In the last post, I floated the view that therapy, far from being value-neutral, may be smuggling the values of liberalism into our pursuit of mental health. If so, therapy might be compromised in various ways in facilitating our flourishing. Not to say therapy is ineffective, but circumscribed in what it can envision and achieve. 

That psychology traffics in the values of liberal individualism is the argument made by Brent Slife, Greg Martin, and Sondra Sasser in their chapter from The Hidden Worldviews of Psychology's Theory, Research, and Practice. This was the issue I raised in the last post, how the values of liberalism are so assumed and ubiquitous we don't even recognize them as regulating our commitments. Everything is operating behind the scenes, hidden and out of view. We're making moral discernments and choices without even noticing. 

So, according to Slife, Martin, and Sasser, what are the values of liberal individualism hidden within the practice of therapy? They describe six:

Atomism: Individual identity is relatively independent of context and relationships.

Autonomy: Individuals have the power and right to govern themselves and decide their own therapy goals.

Happiness: Individuals should pursue the satisfaction of their own desires, including happiness and well-being.

Instrumentalism: Individuals should use the world, including people, as resources for their own ends.

Neutrality: Therapists should strive to practice in a manner that is as free of their own values as possible.

Freedom From: Individuals should reject unnecessary obligations as obstacles to their freedom and self-expression.

These are the values of neoliberalism, a market-shaped view of human flourishing that conceives of individuals as autonomous, self-interested agents within a marketplace of choices where we pursue utility maximization. 

Now I want to be pretty clear here about what I am and am not suggesting. There have been plenty of criticisms leveled at therapy by conservative Christians, decrying therapy as toxic. That is not what I am suggesting here. So let me say this clearly: Therapy is effective and life-saving. What I am suggesting is that, insofar as therapy traffics in liberal values, it will be limited in its ability to see and reach for other goods that promote flourishing. By failing to introduce values into the therapeutic context or, as we've come to see, defaulting to "hidden" and unexamined values, therapy is delimiting the conversation it can have with clients about their health and well-being.

What exactly that larger conversation might look like in therapy is what we'll turn to in the next post. There is more to share from Slife, Martin, and Sasser. 

“Your word is a lamp for my feet and a light on my path.”

We’ve reached Psalm 119, the great Torah Psalm.

Psalm 119 is one of several alphabetic acrostic poems in the book of Psalms. Psalm 119 is a song about delighting in the Law of God. To make this point visually, the psalm has its 176 verses divided into 22 stanzas of eight lines each. Each of the 22 stanzas corresponds to a letter of the Hebrew alphabet and each of the eight lines within a given stanza starts with the letter governing that stanza. Thus, stanza one is Alef, the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet, and each of the eight lines in the first stanza begins with the letter Alef. The next stanza is Bet. All the way to the final stanza of Tav. Visually, English readers of Psalm 119 can’t see this. For example, here are the first verses of Psalm 119, the Alef section. Look to the right, where Hebrew sentences start:

You can see, reading from right-to-left as you do in Hebrew, that each line begins with the letter Alef.

The point of the letterplay in Psalm 119 is to show how the Torah structures our whole lives. This is communicated not just in the meaning of the text but in the visual display of the text on the page.

Regarding the meaning of the text, you probably know that Psalm 119 is the longest chapter in the Bible. And of its 176 verses, 171 reference God’s laws, statues, commands, judgments, instructions, ordinances, mandates, decrees, teachings, or precepts. These aren’t just English synonyms for “law.” Scholars count 7-8 “Torah terms” in Psalm 119, words like torah, ‘edot, piqqudim, huqqim, mitzvot, mishpatim, ’imrah, and davar. 

As I mentioned when we reflected on  Psalm 112, this intense focus upon God's laws in Psalm 119 doesn't tend to sit well with many modern Christians. Especially those who are deconstructing from high control religious environments. Rules and regulations feel restrictive and coercive to us, rather than as expressions of care, love, attention, help, and grace. But that's how the Hebrews saw it, God's law was loving. “Your word is a lamp for my feet and a light on my path.” Without this light we, as children, would wander in the darkness. We'd become lost in the night and never find our way back home. If you're standing a blackout dark being given a flashlight is a grace.

A good metaphor here might be parenting styles. As described by psychologists, parenting styles are a mixture of structure and care. Authoritarian parents have high structure but low care. Many rules but little affection. Permissive parents, by contrast, express affection and care but have low structure, few rules or boundaries. Neither environment, permissive or authoritarian, is good for children. The best parents are described as Authoritative, where structure and care are present in equal measure. In these spaces, there are clear and consistent rules and boundaries. But these rules and boundaries are generously and reasonably placed and couched within a responsive and loving environment. As we all know, children need both structure and care. 

To be sure, this might be a cringy metaphor, but what we find in Israel's experience with God is an authoritative parenting style. As we experience in Psalm 119, there is structure and clear guidance. And those rules are experienced within God's hesed, God's faithfulness, goodness, and kindness. Rules exist, but when we stumble and fall God does not treat us as our sins deserve. 

Antinomian, anarchical lawlessness isn't good for anyone. God isn't a permissive parent. But neither is God an authoritarian tyrant. God's laws are gifts because they provide us a light in the darkness. And even when we do fail, God is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in faithful love.

Using James Mumford's New Atlantis essay "Therapy Beyond Good and Evil" in the last post I raised the question about if human flourishing can be found in a value-neutral, value-absent, or value-skeptical context. If mattering, for example, is integral to mental health, along with the mattering of other people, then human flourishing is necessarily embedded within a context of value, which necessarily creates moral concerns. Health, therefore, is pursued and achieved in relation to a transcendental goodness. Consequently, insofar as therapy implicitly or explicitly denies the reality of transcendental values, and our need to attune with them, it becomes a poor steward of our mental health.

