This fascinating book uses a Jungian frame to examine modern spirituality as practiced in the West. Crucially, it shows how Jungian structures of understanding, such as archetypes, the shadow, the personal equation and psychic energy can help to understand the dark other of spiritual teaching. Oriented through the author's own spiritual development, from a complete absorption in the meditation movement for many years, through disillusion, Jungian therapy to her new role as non-denominational minister and therapist based in Los Angeles, The Holy Longing is part spiritual biography, part psychological analysis, part cultural critique and part meditation.

Psychology, Jungian and also trans-personal, is the chosen lens through which to view spirituality: it is not presented as a sufficient explanation of it. Zweig regards the holy longing, the human soul's thirst for the divine, as archetypal. Spiritual desire is innate and cannot be accounted for as a mystification of any other aspect of human energy. In this The Holy Longing is a work of religious studies making use of Jungian terms of understanding. The book is divided into 'Part One: Before the Fall' and 'Part Two: After the Fall'. Early chapters look at the god-image in a number of religious contexts. There is a chapter on the congruence of sexual passion and religious impulses as the beloved person takes on the mantle of the god-image for a time. However, human mediation of God is not only in the form of romance, and there is a thoughtful analysis of the desire for religious communion with a teacher or a guru.

What makes the book especially convincing in its experiential approach to religion is the author's rooting of her argument in the passionate spiritual continuum of her own career. In addition, she uses stories gleaned from her work as a minister and counsellor. So that when the second half of the book, 'After the Fall' proceeds with a long exploration of spiritual abuse, the reader is engaged by the integrity of the work. Zweig takes examples of unethical exploitation of spiritual followers ranging from the sexual to the financial to the inculcating of damaging mindless obedience from both Christian Churches and Eastern spiritual teachers practicing in America. She carefully sets out the documented evidence and uses first hand accounts where the perfidy of the preacher is proven.

A particular strength of the book is that it is not a tragic arc of disillusion. By using Jung's individuation narrative, the dark aspect of religious power can, if lived through honestly, be a prelude to a mature spiritual attitude. For this it is necessary to integrate the unknown into one's spiritual life. It is also necessary to become aware of the cultural context of religious doctrines. A significant aspect of the problems western believers experience in adopting a guru is attributable to diverse cultural patterns. Given the western emphasis on individualism, many seekers find themselves overwhelmed by a desire to submit wholly to an external other. Such unbalanced holy longing may itself have a corrupting effect upon the recipient.

Both parts of the book contain a meditation: on 'light' and 'up' and 'dark' and 'down'. Such poetic exploration embeds spiritual individuation as the deep structure of the book. It works for the reader as a text of many levels: the acute analysis goes along with experiential creative writing that does more than merely talk about spirituality; it seeks to enact it. Finally, this urge is made explicit as Zweig describes how writing itself became a religious practice. For her, as for Jung, creativity and the numinous unite in the psyche. The Holy Longing represents itself as a ritual in writing. It aims to be a work of Jung's transcendent function in creating something psychically healing out of the violations of spiritual abuse. Today such works for many are an answer to prayer; for any reader they represent an important contribution to understanding religious longing in our age.

—Susan Rowland, Harvest: A Journal for Jungian Studies

The longing to know God is probably the most powerful innate force among humans, according to Zweig. The longing is our guide, she explains; in many it is our raison d'être. The trick is to stop trying to satiate it, and instead listen to what it is trying to teach us. Zweig devotes her final chapter to specific ways readers can integrate this yearning into their spiritual development, such as using imagery, shadow work, and creative expression. She is a resourceful teacher who offers many tools for living with our "holy longing".

—Publishers Weekly

In this substantive follow-up to Romancing the Shadow (cowritten with Steve Wolf), Connie Zweig takes a hard look at holy longing and the spiritual abuse that can occur when disciples project their highest hopes on leaders, teachers, or gurus. Zweig believes holy longing is "the drive toward self-transcendence that fuels evolution in the physical, mental and spiritual worlds." This book plumbs the depths of the widespread problem of spiritual abuse in a time when fundamentalism, which is prone to this kind of surrender of self to an authoritarian power, is on the rise in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

—Spirituality and Health Magazine

As an overburdened graduate student of psychology, I hesitated when asked to review this book. Yet the title enchanted me, whispering intimations about my own “spiritual yearning,” wrestled with for the last decade. I tucked the book away in my overfilled satchel, waiting for a time to indulge beyond the mundane, hoping not to find myself with another academic chore.

