Friday, March 15, 2024

cell913blog.com #37

 History traditionally has been both executed and documented by men, from a masculine perspective. Nevertheless, there is another aspect to the history of each man’s biography, that cannot be reduced to those archaic words, ‘help-mate’…the woman or women in his life. March 8, this week, the world celebrated International Women’s Day, and at the risk of being accused of tokenism, this piece is an attempt to identify and to elaborate the significant contribution of women, especially to the lives of Mandela, Gandhi and Tutu. We start with Mandela.

Clearly, the longest and most impacting relationship with a woman in Mandela’s life was with the woman the world knows as Winnie whose full name was Nomzamo Winnifred Madikezela, a graduate in Social Work from the Jan Hofmeyr School of Social Work. And while the relationship began prior to his divorce from Evelyn, his first wife, Mandela writes about their courtship:

I was both courting her and politicizing her. As a student, Winnie had been attracted to the Non-European Unity Movement, for she had a brother who was involved with that party. ….After (their first lunch), I took her for a drive to an area between Johannesburg and Evaton, an open field veld  just past Eldorado Park. We walked on the grass, grass so similar to that of the Transkei where had both been raised. I told her of my hopes and of the difficulties of the Treason Trial*. I knew right there that I wanted to marry her –and I told her so. Her spirit, her passion, her youth, her courage her willfulness---I felt all of these things the moment I first saw her…..The Treason Trial was in its second year and uit put a suffocating weight on our law practice. Mandela and Tambo (Law Firm) was falling apart as we could not be there, and both Oliver (law partner) and I were experiencing grave financial difficulties…..We had gone from a bustling practice that turned people away to one that was begging for clients. I could not even afford to pay the fifty-pound balance still owing on the  plot of land that I had purchased in Umtata, and had to give it up. I explained all this to Winnie. I told her it was more than likely that we would have to live on her small salary as a social worker. Winnie understood and said she was prepared to take the risk and throw her lot in with mine. I never promised her gold and diamonds and I was never able to give them to her. (Mandela, LWTF, p 214-215)

At the wedding reception, Winnie’s father put the relationship into perspective, as the father of the bride:

He took note, as did everyone, that among the uninvited guests at the wedding were a number of security police. He spoke of his love for his daughter, my commitment to the country, and my dangerous career as a politician. When Winnie had first told him of the marriage, he had exclaimed, ‘But you are marrying a jailbird!’ At the wedding, he said he was not optimistic about the future, and that such a marriage, in such difficult times, would be unremittingly tested. He told Winnie she was marrying a man who was already married to the struggle. He bade his daughter good luck and ended his speech by saying, ‘If your man is a wizard, you must become a witch!’ It was his way of saying that you must follow your man on whatever path he takes. (LWTF, p.216)

Mandela writes a kind of confessional, on the days following the wedding:

There was no time or money for a honeymoon, and life quickly settled into a routine dominated by the trial. We woke very early in the morning, usually at about four. Winnie prepared breakfast before I left. I would then take the bus to the trial, or make an early morning visit to my office. As much as possible, afternoons and evenings were spent at my office attempting to keep our practice going and to earn some money. Evenings were often taken up with political work and meetings. The wife of a freedom fighter is often like a widow, even when her husband is not in prison. Though I was on trial for treason, Winnie have me cause for hope. I felt as though I had a new a second chance at life. My love for her gave me added strength for the struggles that lay ahead. (LWTF, p. 217)

Never one to be surprised by the opinions and determination (stubbornness) of another, Mandela recounts Winnie’s response to the proposal to give their daughter, Zenani (‘What have you brought to the world’?) a Xhosa baptism by calling in an inyanga, a tribal healer, to give the baby a traditional herbal bath. But Winnie was adamantly opposed, thinking it unhealthy and outdated, and instead smeared Zenani with olive oil, plastered her little bod with Johnson’s Baby Powder, and filled her stomach with shark oil. (LWTF, p 226)

A similar kind of narrative unfolded when Nelson attempted to teach Winnie how to drive.

Driving, in those days, was a man’s business; very few women, especially African women, were to be seen in the driver’s seat. But Winnie was independent-minded and intent on learning, and it would be useful because I was gone so much of the time and could not drive her places myself. Perhaps I am an impatient teacher or perhaps I had a headstrong pupil, but when I attempted to give Winnie lessons along a relatively flat and quiet Orlando road, we could not seem to shift gears without quarreling, Finally, after she had ignored one too many of my suggestions, I stormed out of the car and walked home. Winnie seemed to do better without my tutelage than with it, for she proceeded to drive around the township on her own for the next hour. By that time, we were ready to make up, and it is a story we subsequently laughed about. (LWTF, p. 226)

Nevertheless, throughout his trials, imprisonments, and detentions, Winnie was always ready to visit, to comfort and to support and sustain her husband, until near the end.

On April 13, 1992, at a press conference in Johannesburg….I announced my separation from my wife. ….I read the following statement.