Not that therapy is in any way harmful or ineffective. A value-neutral, value-absent, or value-skeptical therapy can provide a variety of opportunities for self-exploration and the acquisition of self-regulation skills and techniques. It's good, for example, to learn how to practice mindfulness. Or to gain insight into your emotional triggers. And it's always helpful to experience acceptance and support when we go through difficult seasons of life. But a value-neutral, value-absent, or value-skeptical therapy will be existentially limited. A value-neutral, value-absent, or value-skeptical therapist, for example, won't ever tell you that you ought or should do something, even when you really ought and should do something. Therapy is non-judgmental and supportive, and doesn't traffic in the moral demands of goodness. 

But I want to raise a question here. Is therapy as neutral as it claims to be? Might therapy be smuggling in values that it fails to appreciate and recognize? Might therapy be a Trojan Horse, presenting itself as non-judgmental when, in fact, it is secretly inculcating values without its clients being aware? Might therapy be, in fact, a form of moral education and formation? 

To start in upon an investigation into this question, I want to share a bit about theological criticisms that have been raised about the modern secular state, especially in regards to liberalism and neoliberalism. 

The modern liberal state purports to be neutral in relation to values. That is to say, the modern liberal state doesn't tell you how you should or ought to live your life. The liberal state creates a "secular" space where its citizens can pursue happiness in accordance to their own beliefs, moral code, and religious convictions. To be sure, the state does police some moral boundaries. Some drugs are banned. Abortion laws are passed. But the regulating ethos of the liberal state is that, so long as you don't bother or hurt your neighbors, you can live however you want. If you want to be a priest, you can do that. If you want to be a pornographer, you can do that. If you want to to be a Christin, you can do that. If you want to be a satanist, you can do that. So long as you don't violate the rights of other people, you can pursue your own values. That is what I mean when I say that the liberal state is "neutral" in relation to values.

But is the liberal state really neutral when it comes to values?

Theologians such as Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, and John Milbank have argued that the liberal state actually espouses metaphysical convictions and values. It's just that the liberal state has hidden these values. Or, perhaps more accurately, these values have become so common and assumed that we no longer recognize them as values. Liberalism is just the air we breathe.

It's like that famous story of the two young fish swimming along. They pass an older fish, who greets them, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” After the older fish swims away, the two young fish look at each other and say, “What the hell is water?” That’s liberalism. We’re swimming in values we cannot see.

So what are these hidden values? Here are two:

• Freedom, independence, and autonomy are the highest good.

• We ought to pursue self-interest.

To be sure, you might not subscribe to these values. At least not overtly. But these are the values of our culture, the moral waters we swim in. And even if you think you’ve rejected these values, you've likely been shaped by them.

For example, how many of us live in the city where we were born? Not many, I’m guessing. I don’t. I’m at the age where many of my friends and colleagues are dealing with aging parents, and one of the biggest challenges is that these parents live in another city or state far away. Why this distance? Why have so many of us moved so far from home?

Answer: the moral culture of liberalism. It’s simply taken as a given that we should move away from home to pursue career opportunities and personal success. In privileging autonomy over familial bonds, and self-interest over familial obligation, we’ve become a mobile labor market. It feels “natural” for us to relocate in pursuit of an individualistic vision of success. And the fact that this new moral code perfectly suits capitalist interests is precisely the point.

My point is this: even if you reject the moral code of liberalism on paper, you’re still a liberal. We value freedom and the pursuit of self-interest. Whenever we face choices, we instinctively ask, “What do I want? What’s best for me?” And we would chafe if anyone took away our freedom or independence to ask and answer those questions.

But here’s the crucial point: These are value judgments! These are moral deliberations!

In short, the liberal state is a Trojan Horse. Liberalism is a moral worldview. It promotes certain values over others, generally those that serve corporate and capitalistic interests. Like the dissolution of family bonds to create a mobile labor market.

Which brings us back to the issue of therapy. Like the liberal state, therapy claims to be value-neutral. But is that true? Might therapy, like the liberal state, be a Trojan Horse? Could therapy actually be a servant of liberal moral order? For example, therapy often takes for granted--like those fish failing to see the water--that autonomy, freedom, and self-fulfillment are the goals. It rarely stops to ask whether those goals are good. Instead of calling our desires into question in relation to a transcendent good, therapy often just helps us chase our desires more effectively. In this way, therapy can end up reinforcing the moral logic of liberalism, where self-interest is paramount and the good life is defined by maximizing personal well-being. Worse, by keeping our focus on personal fulfillment, therapy might actually be cutting us off from deeper conversations about the true, the beautiful, and the good. If that’s the case, then therapy might not be helping us. It might be making things worse.

To be clear, not worse in terms of coping with the current liberal order. Therapy is effective at getting us back to a functional equilibrium. But therapy, so shy about conversations involving value, is unable to raise questions interrogating the health or goodness of that equilibrium. We are simply learning how to cope with a sick status quo, being made functional and rendered useful to a deeply broken world. In this view, therapy provides palliative care for the sicknesses created by neoliberalism. 

Could therapy do more than provide palliative care? It could. But to do so, it would have to begin trafficking in values, becoming willing to raise questions about what is truly good. Most importantly, it would have to interrogate its own implicit moral assumptions and face the truth that it is not non-judgmental or value-free but is, in fact, a form of moral education and formation.

In the last post, I described how flourishing is connected to value. Read The Shape of Joy for the details and the science. And yet, despite the findings from positive psychology, the practice of therapy tends to eschew value. This is mainly due to the, very legitimate, ethical concerns about imposing values upon clients along with the nonjudgmental posture therapists adopt to create a space of acceptance. Therapists allow their clients to espouse their own "personal values," taking these as givens. All this seems routine and obvious. But the question I want to raise in this post is if this value-neutral posture in therapy is more harmful than helpful.

I'm going to let James Mumford make this argument using his 2022 New Atlantis article entitled "Therapy Beyond Good and Evil: A nonjudgmental psychology is failing patients who need to hear hard truths." I discuss Mumford's essay in The Shape of Joy to raise the point about the role of value in mental health.

