Dreaming the Religious Novel Forward
A year ago, I published “Chanting the Feminine Down: A Psychological, Religious and Historical Novel,” about a Bronx woman’s search for the feminine in her Catholic tradition. Colette is a graduate student at a Jesuit college in the Bronx. Prompted by personal trauma, she decides to take an easy college course studying the various church councils, only to find her quest raises doubts about her religion and, at times, even her sanity. Religion will consume her.
I can write without hesitation that this was the hardest book or project I’ve ever worked on in that it totally absorbed me and at times threatened to destroy me. Of course, that was my fantasy and my fiction, prompted by my returning to my religious roots with a critical eye. I had done this before, writing a PhD dissertation on the Catholic Imagination, exploring patterns in a number of “Catholic” novelists. But this effort, though scholarly and serious, didn’t get me close, psychologically speaking, to the subject matter. In “Chanting” a key narrative thread was provided by dozens of dreams I had during the two-year composition period. I dreamed of popes, altars, confessionals, crucifixes, abandoned churches, Catholic school girls, beggars on church steps and the Mass in many forms. The title for the novel came from a dream about Pope John Paul II sinking into a feminine earth while a young woman is turned away from the altar by a priest because she demanded a feminine presence in the Mass. The dream’s narrative structure could not be clearer.
One of greatest challenges of “Chanting” was writing from the point of view of a young woman. This task was made easier by the all the “feminine” dreams described above. This is not unusual or presumptuous in itself. Carl Jung writes extensively about the anima awakening in a man during the second half of his life when he has the opportunity to embrace the feminine within. Jung suggests this is psychologically healthy and even necessary for man to advance his psychic state, reach true adulthood by embracing his Other Self.
When I have given speeches about “Chanting,” people have asked about the regularity and preponderance of religious dreams that contribute so much to the content. I responded that, as an altar boy, a Sunday school teacher, and lector at Mass, religion has been in my veins since birth. In preparation for this task I reread the bible, the works of women mystics, summaries of all the Church Councils since about 400 C.E. and the “secret gospels” from the Gnostic tradition. Most helpful, I think, was my effort to understand religion from archetypal and psychological perspective. The ideas of Carl Jung form a crucial thread in “Chanting.”
I’ve also been asked what I learned in the writing of the novel. Certainly, I learned how much I didn’t know about religion and about how Church history downplays the contributions of women mystics and still mocks the Gnostic tradition. I wish I had known more about the discovery of the “secret gospels” in Egypt in the 1950s. In the dozen gospels I’ve subsequently read, the literal and historic Christ of the New Testament is de-emphasized and the Christ within, almost in the Buddhist or psychological sense, is emphasized. I would have profited from a reading of Elaine Pagels’ “The Gnostic Gospels” where the feminine, largely repressed in the Christian tradition, is an important part of a vibrant, transformative religion.
I would have profited from reading Carl Jung more closely on this subject. Jung’s “Symbols of Transformation,” a book that addresses how Catholicism has or has not been able to transform primitive, libidinal energies into rituals, doctrine and the like, serves as an important frame for the novel because it addresses Jung’s concern about the central doctrine of the Trinity lacking a female component. In a Jung’s words “The Trinity is a dogmatic image based on the archetype of an exclusively masculine nature.”
As I learned as a part of this self-critique, Jung looked at Gnosticism through an archetypal lens. In his “Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious” he writes that “Gnosticism represented an upsurge of unconscious elements, a shadow side to emerging Christianity. This was man-centric, with an emphasis on the god within and the unconscious: fairy tales, dreams and visions. Jung saw these gospels not as some have argued, a distortion of the New Testament texts, but as another stream, a flowering, a counterweight to Christianity that would by the second century become heresy. In the early Church the Gnostic interpretation of the Holy Ghost suffered the same fate.
Elaine Pagels writes in “Why Religion,” her more recent book, that the secret gospels abound in feminine aspects of God but the Church invariably declared these writings heresy. Moreover, the Church’s official position, echoed by Christian moralist Tertullian in the second century, was that women were especially attracted to heresy. In turn, heretical women were without modesty and therefore were bold enough to teach, heal and even baptize. This movie seems to be still playing.
As the secret gospels make clear women were equal to men in the gnostic tradition and could serve as priests, but by the year 208 CE virtually all feminine imagery for God had disappeared from orthodox Christian tradition.
After the publication I have become familiar with organizations, including the Women’s Ordination Conference and the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests, that advocate for full equality for women within the Catholic Church. These women have been ordained in a manner consistent with Canon Law and are a force to be reckoned with. The Catholic Church, citing the authority of Apostolic Succession, still forbids women from serving as priests.
Pagels writes that the Gnostics were too interior, spiritual and undogmatic to represent a real threat to Christianity. But Jung notes that Gnosticism didn’t die. It found its ways into philosophy, psychology and alchemy up to the time of Goethe. It provided archetypal motifs of the collective unconscious.
If I had been more familiar with the history of Gnosticism, I might have paid more attention in “Chanting” to the forces demonizing and repressing feminine during this early phase of Christianity. The Gnostic gospels with their myths, poetry and dreams are symbolic and therefore, essentially the archetypal language of fiction.
In the novel Colette dreams of sending a letter to a bird. When she woke, she wrote in her journal: “Will I write, will I say at the dawn of everyday. I believe, I believe, in what I sketch and what I weave.”
Amen to that.