The relationship between myself and my wife, Comrade Nomzamo Winnie Mandela, has become the subject of much media speculation. I am issuing this statement to clarify the position and in the hope that it will bring an end to further conjecture….Comrade Nomzamo and myself contracted our marriage at a crucial time in the struggle for liberation in our country. Owing to pressures of our shared commitment to the ANC and the struggle to end apartheid, we were unable to enjoy a normal family life. Despite these pressures, our love for each other and our devotion to our marriage grew and intensified…During the two decades I spent on Robben Island she was an indispensable pillar of support and comfort to myself personally…Comrade Nomzamo accepted the onerous burden of raising our children on her own…She endured the persecutions heaped upon her by the Government with exemplary fortitude and never wavered from her commitment to the freedom struggle. Her tenacity reinforced my personal respect, love and growing affection. It also attracted the admiration of the world at large. My love for her remains undiminished…However, in view of the tensions that have arisen owing to differences between ourselves on a number of issues in recent months, we have mutually agreed that a separation would be best for each of us. My action was not prompted by the current allegations begin made against her in the media…Comrade Nomzamo has and can continue to rely of my unstinting support during these trying moments in her life. I shall never regret to life Comrade Nomzamo and I tried to share together. Circumstances beyond our control however dictated it should be otherwise. I part from my wife with no recriminations. I embrace her with all the love and affection I have nursed of her inside and outside prison for the moment I first met her. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you will appreciate the pain I have gone through. (LWTF, p 599-600)

In the words that following the transcript of his public statement, however, tell a deeper and more personal story:

Perhaps I was blinded to certain things because of the pain I gelt for not being able to fulfill my role as a husband to my wife and a father to my children. But just as I am convinced that my wife’s life while I was in prison was more difficult that mine, my own return was also more difficult for her than it was for me. She married a man who soon left her: that man became a myth; and then that myth returned home and proved to be just a man after all…s I said later at my daughter Zindzi’s wedding, it seems to be the destiny of freedom fighters to have unstable personal lives.  When your life is the struggle, as mine was, there is little room left for family. That has always been my greatest regret, and the most painful aspect of the choice I made. (LWTF, p. 600)

Is it reasonable to conjecture that our public acclaim, achievements and accolades can and will never either erase or even outshine our most profound regrets? Our public lives, however exemplary, honourable, and even admirable to some extent, are always profoundly compromised by those ‘inner’ caves of regret, depression, anxiety and feelings of worthlessness and emptiness. And whether our struggles are political or psychological, those struggles consume the vast proportion of our time, energy and even our identity…whether or not we are conscious of that consumption in the process. Indeed, it may well be a that a paradox of ‘over-achievement’ is a mask that both covers and helps us to avoid, deny and take responsibility for our other ‘responsibilities’.

Especially as men, we are indoctrinated to go away on our ‘adventure’ of discovery. And the ‘hero’ option, irrespective of its specific domain, narrative structure or outcome, comes with the ‘territory’ of being an ambitious, self-respecting and courageous man. Mandela, while his ‘heroic’ story is considered epic, globally, nevertheless bears all the hallmarks of the profound price he paid.

*in 1956, the whole executive of the ANC were arrested, along with some one hundred plus, all of whom were being arrested on charges of high treason and an alleged conspiracy to overthrow the state. LWTF, p. 200

 

Next, we plan to take a look at the contribution to his life that women made to Gandhi.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

cell913blog.com #36

 To some whose eyes have passed over these spaces lately, it must seem that a kind of idolatry of three men is both the motive for and the result of these scribblings. And while I acknowledge that the kind of story that the lives of these men tell is highly inspiring, and motivating, it is not to idolize nor to fail to note that these men, for all of their honourable traits and continuing global influence, were and remain basically ordinary, and yet uncovered and deployed their best instincts, learnings, mind, body and spirit in the service of their people. And yet, to reduce their lives to ‘altruism’ or even heroic altruism would be such a reduction as to dishonour them and their legacies.

Far from writing a cheque, or holding a protest march, or writing letters to the editor and even editorials themselves, or even joining a religious organization determined to ‘minister’ to the needs of a neighbourhood, or even a town or city, the lives of these men, while continually beset with threats, hatred, criminal charges and time served in both courts and prison, as well as attempting to evade, deceive, confront and ultimately endure in order to dismantle various edifices of oppression, and the reconciliation that needed to follow wrote their own public historic and psychic histories, while they carried the hopes and dreams of their people on their shoulders.   

Indeed, history, supported and sustained by the public dialogue, the media, the education superstructure, and even the professions is contained within a framework of ‘literal,’ ‘empirical’ and formerly agreed-upon data. And while there is a ‘kind of reality and truth’ to the data, such as birthdate, birthplace, income numbers and sources, address, academic degrees or certificates, number of children, number of marriages, titles and ranks, memberships, and other informational evidence of one’s biography, there is another dimension to each of us. None of us can either be summarized or even characterized by a biography. Of course, we look for adjectives, usually from acquaintances, family members, enemies to help us fill in the gaps behind the literal, empirical data. Our medical and legal fraternities depend heavily on the configuration of the lines that connect the dots of our physical ‘condition’ or ‘action’ (depending whether it is a medical diagnosis or a legal defense that is needed).

Churches, too, as well as political parties, attempt to imbue adherents with a set of principles, or perhaps even creeds, to which submission and commitment determine admission and the privileges that accompany membershccip. And while all of these ‘normal’ depictions of an individual are going on, there is another dynamic at play, within the person. It is to depth psychology that we have turned, in looking into ‘souls’ in extreme circumstances where they/we find the suffering and abnormal and fantastic conditions of psyche. Our souls in private to ourselves, in close communion with another, and even in public, exhibit psychopathologies. Each soul at some time or another demonstrates illusions and depressions, overvalued ideas, manic flights and rages, anxieties, compulsions and perversions. Perhaps our psychopathology has an intimate connection with our individuality, so that our fear of being what we really are is partly because we fear the psychopathological aspect of individuality. For we are each peculiar; we have symptoms; we fail, and cannot see why we go wrong or even where, despite high hopes and good intentions. We are unable to set matters right, to understand what is taking place or be understood by those who would try. Our minds, feelings, wills, and behaviors deviate from normal ways. Our insights are important, or none come at all. Our feelings disappear in apathy; we worry and also don’t care. Destruction seeps out of us autonomously and we cannot redeem the broken trusts, hopes, loves….The study of lives and the care of souls means above all a prolonged encounter with what destroys and is destroyed, with what is broken and hurts—that is, with psychopathology. Between the lines of each biography and in the lines of each face we may read a struggle with alcohol, with suicidal despair, with dreadful anxiety, with lascivious sexual obsessions, cruelties at close quarters, secret hallucinations or paranoic spiritualisms. Ageing brings moments of soul, moments of acute psychic pain, and haunting remembrances as memory disintegrates. The night world in which we dream shows the soul split into antagonisms; night after night we are fearful, aggressive, guilty, and failed…These are the actualities—the concrete mess of psychological existence as it is phenomenologically, subjectively, and individually…(James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, pps.55-56)

