Religion, Psychology and the Creative Process

I have been studying Jungian psychology for more than thirty years at institutes in Philadelphia and New York. I don’t think psychology was very far away during my formative years. After service in the US Navy, I studied literature as an undergraduate and in graduate school. In time I earned a PhD at Lehigh University, in Bethlehem, PA.

I wrote my dissertation on the “Catholic Imagination in Francois Mauriac, Graham Green, and Flannery O’Connor.” Though I would in time leave the teaching field for publishing, I never moved far from religion, psychology, and the feminine, in particular. I recall being in a hallway at Lehigh, waiting for my PhD oral exams, when I received a copy of “The Sewanee Review” with my first published poem of consequence, “That Kingdom Coming Business,” about my Navy service on an ammunition ship during the Vietnam War. This crowned my day.

A few lines: “They stopped wind and rain, hard by Nagasaki’s shores so men below could tender bombs due to print territory on other people’s faces; the blood of fifty states shed deliriously like an oil banket, leveling waves and making sure that if Christ be on his way like a flame from the East, faces from all nations will be welded like a veil of Bessemer smoke on mushroom clouds rising high over the city of peace.” (I was particularly pleased that one of my favorite authors — Robert Penn Warren, was featured in the same volume.)

Over time I would write many how-to books on cycling, solar greenhouses, health & fitness, and the like and, while these paid the college costs for my two children and much, much more, it was my poetry and fiction that tended to stay with me in the psychological sense and helped soothe the psyche. I think that being born in war, losing a father to cancer as a teenager and, with my brothers, enduring the plight of the immigrant, a vulnerable “limey” for the harassing crowd, helped usher me into poetry, fiction and the meaning of dreams.

Here are some lines I wrote about my Irish-born father twenty years after his death, a poem, “Prayer at the End of a Tomb,” published in “Partisan Review.”

“When you were dipped in triple green and chased from mind to the ensign god, I joined time for my soul’s sake and wrote my epitaph at worm-rate for the stone that waits the dying women and their sons, certain that the curve of space allows a certain father fame to deny the truth of atomic bits, stone clear in his heart.”

Though in my twenties, I wasn’t as quick to the altar rail, I had a long and abiding interest in the Catholic religion and the powerful influence it had on me. This was enriched by my graduate studies and helped by my growing familiarity with Catholic authors, including Flannery O’Connor, about whom I had written my Master’s thesis and dissertation, as well as a better understanding of Francois Mauriac and Graham Green. The end result was the novel, “Chanting the Feminine Down.” Here is a description that accompanied the publication of the novel.

“Chanting the Feminine Down” began with a dream about Pope Paul II slipping peacefully into the feminine earth. The dream became a poem and the poem became a vision, then a novel. The work has been brewing for a lifetime.

“Chanting” is narrated from the point of view of graduate student Colette from the Bronx, looking for examples of the feminine in the Catholic/Christian traditions. Her journey is historical and archetypal; soulful and imaginative. Her studies and her dreams, as well as an exploration of Jungian psychology, allow her to experience and re-imagine history and religion through a feminine lens. But this is dangerous territory where the unconscious and dangerous forces live, wage war and compete for her sanity and her soul. Boccaccio’s “Famous Women” represent women from the mystical traditions and anima figures from art. Poetry and her dreams serve as her compass, guide and salvation.

In my writing, my dreams, my poetry I have never moved far from war and the implications for my family for over more of a century. My mother was born in 1900 and married a WWI veteran, giving birth to three children before her husband died from lingering war wounds. She later married my father during World War II, giving birth to me and two other brothers.

My mother’s first children were put in an orphanage for the duration of the war. One was sent home to die from a disease never fully explained. She didn’t. Rather, she would later marry an American GI and travel to America. He did his best to care for wife and children but the war never really left him. He committed suicide decades later. The last words he said to me were, “Charles, these women are killing me.”