Mumford, an ethics professor, begins his essay in a psychiatric facility where he is undergoing treatment for bipolar disorder. In a group therapy session a psychologist is leading Mumford and his fellow inpatients through a "values clarification" exercise. Mumford describes the exercise:

I’m in psychiatric hospital in central London and the psychologist is taking us through a “values-clarification exercise.” I’m interested in what the psychologist has to say about values, because I used to teach ethics, at the University ofVirginia. But now I’m the student, because I’m the patient. And I’m about to be given a strong dose of moral relativism. I’m about to be told that there are no objective values and, by implication, that good and evil are merely projections of our minds. This, apparently, is going to make me feel better. “What does the word ‘values’ mean to people?” the psychologist begins. “What are some of our values?” Unfazed by an unresponsive group — a circle of depressives is not always the most forthcoming of audiences — the psychologist circulates a handout. It’s a list, including the following words: 

Swimming

Honesty

Wealth

Honor

Skiing

An odd jumble of hobbies and virtues, the psychologist asks us to circle the “values” we particularly identify with...

Presented with the handout listing various values, we’ve been asked to circle the ones that resonate with us. Next, the psychologist, with a flourish, ventures an observation. Each of us, he says, has different values. What’s more, we often disagree about our values. “So,” he concludes, “values are subjective.” And our recovery, our restoration to sanity, hinges upon our willingness to choose our own values. He lets us know that while morality “is externally imposed by society,” it is imperative that we be the ones to pick which ideals, morals, judgments, precepts, and rules to live by.

As Mumford recounts, values clarification exercises like these have become ubiquitous due to the rising popularity of Acceptance and Commitment Based Therapy (ACT). According to ACT, one of the sources of mental distress is caused by becoming alienated from your values and deepest concerns. Consequently, healing involves bringing those concerns and values into view. The values clarification exercise is a tool to help with this process. 

And yet, these values are choices. Which is why Mumford raises the charge of moral relativism. He goes on to unpack his criticism of the assumptions at work in the values clarification exercise:

Who would deny that it’s vital that my values be ones I’ve properly signed up for rather than had simply foisted upon me — by my parents, my teachers, my culture? But this truism — that I will more likely be able to live out a set of values if I have consciously adopted them — doesn’t exhaust the sense of what’s being said. My psychologist is implying something more radical when he insists on the pivotal importance of choosing your own values. When he claims that “values are subjective,” he is painting a picture of the world according to which the only values that exist are ones we have created. To say values are subjective is to say there is nothing independent of our own minds that answers to our talk of right and wrong. It is to say that our ethical beliefs do not track a reality which is “there anyway.” According to his picture, values are determined, not discovered, and selfhood — what it means to be a person — is therefore fundamentally about choice, not vision. It is about picking a course of action arbitrarily, not about seeing a reality that transcends you — goodness — and integrating with it.

Now, again, allowing the client to choose their own values might simply be a posture of non-judgmental acceptance. But Mumford sees something more sinister going on. Here's what he thinks is really happening in the field of psychology:

It may seem that the relativism on offer here is just professional etiquette. In a pluralistic society, isn’t it right that psychologists stay neutral and refuse to impose particular moral systems, refuse to foist upon us what the political philosopher John Rawls named “comprehensive conceptions of the good?” Isn’t the psychologist, taking me through my values-clarification exercise, merely showing restraint in keeping with his discipline? Isn’t he simply applying the golden rule that therapists must suspend judgment? “The first duty of a psychotherapist,” writes Frank Tallis in his recent book The Act of Living, “is to create a safe space, a situation where difficult and sometimes dangerous truths can be articulated and explored without fear of judgment, rejection, or condemnation.” Indeed, wouldn’t any other approach open up the whole enterprise to abuse, returning us to an age when the cause of lunacy was simply put down to “laxity of morals?”

I don’t think so. I think the psychologists are up to more than suspending judgment. I think they really believe they’ve got straight on what is and is not the case in the world, that they’ve really uncovered the truth of the matter, which is that there are no moral facts, that good and evil are not part of the fabric of the world. This is not just wariness on psychology’s part. It’s radical skepticism. The idea that “we as therapists shouldn’t talk about right and wrong” has become the very different idea that there is no right and wrong in the first place.

As Mumford goes on to discuss, from Freud to the radical behaviorists, "professional psychology has a long history of flirting with, or outright endorsing, skepticism about objective values." Mumford quotes the influential existential psychologist Irvin Yalom who has stated, "there are no rules, no ethical systems, no values; there is no external referent whatsoever; there is no grand design.” 

We can appreciate Mumford's point. It's one thing to be non-judgmental and respectful toward other people's values. It is quite another thing to deny objective values outright. Mumford's concern is that modern psychotherapy is trafficking in the latter rather than the former. Which, in light of my last post, raises the question: Can mental health be effectively pursued in an environment of radical skepticism? As Mumford goes on to explain:

Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl insisted that we’ll never be able to treat mental illness properly until we acknowledge the existential dimension of depression. “Man’s search for meaning,” he wrote in 1946, “is the primary motivation in his life.” So long as we conceive of a patient’s suffering as resulting solely from a chemical imbalance that needs to be fixed with medication, we stand little chance of helping him. Even the most efficacious pharmacological regimen will not quell someone’s deepest questions about how to live.

Now in one way my psychiatric hospital grasps this, making space as it does for patients to make inquiries about which values are worth pursuing. But in another way the hospital’s therapeutic regime forecloses that search for meaning by denying the reality or importance of objective, transcendent truths by which men and women have historically navigated their lives. The provision of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy whets patients’ appetite for meaning only to deprive them of real nourishment by extracting the very substance on which meaning depends: its orientation toward the absolute.

And lest you think Mumford's concerns are getting overly moralistic, the example of objective value that he turns to in his essay concerns the topic of my last post, the issue of existential significance and cosmic mattering. In the grip of his depression, Mumford describes the exhaustion of carrying what the writer Michelle Thomas calls the "weight of your own worthlessness." And cracking under that weight, Mumford raises his hand in the middle of the values clarification exercise to push back upon the psychologist leading it:

So here’s what I say to my psychologist. “The care I have received in this hospital is superb. The support, the understanding, the empathy. I am treated by your team as if I have irreplaceable value. When I am feeling worthless, you don’t act as if values are subjective. You don’t reply, ‘Yes. You’re right. If you feel worthless, you are worthless!’ No, you and your team always speak and act in ways that imply fundamental disagreement with my estimation of myself. Valuing my worth, you betray your proclaimed belief in the subjectivity of all values. You embrace truths far beyond any of our mere preferences.” 