These observations, without the benefit of clinical assessment and diagnosis, attended the lives of Mandela, Gandhi and Tutu, in various degrees. These men were engaged in an epic struggle to destroy an evil, degrading, racist, bigoted and hateful attitude, and the laws and systems that instilled and sustained it. And the resistance to their efforts proved both their justification and eventually, with its own demise, their modest and complicated achievements. Nevertheless, all these decades later, vestiges of racism, imperialism and the abuse of power persist and seem to be finding new voices to retake their heinous ascendency.

 The self-reflection, prayer, humility, fasting (for Gandhi) and laser honesty of these men,  with their assessment and diagnosis of their personal and the larger circumstances, the purpose of their dedication to liberating their people shines through even in the darkest and most dangerous circumstances. Mandela’s account of his view of deploying a hunger strike, while in prison, provides evidence of his clarity of mind, under extreme duress. Following a food boycott by the warders in Robben Island, who demanded better food and improved living conditions, after prisoners in ‘F’ and ‘G’ sections had been on a hunger strike, Mandela’ section followed the next day. However, in Mandela’s own words:

For me, hunger strikes were altogether too passive. We who were already suffering were threatening our health, even courting death. I have always favored a more active, militant style of protest such as work-strikes, go-slow strikes, or refusing to clear up; actions that punished the authorities, not ourselves. They wanted gravel and we produced no gravel. They wanted the prison yard clean and it was untidy. This kind of behavior distressed and exasperated them, where I think they secretly enjoyed watching us go hungry. …But when it came to a decision, I was often outvoted. My colleagues even jokingly accused me of not wanting to miss a meal. The proponents of hunger strikes argued that it was a traditionally accepted form of protest that had been waged all over the world by such prominent leaders as Mahatma Gandhi. Once the decision was taken, however, I would support it as wholeheartedly as any of its advocates. In fact, during the strikes I was often in the position of remonstrating with some of my more wayward colleagues who did not want to abide by our agreement. ‘Madiba, I want my food,’ I remember one man saying. ’I don’t see why I should go without. I have served the struggle for many years.’ (Mandela, LWTF, p.423)

From mkgandhi.org, we read the words of Gandhi on fasting:

When human ingenuity fails, the votary fasts. This fasting quickens the spirit of prayer, that is to say, the fasting is a spiritual act, and therefore, addressed to God. The effect of such action on the life of the people is that, where the person fasting is all known to them, their sleeping conscience is awakened. But there is the danger that the people through mistaken sympathy may act against their will in order to save the life of the loved one. This danger has got to be faced. One ought not to be deterred from right action when one is sure of the rightness. It can best promote circumspection. Such a fast is undertaken in obedience to the dictates of the inner voice and, therefore, prevents haste. (H,21-12-1947, p.476)

 Writing to celebrate Archbishop Tutu’s 80th birthday, on TimesLIVE.co.za, on October 06, 2011, in a piece entitled, Tutu and the curse of self-doubt, in Ideas By Brendan Boyle:

It is easy today to forget how much white South Africa hated the little bishop who went around the world campaigning for sanctions against his own country. He was denigrated in dinner table conversation then in much the same way that Julius Malema (founder of the Economic Freedom Fighters, a populist far-left political party) is now…Graffiti on suburban walls urged him to emigrate, criticized his modest wealth and called sometimes for physical harm to be done to him…..(On Tutu’s anger at Jacob Zulu) It might be an  important moment if it finds somewhere within the party machine that quality which, for me, has always set Tutu apart from Mandela-the curse of self-doubt. Mandela has seemed always to me to have the perfect pitch of a political prodigy. He instinctively knows that right thing to do, the appropriate response to wring the best from an opportunity or to rescue a situation as dangerous as the assassination of Chris Hani (fierce opponent of apartheid, assassinated by Janusz Walus, a Polish immigrant and sympathiser of the Conservative opposition on April 10, 1993),. Tutu pits his wits against the challenges that come his way, prays to his God for guidance, worries about the possible consequences and then plays a hand he sometimes regrets. Travelling with him for a few days in 1986 to research a profile for United Press International, I saw him snap at a middle-aged woman who was asking for assurance about some aspect of being a white person in an apartheid state. She cried as he stalked off. Hours later, in the car heading back to Port Elizabeth, he broke his own call for silence and said, almost to himself, ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’ Once his chaplain had discovered what he was talking about, they started working out how to find the woman and apologise. I don’t know if he managed, but was visibly bruised by his own mistake. If more of us could have Tutu’s courage to do what we think is right and yet to think it possible that we might be wrong, surely ours would be a better world.

Political and personal strength, courage, activism and accomplishments are hallmarks of history. They are, rarely, if ever, accounted for through a deep and penetrating examination of the ‘inner voice’ the ‘inner life’ the ‘inner self-talk’ and the psychic sinews of vulnerability, self-doubt, self-effacement and withdrawal. Indeed, while we live in a primarily masculine-defined and designed culture and psychic superstructure, such attributes are perpetually disdained, denigrated, and even dismissed. Heroes are ‘birthed and celebrated on the merits of their literal, visible, measurable and demonstrated ‘achievements.’ Regrets, self-doubt, failures, and even inexcusable errors in judgement are deployed by enemies as evidence of moral depravity, ‘gutlessness,’ ‘weakness,’ and justification for alienation, separation, and even isolation. Let’s not forget, the solitary confinement imprisonment cell was devised and designed by Quakers, the most ‘passive’ and peace-seeking among Christian faith groups. Mandela regarded this as the most heinous of all possible treatments of offenders.