Over time with my understanding of psychology and many conversations with sisters and others, I came to understand it was what he considered the “weight” of the feminine, a house with a wife and three daughters, that he couldn’t deal with. Years later a son would take his own life. War hung heavy over the household.

My two brothers and I, who grew up in war-torn London in a neighborhood with plenty of bombed-out buildings a decade after the war, were eager to leave that scene behind for a new start in America. Sadly, our father died two years after we arrived in America, and we were obliged to get odd jobs before and after school, such as delivering newspapers. My older brother quit school and joined the Army. My other brother and I waited until graduation. I joined the Navy as he did a few years later.

This was during the Vietnam buildup. I was assigned to the USS Mount Baker, an ammunition ship with the Seventh Fleet. It immediately made sense that an ammo ship should be named after a volcano. I’ll dispense with the shipboard jokes about this uncomfortable situation. I did get serious at times, such as during Typhoon Nancy when the ammunition in the ship’s holds broke loose and crew members had deal with this near-catastrophe during heavy seas, cascading bombs, on a ship that had largely lost steering.

I recall the captain summoning the chaplain and crew for prayers on the ship’s navigation bridge. I think it was nondenominational, but I suspect the Catholic in me found a very familiar terrain. I don’t recall tears or goodbyes or anything like that. We were soon in the ammunition holds throwing our mattresses and pillows amongst the cascading 2,000-lb bombs, hoping to slow their trajectory until the typhoon subsided. It did after a few days. War has lingered for a long time and it was decades before I could write about these experiences.

“When War Becomes Us” is about the profound effect war has on the individual, family and psyche. The novel is about a multi-generational family’s attempt, especially through the mother, to keep a tidy war story passed down through generations as gospel. The book is about a mother’s hold on the family, the past, the collective generational tales, especially about war. It is about how we remember and forget wars and the devices and tools we use to inflate and suppress the past. It is about the history of wars examined through a psychological lens.

“When War Becomes Us” explores the psychology of such memories, and how a series of events including suicides, other sudden deaths, and the eruption of countervailing dreams in the narrator, Neil McGuire, and his siblings prompt them to reexamine their past. Central to the narrative is McGuire’s efforts to come to grips with his history, his mother complex, his father’s shadow, his religion, and his own psychology.

The characters in the novel are largely based on family members who have felt the effects of a century of wars, including World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam. McGuire is forced to reflect on his family after his brother-in-law, a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge declared, “These women are killing me,” shortly before committing suicide.

This need becomes more pronounced after his sister Hilda implores him to “Tell them everything” about the family history, before dying suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage. The urgency of this request increases as McGuire receives documents at his sister’s funeral about her rape in an orphanage by a priest and nuns after being largely abandoned, along with her two siblings, by their mother.

The center of the novel is McGuire taking up his sister’s plea to “Tell them everything.” Hilda’s urgent request prompts McGire’s descent into the past: his relationship with his parents and siblings. After Hilda’s death McGuire dreams constantly of war, conflict, religion and an array of martial encounters that serve as a kind of mirror and compensation, an internal check on his daylight activities. His dreams serve as a path forward and a psychological narrative that help him heal. His dreams often show up in religious dress, representing conflicts with the Catholic Church and ways to move beyond the institution. His dreams become his prayer. For him this is soul work. This presents a profound tension in the novel.

Other dreams have a strong anima or feminine element that encourages McGuire to better understand the feminine in his own psyche and what his brother-in-law might have meant with his remark: “These women are killing me.” The works of psychologist Carl Jung provide a frame for these dramatic, archetypal developments. Jung even shows up in a dream.

“When War Becomes Us” is a psychological novel in that the importance of outer, historical events is balanced, modified and at times reshaped by dreams, as well as fantasies and story-telling. The novel contains more than sixty actual dreams experienced by the author during the planning and writing of the novel. Dreams are the heart of the novel.

The novel charts the efforts by five family members, not to rewrite history, but to transform that history by soul-work into a living, breathing narrative that invites psychological healing. The family finds its soul.

I expect “When War Becomes Us” to be published later this year.