A non-relating
Christ
Imagine what it would
be. Christ became incarnated, grew up, walked
around tiny towns of Judea, miraculously healing
the sick, vanquishing evil spirits, telling the
crowds that “blessed are the poor” and “turn the
other chick”. He would do this in a very general
way, as someone who has a mission, the words to
deliver to the general audience. He would do
what was described in the Gospels but would do
that without relating to others. No, He would
not be silent when the apostles woke Him up when
they thought their boat was sinking – He would
simply say “waves, be quiet” and then, without
adding “why do you have such little faith?” to
the apostles return back to his cushion.
Actually, He could
still say those words but in a very impersonal
way, without truly connecting with his
disciples, heart to heart. One can say “I love
you” in a way that another feels being stabbed,
so obvious is the lie. He could also enter
Jerusalem without making personal points and, in
the same non-relating way, become crucified and
die. He could, as well, pray for those who
crucified Him but do this in an empty way, just
because the Son of God must say those words. It
is fitting His previous teaching. A Christian
must pray for the enemies, and He also must give
us an example – perhaps He uttered those words
just for that reason. He could say them
silently; after all, the Father still would hear
Him.
The striking thing
about the Gospels is that they do not say, as
the novels do, anything about how the people
there look, or about their intonation etc. but
they are all somehow very alive and very
visible. They are visible and come to a life
via the response of Christ to them. An
impersonal “woman with an issue of blood” who
touched the hem of His cloth in a hope of a cure
becomes, via His response to her, very clearly
visible to us in His words “go daughter, your
faith saved you”.
Noteworthy, Christ in
that episode (as it is related in the Gospel of
Mark) seems to need to see the one who
touched Him and this is why He asks who did it
and continues to insist despite the very
reasonable statement of the apostles that He is
in the middle of a crowd and everyone presses
Him so how can they – and He – know. Obviously,
since He had no trouble seeing Nathaniel under
the fig tree before Nathaniel was called, by
Philip, to come to see Him [and even before
Nathaniel was born] He did not need to
physically see the one who touched Him. It
appears that He wants a woman who hid herself in
the crowd to come out for the sole purpose of
relating to each other in person, via the act of
seeing each other. By that very act of
His we see that woman now as she is under the
magnifying glass. She literally pops up from the
pages of the Gospels. It is quite astonishing
because no “literary methods” of description
etc. is employed like the description of the
woman’s face, how she looked at Christ etc. She
is alive to us because He saw her soul, “your
faith saved you”. She knows she was seen = her
soul was seen by Him and she feels fully alive,
and we feel it as well.
There is something
else there. In that little fragment the woman
with the issue of blood is as “big” or clear or
convincing, a figure, as Christ. He does not
look down to her but simply relates. Much more
can be said about this episode, I only would
like to highlight that the woman believed in
Christ already, and she obtained her cure
already, by mere touching His cloth i.e. being
“non-seen” by Him and not seeing Him, not
engaging eyes-to-eyes and soul-to soul. However,
it was not enough, from Christ’s point of view.
The theme of Him healing others and then looking
intently into them, searching for the response
not to “Him a great teacher”, not to “Him a
miracle worker” etc. but to Him as He is,
the Son of God and the Son of Man, the Person
fully human and fully divine, appears in the
multitude of His interaction with the others.
One especially telling
example comes to a mind, when after restoring
the sight to a blind man Christ later finds him
and asks “do you believe in the Son of God?”
“And who is he so I would believe in him?” –
asks the former blind man. “It is the One who is
speaking to you”. And then something happens,
via the former blind man looking at Christ and
Christ – at him, a moment of recognition of Him,
something many Christians can relate to because
they experienced it themselves, including via
reading those very encounters. The glimpses
into the Person of Christ, human and divine,
made visible via His relating to other persons
and those others relating to Him is precisely
what makes it possible for us to connect with
Him and to recognise Him as such. Again, Christ
did not say: “do you believe in the Son of God
because He returned your sight?” (a spectacular
miracle it is, prophets could do this as well;
this is why the former blind man thought Him to
be a prophet, “a man of God”) but He asks “do
you believe in the Son of God = Me Whom you see
in front of you?” [It is almost as the
restoration of the physical sight was necessary
so the blind could see = could relate; of course
the physically blind can and do believe in
Christ, I am discussing strictly “seeing”
understood as “relating to the other”] The
transformation of a human being into one who
believes in Christ takes a place not in a moment
of cure or other interferences of the Divine
into a human life but in the moment of the
response of a human psyche to the attempt of the
Divine to communicate, in the Person of Christ.
The words “God the Person Who relates to the
other person and wants to be related to as the
Person by the other person” are the key.
