Radix Fidem is the name of our covenant and our religion. As long as I’m alive, this will never be formalized into a government approved tax-free denomination. You are a member if you think you are and you try to fellowship with other members. There will be none of this membership induction process where you have to meet certain requirements. The only requirement is that you hang around and try to part of the family. This is first and foremost a covenant family, but it won’t work too well if you hide in the shadows. Come out and let us love you.
This is not a clinic where you have to pass through an audit of your personal life. You share that stuff when it’s a natural part of the conversation. On the other hand, if you know you need help, one of the first things we’ll need to know is how you got into the mess you are now. Most Americans have at least brushed up against the idea of counseling and personality assessment. It’s a part of our culture. That in itself isn’t so bad, but so very much of our society is messed up that it typically becomes an excuse to enslave people in one way or another. Our goal is to set you free. You need to know who you are, but more importantly, who God made you to be.
Some of this series will review previous teaching on this blog, but hopefully I can restate things with a little more depth and clarity.
The single greatest break we make with secular clinical psychology is our assertion that humanity is fallen. Whole books have been written seeking to relate all the implications of this, but in clinical terms, it means that there is an insurmountable gap between what we can be on one side, and what we ought to be by design on the other side. You’ll never be whole in this life. The best we can hope for is to give you a goal in living and try to make the most of a bad situation. While many clinicians operate on similar assumptions, we take it much farther.
Our current human existence is not the norm. We are under a curse that cannot be fully lifted until we die or Christ returns to restore all things back to Eden. We insist that our human sense of time-space boundaries is part of the Curse of the Fall. Thus, there is no way we can in our current existence bypass it. It’s not that the boundaries are immutable, but the human experience of them cannot be changed. We believe that we were created without those boundaries. Not that Eden had no time and space dimensions, but that they were manageable. We are designed to move about in time and space without physical effort, but our human minds are incapable of processing that.
There must be something in our make-up that handles those dimensions as variables subject to easy manipulation. In other words, there is a part of us that is eternal. In our culture, it would seem there is no innate means to connect with that eternal part. Nothing in our culture, and very little in our psychology lore, even acknowledges such a thing, much less pretends it can be used in any way.
The problem we face is that no amount of clinical language can capture the essence of this thing. What we are left with is a sort of hybrid clinical and mystical discussion. Reminder: Mysticism is direct experience of something that defies description. It’s not a higher level of intellect, but exceeds the limits of intellectual grasp. It places a claim on your existence, something undeniable, even while it remains indescribable. It pulls in some parts of us that are called subconscious, simply because it affects our thoughts and behavior but not from a source fully in the light of conscious awareness. It includes things like intuition, when something is recognized (typically part of a pattern) on a level not fully conscious. It does not require full linear rational processing, but leaps over logical steps and still arrives at an accurate answer.
In our case, what we seek is a conscious awareness of something that touches us outside the rational domain, something entirely personal, though not merely subjective. It clearly comes from outside of us and makes demands.
