Analytical Psychology and Orthodox Christianity Consultation

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“Our drinking problem, our food addiction, our reliance on drugs to meet our dependencies, our lusting after power…our unrealized hopes, our cruelty to others—whatever looms as our basest fear or despair or hopelessness—now turns out to be just the occasion and place where God comes to us. We are found on our own cross. We cannot get out of that gap to get to God. We do not leave behind our problems to get to God. God comes to find us where we are weakest, in the secret hiding places of our compulsions, in the segregated district of self that we despise and oppress…God comes to us”
— A.B. Ulanov
“Disease is a disorder and yet it does not obliterate everything since if this were to happen the disease itself could not exist…For that which totally lacks a share in the Good has neither being nor a place in existence, whereas that which has a composite nature owes to the Good whatever place it has among beings, and its place among them and the extent of its being are directly proportionate to the share it has of this Good. ”
— Pseudo-Dionysus
 
 

The Medicine of the Psalms

It's been a long and hard week in the world. As Christians around the world prepare to enter Holy Week, with East and West on the same calendar this year, I was reminded of this extraordinary clip of an Assyrian monk chanting Psalm 53 for Pope Francis during his visit to Georgia last October. He is accompanied by Iraqi and Syrian families, and is chanting in Aramaic. The Church Fathers recommended the Psalms as 'medicine' for unrest of soul. I wonder if, much like Jung's archetypal approach, they helped connect individual suffering to the collective, and created a container for lament. 

Pia Chaudhari