It is so important
that I cannot highlight it enough: this response
of a human being is always a response to the
demand for that response, by Christ, Who
addresses each person individually. But there is
even more: not only Christ relates, He is
desperate to relate and tirelessly does so, at
the price, as we can see, of the Passion and
Crucifixion. Apart from many other sides of the
Crucifixion, it is a completely logical outcome
of His attempts to relate to the others as He is
and as they are. I will even add that,
speculatively speaking, the Crucifixion could
not take place otherwise. Furthermore, if Christ
related to others as He is but not as they are –
a pure speculation of course because one cannot
go without the other – the Crucifixion would
also not take place. Leaving aside the idea of a
“fake Messiah, a blasphemer” for which He was
allegedly crucified and also other
considerations about the necessity of the
Atonement and
considering the matter psychologically He was
crucified precisely by those who could not stand
Him seeing them as they were. And even if we
take into account “a fake Messiah” as a reason
to crucify Him I doubt that it is the real
reason. There were many fake Messiahs at that
time (just like in ours); it is quite easy to
ignore them even if they attempt to annoy you in
person (like some street preachers who literally
grab your sleeve demanding a response) if you do
not have that disturbing gnawing feeling that in
the light of the “fake Messiah”, the pathetic
fake indeed, you are nothing and worse even, you
are probably a fake. Hence it is “the fake
Person” against another fake person, me against
Him, my perception of myself against His
perception of me; the very existence of His fake
makes me appear to be a fake – so what should I
do? The solution is made easy by the doubtless
fact that He is a fake. It is not a crime to
kill a fake, especially if by doing so I, the
real person, am saving myself.
To be seen by
Christ
I read somewhere that
the Gospels are a portrait of Christ. I would
add, in the context of what was said above, that
the Gospels are the portrait of Christ in
motion, created not just by the observers of Him
but by Christ Himself, via revealing His
personal reaction to other persons including the
observers. And furthermore – via reading the
Gospels and relating to various people to whom
Christ relates there the reader somehow becomes
the subject of Christ’s relating to him or her.
Here is the point that distinguishes the Gospels
from the rest of anything ever written: none of
it can produce, in a reader, the sense of being
seen by the main hero, without even mentioning
this possibility. In fact, being mentioned, such
a possibility immediately cancels itself.
I note here, in
relation to the notion “the Gospels are the
portrait of Christ”, the living portrait through
which not only we look at Christ but He looks at
us as well, that the Orthodox icon which depicts
Our Lord as on a portrait (a single figure), has
exactly the same quality – Christ on an icon
looks at a person intently, His eyes always meet
ours wherever we stand and the way He looks
somehow pulls us closer to Him, into the iconic
space which is the depiction of the Kingdom of
God.
I do not know if I
managed to convey that Christ, being properly
depicted, in colours and words, always relates
to the other. And not just “relates”. He treats
the other person in a way the latter feels that
he or she is fully seen, as a person, that she
is very important for Him. There is nothing
flattering about such attention – He was equally
attentive to the Pharisees or Judas when He
condemned them. It is nothing else but seeing
the other as she is and relating to that depth
in the soul of the other, regardless of
appearances. At a given moment, the most
important for Christ is to crack into the
other’s soul providing her with an opportunity
to… yes, again, to respond in truth, to relate
to Him. Precisely because of this, the icons
which depict Our Lord doing something to/with
the other and not looking at him or her are
profoundly false. An example: Christ, on some
icons called ‘Walking on Water’, is pulling
drowning apostle Peter up and looking not at him
but at the viewer, as if to say “Look at me,
what I am doing!”
Interestingly, here we
have Christ relating to the viewer but in an
entirely artificial, non-Christ-like, and
therefore unconvincing, way. Worse yet, this
artificial “relating” to the viewer distorts and
even nullifies the true mode of how the true
Christ relates to a viewer, via apostle Peter
with whom the viewer is supposed to identify
himself, psychologically. As a result, instead
of feeling that the Lord truly cares, for Peter
and for him, a viewer is left with the sense
that Christ cares primary about the viewer’s
perception of His mighty deed. The fact that
Peter jumped into the water on the call of the
Lord to believe that it is Him indeed makes that
subtly wrong representation of Christ
particularly worthy to ponder at. “Lord, if it
is You, order me to come to You on water” He
[Christ] said “Go.” And then “Peter became
scared and, drowning, screamed “Lord, save me!”
Jesus immediately stretched out His hand,
supported him and said “Man of little faith! Why
did you doubt?”
I cannot imagine the
Lord saying and doing all those things and not
looking at Peter; if He did His behaviour
effectively would communicate the following:
“believe that I is I and come to Me by the way
of blind faith but you cannot count that I will
see you.” In effect, it says “I will not save
you, Peter, a particular person, you will
get saved because you happened to be an actor in
a grand scene, an unnamed one in the admiring
crowd.”
Such “relating” to
Peter would be of course extremely odd, from a
human point of view. Here we do not deal with
any high theological ideas but only with
[conveyed] abnormal human behaviour of the One
in Whom the human nature is perfected. However,
this psychologically aberrant representation of
Christ the Person distorts Him as Son of Man and
Son of God both i.e. the abnormal psychology of
this icon blows off the theology.
I was discussing the
twisted representation of our Lord at such
length because I have been trying to provide the
reader with a sense of something inexplicable
that seems to lurk there, similar to something I
experienced before in a different circumstance
that will be addressed later. The icon
discussed above does not depict the non-relating
Christ but presents Him in a way that He appears
to relate while He really does not.
