Pamela Cooper-white - Braided Selves: Collected Essays on Multiplicity, God, and Persons

All writing is conversation. The intention is to get something going, to lob a thought or to return it with a new spin. Writing extends the reach of ideas beyond the immediate circle of students, friends, and colleagues to conversation partners the writer can hardly even imagine. The intention behind this book is to continue and expand a challenging conversation that has been going on for a while now, about what it means to be an I, and how much more complex and fluid the understanding of I has become or is still becoming in postmodernity. This particular book is written from the perspective of a pastoral theology (an interdisciplinary field that works at the intersection of constructive theology and the theory and practice of spiritual care and clinical psychology), so the conversation further engages this question of the complexity of persons in light of who and what we believe and imagine God to be.

To the extent that all our beliefs about God begin in and amid human experience, the psychological and the theological must ring true to both realmsthe realm of belief and the realm of experience. That experience itself is subjective, permeated with imagination, competing and contradictory beliefs, and even (as Sigmund Freud spent his career warning us) self-deception becomes less of a problem in postmodernity, because variability and even contradiction are now being valued in ways modernity could not conceive. As we begin to exchange static metaphors and models of the universe, the self, and even God for models that are less concrete and hard edged, more flexible and permeable; and as we mute our claims to possession of a universal truth in favor of a more modest, local, and culturally contingent approximation of truth(s), we may find new richness, openness, and expansiveness in both our theology and our anthropology (our understanding of what it means to be a human person). Ultimately, I believe, the more complexity we can admit to in ourselves, other persons, and our conception of the transcendent or the divine, the more we will experience empathy and compassion toward ourselves, other human beings, and ultimately, the whole creation.

The premise of this book is that both persons and God are multiple , and that this multiplicity, although intuited in past generations, needs to be foregrounded in ways that were unthought and perhaps even unthinkable until the postmodern era. There has always been a dialectic of One and Many. In ancient times (e.g., with Platos concept of the tripartite soul/ psyche ), However, a dominant theme in the West, particularly with the advent of the Enlightenment, has been unity/integration of the self (at least as an ideal) and an emphasis (through deism and theism) on God as singular prime mover and (only in Theism) shaker of the universe.

As we have been increasingly emerging in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from the grip of modernity (in particular the legacy of Descartes and eighteenth-century rationalism), we are also beginning to question its foregrounding of unity, oneness, and integration. The rhetoric and ideal of unity has served many admirable purposesas a resident of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where one of the most pivotal battles of the Civil War was fought right here on seminary ground, I am especially mindful of the language of Union, and grateful that the horror of slavery was abolished in all the states and territories of the still fragile United States of America. Yet I am also mindful of the ways in which the symbols of union, equality, and the melting pot, fused with the Enlightenment image of the rational, free (white, male, and preferably Christian and landowning) citizen have actually served to exclude and disenfranchise women, persons of color, non-Christians, immigrants, non-English speakers, the landless, and the poor. By making the image of the ideal citizen, the normative image of the privileged One and holding out equal opportunity as a fact rendered invisible and unquestionable the realities of exclusion, inequality, and oppression.