Many Voices/The Light of God's Shadow
An Interview with Poet and Spiritual Director Jinks Hoffmann
Jinks (Jennifer) Hoffmann, spiritual director, psychotherapist, and poetry and prose writer is the poetry editor for Spiritual Directors International. Her poetry collection, It’s All God, Anyway was published in 2020. Her poetry has also appeared in numerous books and journals and on-line. A devotee of waking up for over forty years, Jinks reads, writes, walks, works with her dreams, and pays attention to her daily messes and triumphs—ever in search of Mystery, all the while knowing that Mystery is searching for her. Her book, The Light of God’s Shadow: Musings, Stories, and Poems on Waking Up, came out in 2022 and is available on Amazon and from SDI. Recently, I spoke with Jinks about her work.
Talk to us about the transition from practicing psychotherapy to being a spiritual director. Do you see yourself as more of a God-centered person now than you did years ago when you began your work as a psychotherapist? What drew you in that new direction?
I often make discoveries about the direction my life will take through my dreams. In my early days of being a psychotherapist, a dream told me “now is the time for your Jungian analysis.” Knowing nothing about Jung, yet trusting a strong impulse to honor the dream, I entered analysis and the world of depth psychology which profoundly affected my own practice of psychotherapy. I just knew I was to do this. Some years later I knew that in the psychotherapy sessions I needed even more depth and silence—a place for not knowing. When I heard that Elat Chayyim, the Jewish Renewal Retreat Center, was launching the first ever program for training Jewish spiritual directors in North America, I knew I had to enter that program, even though I knew nothing about Jewish Renewal, or much about spiritual direction. The most meaningful professional and spiritual change in my life had begun.
How did I know any of this? I don’t know, but I would say God was pulling the strings of my life. All I know is that “I” —my conscious mind—did not orchestrate this—something bigger did and I only recognized this well after the changes had taken place. I am always becoming more God-centered. The Infinite is forever beckoning me towards wholeness. My life’s work.
In my conversations with you, I’m aware that when you use the word God, you always attach the disclaimer “whatever that is.” Do you say that out of some modesty or reluctance to claim a knowledge of God? Would you be willing to tell us what God is for you?
What or who is God? I don’t know. I am not being modest, simply truthful. I had a dream that seems to offer a clue, though. I walk into a room. I am suddenly intensely awake. I think “This is God.” I feel terror. I feel wonder. I think “This is unity.”
If we are intensely awake how can we not know that all is sacred? The light and the dark. Reality and life are two of my favorite names for God.
What is God for me? Ever since I was a child I have had moments which “came upon me” when my eyes would go slightly out of focus, my breathing would deepen, I would get goosebumps all over, and I would become tearful in quiet ecstasy. It was years later that I recognized those to be my “awake to God” moments. God is not an idea for me, but a visceral, emotional, contemplative experience. I am in love with what I call God, that deepest, most mysterious, most exquisite, most terrifying part of all life and of me. Most of my waking time I have a running conversation of praise, lament, and “what shall we have for lunch?” with the Beloved.
God is everything, the source of life, creation happening now and now and now. My breath is a gift from the Divine. God is the longing to give and receive love. The yearning to know and be known. God is the sacredness of life in each blessed human, the dog-shit in the park. Today God is in my sorrow about the latest school shooting, the latest tornado. Disconsolate, I go for a walk seeking the sacred. One of my spiritual practices. My feet touch the pavement and instantly prayer arrives. At the traffic-light, a harried mother yells at a toddler. She shrugs. We smile. Say how cold it is for April. “Hello God” I think. “I love you.”
In all your work, you have lifted up the idea of God’s darkness, of the holy knowledge that comes from going down into painful, sometimes terrifying experiences that we don’t want to have and thereby encountering our shadow. How does that encounter occur?
For me God is the experience of everything and its opposite. Jung called this the unity of opposites. In kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, God is also considered to be dark and light, conflict and union, the source of all beauty and wonder, and the source of love and of evil. The title of my book The Light of God’s Shadow, came to me in a dream. The light is the consciousness attained when we meet, stay with, and experience shadow—those previously unknown parts of life and of ourselves.