Furthermore, this representation is somehow
rationally defendable. For example, “an icon is
a sign, not a realistic depiction” or “He is
God, he can save and not look” or “He is looking
at you”. God can save without looking
physically. The icon is a sign, if one means
that it points to the reality of the Incarnation
and shows that reality at the time. Christ is
indeed looking at the viewer. It sounds OK until
the “personal factor” comes into the picture. It
is only in the attempt of a believer to connect
with Christ via that icon its falsity – and the
falsity of the apparently sound arguments above
– is felt by him albeit vaguely.
The notion of relating
to = seeing the other is taken and its kernel,
empathy, is removed from the preserved shell.
Christ on the icon now looks at the other but
does not see him as a person and it is felt by
that person. Because of that Christ – the real
Christ – now cannot be seen = to be related to,
as well. And – back to something lurking – His
invisibility and non-availability for personal
relationship is conveyed not via the removal of
His image but via presenting the flawless image
of Him, meticulously painted in accordance with
the iconographic canon, with all His likeness
and very recognizable facial features. It is
Him, just the eyes and the spirit that are not
His.
A personal aspect
of Salvation
My point, made by the
means of psychology, that Our Lord cannot be
described and understood without the notion of
the relationship with others can be easily
backed up theologically/dogmatically. God is
Love; He is not a monad engaged in self-love but
is the relationship of three Persons in mutual
selfless love. Jesus Christ, being Love and
Truth Incarnate, can relate to human beings only
in His own true mode that is selfless love. And
Love cannot be content without expressing
itself, without relating to its subject, that is
the creation and each of us. Hence Christ who
does all that He is supposed to do including the
Atonement but is non-relating to us is not
Christ but His opposite, quite a dead figure.
This is a strong
statement. It came unexpectedly as a result of
my mental exercise, to imagine a non-relating
Lord. The Atonement would not make sense if the
Lord did not relate to the people around Him and
to us because such non-relating, despite all the
necessary actions, would silently state: “I do
not care about you, I do not see each of you”.
Human nature would be brought to the Cross and
then get resurrected but it would be the human
nature that is without personhood
(personhood cannot be without relating to other
persons). Hence the humane persons would
have no chance to be resurrected.
It is not enough
for me to know that someone named Jesus
Christ sacrificed Himself and somehow now my
sins are forgiven as a result. To appreciate
this fact I must understand why it has
anything to do with to me. But an intellectual
understanding alone will not do; I must
experience, one way or another, that the unknown
to me person called Jesus Christ did it for
my sake, for my person and even more – I
must feel that it is true and not some tale
crafted to make me “be good”. I must experience
some of truth of that, quiet irrational, notion.
Something or someone that tells about this
strange fact must also give me an opportunity to
meet that Jesus Christ. I must myself
experience, via the source of information, that
He loves me, not “loved” but loves and wants to
deal with me. “If you love Me you will keep My
commandments.” To love Him I must experience His
love first. The abstract story about the
Atonement will not do; it must be applied to
me, to my life now.
I must restate here
that the Gospels do exactly that i.e. they
provide the reader with a personal experience of
Christ, first of the witnesses and then, if the
reader allows it, with his own, even if very
dim. It is not the facts of Christ’s Atonement
or miracles or high ethic/morals of His teaching
make Him believable but meeting His Person, via
the Gospels or other means, gives the meaning
and the reality to the Atonement and miracles or
ethics/moral teaching. The idea of Atonement was
very understandable to the ancient Jews but,
taken abstractly, says nothing to modern people
(at least it is not something that can move them
to change their life radically). The same goes
about the idea of the Messiah. Equally, not many
seem to realise their own insufficiency and
misery, the meaninglessness of their own life
without “something more”, painfully enough to
wish “to be saved”. The high ethics and morals
are by no means something exclusive – they can
be found in other teachings and movement so they
do not make Christ something special. Hence,
nothing in the discourse of the Gospels can move
a person to believe in Christ, apart from
something irrational, some sudden vague
intuition that “it must be true– yes, He is
real!” Known to me accounts of conversions to
Christianity typically include this element of
“feeling Him”, “feeling it is true”, “He is
real” – in one word, various encounters of
Christ Himself, as the Person or the sense of
Him as the Person, even if very dim and also,
very importantly, the sense that this discovery
somehow demands from them to do something about
it. I.e., there was always that element of being
personally related to which demands them to
relate back, to answer.
A point of entry
The reader may wonder
what am I doing here, why am I trying to prove
(over five pages already) that Jesus Christ
relates. The whole host of Christian
literature, beginning from ‘Acts’, is the record
and product of such relating. Probably even an
atheist would agree that Christ relates,
as a fictional character of course, but He does,
to the deluded believers in Him. Interestingly,
an atheist would not deny that He relates to a
believer providing that he adds “it is only
self-hypnosis of course”. He may say “God does
not speak to you, you are mad” but will not say
“Christ as a person, albeit fictional cannot
relate to another person”. Why? – First, because
a normal person = a person with a normal psyche,
whether real or a fictional character, relates
to others. Second, because the facts (fiction of
course) in the Gospels clearly state otherwise.
Third, because, if Christ indeed did not relate
to others, there would be no need to try to
prove that Christianity is nonsense.