Once again, mattering. And how mental health depends upon living in relationship to objective value. As I describe in The Shape of Joy it is the objective, existential, and cosmic nature of this value that keeps our worthiness and significance from becoming variable, fluctuating, and contingent. 

And if this is so, Mumford concludes, therapy has to step away from radical skepticism. Objective value needs to be reintroduced into the modern pursuit of health and happiness. As Mumford concludes his essay:

What would it look like for psychologists to preach what they practice, to accommodate the intrinsic value they presuppose their patients to have? It would not, I think, necessarily entail a return to Victorian-style moralism...Rather, it would see psychologists refusing to rule out from the outset a transcendent good that is the natural end of “man’s quest for meaning.” It would see psychologists encouraging patients to search for values beyond themselves, but making that quest for themselves. It would see psychologists echoing Iris Murdoch’s challenge, that each of us make “an attempt to look right away from self towards a distant transcendent perfection, a source of uncontaminated energy, a source of new and quite undreamt-of virtue.”

There are values and obligations and demands out there in the world that I may never have assented to, that simply come with the territory of being human. Any psychology that is going to be therapeutically beneficial, that is going to help people attain personal growth and become good again, will help us acknowledge and reckon with values — with truths — we may never have circled in an exercise.

In The Shape of Joy I make the argument, following the empirical research of positive psychology, that transcendence is good for you. Some of this is simply noting that studies have shown that faith and spirituality are positively correlated with mental health and meaning in life. But the other issue here concerns transcendent value, how we conceive and relate to the true, the beautiful, and the good. 

As an illustration of this, a psychological construct that I discuss in both Hunting Magic Eels and The Shape of Joy is what psychologists call existential significance or cosmic mattering, or more simply mattering. The word mattering points to our value, significance, and worth. And the words existential and cosmic point to the metaphysical grounding of this value, what I call an "invisible fact" in The Shape of Joy. 

The term "invisible fact" looks oxymoronic, but I coined it to be a provocation. By "invisible" I mean not empirical or scientific. Value isn't anything that registers on scientific measuring devices. You can't weigh value on a scale, measure it with calipers, or detect it with an x-ray. Value is invisible. And yet, when it comes to mattering, your value must be asserted as simple reality and obvious truth. Your worth isn't a fiction. Your worth is a fact. And it's this factualness, this enduring givenness, which allows mattering to stabilize our mental health. For if my value is simply the truth about me, this mattering exists independently of my shame and failure. I might not feel like I matter, but that doesn't affect the fact that I matter. As an invisible fact about my reality, mattering isn't anything that can change. My mattering simply is. 

Mattering illustrates what I mean by living in relationship to value, along with its mental health benefits. But mattering is only one illustration. Consider the cosmic mattering of other people. Because human persons have worth and value they are due recognition, respect, and care. And since people matter how we treat each other matters. Due to the invisible facts surrounding us we find ourselves embedded in a matrix of moral duties and ethical obligations. Again, these duties and obligations are invisible. But that doesn't mean they aren't real. Everyone assumes moral realism. We all believe in moral facts. Steal a person's wallet and they'll tell you to stop. And if you ask them why, they'll share a moral fact with you: "Because it is wrong." And if you disagreed, they'd be as puzzled as if you denied the law of gravity. Like our mattering, goodness simply is. 

In Hunting Magic Eels I describe our relation to value as "the primacy of the invisible," a phrase borrowed from the late pope Benedict. Science is important, but what is primary in our lives are the invisible facts. Our mattering. The mattering of others. Our moral concerns. The values that inform how I am pursuing a significant and meaningful life. This is precisely why the New Atheists floundered. In their scientistic materialism, the New Atheists denied the factuality of the invisible and in a stroke evacuated the world of all that was essential and primary in our lives--the ground of personal dignity, the worth of others persons, the demands of moral obligations, and the source of meaning and significance. 

Now, I've shared all this before. These are familiar beats I've discussed in this space and in my last two books. This post is just a review to set up the question and exploration of this series. I want to talk about value and therapy. More precisely, the place of value in therapy. 

Specifically, if it is true that we flourish in relation to value, a relation I've re-sketched above, then wouldn't it stand to reason that the pursuit of mental health would involve an exploration of value? It would seem so. And yet, as broadly practiced therapy presumes to be value-free. This flows from the non-judgmental posture of therapy, expressing "unconditional positive regard" toward a client no matter their self-selected and self-directed vision of happiness. Therapy isn't moral education or direction. And it is unethical for a therapist to impose their own values upon a client. 

So, do you see the tension here? 

Value is good for us, but value isn't anything a therapist can suggest or impose upon a client. 

What can be done about this issue? Well, the most common thing therapists do is explore the values of the client and work from there. But upon a closer investigation, which we'll do in this series, things aren't so clearcut and simple. 

During our time in Ireland last May, my co-leader Claire Davidson Frederick guided our students through walking the prayer labyrinth at Glendalough.

Growing up in a low-church Protestant tradition, I was never exposed to prayer labyrinths. But they've become very popular. Our campus has one on the grounds.

Labyrinths pre-date Christianity, but they began to show up in the Christian tradition in the Middle-Ages. The most famous of these is the labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral, built around 1200 CE. The Chartres labyrinth is unicursal, one continuous path to the center. This is the most common form for a prayer labyrinth, which generally aren't intended to be a maze with dead ends. Here's the layout of the Chartres labyrinth: 

The labyrinth at Glendalough takes its pattern from the famous Hollywood Stone. Discovered in 1908, the Hollywood Stone depicts a labyrinth carving. The etching is generally dated to the Middle-Ages, though its actual age is impossible to determine. Here's a nifty 3D model of the stone you can examine.   

