Process Theology

Process Theology, as deployed in this passage from Boothby, names a theological orientation in which God is not a completed, self-sufficient, atemporal Substance but an ongoing, open-ended becoming — a "work in progress" whose self-realization is co-constituted through creaturely (specifically subjective, experiential) participation. This is not orthodox theism but a theology saturated with Hegelian dialectics: God comes to itself through the movement of Spirit, through negation and loss, rather than residing in sovereign fullness prior to creation. The force that energizes this divine becoming is love and longing — desire, understood not as privation but as the very motor of ontological process. Crucially, God shares the subject's constitutive unknowing: even God cannot foreclose the encounter with what is yet to be found, because the object that structures the voyage is, in the Lacanian sense, always a lost and retroactively constituted object.

The concept emerges from a psilocybin-induced mystical experience narrated in an autobiographical register, but its theoretical stakes are considerable. Negation — specifically death, grief, and loss — is not merely suffered but is cast as the very condition through which love achieves self-realization (an implicit Aufhebung: loss sublated into higher reunification). This mirrors the Lacanian-Hegelian principle that the lost object is not simply absent but is what desire circles, what gives love its direction and force. God, on this account, is not the guarantee that the object will be found but the name for the shared process of seeking — a seeking that is constitutively without a pre-given destination.

This concept appears once, in Boothby's autobiographical-philosophical text (richard-boothby-blown-away-refinding-life-after-my-son-s-suicide-other-press-202, p.231), and sits at the intersection of several cross-referenced canonical concepts. It is most directly an application and extension of Dialectics: the Hegelian movement of Spirit coming to itself through negation is transposed onto a theological frame, so that God's becoming is the dialectical process itself rather than its endpoint. Where Lacan marks the limits of dialectics (its blindness to the non-dialectizable Real, to surplus-jouissance), Boothby's process theology seems to embrace dialectics in its full Hegelian register, including the promise of sublation through love and loss.

The concept is equally anchored in Negation and the Lost Object: the death of Boothby's son — the ultimate negation — functions not as sheer annihilation but as the condition of a higher encounter, structurally homologous to the Lacanian formula that the object "is by nature a refound object" and that loss is retroactively constituted as such. The "voyage" on which "even God doesn't know in advance what we will find" enacts the logic of the lost object: no destination is pre-given; the finding is always a re-finding. Sublation lurks here too — death is not the final word but is carried forward into love's self-realization. Meanwhile, the psilocybin context links the passage to Psychedelic Revelation and to the registers of the Real and Jouissance, insofar as the mystical encounter touches something outside the symbolic order — a surplus that language can only gesture toward. Process Theology as a concept thus functions as a synthetic node that re-reads theological discourse through a Lacanian-Hegelian lens, making God's being answerable to the structural logic of desire, negation, and the lost object.

Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's SuicideRichard Boothby · 2022 (p.231)

God Himself is a work in progress, Himself energized by the force of love and longing. Even God doesn't know in advance what we will find on our voyage.

The phrase "work in progress" is theoretically loaded because it refuses divine substance in favor of process and becoming, while "energized by the force of love and longing" replaces omnipotence with desire as the ontological motor — directly invoking the Lacanian-Hegelian axis where longing (lack, negation) is what drives any subject, including the divine, forward; the final clause ("Even God doesn't know in advance what we will find") clinches the structural point by making the lost object irreducibly open, foreclosing any teleological guarantee.