From NARCAT.org, National Religious Campaign Against Torture, we read:

Dr. Benjamin Rush and Benjamin Franklin and several Quaker leaders first instituted solitary confinement at Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia in the late 18th century, believing that total isolation and silence would lead to penitence, hence the term ‘penitentiary’ was coined. That led to the building of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Penitentiary in 1829, which only had solitary confinement cells. However, instead of becoming penitent, the prisoners developed serious mental health problems. The Quakers recognized that solitary confinement cause severe psychological harm and apologized for their use of solitary confinement. Unfortunately, the U.S. has let history repeat. In the 20th century, some U.S. prisons had a limited number of solitary confinement control units within their facilities; however, in 1983, Marion prison in Illinois instituted a permanent ‘lock down’ of their entire facility, in which inmates were confined alone in their cells for 23 hours per day. The use of solitary confinement has increased dramatically since then.

From policyoptions.irpp.org, January 18, 2022, in a piece entitled, ‘The use of solitary confinement continues in Canada,’ we read:

According to the Canadian government, November 30th 2019, marked the end of solitary confinement in Canada. Yet, people in prison continue to be placed in solitary confinement in a variety of ways, in contravention of their Charter Rights…..Reports released by researchers Jane Sprott, Anthony Doob, and Adelina Iftene as well as the Office of Correctional Investigator—in addition to our own experience monitoring the conditions of confinement in the federal prisons designated for women—make it clear that solitary confinement is a form of punishment that is disproportionately used against Black people, Indigenous people and people with mental illness. This is yet another violation of section 15 of the Charter.

The cliché that nothing worthwhile is ever accomplished without sacrifice, while warranted, tends to gloss over the details of suffering, threats and self-doubt that accompany these three men, and all of us, daily, hourly, and over our life-time. It is our fixation with the ‘light’ in our multiple historic and psychic and cultural landscapes, to the avoidance and denial of the ‘darkness,’ that we do and will continue to owe our repeating oscillation around the serious issues we are challenged to face. Suffering, pain, depression, anxiety, and even desperation are all an integral part of each of our lives, And these men were certainly not immune from their scars.

 

 

 

 

Monday, March 11, 2024

cell913blog.com #34

 He who loves the bristle of bayonets only sees in the glitter what beforehand he feels in his heart. It is avarice and hatred; it is that quivering lip, that cold, hating eye, which built magazines and powder-houses. (Ralph Waldo Emerson from vaps.org The Virginia Center for Public Safety)

There is a radioactive paradox that has been rumbling around in my head for some time. While reading and reflecting on the lives, the thoughts and inheritances of men such as Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and their commitment to and honouring of nonviolence in the conduct of their epic struggles to end the oppression of their people, their impact on their time and people, as well as on the world generally, I am struck by the headlines of war, insurrection, terrorism, revenge and retribution, domestic violence and mass murders. Much of the violence in the world has to be laid at the feet of men. And, it is both clear and disconcerting to note that the disconnect between these two polarities cannot be lost or avoided by men of the twenty-first century. Living in the ‘middle’ of these poles, one is prompted to reflect on several questions.

·        Is the deeply embedded seed of faith and a religious discipline an essential for men to embrace fully a commitment to non-violence, and to an abstention of the abuse of power in all of its many forms and faces?

·        Are the male leaders (Mandela, Gandhi, Tutt, and King among others) of a special genetic or psychological nature that sets them apart from the rest of us?

·        Were these men so committed to a cause to which they dedicated their lives, that the strategy and tactic of non-violence became and remained essential for their ultimate success in dismantling, or at least remediating, apartheid, imperialism, racism?

·        Has the way we have ‘done’ history, through the factual, literal, date-filled documentation of the events, encounters, speeches, writings and their ‘heroic’ accomplishments either shielded or passed over the ‘inner lives’ of such men, and the daimon that ‘moved’ them?

·        Is there a divide, based on evidence, and transmitted through popular culture that separates the pursuit of high ideals (such as the dismantling of apartheid and imperialism and racism) from the work-a-day perspective, language and attitudes of the mechanic and the carpenter and the plumber all of whom must make a living with their hands?

·        Is there also a divide between these ‘epic heroes’ and the theoretical scholars whose books and philosophies, principles and experiments have filled the stacks of university libraries and lecture and seminar rooms on one hand, and on the other hand, those ‘blue-collar labourers’ on whose hands and brains and morals we place our trust?

·        Have we so elevated, glorified, pedestalled, and virtually ‘worshipped’ the ideals and the accomplishments of men like Mandela, Gandhi, Tutu, and King, (and others) that we have lost sight of the reality of their vulnerabilities, their dark sides and their often-monumental screw-ups?

Men of all political, economic, academic, professional, political, theological, philosophical, geographical and psychological strains and strata have been, and continue to be in search of their identity, their purpose, their modus operandi. And, for many, if not most men, the resume, or curriculum vitae summarizes their ‘identity’ for the purpose of attempting to identify ‘ourselves’ to a prospective employer. Such a document, regardless of how detailed, comprehensive or ‘personal’ it might be, is a seriously reduced and simplified depiction and description of who we are. And while it is also reductionistic to reduce the purpose of the resume to a catalogue of skills, it is also true that we present ourselves as a “role-player, function, in the design and strategy and purpose of some piece of “work” whether that be for an employer, as an entrepreneur, or even as an artist or professional. Performing actions to accomplish an end goal is the frame and lens in and through which we conceptualize our lives, especially as men. Even as fathers, we see ourselves as ‘bread-winners’ and ‘husbands,’ and ‘role models’ and advocates/protectors of our children and family. “Doing” is our way of relating, and comparing is our way of assessing our relative “place” and “value” in our circle. “Extrinsics,” those literal, empirical, measurable pieces of data of our existence are listed, highlighted and valued both by the one presenting to an employer/examiner/admission officer and hopefully also by the assessor.