After the Holy Lands were lost during the Crusades, Medieval Christians increasingly began to use labyrinths as a substitute for pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Walking labyrinths became a spiritual practice—a symbolic journey toward God. Generally, people use labyrinths as a contemplative practice of walking prayer. There's no standard or "correct" way to walk a prayer labyrinth, so you're free to adopt or create a practice of walking that suits you. 

After Claire's presentation to our students, I added some brief reflections about my own experiences with labyrinths. When I look at labyrinths, I shared with the students, I see a knot. A knot that looks like my life. I thought I was heading in one direction only to find myself backtracking and going in the opposite direction. Just when I thought I was making progress, getting closer to my goal, I found myself further away than when I had started. And for most of my life, I've never had a long view stretching out ahead of me. I've never seen the horizon. A sharp turn, a short way ahead, would always appear. And I've never been able to see around the next corner. 

Like I said, a knot.

And yet, though the path has felt like an inscrutable maze, I was always making progress, always moving toward the center, always being drawn toward God. I was not lost, though I felt like it. I was on the path. I only needed to keep walking.

So that's what I told the students. The labyrinth looks like a knot, but it's a meaningful knot. Just like your life. Snarled and twisted, you double back and reverse direction, you can't see what's around the next corner, and you often seem farther way from the goal than when you first began. But as Tolkien said, all who wander are not lost. Life is labyrinthian, but labyrinthian doesn't mean lost. God is drawing you. You've always been walking Home. 

So, yes, your life has been a knot, but it is a meaningful knot. 

"It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes."

This is my political theology in a nutshell. In my estimation, one of the most pernicious and lamentable developments within Christian life has been our relationship with partisan politics. On both the left and the right, Christianity has become instrumentalized, a tool of political power, a means of winning elections. Christians no longer trust the Lord. We trust Washington, DC. Or, more precisely stated, we trust in having our people run Washington, DC.

To be sure, I've wrestled with our democratic responsibilities and common sense appeals that Christians should and must vote to improve our shared existence as citizens. But what I'm naming here is trust, about where we're putting our confidence. And I think it's reasonable to infer where our trust is located by noticing where most of our attention, emotions, and energy is being directed. As Jesus said, where your treasure is there will your heart be. And I think it's pretty obvious that most Christians have their treasure and hearts invested in politics. 

What strikes me about the early Christians was their interest in evangelism. Their tool was persuasion. That, and the attractiveness of their shared life together. They lived within a wicked and tyrannical empire with a political equanimity that would flummox us today. They had their trust properly placed. Their treasure was in heaven, not in Rome. And they knew that their calling was to convert their neighbors rather than coerce them. They would change their world by calling people to God, not by controlling the government. Modern Christians, by contrast, have wholly given up on their evangelistic calling and have chosen, instead, to legislate their way to a better world. If you can't persuade them, force them. Don't evangelize, win elections.

Again, I'm not offering here a well-thought out political theology. That's a complex and snarly task. But what I do think any political theology has to reckon with is how twisted and malformed American Christianity has become. Our relationship to politics is sick and diseased. Our trust has become misplaced. We're idolators. And any vision of Christian political action that fails to account for this sickness is an adventure in missing the point. Our political action must begin and end in the heart. Before anything else the issue of trust has to be dealt with. As a Christian, you will not have a healthy relationship with politics if you are putting your trust in princes and Presidents.

The Hebrew word for "glory" is כָּבוֹד, transliterated as "kavod." Kavod literally means "heavy" or "weighty."

Psalm 19.1 says, "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands."

Creation is heavy with significance. 

The world bears meaning. 

Reality is not hollow. Reality is fullness. 

Creation, as Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it, is charged with the grandeur of God. 

The world is filled with the weight of the divine presence.

The glory of God exerts an ontological pressure upon all that exists. Meaning impinges upon matter. Significances saturate each second and space. 

After I publish a book, I get better and better with its elevator pitch. In the months following a book's publication, I often give long, windy answers whenever someone asks, "What's it about?" But after doing a few podcasts about the book, I become better at distilling its central theme and arguments. 

Here's how I've increasingly come to describe our predicament in The Shape of Joy, the observation that sets the agenda for the book, why the book exists.

Our modern pursuit of mental health has becoming increasingly introspective and self-referential. This self-referentiality keeps us stuck within ourselves, trapped in our own minds. But psychologists are discovering that introspection isn't good for us. This turns the story we've inherited from Sigmund Freud completely upside down. Here's how the psychologist Ethan Kross explains where the science is at:

In recent years, a robust body of new research has demonstrated that when we experience distress, engaging in introspection often does significantly more harm than good. It undermines our performance at work, interferes with our ability to make good decisions, and negatively influences our relationships. It can also promote violence and aggression, contribute to a range of mental disorders, and enhance our risk of becoming physically ill.

Simply put, the Freudian "turn inward," digging into ourselves in the pursuit of mental heath, has significantly undermined our emotional stability. 

Next, notice what so many of our current mental health recommendations--mindfulness, flow, gratitude, and awe--have in common. None of them involve introspection. In fact, mindfulness is explicitly aimed at stopping introspection, ceasing the inner chatter. Less well known in relation to mindfulness, gratitude, and awe is the research on humility, but it makes the same point. Humility isn't about thinking less of yourself (it's not a self-esteem move) but is, rather, thinking about yourself less. That is, humility is a hypo-egoic state, a capacity for self-forgetfulness. Note, again, the connection: Self-forgetfulness, rather than self-focus, is the path toward mental health. And on top of all this, the commonsense, but very powerful, recommendations to "go take a walk" or "go bake some bread" when anxious or distressed, finding some mental occupation to focus on to pull you out of yourself and stop your emotional looping.

A question I've been asked since the publication of the book is the role of therapy in our mental health journey. Doesn't therapy cause us to focus inwardly, asking us to become introspective in the search for self-awareness? The answer is that some therapeutic approaches do exacerbate rumination. But the most effective therapies, as I recount in the The Shape of Joy, make it a treatment goal to prevent cognitive rumination. So yes, therapy works, but it works best when it gives you the skills to stay out of your head.