When the day finally came, I felt like the proverbial kid in a candy store. Connie Zweig’s personalized prologue immediately sparked my interest—a humorous, honest account of her own youthful enthusiasm for the fledgling meditation movement taking root in America, a young idealist filled with the New Age naivete, that one-sided focus on light, love, and “transcendence.” Fortuitously, a growing disenchantment with the shadowy egos of her community caused her to listen to her own soul and her own questioning, which had been suppressed by hopeful devotion. And from this nagging disenchantment arose an honoring of her maturing spirituality, and the narrative of this wonderful book.

This book is a welcome guidepost for psychologists, scholars, and seekers concerned with a mature, honest, and penetrating spirituality. Rather than presenting a one-sided glimpse of the heights and the benefits of spirituality for psychological well-being, Zweig embraces the holy longing, riding it through the peaks and down into the dark underbelly of today’s spiritual realities. Drawing upon the foundations of Freud, Jung, Kohut, and Wilber, with elucidating insights and examples from a variety of religious traditions, Zweig offers a thorough and engaging look into the psychology of spiritual aspirants, the shadows of fallen gurus, and the dark side of religious communities. She shows the need to aspire to the heights with spiritual practice and contemplation, and the need to examine our personal unconscious and the archetypal shadows that hinder a mature spiritual engagement with our world.

With reference to the work of Ken Wilber, she traces the pathway of the religious instinct, from prepersonal and personal ego development, into the transpersonal. Rather than reducing spirituality to the template of unmet childhood needs, she more appropriately shows how one’s personal dynamics can influence the lens through which one sees (or feels their way toward) the imago dei. Moreover, she offers poignant examples of how these early dynamics influence one’s relationship with spiritual leaders. Finally, she offers a startling elucidation of how this “holy longing is a two-faced archetype, with a light side and a dark side.”

Zweig circumambulates the archetype of holy longing with poetry and insight. She sees the religious instinct muted, suppressed, or expressed through addictions to alcohol, drugs, food, or a devotion to endless consumerism. In less destructive modes of being, she renders the impulse visible in fantasies for beloved soulmates or for Hestia to create the perfect, paradisal home. However, Zweig points us to an approach of greater mindfulness:

To the degree that we do not take our longing into our own souls where it truly belongs and suffer it through as a rite of passage, we will be compelled to live it out literally to the bitter end—and to live only and always in painful longing. But if we can acknowledge our religious yearning and even befriend it, and if we can detect the hidden objects of our desire, perhaps we can follow our holy longing to a higher end.

By looking at the images of our longing, we can become conscious of the ways in which “they may haunt us like ancestral ghosts.” With numerous examples, she reveals how in our subjective contemplation:

As we imagine the divine, we reject certain traits, which get banished into the demonic. And in this way we disown both the light of the god-image and the darkness of Satan. Therefore, if our godimages do not evolve, our shadow images remain static as well, narrowing the range in which we can live our conscious lives.

She expounds and clarifies this shadow dynamic with excellent case examples. She shows how rigid adherence to Buddhist imagoes of nonattachment conflict with conscious intentions to seek intimate personal relationships, and how a fixed image of a harsh father god can perpetuate feelings of guilt and unworthiness.

—The AHP Perspective Magazine
Feb-Mar 2004

How does the quest for spirit go awry? Is the spiritual drive in humans innate? How do we balance abuses of power by spiritual teachers and organized religion, and still nurture our soul? These are some of the questions addressed by Connie Zweig, therapist, minister and long-time seeker. Born of personal experience and balanced by study, research and practice can help anyone contemplating serious spiritual practice. For those who may be struggling, disillusioned, or apathetic because of past experience Zweig renews hope that one can find understanding, perspective and renewal.

—IONS Review #64
Jun-Aug 2003