We, modern individuals, live on scraps of meaning, whether we know it or not. This experience of a fragmented self affects both our personal and our Christian identity. We want to live on a coherent sense of self and to live a life of integrity ground...
We, modern individuals, live on scraps of meaning, whether we know it or not. This experience of a fragmented self affects both our personal and our Christian identity. We want to live on a coherent sense of self and to live a life of integrity grounded in gospel values. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to explore the hidden wholeness of the self by examining the story of Martha and Mary in Luke 10: 38-42 from the perspective of Jung’s notion of the conjunction of opposites.
This story is well known to Christians. In chapter one, this story is summarized and suggested that Martha and Maria can be represented as different aspects of human psyche, not just two distinct individuals. In Chapter two, Jung suggests how these distinct dimensions may be brought together by and within the self. So Jung’s basic notion, the self and the psyche, is introduced. The self is both the center and the circumference of the whole psyche and the term psyche is used to speak of functions, actions, or psychic processes.
in chapter three, the process to recover the hidden wholeness is explained. In the first stage, we need to notice our destress, to be freed from the image of our own character, and to fully acknowledge conflicting tendencies to know ourselves. In the second stage, we need to make opposing tendencies completely transparent in love, to realize conjunction between two opposite tendencies, that is, to conjoin hearing and doing the word in Martha and Maria, and to transform our personality in Christ. In conclusion, it shows that the story of Martha and Maria is very helpful symbol for Christians to go through the process of individuation.