Various anti-Christian
arguments typically follow two roads. One,
“philosophical”, attempts to make Christian
teaching nonsense from an existential point of
view; another – “scientific”, tries to prove the
sheer incompatibility of the mind enlightened by
modern science with Christian faith. Their
meeting point, a “psychological” or
“psychoanalytical” way of dealing with
Christianity, undertakes to interpret religious
experience as various disorders of the
oppressed/undeveloped psyche. None of them can
cause any real harm to a practising believer who
already has a personal relationship with God
i.e. who is beginning to know Christ and himself
as well, via that relationship. “Your theology
is crap” will not work. “You escape into a
delusion because you are weak” will also not
work. “Your experiences of Christ are delirium”
will work even less.
Those statements are
not effective for several reasons. The accuser
is outside of faith hence his handling of the
Christian phenomena is too crude and therefore
unconvincing no matter how much study of
Christian theology he has done [the dealing of a
non-believer with the Christian sacraments is a
good example of that]. His argument may raise
some questions and some doubts in some aspects
of dogma but they cannot do any harm to the
personal relationship of a believer with Christ
because, being an anti-Christian, all he can do
is to crudely deny the possibility of such a
relationship as a logical outcome of his
statement that Christ does not exist. A
believer knows better: Christ definitely exists
because he has that relationship with Him. For
an anti-Christian, Christ does not exist not
because he does not have a relationship with Him
but because of various convictions –
intellectual, psychological and so on. Here
the personal knowledge of the Person of Christ
(by a believer) goes against the non-personal
constructs (of a non-believer). To seriously
affect the faith of a believer who has a
personal relationship with Christ one must break
into the personal realm where the relationship
with Christ takes a place. And a non-Christian
cannot do it because to enter there he must
believe in the existence of that realm first.
From here it logically
follows that only a Christian can prove that a
personal relationship of a believer with Christ
is a delusion.
A mental exercise
I have no idea why I wrote “only a Christian can
prove that a personal relationship of a believer
with Christ is a delusion”. Not only does this
conclusion not add anything to the argument that
stopped on the positive point, that “nobody can
destroy the faith of a Christian who has a
personal relationship with Christ” it also seems
to undermine that point via suggesting the
possibility of the existence of “[only] a
Christian [who] can prove that a personal
relationship of a believer with Christ is a
delusion”. Metaphorically speaking, that step in
the discussion seems to pass a zero point and
moves into the “minus” section of the scale, for
some reason bringing to mind associations like
“faith inside out”, “plus defined by minus” and
even “the path of negation”. The rhetorical
accident would not be worthy of attention if it
did not have the unmistakable flavour of a
so-called double bind.
A double bind, in
psychology, is defined as “an emotionally
distressing dilemma in which an individual (or
group) receives two or more conflicting
messages, and one message negates another”. The
conclusion above is a kind of a double bind,
i.e. a contraposition of the mutually exclusive
possibilities, but it seems also to exclude the
existence of a necessary component of a double
bind, a person who has to and cannot make
a choice between them. A Christian cannot
destroy the reality of someone’s relationship
with Christ because in the moment he chooses to
do so he ceases to be a Christian. What makes a
Christian a non-Christian is a choice. But what
if a person is not conscious of that choice? I
am not speaking about a zombie but someone who
incorporates those two possibilities into
oneself thus becoming the extension of the
double bind, a double bind incarnate.
As it was established
in the previous chapters, faith in Christ
implies the notion that “Christ relates” meaning
that one who believes in Him relates to Him and
He relates to him. Quite naturally, anyone who
looks at the sentence “only a Christian can
prove that a personal relationship of a believer
with Christ is a delusion” reads it as: “only a
Christian believer, i.e. one who has a
personal relationship with Christ, can prove
that a personal relationship of another
Christian believer with Christ is a delusion”.
This assumed notion of “a personal relationship”
is precisely what makes a mind go blank because
it says: “only a Christian believer = one who
knows that Christ relates can prove to another
believer that Christ does not relate”. The
personal aspect being removed, the rendition
“only a Christian believer = one who does not
know that Christ relates can prove to another
believer that Christ does not relate”
immediately destroys the double bind because one
who does not know that Christ relates is not a
Christian – perhaps a nominal but a nominal
Christian cannot prove anything to a non-nominal
one.
The reworded double
bind “only a Christian believer = one who knows
that Christ relates can prove to another
believer that Christ does not relate” is a very
descriptive of “a double bind incarnate” I am
about to explore. It is a narcissist priest.
A double bind
incarnate
I am not speaking here
about a classic narcissist i.e. an individual
with a sense of entitlement, absence of empathy
and a conviction in his superiority to the point
of “I am God” who innately treats others as
unworthy slum. I am speaking about the so-called
covert or closet narcissist who has all the
necessary qualities of the classic one but does
not exhibit them in a way that makes it
impossible for him to pass for a convincing
Christian.
A covert narcissist in
his essence is the same empty, grandiose, devoid
of empathy individual as the classic narcissist
but who has learnt to cover those unpopular
qualities. He does it not because he perceives
them to be bad and is therefore ashamed of
himself but because his fragile psyche makes it
impossible for him to act them out openly as a
classic or overt narcissist does. If an overt
narcissist defends against the lurking
semi-conscious thought about his own inadequacy
by the means of the grandiose mirrors created by
the others (so-called narcissistic supply), a
covert narcissist opts for the more moderate
image of “a very nice guy” (a very modest
person, very selfless, very caring and so on).
