i'm a guy. i do stuff. i enjoy life. is that interesting? probably not. am i glad you're here? yes indeed. does it surprise me that you find this worthwhile? kind of, yeah. should i stop asking myself questions? [nods head slowly] so anyway, i'm a guy. this is my blog.

Friday, January 14, 2005

psychodrama: the comeback

i'm not sure i even get the original concept, but i know i like the word. here's the context: someone asked theologian walter brueggemann if he had anything to say about the defense of God's apparent violence in the OT...his response blew me away! to simplify him by quoting him, he basically said, "the God you speak of is the God you get". he's referring to the poets who wrote the psalms, and maybe even some of the lamenting prophets...but at that phrase, i immediately thought of fight club. it seems very true to say that the tyler durden that ed norton SPEAKS of is the tyler durden that becomes a relational reality in norton's life. while i'm contemplating the possibility of God validating this form of writing, Brian McLaren jumps in with a great illustration of the point. say a guy has a wife. he also has an image of his wife in his mind. the actual wife and the imagined wife are corresponding, but never identical. isn't it likely that the guy has more "internal conversations" between the image of himself and the image of his wife, than he has actual conversations with his actual wife? this guy's hope would be that the internal conversations are somehow modified and shaped by his real-life interactions with his wife...but the internal exchanges will always be there (and influential). hence...psychodrama! what if the best the poets and prophets could do was have an imaginary convesation with God, because we can never accurately describe an Infinite Being as is, but rather that God INSPIRED the writers' IMAGINATIONS. i think this is some mind-blowing, mental stuff! but ok...so if Brian's illustration is apt, then we'd also include a hope to see reality inform the image. so God in the OT might seem irreconcilably vicious and vindictive, but that makes sense, because people's "image" of God had to develop as the story developed (man is narrative theology amazing, or what?), but as it did, it wasn't God's nature that changed, but rather the God-character in the ongoing pychodrama shifted as the biblical plotline rooted itself in more and more passing historical years. it's not like i want to let God off easy for the really horrific stuff (that have been traced back to His "will" (sometimes reasonably traced, sometimes not)), but i know i need to think about this a good bit more, and now from an angle that i never could have predicted.