As James Hillman writes in The Soul’s Code, a premise that grounds much of his thinking about contemporary (American) culture:

At the outset we need to make clear that today’s main paradigm for understanding human life, the interplay of genetics and environment, omits something essential—the particularity you feel to be you. By accepting the idea that I am the effect of a subtle buffeting between hereditary and societal forces, I reduce myself to as result. The more my life is accounted for by what already occurred in my chromosomes, by what my parents did or didn’t do, and by my early years now long past, the more my biography is the story of a victim. I am living a plot written by my genetic code, ancestral heredity, traumatic occasions, parental unconsciousness, societal accidents…..We are victims primarily of theories before they are put into practice. The current American identity as victim is the tail side of the coin whose head brightly displays the opposite identity: the heroic self-made ‘man,’ carving out destiny alone and with unflagging will. Victim is the flip-side of hero. More deeply, however, we are victims of academic, scientistic, and even therapeutic psychology, whose paradigms do not sufficiently account for or engage with, and therefore ignore, the sense of calling, that essential mystery at the heart of each human life…..We dull our lives by the way we conceive them. We have stopped imagining them with any sort of romance, any fictional flare. (p. 5-6)

What kind of hero, then, is a question that has beset generations of men for centuries.

“From Hercules through St, George to the hero role in Freud and Jung we have had a hero archetype moving us, the ego. We believe the ego should be strong and just and overcome death, depression and decay and stand for culture and civilization’. (Dick Russell, The Life and Ideas of James Hillman, Vol. 2, Revisioning Psychology, Hillman’s notes on lectures at the Jung Institute, 1971, p. 94)

Indeed, contemporary vernacular is replete with the word and notion of ‘self’ (as if self and ego were identical).

The New Oxford English Dictionary—the shorter edition!—gives ten columns in its small print to compound of ‘self’: ‘self-satisfaction,’ ‘self-control,’ ‘self-defeating,’ ‘self-approval,’ ‘self-contempt,’ ‘self-satisfied,’ and maybe five hundred more.  (Hillman, The Soul’s Code, p. 257)

Against and in place of the self and the ego, dominating both our language and our perception of human identity, Hillman poses a different lens through which to open the door and window to identity: the daimon---calling, fate, character, innate image ….together they make up the ‘acorn theory’ which holds that each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived (TSC p.6)….Daimon as genius and then (in) more modern terms such as ‘angel,’ ‘soul,’ paradigm,’ ‘image,’ ‘fate,’ ‘inner twin,’ ‘acorn,’ ‘life companion,’ ‘guardian,’ ‘heart’s calling,’ ….Among native peoples on the North American continent, we find a parade of terms for the acorn as an independent spirit-soul: yega (Coyukon): and owl (Kwakiutl); ‘agate man’ (Navaho); nagual (Central American/southern Mexico); tsayotyeni (Santa Ana Pueblo), sicom (Dakota)…these beings accompany guide, protect, warn. (TSC, p. 257)

A daimon in the ancient world was a figure from somewhere else, neither human nor divine, something in between the two belonging to a ‘middle region,’ (metaxu) to which the soul belonged. The daimon was more an intimate psychic reality than a god; it was a figure who might visit in a dream of send signals as an omen, a hunch, or an erotic urge. (TSC p 258)

Contemporary history is filled with the biographic details of Mandela, Gandhi, Tutu, as well as details of the kernels of their respective faith and/or belief systems. Common to all three is the well-documented and oft-repeated adjective, ‘selfless’. And in a period in history in which the alpha male (‘ego’ and ‘might’ and ‘power’ and ‘strength’) is on display in political and journalistic rhetoric, as if those details were the prime causes and motivators of whatever current political and military actors are doing, the concept of selflessness remains, in the vernacular, an epic indication of weakness. Unfortunately, we have a parade of what Hillman might call ‘titanism’ a human trait he considers worse than narcissism.

In the preface to his monumental work, Re-Visioning Psychology, James Hillman writes:

I would not encourage Titanism, a menace far greater than Narcissism, which presents only a pensive pretty-boy compared with the titanic grandiosity of Self. …..Self can be defined only from within itself by its own representations. Principal among these are the irrefutable truth of personal experience and the inflating feelings of personal significance. Utterly self-referent, it knows no God greater than itself. Now most psychology takes all this quite literally, so that behind psychology’s devotion to the personal stands neither humanism nor individualism, but rather a literalism of Self like an invisible nonexistent God absolutely believed in. Absolutism is either fundamentalism, delusion, or literalism—or all of the Above. Perhaps it’s right then to say there is no greater literalism in psychology than its idea of Self, a literalism that converts our supposedly investigative field into a branch of mystic fundamentalism. This leads me further to think that our culture’s omnipotent and omniscient Godhead who supposedly replaced the mutually limiting pagan beings on myth is none other that a Titan returned from Tartaros (the infernal region of ancient Greek mythology, the underworld) to a too high place, and, worse, all alone. (p. xii)

It was the ‘cause’ the purpose, and the calling of Mandela, Gandhi, Tutu, and not their personal ‘ego’ that drove their lives….and not their own self-aggrandizement. Indeed, all three suffered considerably, at times almost inexplicably and tragically, in order to sustain the cause of their efforts. They, likely without a single second dedicated to the notion of what the history books would say about them, submitted themselves to the movement of alleviating oppression of their people. And, to those of us reflecting backward on their lives, we can readily see a ‘calling’ a ‘genius’ and an ‘angel’ that both came from within and drew them onward, without even flinching or failing insofar as they had both energy and consciousness.

