The Wild God

I first encountered this reading when I was in training 15 years ago.  I have kept a copy ever since.   I shared it this morning with the Executive Peer Circle Group I am a part of this year. 

The Wild God

From The Art of the Psychotherapist  

By

James F.T. Bugental, Ph.D.

They have said that God is dead, and it may be so, But I believe that the God who is dead is the god in the cage, the zoo god.  We thought to contain the zoo god by our definitions, our interpretations, our inventions of “divine laws.”  The god whom we captured and domesticated in our intellectual zoo of exotic concepts, that god has not thrived in captivity, and that god has died.

But the wild god, the god that cannot be captured by our wills or our intellects – the wild god who will not be domesticated – is alive and free as ever.  He moves in the wind.  She sings in the silences of the desert. It nourishes us in the sun.

The wild god is more than the god of evolution; the wild god breathes revolution as well. The zoo god could not take us by surprise; we visited him at our convenience and chiefly as children.  The zoo god could not upset the comfortable routines of our lives, and he seemed - until he died – to require little feeding with anything that mattered.

Not to be so trained is the wild god, who may overturn everything as he comes into our lives.  She may demand all we have as It devours our complacency and requires us to change violently, totally, frighteningly.

[Paul] Tillich called the wild god, “the God above god.”  The wild god is the god of mystery.  And mystery is a world too seldom found in psychological writing or psychotherapeutic discourses.  We deny mystery; we pretend it exists in the minds of children, authors, and mystics.  And we deceive and blind ourselves when we do so. 

The wild god comes upon us in ways we cannot predict and in forms we do not expect.  The wild god may come disguised as a frightened and withdrawn client who awaits release to show a rich, poetic creativity.  The wild god may be the client who baffles us, frustrates us, and forces us to think freshly about aspects of our work which had felt solid and dependable.  The wild god may work through our own restlessness and irritability to forces us to confront long-denied inner conflicts.  The wild god shakes the ground under our feet, obscures the path we follow, and makes us aware we dwell in cages that we have constructed and that we call “reality”…

If we seek the wild god, we must go out into the world, out into the dangers and opportunities, go without a map, without a compass, without enough food, protection, anything.  And as we seek the wild god, we may be captured by him.  For mystery comprehends us; we do not comprehend it. (pp. 272-274)