So, that's how the opening argument from The Shape of Joy has evolved into a tighter elevator pitch:

Our mental health has become self-referential. We're trapped within ourselves. And left alone, the mind poisons itself. Freud was wrong. The research on mindfulness, gratitude, awe, and humility all tell the same story: We need to get out of our heads.

During our time in Ireland we had some free travel days, and I used one of mine to visit Kildare, the town where St. Brigid's monastery was located. 

Kildare, Cill Dara in Irish, means "Church of the Oak." Legend has it that Brigid founded her church at the site of an oak tree. This association, of course, also has pagan overtones. Some scholars believe that the name "druid" comes from two Proto-Indo-European roots, dru meaning "oak" and wid or weid meaning "to see" or "to know" (as in "wisdom" or "seer"). Put together, then, "druid" could mean "Knower of the Oak" or "Wise One of the Oak." Given that oak trees were sacred places for the druids, you can seek how Brigid's "Church of the Oak" would pull in druidic associations.

Another pagan connection concerns the "perpetual flame" that Brigid and her sisters kept lit at their monastery. A late hagiographic account of Brigid by Gerald of Wales describes how Brigid and her sisters attended a perpetual flame at Kildare, a fire that men were forbidden to approach and which miraculously produced no ashes. Many, again, see pagan overtones in the legend of Brigid's flame. Recall, the goddess Brigid was the patron of smith-craft. So, is there a fire/forge connection here? 

Last year, in 2024, the town of Kildare celebrated "Brigid 1500," a commemoration of the 1,500 year anniversary of Brigid's death. Two murals of Brigid can be viewed downtown. This is the most striking one:

This depiction portrays Brigid more as the "pagan goddess" than as the Catholic nun and saint, though you can see a halo around her head. Note the symbol on her chest. This is St. Brigid's cross, found throughout Kildare and Ireland. Irish children make St. Brigid crosses from rushes or straw the night before Imbloc, the spring festival which is also St. Brigid's feast day. It's a springtime folk tradition similar to coloring Easter eggs and, obviously, is yet another location to observe pagan/Christian syncretism. When I was at Glendalough I sat down by a stream, gathered some rushes, and made a St. Brigid cross:

There's a lovely holy well associated with St. Brigid in Kildare, complete with a statue of Brigid:

On the site where Brigid's monastery once stood is St. Brigid Cathedral, which is, a bit incongruously, an Anglican church. Outside of the church is the location where it is believed Brigid's perpetual flame was located:

Exploring the town, I discovered that a relic of St. Brigid's skull was at St. Brigid’s Parish Church, which is Roman Catholic. After her death, Brigid's skull was taken to Europe. A piece of her skull had been in Portugal since the 13th century. This relic was given back to Kildare in 2024 in commemoration of the 1,500 anniversary. The reliquary is a lovely silver oak tree: 

And the relic is found at the base of the trunk:

St. Brigid, pray for us.

Okay, if you've followed this far we have made two separate connections in this series.

First, St. Brigid, as "Mary of the Gaels," is a Marian figure in Celtic Christianity.

Second, Sophia, as the divine feminine figure that co-creates, suffuses, and guides the natural world, from solstices to animals to the medicinal properties of roots, is a Christian vision of what many pagans appeal to when they speak of a "nature goddess."

So, to summarize:

Brigid ---> Mary

Sophia ---> Divine Feminine in Nature

But this doesn't connect St. Brigid to the divine feminine in nature. To bring Brigid into a conversation about the divine feminine we need to connect Mary to Sophia. That's the goal of this post.

Perhaps a good place to start is with cosmic visions of Mary. In Marian iconography you'll often see Mary depicted crowned and standing upon a crescent moon. The vision comes from Revelation 12:

A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head.

This is the celestial Mary. Mary Queen of Heaven. Now, this celestial Mary isn't described in Revelation as Sophia, but this more cosmic vision of Mary starts to push the Marian imagination beyond the human Mary. To be sure, we're pushing the Protestant imagination too far, but these associations are coming from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions. So, to follow this argument, you're going to have to play in that metaphysical sandbox. Of course, you don't have to agree with any of the Marian theology, but if you want to see the shape of the argument you'll have to adopt the priors as a practice of sympathetic understanding. 

So, if we adopt a more cosmic view of Mary, is there a connection between Mary-as-cosmic-principle and the vision of Sophia in the Old Testament? A few connections can be made.

To start, both Mary and Sophia function as mediators between God and creation. God creates the world through Sophia. And God is born into the world through Mary, the Mother of God. Both Mary and Sophia function as bridges between God and creation. Christ comes to us through feminine mediation. Cosmically, the Logos is mediated through Sophia. And the Incarnated Jesus is born as the son of Mary. What Sophia is to creation, Mary is to the Incarnation.

Next, both Mary and Sophia are set apart from the created order. Sophia was the first of God's creation and works alongside God as co-maker and co-creator. Mary is not described as pre-existing creation, but she is set apart from creation in the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. That is to say, Mary is the only created being who was not touched by sin. Again, while the correspondence is not exact, both Sophia and Mary are creatures who are uniquely set apart from the rest of creation. 

Mary and Sophia are also described in similar ways. In Proverbs, Sophia is described as "a reflection of eternal light." Mary, in Revelation, is described as being "clothed with the sun." 

Lastly and most importantly, both Mary and Sophia express the divine feminine. 

All these allusive correspondences have caused some theologians to make a connection between Mary and Sophia. Sophia is the divine feminine aspect of God's creative work, and Mary is the perfect realization and embodiment of that aspect of creation. We might put it this way: Mary is the incarnation of Sophia, the divine feminine made visible in a human person. 

For example, Teilhard de Chardin wrote a poem in 1918 entitled "The Eternal Feminine" where he connects the Old Testament vision of Sophia with the Virgin Mary. Here's a sampling from the start of the poem:

When the world was born, I came into being. Before the centuries were made, I issued from the hand of God — half formed, yet destined to grow in beauty from age to age, the handmaid of his work...

I am the beauty running through the world, to make it associate in ordered groups: the ideal held up before the world to make it ascend.

