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Having just read and really tried to digest Steven Davison's post What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Fellowship & the Angel of the Meeting, I want to write a little bit about the role of projection in religious leadership.
To summarize the very fine post by Steven Davison would be
challenging, because it has many aspects, but I'll pull out some of it. In it, he is working to articulate
the angel of meeting, and its role for ministers in their leadership within a
community, either a home community or in traveling ministry. His lived
experience of angels of meetings led him to explore contemporary modeling of
how to ascertain this angel and how to engage with the information and
communion with these angels for the purposes of moving meeting communities, ministering
to their needs, and effectively responding the inner Teacher who calls ministry
out of us. But you should read it.
He does a lot of great question generation for working on
ascertaining the angel, and makes even better connections to Walter Wink's
work. Quoting extensively from Unmasking the Powers about this angel of the
church, "[that] exist[s] in, with, and under the material expressions of
the church’s life as its interiority. ...,"(p 71, from Davison's post)
Davison brings out the ministerial lessons that this angel can offer us.
There is a striking couple of sentences early on in his
piece, in defining his experience with these angels, that struck me and has
stayed with me.
"I have never experienced the angel of my own meetings,
but that is because they are partly a manifestation of myself as one of the
meeting’s members. That’s what the angel is, the spirituality of a meeting, and
thus a projection, if you will, of all its members. It’s really hard to
spiritually commune with your own true self."
Two pieces are really powerful here. First there is this
admission that it is really hard to
commune with your true self. That is no joke. It’s hard because it is a
discipline and practice that some traditions have as their central work and
vocation. And second, Steven Davison calls this spiritual
manifestation of the angel of a meeting a projection
of a true self—or maybe many true selves, as members gather together. This is
very interesting to me.
Full disclosure, my bias and perspective is distinctly
psychological here. So there’s that. Davison is writing from a theological/spiritual
and sociological perspective in his very fine piece.
Projection, from where I am sitting, is about the taking of
an aspect of self and placing outside of the self. Projection is a fundamental
function of xenophobia and racism. We recognize aspects of the inhuman in
ourselves, and we project it outward onto those who are less powerful, or on
those we secretly identify with, but need to distance ourselves from, for some
reason.
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| Bread and Puppet: kings and queens of symbolic projection |
Projection is the thing that stalled me most definitely from
seeking ordained leadership in a church, before I really understood myself to
be a Quaker in the liberal tradition, which does not ordain leaders in their
meetings. In seminary, I took a course, a really
brilliant course, called Re-visioning the
Power of Leadership in the Church. Leave it to my lefty seminary, Episcopal
Divinity School, to offer this course. This course was about projection, or at least that's what stays with me 16 years later.
The course was specifically trying to help folks seeking
ordination to think critically about projection in their role as pastor in a
church. Unchecked, projection can
lead to all kinds of abuses of power. A parishioner in need of succor comes to
feel love for a pastor because the pastor is making it possible for her to
project a parental feeling onto the pastor. The pastor can seem like a parent
to the parishioner. How the pastor handles this projection is crucial for
appropriate leadership, as well as empowerment of the parishioner. The truth is
the parishioner has the parent within their self, the resources and ability to
heal their self. A responsible model of ministry recognizes this and builds
towards it pastorally, structurally.
But projection goes both ways. The pastor also projects,
also separates aspects of their selves to good or ill effect. In the same situation, a pastor might project their own struggle onto a person coming with a need, making it harder for that pastor to serve that parishioner. Or, the pastor might project a family feeling onto that person, making it easier to connect. I remember a brilliant
exercise, where we were asked to identify a mentor or person we looked up to—I chose George Lakey. We were
then asked to repeat this in pairs—to say, I
love the George Lakey in me, and then proceed to name aspects of that
person’s identity as a part of ourselves.
By doing this, I was able to identify with in a deeper way
the parts of myself I had projected onto him. But then there were aspects of
him that I was not—male, middle aged, working class, etc. As I said to
myself-- I love the man in me, I love the middle aged in me, I love the working class man in me, I smiled, recognizing the dissonance, and the sense of melting limits.
It was powerful, playful, and taught me a lot about owning my own projection.
Not that this stopped it at all. I feel like we humans are a
bundle of projections, for good or ill. In another post I talk about splitting,
an extreme and terrible aspect of this. Projection frightens me. And it's in the fabric of our relating.
But I wonder, what would it look like if we did this—I love the angel in me. I love the wild
winged life in me. I love the God talk in me. I love the connection in me. I
love the best and worst in me. I love the meeting in me. I love the angel in me.
Steven Davison’s post did a lot to open up the possibility
that projection can be a good thing, a way to name what we put out of
ourselves, and the good that can come of it, in a gathered meeting. It also
reminded me of the lessons of that class. And although I still feel grounded
and committed to listening within for the welling up of the Teacher to speak
through me in meeting, I am beginning to feel like the hovering angels of our
best nature are there, too, within and without, calling us to commune, and
move, and grow together.
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