There was nothing ‘fundamental’ or absolute about their methods, their relationships, and their perspective on themselves as well as on their ‘situation’. They sought and deployed multiple options in strategies, tactics and human supports. They spent hours in deep reflection, not merely in strategizing and planning, but also in learning, remembering, tolerating others and indeed in supporting others of a similar commitment to their respective cause. There was no delusion, and certainly no minimalist literalism to their perspective, the ideology or their discernment of their respective roles and histories. Lacking almost completely in inflated feelings of personal significance, it was their dedication to nonviolence, to reconciliation, and to the freedom of their people in their pursuit of the almost insurmountable and epic outcomes.

Today, by contrast, we have a culture drowning in images of ‘self’ as if personal significance, expressed in the latest microscopically parsed ‘word’ or phrase, indelibly inked into the public consciousness, as a convicting piece of evidence of some psychic or genetic abnormality and justification for ‘unworthiness’ for office. Not only are the actors on the stage under highly inflated moral, ethical and psychological and religious microscopes, so too are the messengers. And both groups have lost sight of the shared responsibility not merely to preserve democracy, but to deploy its strengths to enhance the lives of their people, through the reduction of those things than enshackle them: fear, alienation, anxiety, homelessness, statelessness, war, terrorism, famine and existential environmental threats.

Just because the “oppression” is not so narrowly defined, and just because the oppression is not confined (nor confineable) to a single nation or region, and because everyone on the planet is aware, in real time, of the ravages and the murders and the rapes and the bombed hospitals, schools, apartment complexes and city squares, not the mention the nuclear reactors on the verge of meltdown…the kind of selflessness, and ‘calling’ that lay in the hearts and minds of at least the three men in our view, is more needed and more absent, than at any time in the lifetime of this scribe.

Were these men, and others, legitimately and authentically, ‘ahead of their time’ in the sense that they saw beyond the immediate, the literal, the egocentric to the ‘vision’ as an integral part of their own ‘daimon,’ or ‘inner angel’….

Joseph Campbell, in his work, Myth and Meaning, (202) writes about the time we are in:

We’re in a period, in terms of history, of the end of national and tribal consciousness. The only consciousness that is proper to contemporary life is global. Nevertheless, all popular thinking is in terms of loyalties to the local communities to which all are members. Such thinking is not out of date.

What we face is a challenge to recognize one community on this earth, and what we find in the face of this challenge is everybody pulling back into his own group. I don’t want to name the in-groups, but we all know pretty well what they are. In our country (the U.S.), we call them pressure groups. They are racial groups, class groups, religious groups, economic groups, and they are all tangling with each other.

For any people to say, ‘We are it and the others are ‘other—these are dangerous people. And there are religions still doing this. The new thing that is very difficult for people to realize I sour society is the human race. And out little suburb is the globe. Spaceship Earth.’ (https://www,jcf,org/product-page/myth-and-meaning-conversations-on-mythology-and life-ebook)

Such a perspective, whether or not actually read and studied by Mandela, Gandhi and Tutt (and others), would have easily compiled, even sustained the work to which these men dedicated their lives. There seems to have been a connecting ‘bridge’ between their ‘daimon’ and their moment in history. The sophomoric question of whether history makes the man, or the reverse, the man makes history, notwithstanding, there has to be an intimate, sentient, sensitive and imaginatively courageous perspective both of the identity of the individual and the inherent and seemingly natural ‘integration’ of the man and his moment that defies science, and perhaps theology.

The capacity to withstand the onslaught of continual pressure, continual betrayal, continual defiance, and misinterpretation of both personal identity and motive, of ideology, morality and ethic, of a determined resistance to defend, at all costs, the ‘it’ and to make them (and their comrades) ‘the other’ is a theme which has defined much of western history. In the case of South Africa, the ‘it’ comprised the apartheid system of white supremacy, and the ‘other’ were the blacks, and coloureds and Indians. In the case of India, the ‘it’ were the British imperialists, while the ‘other’ were the Indian people. Campbell’s insight that ‘in-groups’ define the manner in which the political and cultural systems are being manipulated, can apply internally to each nation, as well as to the geo-political stage. In each and every town, school, college, university, and corporation, there is a dominant “it” and a recessive “other” so defined and determined and sustained by the power of the will of the ‘it’.

And, from one perspective, these men, Mandela, Gandhi, Tutu, all considered themselves intimately connected to ‘other’ and determined to oppose the granite establishment of the ‘it’. Doubtless, they would all argue that their perspective was not what defined them, so much as how they were determined and enabled to enact their beliefs, principles, values and both strategies and tactics with others of like mind and determination. And in the course of their ‘living out’ their work, they adopted the principles of ‘nonviolence’ and respect for the ‘other that was missing from those who considered themselves the ‘it’.

We do know, for example, that one of these men, Mandela, regularly recited the poem Invictus during his imprisonment (Charle LaMonica, Invictus  A poem frequently recited by Nelson Mandela, from worldview.unc.org). Invictus, meaning unconquerable or undefeated in Latin, was written in 1875 by William Ernest Henley.

Out of the night that

covers me,

Black as the pit from ‘

pole to pole

I thank whatever gods

may be

For my unconquerable

soul.

 

In the fell clutch of

circumstance

I have not winced nor

cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings

of chance

 My head is bloody, but

unbowed.

 

Beyond this place of

wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of

the Shade,

And yet the menace of

the years

Finds and shall find me’

unafraid.

 

It matters not how strait

the gate,

How charged with

punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my

fate

I am the captain of my

soul.

