“Now Mine Eye Seeth Thee”

“I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee.”

~ Job 42:5

There comes a moment in the soul’s journey when we stop hearing about God, the Center, Source, archetypal Self, objective Psyche – and start seeing. Encountering.

But the vision is not always what we expect.
Or is it exactly what we don’t?

This shift from inherited image to direct encounter – no matter how incomprehensible – is the ground of spiritual maturity. In Jung’s terms, “There are psychic truths which cannot be explained, proved, or contested.” They confront and change us.

In Job’s ordeal, the image of a fair, benevolent, lawful God is shattered, and give way to a deeper, more terrifying truth. Yahweh does not answer Job’s suffering with comfort, but with a revelation of monstrous power – power beyond justice, beyond morality, beyond human categories altogether.

Awakening to God meant awakening to a totality – light and shadow. Not just to the Creator, but to Behemoth and Leviathan, the deep, primordial forces that rage at the foundation of being. The raw, unconscious life-force: greedy, devouring, indifferent to ethics. They dwell not only in the abyss of creation but in the depths of our own psyches. They are life’s deep, unconscious appetite.

Jung saw in this a sacred turning point: Job is no longer a servant appealing to divine justice. He is now a conscious witness. He no longer relates to God as a child to a parent, but as a soul responsible for beholding the totality – including its darkness. It’s easy to describe with words but it’s an unimaginable tension to experience and hold consciously. If one survives it and succeeds in integrating it into one’s worldview, it is an epical achievement of psychological development. To see the unconscious – to see that God is not ‘good’ in the way we wish to see Him – is to grow up spiritually. It is to be initiated. And it is terrifying.

And yet,
it is only by bearing this vision, by holding the unbearable tension between justice and chaos, light and shadow, that something new is born- a consciousness of wholeness.
Not a clearer doctrine, but a deeper vision of life.

This is the wound that makes the divine long to become human,
and a human – whole.