Bow
Down
“Bowing
promotes the dialectical relationship between conscious and unconscious so that
the ego does not suffer too much identification with the Self or too much
alienation from the Self.”
Jerry
R. Wright (“Thin Places and Thin Times,” Irish Culture and Depth Psychology, Spring
Vol. 79, 2008)
Carl
Jung wrote extensively about the numinous experience. Most of us have one or
two experiences in a lifetime in which we are momentarily transported out of
our everyday selves into a moment of transcendent joy—a breakthrough of the
holy into the earthly ordinary. These encounters are marked by awe in which we
are struck silent, and sometimes overwhelmed. The image that comes to mind is
from the Christmas story, when the shepherds out in the fields were suddenly confronted
by an agnel who brought them word of Jesus’ birth. We are told that the “glory
of the Lord showed all around them” (Luke 2) and the response of the
shepherds was to be “terrified.” In almost every numinous encounter,
biblical people “fell on their faces” or “fell to the ground.” Have you ever
received news that caused your knees to buckle and, instantly, you were
kneeling on the ground?
The
word “numinous” literally means “a nod from the gods.” According to
Jerry Wright, the “appropriate human response seems to be a reciprocal nod
or bow.” My formative years were spent in the Episcopal church, at a time
when girls and women had to cover their heads to be allowed into the sanctuary.
As soon as you entered, you bowed, before you entered your pew, you bowed, and when you put your kneeler down to pray, you bowed. All this was to ensure that everyone
knew their proper place in relation to the Holy. In other words, you checked
your ego at the door. You acknowledged your fragile humanity in the presence of
the divine.
There
are other ways that the sacred breaks through into normalcy. Sometimes we
see or hear something that simply changes everything—something that changes who
we are, or what we believe. We walk away knowing “I will never be the same again.”
One of my sons said this after he stood on Hadrian’s Wall. Some feel it at the
wailing wall in Jerusalem, or at Stonehenge in the UK, or in the pyramids of Gaza.
For me, it happened in the desert of southern Arizona when a sunset, the likes
of which I had never experienced, seemed close enough to touch. When something
numinous momentarily bursts into consciousness and we are forever changed. We
are somehow made new—reborn, with a different awareness of what is real and
what is not.
Having what
Jung called a “religious attitude” is essential to healing. I’m not talking
about a particular religion like Muslim or Christian, but an attitude that
holiness exists, that we are in the company of angels, in the presence of
divinity, and furthermore, that we are part of something much bigger than we
think. This attitude, all by itself, is healing. And if we are part of that, so
are others, regardless of their differences, and so is this earth and all its
creatures. We exist in holiness. The gods have nodded, and we should bow.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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