Where do the Gods go when they’re not on Mt. Olympus?

in the final lesson of a Jung course I took, the professor shared a question Jung contemplated, “where do the Gods go when they’re not on Mt. Olympus?”

I thought it was a beautiful way to reflect on the absence of God and all the places they inhabit. where are they and where do they rest? Jung believed they left Olympus and entered the solar plexus of the modern, as in they become psychological realities for us.

el profe reflected on what makes a God. the ego’s tendency to focus on the husk of God. how people devote energy to the shell even when its energy has left. humans caught up in formulations rather than the quickening of the soul. ultimately describing that our psyche becomes unhappy when our energy isn’t being distributed well.

I kept coming back to the main question and the husk. and what God means to Queers. how the image of God has harmed Queers. how Queers avoid God because all they know is God as violence. God as rejection. God as infraction.

religious persecution severed us from God. we grow up disconnected. we deny and shelve it. and I know why. the white supremacist capitalist imperialist patriarchy purposely distorted God. we’re told there is no room for us in divinity. so we put God away because a tender part of us was shunned. but if you knew She lives within, how would you feel? present? grateful? divine? erotic? alive?

empire desecrated God, but Native peoples knew God and God was everywhere…from the Sun to the Earth and beyond. what if we redefined God through a Queer lens? and when the psyche looks for meaning then, where will it look this time?

where does God go? They live in breath. en la vida cotidiana, in rituals and small moments. God lives when MC croons “you know my love is good now, baby, yeah…” and when adele penned “through it all, the good, the bad, the ugly, and divine. I will be the melody, the rhythm, and your rhyme.” God lives in the shrimp tail my Goddaughter was delighting in over sushi dinner and I felt God beaming through my chest witnessing her uninhibited joy.

Queers - what I’m saying is that God lives within you 🩵

👽✌🏼