Employing the language of theology, a covert
narcissist is a narcissist who is engaging in
kenosis – decreasing for the sake of
increasing.
Those words which
allude to the Gospel lines help to understand
something important about the covert
narcissistic priest. St John the Baptist said,
witnessing to Christ that he (St John) “must
decrease so He (Christ) would increase”. This is
the paradigm of a Christian life; one who
believes in Christ must decrease so that Christ
would increase, in His soul. This process of
course is very private and hidden. In the case
of a covert narcissist, he must decrease so that
he himself would increase, and
increase superficially, as a figure for
admiration. There is no Christ here, apart from
the possible proposition that, as an icon of
Christ, a priest via increasing in statue would
increase His icon as well. The falsity and
superficiality of this proposition (a
narcissistically increasing priest makes an icon
of himself, not of Christ) brings another
consideration: Christ, in His extreme kenosis
[Passion and Crucifixion], reveals the nature of
God much more than in His glory. This “free
association” may help to grasp the air of the
peculiar quality of a covert narcissist priest:
it does not matter how theologically flawless
may be his discourse about God there is always
something odd present there, something that
brings to a mind the oddity of the icon ‘Walking
on Water’ discussed above.
In the case of ‘Walking
on Water’ it is a twisted representation of how
the Person of God = Christ relates to a human
person, apostle Peter i.e. a representation of
Christ who does not relate. In the case of a
covert narcissist priest it is exactly the same
phenomenon, Christ = God Who does not relate,
conveyed not by unanimated means like paints but
by a living individual, a priest. The impact is
more subtle and more potent.
How does he do it? –
By simply being, because he himself does
not relate to Christ = to God, in truth, as a
person to the Person. And not only does he not
relate to God – unlike a non-narcissist priest
who in such a case would probably feel there was
something wrong in that situation – he does not
feel the slightest contradiction because for him
not to relate to another, whether it is the
Person of God or a human person, is a norm. A
narcissist, overt or covert, does not see others
as persons but only as soulless means for his
gratification. And since, as it was established
earlier, even “dry” Christian dogmas cannot be
defined and understood without the notion of a
relationship, a narcissist is unlikely to
provide an entirely convincing (and correct)
theological discourse. Understandably, even more
so his deficiency is perceptible when he
attempts to comment on the text of the Gospels;
speaking about the interactions of Christ with
the others he is incapable of bringing into his
discourse even the faintest trace of a personal,
of his own relationship with God or at least the
aspiration of such.
However, this is not
all. Precisely because such a person is the
incorporation of the statement “Christ does not
relate” his homilies extinguish, for his
audience, the sense of personal relationship
with Christ = His reality = His personal
relevance even if it was already powerfully
conveyed by those in the Gospel texts he is
attempting to comment on. The encounters with
Christ described in the Gospels in his take
somehow turn into a soulless, impersonal,
lifeless discourse. People, who before were seen
as popping up from the pages, now, being
processed through the narcissistic prism, are
somehow lacking a life, they flatten and sink
back. Christ, reflected by those people He dealt
with, is now flat as well and follows the same
fate, as someone who happened to cure someone
and then went on his way somewhere – nothing to
do with the narcissist – with the cured one –
with us. Christ in the take of a narcissist
priest is thoroughly dead. Summing up, a
narcissist priest can neither convert anyone
into the reality of a relationship with Christ
nor enhance someone’s relationship with Him. It
may be hard to see though, for a reader, how he
can ruin it (as
“a double bind incarnate” is supposed to do).
Well, I also find it
hard to see right now because I, just like you,
know that a priest in a question is a covert
narcissist i.e. I know that he, par excellence,
cannot convey the notion “Christ relates”. But
what if I did not?
Imagine a charismatic,
engaging young priest. He is preaching about
“love of God”, that we are “children of God”,
that we are “good enough” for God – He loves us.
He is greeting a congregation before Mass and
asks them how they are, “not too cold?” etc. He
so much wants to be close to the people that,
for the purpose of removing the boundaries
between them and himself, he delivers his homily
not from where he is supposed to but leaves the
sanctuary and walks in the isle into the middle
of the church. “We must treat each other well!
God is love, He wants to love everyone and we
must love each other!” he says while pacing
there. This picture depicts a genuine good
priest who could well be even Christ, in some
movie. And it can also be a portrait of a closet
narcissist priest.
Here is the point. “It
can be – it can be; it can be – it cannot; it
cannot – it cannot”. If one can be than
another cannot be, but they look the same.
This is precisely the state of a mind of a
person who began noticing the “oddities” and yet
does not dare to admit their existence because
they clash with the image of the engaging priest
who spoke about “love of God” or “love for each
other” with such enthusiasm. “I must have
misunderstood him” or “he used an unfortunate
expression” he may think.
