the divine turding

One sunny day in 1887, 12-year-old Carl Jung was tripping happily through the town plaza in Basel, Switzerland, and admiring the way the sun gleamed off the newly-restored and freshly-glazed tiles of the city's cathedral. Suddenly the lad felt the frightening approach of what his biographer and editor, Sonu Shamdasani, calls a "terrible, sinful thought."

The boy suppressed the evil thought for several days, but it continued to haunt him, lurking inside the deepest recesses of his innermost mind. Finally he decided that God wanted him to consciously think this thought, just (Jung reasoned) as He had actually wanted Adam and Eve to sin.

So the boy C.G. Jung stopped resisting the message emanating from the primal regions of his subconscious mind and allowed himself the vision of Almighty God, enthroned in heaven, unleashing an almighty turd on Basel which smashes the cathedral roof Jung had so recently been admiring and brings down the entire structure.

This was all a pretty elaborate way of expressing the idea that (as people usually say today), "I'm spiritual but not religious." And Jung himself later said of this vision that through it he had experienced "the direct living God, who stands omnipotent and free above the Bible and Church." He left out that his vision also graphically expressed resentment and contempt, as it was also a judgment on the uselessness of the Church, and its failure to serve its stated and intended purpose.

In our own time the mosque still rules in Muslim lands, but the Church (whichever church it may be) no longer holds a monopoly on spiritual allegiance here in the West as it did during Jung's 19th-century boyhood. For many Americans today, especially, our national symbols (the flag) and scriptures such as the Declaration of Independence are venerated by modern citizens with an intensity of devotion that is truly religious (or spiritual). Nationalism for many reasons is the natural religion of the modern-day citizen of advanced, industrialized countries.

I think it's time I took a trip to Washington, D.C., so I can admire the dome of the Capitol.