Indefatigable, selfless, deeply committed, not only to the ‘cause’ but also to a deep and profound awareness of the limits to one’s power and influence, and a determination to exercise a discipline on himself, …..clearly these attributes apply to all three.

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

cell913blog.com #33

 Influenced by his father’s tribal priesthood, his mother’s conversion to the Methodist faith, the regent whose tutelage and home were his for a period, his attendance in Methodist-operated educational facilities and also by the writings and teachings of Gandhi, Mandela seemed destined for a significant role in the evolution of South Africa throughout his life.

And his activism, along with his colleagues in the ANC, was clearly echoed, reverberated and trumpeted by the man to came to chair the Truth and Reconciliation Committee following the demise of apartheid. Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Stories that Tutu ‘was not officially invited to Mandela’s funeral’ notwithstanding, (some report that in South Africa, invitations are not issued for funerals), the two men have left an indelible imprint not only on the men and women with whom they worked and fought, but also on the government and its policies in South Africa. Indeed, their circle of influence extends in various ripples across the globe.

(Personal note: I had the opportunity to attend an event at which Archbishop Tutu was the keynote speaker, in the then “Pepsi” Centre in Denver Colorado. Invited to support the work of those engaged in youth projects, the event featured a stage filled with church leaders from almost all denominations, sadly excluding the Episcopal Bishop of Colorado, whose absence was noted by many. Immediately following the event, like a young boy at a rock concert wanting to ‘meet’ and shake hands with the Archbishop, I found my way through the maze of hallways in the arena to the loading dock where the venerable Archbishop was already seated in the rear seat of a van. His eyes, as always it seemed, sparkled, his smile beamed, his hand stretched out as I breathlessly blurted, “Archbishop, I bring greetings from “A.W!” (New Testament Professor who had previously worked in Africa and knew the Archbishop personally.) I had been surprised and grateful that the opportunity to listen to him speak and even more energized that I might meet him face to face. Words to be spoken, unrehearsed, were the last thing in my mind as I raced through the concrete halls. Only the moment, if possible, seemed important! And, these three decades later, the moment remains etched in memory, in indelible ‘ink’.)

 Both Mandela and Tutu were born of Xhosa parents, and were educated in mission schools, Tutu in those where his father taught, Mandela in Methodist mission schools. Tutu though he wanted a medical career…was unable to afford training and instead became a schoolteacher. Ordained an Anglican priest in 1961, he obtained an M.A. from King’s College London (and) from 1972 to 1975 he served as associate director for the World Council of Churches. He was appointed dean of St. Mary’s Cathedral in Johannesburg in 1975 the first Black South African to hold that position. From 1976 to 1978 Tutu served as Bishop of Lesotho. In 1978 Tutu accepted an appointment as the general secretary of the South African Council of Churches and became a leading spokesman for the rights of black South Africans. During the 1980’s he played an unrivaled role in drawing national and international attention to the inequities of apartheid. He emphasized nonviolent means of protest and encouraged the application of economic pressure by countries dealing with South Africa. The award of the 1984 Nobel Prize for Peace sent a significant message to South African Pres. P.W. Botha’s administration. In 1985, at the height of the township rebellions in South Africa, Tutu was installed as Johannesburg’s first Black Anglican bishop, and in 1986 he was elected the first Black Archbishop of Cape Town, thus becoming the primate of South Africa’s 1.6 million-member Anglican church. In 1988 Tutu took a position as chancellor of the University of the Western Cape in Bellville, South Africa. During South Africa’s moves to democracy in the early 1990’s, Tutu propagated the idea of South Africa as ‘the Rainbow Nation,’…In 1995, Nelson Mandela appointed Tutu head of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated allegations of human rights abuses during the apartheid era. (from britannica.com)

Here is a quote from Tutu’s Rainbow People of God (p.121) that expresses his theology:

If we could but recognize our common humanity, that we do belong together, that our destinies are bound up with one another’s, that we can be free only together, that we can survive only together, that we can be human only together, then the glorious South Africa would come into being where all of us lived harmoniously together as members of one family, the human family, God’s family. In truth a transfiguration would have taken place. (from Denison Journal of Religion Volume 7, 2007, in a piece entitled, Desmond Tutu: A theological Model for Justice in the Context of Apartheid, by Tracy Riggle, Denison University)

 Such thoughts and aspirations may not have reached Mandela directly while in the crucible of the crisis of his fight to dismantle apartheid. He would, however, have been somewhat familiar with Methodist teaching, thinking and theology, from a very early age. Not only was his mother a member, and his schools operated under the Methodist ‘banner,’ but the theology would have been inculcated deeply into his mind, heart and body.

From resourceumc.org (resource United Methodist Church), we read:

United Methodists believe in actualizing their faith in community---actions speak louder than words. The three simple rules are: ‘Do no harm. Do good. Stay in love with God.’….United Methodists serve the world over, showing Christ’s love through tangible meant. From sustainable water systems, to health care, micro-lending, advocacy and helping eliminate malaria deaths….Ums believe: ‘The gospel of Christ knows no religion but social.’ United Methodists believe: ‘All creation is God’s, and we are responsible for the ways we use and abuse it. ‘United Methodists believe: Christ hosts Communion and all are  welcomed by him.

And from umc.org, under the title, Our Mission in the World, we read:

‘As servants of Christ we are sent in to the world to engage in the struggle for justice and reconciliation. We seek to reveal the love of God for men, women, and children of all ethnic, racial, cultural, and national backgrounds and to demonstrate the healing power of the gospel with those who suffer.

Imagine being reared in the ethos of such thoughts, aspirations, prayers, hymns and role models!