I am the essential Feminine.

In the beginning I was no more than a mist, rising and falling: I lay hidden beneath affinities that were as yet hardly conscious, beneath a loose and tenuous polarity.

And yet I was already in existence.

In the stirring of the layers of the cosmic substance, whose nascent folds contain the promise of worlds beyond number, the first traces of my countenance could be read. Like a soul, still dormant but essential, I bestirred the original mass, almost without form, which hastened into my field of attraction; and I instilled even into the atoms, into the fathomless depths of the infinitesimal, a vague but obstinate yearning to emerge from the solitude of their nothingness and to hold fast to something outside themselves.

I was the bond that thus held together the foundations of the universe.

For every monad, be it never so humble, provided it is in very truth a centre of activity, obeys in its movement an embryo of love for me:

The universal Feminine.

You can see all the imagery being pulled from Proverbs 8 and Wisdom 6-7. In the middle of the poem de Chardin describes how humanity can come to misuse nature--the divine feminine--or falsely worship it:

For a long time man, lacking the skill to distinguish between the mirage and the truth, has not known whether he should fear me or worship me.

He loved me for the magic of my charm and my sovereign power; he feared me as a force alien to himself, and for the bewildering riddle I presented.

I was at once his strength and his weakness — his hope and his trial. It was in relation to me that the good were divided from the wicked. 

Indeed, had Christ not come, man might well have placed me for ever in the camp of evil.

Humanity, therefore, has to approach nature and the divine feminine in a chaste and holy manner. Because of this, the divine feminine declares in the poem: "Henceforth my name is Virginity." And yet, in the very next line: "The Virgin is still woman and mother: in that we may read the sign of the new age." We can see here the poem building a bridge between the divine feminine of Proverbs and Wisdom with the Virgin Mary. This connection comes into full view toward the end of the poem where Sophia finally discloses her identity,

Lying between God and the earth, as a zone of mutual attraction, I draw them both together in a passionate union.

— until the meeting takes place in me, in which the generation and plenitude of Christ are consummated throughout the centuries...

I am Mary the Virgin, mother of all human kind.

Russian sophiological theologians, like Sergius Bulgakov, also make connections between Sophia and Mary. 

To be sure, these connections between Mary and Sophia are all very speculative, but I think generatively so for the St. Brigid conversation. Specifically, if a connection between Mary and Sophia can be made, then St. Brigid as "Mary of the Gaels" can enter into a conversation about the divine feminine in nature. And importantly for my interests, this wouldn't have been done through a pagan pathway, but flows wholly through a Christian imagination. What we view in the life of St. Brigid, then, are visions of both Mary and Sophia, each manifestations of the divine feminine. No nature goddess needed.

"Praise the Lord, all nations!"

Psalm 117 is unique as a call to praise. Most of the time, the Psalms call upon Israel to praise the Lord. But Psalm 117 calls all nations and peoples to the praise and worship of God:

Praise the Lord, all nations!
Glorify him, all peoples!

There is a dance here between the particular and the universal. God calls a particular people--Israel--but gives this people a universal vocation. 

My next book is scheduled to come out this spring. Titled The Book of Love: A Better Way to Read the Bible, it has a chapter on this dialectic between the particular and the universal. One of the points I make is how love gets distorted when it is pulled too far in either direction.

On the one hand, there is the particular. We are not called to love generically or abstractly. I am called to love the particular people God has put within the scope of my care. My family, my friends, my church, my city. I am called to love a particular people at a particular place. And yet, this love of mine can become insular, xenophobic, and ethnonationalistic. 

This was precisely the temptation Israel faced. We see that play out in Acts 10, where the Holy Spirit has to nudge the Jewish followers of Jesus toward the goyim, away from the particular and toward the universal. As Peter declares at the end of his hard lesson, "God has shown me that I must not call any person impure or unclean."

So, love is universal. As Psalm 117 declares, Israel wasn't just to love herself. She existed to love the nations. And yet, a universalized love has its own temptations. Can you love the entire world without that love become generic, abstract, and disengaged? That is to say, we can love the world in principle but, as I point out in Stranger God, in practice love is local, a face to face interaction. Far too often we love the world at a digital distance via expressions of social media solidarity. Love becomes a meme. Loving everyone universally tends to mean loving no one in particular.

This is a crude contrast, but conservatives tend to make love too particular, with all the attendant temptations. Liberals, by contrast, tend to make love too universal, and suffer their own temptations in that direction. Psalm 117 places us in the middle. A particular people are reminded of a universal calling and concern.

In light of the St. Brigid tradition, we've been talking about pagan nature and fertility goddesses. As I've argued, the link between the Irish goddess Brigid and St. Brigid is thin, really just the similar names. Plus, the goddess Brigid wasn't a nature or a fertility goddess. In fact, the notion of a nature goddess in modern neo-paganism really became established during the modern period with the 18th and 19th century Romantic movement. Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon gives a good account of this.  

And yet, I do think a sympathetic conversation between Christianity and neo-paganism can be had in regards to how the divine feminine relates to nature. The bridge here is the vision of Sophia from the Old Testament.

Proverbs 3 describes how Sophia (Wisdom) was "the first of his [God's] acts" of creation. And once created, Sophia is depicted as a co-creator with God, standing "beside" God as "a master worker." Proverbs 8:22-36:

“The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of long ago.
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth,
when he had not yet made earth and fields
or the world’s first bits of soil.
When he established the heavens, I was there;
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master worker,
and I was daily his delight,
playing before him always,
playing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.

“And now, my children, listen to me:
happy are those who keep my ways.
Hear instruction and be wise,
and do not neglect it.
Happy is the one who listens to me,
watching daily at my gates,
waiting beside my doors.
For whoever finds me finds life
and obtains favor from the Lord,
but those who miss me injure themselves;
all who hate me love death.”

Simply, Sophia is a divine principle, imagined as feminine, that co-creates and pervades the natural world. More, we are called to live in attunement with this divine, feminine principle. Whoever finds Sophia, says Proverbs, "finds life" and "obtains favor from the Lord." Negatively, those who "miss" Sophia "injure themselves" and those who "hate" Sophia "love death."