Perhaps this is a good
time to give the reader an example of such
“oddities”. As a rule, they always involve
interpersonal relationships. Like, “Mary
Magdalene did not recognize Christ after His
resurrection because she was afraid. She was
thinking “what will become of me if the man who
banished seven demons from me is dead?” The
priest seems to be oblivious to the fact that,
if St Mary Magdalene had those thoughts she
would never go to the tomb; furthermore, the
text of the Gospel clearly conveys that all she
was thinking about was Christ. “Where did you
place Him, tell me and I will go and take Him”
she says to Christ Whom she mistakes for a
gardener. Christ is all she can think about,
being by herself in a lonely place with some
unknown man approaching her. She did not
recognize Him for a variety of reasons – because
she was full of despair, because her eyes were
filled with tears, because she even did not
bother to look at “a gardener” (what for?) or
because the risen Christ looked differently
(other who encountered Him after the
Resurrection also did not recognize Him until he
indicated Who He was). The preacher appears not
to understand that all that moved St Mary
Magdalene was her love for Christ, her response
to His love for her, about which he preached
abstractly as “love of God” on a number of
occasions. Finally, the statement “what will
become of me now when He is dead” shifts
the focus from Him to “me” – something that is
entirely absent in St Mary of the Gospels who is
entirely focused on Him, forgetting herself.
To understand what
such an interpretation does, the reader must
keep in a mind that each story in the Gospels,
apart from conveying the story of individuals,
has also a symbolic/metaphysical aspect. A
temporal individual, via coming into contact
with the eternal, Christ, is (if he is willing)
being lifted up into the eternal and expands.
Additionally, each event/person/everything in
the Gospels is always considered and understood
in the context of the whole Scripture. St Mary
Magdalene is not just some woman who happened to
go to the tomb but one of a few who followed
Christ to Golgotha and stood under the cross.
She is also the first person to whom Christ
chose to appear after Resurrection and this is
why she is called by the Church “the apostle to
the apostles”. She is typically seen by
believers as an example of selfless, faithful
and courageous love for Christ; because her love
was so outstanding, some say, she was the first
to see the risen Lord. In the preacher’s
rendition of the episode the love of St Mary
Magdalene is swapped by a fear hence her exulted
image (icon), as it is created by the Gospels
and understood by the Church, is destroyed. And,
if a listener happens to recall the well-known
words in the same Gospels, “there is no fear in
love but perfect love cast out fear; he who
fears is not made perfect in love”, the
destruction is even more felt. It is apostle
John now who renders St Mary Magdalene as
“imperfect in love”.
But the preacher does
not just drop down St Mary, he also drops down
the whole episode. Being devoid of the notion of
love conveyed in the Gospel by the powerful
emotions of despair of a loss of a loved one,
faith, sacrifice, hope etc., its pinnacle – a
sudden recognition of the Beloved = witnessing
the Resurrected Christ – now looks as quite a
trivial, dull event. Here the twisted psychology
ruins theology again, albeit in a subtle way.
The new version of the event loses the spark,
the real response of a person (Mary) to Christ
and His – to her, that very spark that kindles
in a listener the sense of the reality of the
risen Christ, the notion of “Christ Who
relates”. He now, being reflected in this new,
devoid of love St Mary, is also flat. As a
result, the story can now hardly touch anyone.
Noteworthy, all the
visible facts (she went, she saw, He said) are
left untouched. Only the invisible or subjective
(feelings, emotions, reasons) are being twisted.
There is more in all
this. In this new rendition, the “fear” of St
Mary is so much out of context that one cannot
help to wonder how a priest could come up with
it. It appears to me that he was talking about
himself. It is of course only a speculation; in
any case there is nothing wrong with identifying
oneself with some characters in the Gospels – in
fact it is how we are supposed to read them.
There is a difference though: a person not
entirely devoid of self-insight sees another as
“more courageous than I”, “more selfless than
I”, “more loving than I” – or less hence he
would have no trouble, being fearful, to think
“love made St Mary brave, I wish I could have
such love. In her place, probably, I would be
too terrified to go to the tomb and would hide
being afraid to be arrested when the Teacher is
dead (as the other apostles did)”. He simply
could not attribute to St Mary his own lack of
courage. A narcissist is unable to make such an
unfavourable, for himself, comparison, even
without vocalizing it. This point brings us to
another peculiarity of a covert narcissist
priest – his avoidance of speaking of Christ.
It is not surprising.
First, it is impossible to speak of Christ
without feeling His supremacy/superiority,
something a narcissist cannot bear. Second,
being the exact opposite of a narcissist, his
Person lacks anything a narcissist could truly
relate to and deal with in his usual way. There
is nothing in Him to use, to manipulate, to
twist and so on. It can be done only via the
third party (like via St Mary, above) but to
deal with Christ directly a narcissist cannot
do. So he does not; he rarely mentions Christ
and never discusses him in any way that allows
Him to look present. It almost feels as if a
narcissist cannot be in the same space with the
alive Christ. And, since there cannot be a
homily without a priest the one who must go is
Christ.
So he does, and even
the traces of His formal presence are being
gradually erased in various ways. A narcissistic
priest seems to be compelled to “overwrite”
Christ’s parables, providing not just his
commentary but his own alternative. Instead of
interpreting, let’s say, the words of Christ “I
am the vine, My Father is a vine dresser;
without Me you can do nothing… remain in my
Love” the priest says: “I will tell you a story”
– an announcement very similar to what Christ
habitually makes in the Gospels. Then he begins
his discourse about how everyone present wants
to appear fit so we go on a diet and even take
slimming pills. “But” – he continues, “we
somehow forget that we have an excellent
slimming pill – communion which makes us slim
for Christ, to be fit for Christ, etc.”
