The poet Rilke had a brief encounter with psychoanalysis, but proved wary of it. “I am afraid,” he said, “that if my demons leave me, my angels will take flight as well.”
His remark popped into my mind recently under somewhat odd circumstances: at Sunday Mass during the reading of the Gospel. The text that day was taken from Matthew, chapter 13. It’s the story about how a man sowed good wheat seed in his field, but during the night an enemy came and sowed cockle (a weed that happens to look a lot like wheat) among the wheat.
This is discovered, of course, when the seeds sprout. The man’s servants ask him if he wants them to pull the cockle out and he tells them, “No, lest perhaps gathering up the cockle, you root up the wheat also together with it.” Instead, he says, “Suffer both to grow until the harvest, and in the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers: Gather up first the cockle, and bind it into bundles to burn, but the wheat gather ye into my barn.”
What brought Rilke to mind, of course, was the bit about not pulling up the cockle until harvest time. It seems to me that Jesus is pointing out how good and bad can become inextricably bound up with one another, and that a premature attempt to separate the one from the other can be, as they say, counterproductive.
Some, of course, might see the cockle as representing sinners cast into the fires of Hell at the Last Judgment. But if they brought to bear on this passage of scripture the same critical imagination and intelligence they would bring to a poem, say, then they would probably understand it differently.
To begin with, one has to remember that Jesus also said that “the Kingdom of God is within you.” It is therefore reasonable to infer that the so-called parables of the Kingdom are principally about psychology. So the field in the parable and what takes place in the field – the growing side-by-side of the wheat and cockle – may be said to represent a process taking place within the human soul. The culmination of that process is the harvest, when the cockle is finally separated from the wheat and the wheat is gathered into the barn.
But it seems to me that one can’t stop there if one wants to get at the point of the parable. For most of the wheat will be discarded as well. Only the grain will be saved, and that will be ground into flour and used to make bread.
Taking into consideration all of the components of this fairly complex metaphorical structure can lead to some arresting provisional conclusions. It would, for example, seem to suggest that the point of my being is not I what I am now, but rather what can be made of the fruit (or grain) that I bear. This is rather different from the conventional religious view, which is that I am in this life on a kind of probation, at the end of which I will be judged to have measured up or not and treated either as the cockle or the wheat.
The older I get, and the more I “think on these things,” as St. Paul suggested we do, the less enthralled I am with the idea of God as a kind of crazed coach just waiting for us to commit some infraction of the rules, so he can toss us off the team.
The problem with most discussions of religion is that many religious people don’t think on these things. They bring little imagination to the beliefs they affirm, content with hand-me-down notions that they never bother to examine closely, let alone question. Worse yet, it is these notions that those who object to religion invariably use as the basis for their objections.
Take, for instance, the idea of God as the creator, not of the universe, but of oneself and of everybody else. If this be true, then right now, as I write these words, God is creating me, thinking me into being, sustaining me in life. Now, anyone who writes or paints or composes music knows how intimate the relation is between oneself and what one creates. But the kind of creative relation that would exist between a creator God and his creation of those made “in his own image” would be one of well-nigh incomprehensible subtlety.
Whether or not there is a God is a question that really ought to be put aside until we grasp the implications of what we mean when we use the term God. I am afraid that many churchgoers never bother to tease out those implications.
That is why religious discussions tend to be framed in terms that are stale to the point of decay. And that is why such discussions usually lead nowhere.
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Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts [5])
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