These connections deepen when we turn to the Deuterocanonical book of Wisdom, found in the canon of the Catholic and Orthodox churches. Admittedly, this is a long passage to share, but if you're a Protestant you've likely never read it and it would be illuminating to give it a close, attentive reading. It's a pretty startling and mind-bending text:

Wisdom is radiant and unfading,
and she is easily discerned by those who love her
and is found by those who seek her.
She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her.
One who rises early to seek her will have no difficulty,
for she will be found sitting at the gate.
To fix one’s thought on her is perfect understanding,
and one who is vigilant on her account will soon be free from care,
because she goes about seeking those worthy of her,
and she graciously appears to them in their paths
and meets them in every thought. (Wisdom 6:12-16)

May God grant me to speak with judgment
and to have thoughts worthy of what I have received,
for he is the guide even of wisdom
and the corrector of the wise.
For both we and our words are in his hand,
as are all understanding and skill in crafts.
For it is he who gave me unerring knowledge of what exists,
to know the structure of the world and the activity of the elements,
the beginning and end and middle of times,
the alternations of the solstices and the changes of the seasons,
the cycles of the year and the constellations of the stars,
the natures of animals and the tempers of wild animals,
the powers of spirits and the thoughts of human beings,
the varieties of plants and the virtues of roots;
I learned both what is secret and what is manifest,
for wisdom, the fashioner of all things, taught me.

There is in her a spirit that is intelligent, holy,
unique, manifold, subtle,
agile, clear, unpolluted,
distinct, invulnerable, loving the good, keen,
irresistible, beneficent, humane,
steadfast, sure, free from anxiety,
all-powerful, overseeing all,
and penetrating through all spirits
that are intelligent, pure, and altogether subtle.
For wisdom is more mobile than any motion;
because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things.
For she is a breath of the power of God
and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty;
therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her.
For she is a reflection of eternal light,
a spotless mirror of the working of God,
and an image of his goodness.
Although she is but one, she can do all things,
and while remaining in herself, she renews all things;
in every generation she passes into holy souls
and makes them friends of God and prophets,
for God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom.
She is more beautiful than the sun
and excels every constellation of the stars.
Compared with the light she is found to be more radiant,
for it is succeeded by the night,
but against wisdom evil does not prevail.

She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other,
and she orders all things well. (Wisdom 7:15-8:1)

Like I said, a remarkable passage. Sophia is a "pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty." Sophia "pervades and penetrates all things." Sophia is the "fashioner of all things" within the created order, from the solstices to the nature of animals to the varieties of plants to the virtues of roots. 

As should be obvious. there are resonances here between Sophia and the neo-pagan vision of a nature goddess. Both describe a divine feminine principle that infuses and suffuses nature, from solstices to herbal remedies, that we must live in attunement with. 

Now, can Sophia be connected to St. Brigid from a Christian perspective? It can, and it comes through that Marian association we've already discussed. We'll turn to that issue as we wrap up this series.

One way to tell the story about the relationship between paganism and Christianity in the West is that Christianity co-opted and stole pagan practices, rebranding them as Christian holidays, rituals, and symbols, from Christmas trees to Easter eggs. In this telling, there is a primitive pagan "core" to the Christian practice that has been occluded and which might be recovered by removing the Christian accretion. 

In the Brigid tradition, as I've shared, there is a convergence between her feast day and the festival of Imbolc. As one of the four Gaelic seasonal festivals, which include Bealtaine, Lughnasadh and Samhain, Imbolc likely has pagan origins as a celebration of spring and the lambing season. These fertility and birthing connections pull in divine feminine imagery. And given that Brigid's feast day falls on Imbolc we might suspect that, once again, Christianity is rebranding a prior pagan practice. Imbolc, a pagan fertility celebration, has now become the feast day of St. Brigid.

This case is strengthened because there was a goddess named Brigid (or Brigit). Brigid was one of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the gods and goddesses of Irish lore, the deities of pre-Christian Gaelic Ireland. A 9th century Christian account of the goddess Brigid describes her as being associated with poetry, wisdom, healing, smithing, and the protection of animals. The argument therefore has been made that St. Brigid is a Christian syncretization of the goddess Brigid. And yet, this account has a few problems. First, and most significantly, St. Brigid was a real person. St. Brigid, as a historical woman, is not a syncretistic co-opting of a pagan legend. Second, the goddess Brigid wasn't a fertility or nature goddess. Her main associations were poetry and smithing. Third, and relatedly, there is no particular association between the goddess Brigid and the festival of Imbolc, which became St. Brigid's feast day.

Basically, the only link between the goddess Brigid and St. Brigid is the name. The goddess Brigid wasn't a nature goddess. Nor is there any connection between her and Imbolc. Still, there are just enough threads of association to be woven into a neo-pagan tapestry. St. Brigid shares a name with a pagan goddess. St. Brigid's feast day falls on Imbolc, which may have origins in pagan fertility rites. Therefore: St. Brigid was primordially a nature and fertility goddess. The pagan goddess became the Christian saint. But upon closer inspection, as pointed out above, this case falls apart. Mostly, again, because St. Brigid was a historical person. St. Brigid didn't become a Christian, take vows, and become an influential abbess because she was "stealing" or "co-opting" the persona of a pagan nature goddess. She was simply her own true, historical Christian self and would be quite horrified at how she is being depicted and venerated in Ireland today. So while it is true that Christians have syncretically borrowed from pagan culture, this didn't happen with St. Brigid. As I put it in the first post, the St. Brigid tradition isn't a case of Christians stealing her from the ancient pagans but is, rather, modern pagans stealing St. Brigid away from Christianity to remake her into a pre-Christian nature goddess.

But now, having said all that, I don't want to be too deflationary. As a historical person, St. Brigid is not a syncretic nature goddess. That much is sure. But I do think a sympathetic conversation can be had with paganism when it comes to the divine feminine and nature in relation to the St. Brigid tradition. I'll turn to that topic next.