One can say that the
“story” has some relevance to the words of
Christ. “Grape wine – wine – communion”.
“Slimming for Christ – getting rid of sins –
remaining in Christ”. To that I would answer
that yes, there are formal connections, but they
do not and cannot withstand a lame comparison,
“holy communion – slimming pill – slimming for
Christ”. Why? – Because communion is Christ, and
Christ is ALL therefore communion is the opulent
feast, and symbolically the Eucharist is the
feast, the foretaste of the heavenly banquet,
and the opulent feast cannot make anyone “slim”
but is supposed to make us fat, in God, and that
communion is Christ Himself hence we cannot
partake Christ for the sake of being slim for
Christ. What is missing here is the notion of
“sin” and repentance and fasting. One fasts and
repents – slimming himself from sins – for the
sake of Christ but this priest did not say that.
Sin and repentance are the other notions which
seem to be entirely alien to the narcissist
priest. What is left, in the minds of the
congregation after hearing this “story” is the
unfortunate image of “communion as a slimming
pill” that totally overwrites the normal image
of communion as Christ. The original text, the
words of Christ, are forgotten as well as Christ
Himself.
Is a priest who pulls
the Gospels down, pushes Christ aside or
depersonalizes Him, overwrites His words with
his own, good enough to ruin the believer’s
relationship with Christ? I do not know; if not
there is something else in the priest that can
help it: he is undoubtedly nice.
Remember how we
started? “Imagine a charismatic, engaging young
priest. He is preaching about “the love of God”,
that we are “children of God”, that we are “good
enough” for God – He loves us. He is greeting
the congregation before Mass and asks them how
they are, “not cold?” etc. He so much wants to
be close to the people that, to remove the
boundaries between them and him, that he
delivers his homily not where he is supposed to,
in the sanctuary, but walks down into the isle.
“We must treat each other well! God is love, He
wants to love everyone and we must love each
other!” This picture depicts a good preacher who
could well be Christ, in some movie.”
Analysing the impact
of the activity of the covert narcissistic
priest above, the discourse necessarily
concentrated on the negative, leaving the
positive image aside. Thus he was made an overt
one i.e. one who is openly selfish, grandiose,
non-compassionate i.e. the total opposite of
Christ. Unfortunately, it is exactly what I did
while analysing why a narcissist literally
cannot stand Christ. Both overt and covert
narcissists cannot stand Christ but the former
acts this out openly and the latter covers his
disgust with the mask which is an imitation
of the image of Christ. I said “an imitation
of the image” because it is not an “imitation of
Christ” i.e. qualities of Christ that every
Christian is supposed to try to develop but “the
image” meant as in “image-making” i.e. their
outwardly appearances. It means that for
sustaining his Christ-like image such a
priest must engage in equally superficial
actions. He does not encourage his congregation
to engage in acts of mortification for the
purpose of becoming better. Instead, he makes
them feel nice.
Just like with erasing
the presence of Christ, it is done in multiple
ways. Instead of the extremes of the Gospels
“reject oneself and follow Me”, “take up your
cross and follow Me”, “one who saves his life
will lose it” etc., the narcissist priest says
“you are good enough for God”. It sounds nice
indeed. It can even be theologically defended,
as “God loved the world so much that He gave His
only Son…” “Good enough” could be possible
[albeit not the best and not entirely correct]
rendition of the notion of the selfless love of
God for His prodigal children if the priest did
not keep missing another point of the story: the
prodigal son repented. And not only this – the
whole Gospels begin from St John the Baptist’s
call for repentance. (“Repent and believe in
good news!” says also Christ). This is how a
Christian life begins and continues: love of God
– my response to Him, repentance out of seeing
myself in His light – my love for Him that is
never enough – repentance – and so on, towards
the union with Him, in mutual love. This notion
of the movement of a soul towards God is
entirely absent in a take of a narcissist
preacher who keeps going on “we are good
enough”; in fact he does it so often that it
looks like a self-comforting mantra.
“Feeling nice” thus
comes for the price of not walking towards
Christ = losing Christ. Astonishingly, this fact
passes unnoticed. The subtle changes, conveyed
ambivalently and often implicitly, appear to be
entirely subjective i.e. they can always be
denied or easily dissolved because they do
nothing directly with the text of the Gospels –
no heresies then – but undermine it by
providing his own, narcissistic, Gospel and
narcissistic Christianity. All this, I repeat,
while appearing Christ-like.
I got carried away
with the description of the fruits, hence the
image of “the nice guy” slipped away again
giving a way to a narcissist. In real life,
however, a believer typically starts from the
opposite end; the enduring glow of a “nice guy"
is only occasionally overshadowed by the
“oddities” discussed above. So let us try to
place ourselves again into the position of a
believer who only now begins noticing some
strange things but has no thoughts that a priest
may be a covert narcissist; in fact he may not
even know that such a phenomenon exists.
