Two men sprang to mind when I read “Happy Holidays? Why are many holiday family gatherings marked by tension and unhappiness?”
ANTONY FLEW—formerly Britain’s most prominent atheist—in late age concluded that the existence of purpose cannot be explained without assuming the existence of a purposeful Mind behind and within the universe. Late last year, with eleven other academicians, he urged the British government to teach ID (yes, “intelligent design”) in the public schools! But--given the “On Faith” description of “many holiday family gatherings”—we cannot believe that they are intelligently designed, can we?
Well, yes, if we hear from the other man who sprang to my mind. He wasn’t an archangel, but he used “the Archangel” as a way of referring playfully to a life-assumption that has educational and therapeutic value. (Though himself a devout Christian, he avoided using “God,” a turn-off word for many of his patients.) A Berlin psychotherapist and Jungian analyst who emigrated to the U.S. at the beginning of World War II, he was missing a shoulder—blown off when he was a German soldier in World War I.
Four years before his death in 1956, I introduced FRITZ KUNKEL to an American audience of some 500 clergy with the question, “Did you have to go through all that you’ve suffered in life in order to become who you are?” With only a slight pause he replied, “No, but it all helped.” And I can still hear the first words of what I call his Archangel lecture (which I recorded):
“Things occur in human life that would seem to be unfavorable to wholeness. Sometimes the wind changes, and we must re-set our sail.” He did not say we must change our course, though we may have reason to do so. He was referring to the permanent possibility that human life can be lived purposefully in transcendence of circumstance.
Flew moved from evolutionism’s teaching that life is only random to DEISM’s conviction that there is a directive dimension to reality: the existence of a conscious, intelligent First Cause God is scientifically verifiable (in line with the traditional teleological argument for the existence of God). Kunkel also rejected materialism’s claim that life is only random, but for him the directive dimension was THEISTIC: God is not a far-away indifferent injector of purpose into life’s processes and structures but is personally involved in his creation with his creatures—and the story of this involvement, Dr.Kunkel believed, is best told in the Bible.
Flew, purpose: Kunkel, good-will purposing—God’s and ours.
Back to the Archangel lecture: “When a couple decides to have a baby, the Archangel studies each of them and asks ‘What do they need? They both hate politics. I will give them a senator.’ The Archangel gives you just the children you need.” After you stopped laughing, Fritz would gently ask you if you can come up with a better way of looking at your children and “how life is trying to help you grow up, mature, as your children grow.”
No, I didn’t forget the question. Fritz is asking participants in tense and unhappy holiday family gatherings to ask “What is the Archangel up to, doing this to us?” Whispers the Archangel, "I have some unfinished business with you, and you have some unfinished business with one another."
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