerland home-consulting room he had the carved Latin: Vocatus Atque Non Vocatus Deus Aderit, from the Greek oracle at Delphi, meaning: “Called or Not Called, God Will Be Present.”
religion from the “outside-in” vs “inside-out”: mine
All of which, abetted by those Southern Baptist pirates, brings me to a jolting new look at my own faith- and religion- experience: Specifically, how directly and early my connection to Jung’s writing and work with the “inside-out” of soul arose out of, as antidote to, my teens among the suburban Southern Baptists. With soul my week-to-week core topic here, I feel a reluctant disclosure obligation. (Somehow for me the taboo-topics sex, money or politics are easier than religion—and from the therapist in me, preferably other people’s!) Here I’ve created another dining-table gathering to help summarize where I am coming from:
My family of origin on both sides, and the Charlotte church of my youngest childhood, were largely independent liberal Baptist of the social-justice, Jimmy Carter, Martin Luther King, Jr. models of the faith (with a few bookish Presbyterian clergy in the mix.) But a move from city to suburbs and parental desire to support a fledgling neighborhood church put me just in time for puberty amid the “outside-in” of Southern Baptists: Altar-calls and “crusades,” total-immersion baptism in all its sensate detail, brutal mass “votes of confidence” against troubled pastors, and “all-your-Jewish-friends-are- going-to-hell” messages. So much of this, along with horrific politicized behavior by adults even back then, was so alien to my own direct soul experiences that stumbling somehow into Jung as a teen was life-giving (not to mention pretty weird!)
By youngish adulthood I’d found the way back to the independent, social-justice-oriented, theologically inquisitive, non-Southern Baptist Charlotte church of my earliest years—where I even had a Jungian Sunday School class! (Later moves in more recent decades here to the exurban hinterlands have put me among like-minded Methodists, sometimes collegiate Presbyterians. If geography and life ever cooperated, I’m probably most myself at home there as “that kind of Baptist.”)
So those Nashville-bound pirates sure commandeered my attention!
🦋💙
Transitioning from this news-packed week, a Southern CA reader sends a comic take on the challenge of living both the “outside-in” dailiness of life and news with our “inside-out” felt-experience or soul dimension.
For several follow-ups to last week’s focus on race and shadow, features and what’s ahead, on the website go to
I’ll close today with a longish but inspiring video with literary-horror-fiction phenom Stephen King. The nugget-filled personal interview with him begins here around 2:30 or 3 minutes in and escalates to a great finale. It’s an excellent example of soul-conscious life and the precious gold monsters we can find lurking in our darkest, most painful shadowy attics:
“Whatever it is, something chimes in you! I found something that resonates in my soul.”
NewShrink is public, so please do share:
And, that is all I have! Talk to you next Friday.
🦋💙tish
… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
PS + Footnotes
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/world/europe/biden-summit-putin.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/world/europe/biden-summit-putin.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/u-k-churchgoers-stunned-bidens-join-them-sunday-service-n1270608
https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2021/06/14/biden-catholic-president-usscb-bishops-abortion-communion/
https://www-nytimes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/world/europe/biden-vatican-communion-abortion.amp.html#
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/12/us/southern-baptists-conservatives.html?referringSource=articleShare
https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2021/06/14/southern-baptist-reckoning-race-gender-abuse/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/us/southern-baptist-convention-president-runoff.html?referringSource=articleShare
https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2021/06/05/russell-moore-southern-baptist-sex-abuse-allegations/
—