A torture of
non-recognition
This inability to
decide who the priest is, is precisely
the double bind in which a member of the
congregation is caught. “Feeling nice”
cultivated by the priest certainly does not help
the needed clarity; “Christian considerations”
like “we always have to attribute good
intentions to a person” play a deafening role as
well.
Apart from that, a believer is blinded and
constrained by his own expectations of what a
priest is supposed to be and also by the air of
his authority carried by those expectations.
That is, the minimum one naturally expects from
a priest is to teach and to preach Christ, and
to do so in accordance with the official
teaching of the Church. His exclusive position,
of the only one who is allowed to say a homily
(i.e. to explain the Gospels) during the Mass
strengthens this, very natural, expectation even
more. Challenging a priest then may look and be
perceived as violating the Church order and even
as not being a true member of the Church –
especially since he is dealing with someone who
is very nice and whose fault is only in
producing some “oddities” that somehow change,
in the mind of a believer, the Gospels
into something else and make Christ a bit too
much absent and the priest – too much present.
It is not with the
“human badness of a priest” that a believer is
labouring. A sinful priest (unkind, drunkard,
womanizer, etc.) can still deliver the Gospel
message correctly like a kind of polluted
microphone. A humanly “bad” priest can still
preach the real Christ. Neither is a believer
thinking about “challenging an openly heretical
priest” (who says for example that Christ is not
divine) because the open gross heresy would
render a priest to be unsuitable for his
position by itself, without doubts. Also, a
grossly open heresy is impossible without
preaching Christ, albeit heretical. A believer
here is dealing with a kind of a gap, a hollow
space, a shadow, the phenomenon that can be
grasped only as a negative reference to
something real.
The thought of
clarifying a matter in an open confrontation is
hampered by “If I think he is a bad priest I
will look unchristian because he looks like a
good priest – what reason have I apart from
being suspicious?” but another thought “if I
think he is a good priest than I agree with his
strange handling of Christ” gnaws at him
nevertheless; not being entirely silenced by the
rational response “but how can I know what he
really means”. Murky as it is, it may begin to
transpire that a believer here deals not just
with a choice “him or Christ” and “me or Christ”
but also with “me looking bad = “unchristian” if
I say he is bad = unchristian” or “me looking
good = Christian if I say he is good =
Christian” glued to it. It is noteworthy that
the word “Christian” here constantly adds blur
via changing its meaning, from the description
of a noun to adjective, of a person who
belongs to Christ to a person behaving nice.
He is now, in his mind, bound to a priest;
making a priest bad = a fake makes him look bad
= a fake as well.
One may speculate
whether it is the beginning of a transformation,
of the believer, into an extension of a double
bind priest. A believer cannot now “defend
Christ” without showing himself as being bad,
suspicious, an unchristian person. Thus his
dilemma is:
“priest is bad =
unchristian (Christ-omitting) i.e. a fake – presence of
Christ returned – I am bad = unchristian person
i.e. a fake”
or
“priest is good =
Christian – there is no Christ – I am a good =
Christian person”.
Taken purely as a
formula or as a mad thought, a believer now, via
a double bind is joined to the priest in his
intolerance of Christ. There is no longer a
meeting place for them (a believer and Christ).
Of course it is only a formula but it nicely
illustrates the state of the psyche and
spiritual “reality” as well.
The endless
questioning of reality makes him develop
mistrust, in the others and in his own
perceptions. In application to his private
spiritual life it means that, being mistrustful
and fearful in general, he is unable now to
trust his own relationship with Christ and in
the reality of his communication with Him. Or,
better to say, he neither trusts nor mistrusts
or one day trusts and the next day does not. His
psyche, being exhausted by the endless doubts
and the attempts to reconcile the opposites,
develops a compensatory mechanism and grows
numb. While it is possible to have a leg or arm
locally anesthetized it is impossible to
anesthetize a part of a soul without
anesthetizing all so a believer ends up being
numb to Christ as well. Not only is he now
unable to trust a perceived response, he is
losing the ability to detect the response.
Therefore Christ now no longer relates.
Therefore if He does not relate He has never
related. Therefore a believer’s previous
relationship with Him was a delusion. Therefore
“only a Christian can prove that a personal
relationship of a believer with Christ is a
delusion”.
This is a lie of
course.
PS
Christ in a crown of
thorns, the fake outwardly, has it all = God
in Himself. Those who are about to kill Him have
it all outwardly but are fakes inside. How does
He make them feel their inward emptiness? He is
“nothing” visibly. Nothing that can provide a
narcissist with a mirror. No glory. This is a
reflection, the dividing image. Those who have
something of Him inside themselves – compassion,
empathy, even love despite sinfulness see
something of themselves in Him. [They do exist,
via Him.] Not so a narcissist who does not have
empathy or love or compassion, who is all lie –
he will see nothing in Him.
Paradoxically, ‘Ecce Homo’ shows to all who they
are. Those who still are humane see something;
but a narcissist not just sees nothing, he also
perceives that he is being mocked by the sight
somehow. Here He is, the hugest mirror the Grand
Narcissist could possibly obtain, God and it is
refused to him via that damn kenosis, and it is
impossible to reduce it or to break it because
Christ has already done it all.