There is a cogent and insightfully reflective piece about Tutu’s legacy, from Notre Dame, (modernities.nd.edu) that sheds light back on the life and legacy of Mandela’s South African peer, friend and colleague (Tutu):

While perhaps most remembered for his work fighting against apartheid in South Africa, and following its dismantling his leadership of (the) country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Tutu’s advocacy for the marginalized was not limited to his home. Indeed, he addressed issues of injustice in contexts across Africa, in Israel/Palestine, and in Northern Ireland. In this series of posts, which were first presented at the 2022 Academy of  Religion Annual Conference in Denver Colorado, scholars across religious and geographic difference grapple with Tut’s legacy in the international arena, focusing especially on  Israel/Palestine. Together, they suggest that Tutu’s voice remains a prophetic one that is needed now as we navigate the rise of religious nationalism populism, and demagoguery….In these reflections, Hilary Rantisi draws on her own experiences growing up as a Palestinian under Israeli apartheid to illustrate the impact of Tutu’s work o both her and her community.  She argues that Tutu was a joyous yet fierce warrior in the Palestinian cause, and that his theology guided him to stand up to those who were marginalized not only in his own community but in communities around the world. In these reflections (also), Farid Esack, under the title, Desmond Tutu: A Much-loved, Deeply Disturbed, and Offensive Prophet, writes: (Quoting Mandela) ‘Sometimes strident, often tender, never afraid and seldom without humour, Desmond Tutu’s voice will always be the voice of the voiceless.’ And (quoting Tutu himself) ‘This God did not just talk. He showed Himself to be a doing God. Perhaps we might add another point about God. He takes sides. HE is not a neutral God. He took the side of the enslaved, the oppressed, and the victims. He is still the same even today. He sides with the poor, the oppressed and the victims of injustice. (From Sparks and Tutu, 73)

And Esack who worked with Tutu, writing in his own words:

Tutu was a Christian, a mensch, and a prophet. I use the word prophet in the sense given to it by liberation theology as someone desperate to challenge power and  injustice. (Referencing Tutu’s work, God is Not a Christian, Esack offers a quote from a Tutu interview with Allister Sparks:

I am a Christian, but the books  that we hold to provide for how we should be thinking about God…I mean, right at the beginning, the gospel of John tells about ‘the light that lightens everyone’: it does not say ‘the light that  lightens those who become Christians’; it says ‘everyone who comes into the world.’ (113) And from another Tutu interview with Sparks, on June 16, 2020, Tutu is quoted as saying during a conference of interfaith leaders:

Don’t insult people of other faiths by saying, ‘Oh, actually our God is your God too; You are a Christian too without knowing it. Don’t insult people by reducing their faith to that.’ (313

Esack continues: While the God that Tutu worshiped was decidedly not a Christian, Tutu certainly was one, as demonstrated in his love for and agonized relationship with the Anglican Church. He was concerned with all its Anglo ceremonial and hierarchical trappings and doctrine and sustained a relentless critique of its positions on the ordination of women and the recognition of gay rights among others…..Sometimes we would spend many hours debating the wisdom of marching to Parliament, starting from St. Georges Cathedral in the Cape Town city centre, literally a stone’s throw away from Parliament. We were fully aware that we would be confronting the police and end up being arrested if we did. On a few occasions just before the march, Tutu, who was never a signed-up comrade of any of our political formations, would go to his sanctuary to pray for guidance, only to emerge from there saying something to the effect that this is not what he was moved to do by the spirit!

Although the two men were born some fifteen years apart, (Mandela in 1918, and Tutu in 1931) their lives not only intersected over apartheid, but doubtless, enhanced and supported the work each was doing throughout their shared time on the South African political/cultural/religious/social justice stage.

Theology, the teachings of the churches, not only its theory but also its praxis, has been a heated topic of consideration among political leaders, both practitioners and theorists, for many years, The dynamic of one’s personal theology, called by many names including the search for and relationship with God (in whatever name), and one’s political and philosophic views are two intersecting dynamics whose separate identities are rarely, if ever, disentangled. Indeed, there is a substantial argument/case to be made that they are unable and unwilling to be dis-engaged from each other. We exist in a world in which we can all see, as well as experience, injustice, whether of a legal, or an ethical or a professional or even on a social level. Certainly, it is feasible and perhaps even necessary to begin to unpack the potential and extant links between all forms of injustice with the politics and the current ethos (anima mundi) in which those politics are being practiced. Institutional churches, of whatever faith, continue as the reservoir, the tablet, the sanctuary, the rituals, the hymnody, the dogma and the promise, the prayers and the history and tradition of each of those deeply embedded traditions. Tutu’s ‘God is not a Christian’ rings harmoniously for some, as a profound dissonance, even heresy, for others.

Anyone who has been accompanying this blog-pilgrimage will already intuit that I stand with Tutu, and many others, in the non-denominational, and non-creedal and non-institutional notion of God. And while this notion leaves out the specific faith community that holds to a specific set of beliefs, it also affords a perspective that remains open to striving to embrace and to support and to foster all efforts, images and art that point towards a different and more just world. Mandela and Tutu are two of the many male role models, not merely in their actions but also in their thought, prayer, theology, struggles in their personal crucible as well as in the public sphere, for the effective, challenging and almost impossible option of marrying one’s life and actions to one’s theology.

Monday, March 4, 2024

cell913blog.com #32

 Readers in this space may recall a reference to Nelson Mandela as “selfless” in that he paid the utmost attention to every person with whom he engaged, including his enemies. He frequently, and also somewhat surprisingly, deferred to his colleagues, in the event that his ‘view’ seemed unable to gain traction after his direct and clear advocacy. He sincerely lauded all of his colleagues and their respective skills, talents, fortitude, resilience, intelligence, grace under fire, and, as we have learned, even tipped his hat to de Klerk in his Nobel acceptance address, for recognizing the need to end apartheid.

Readers here will also recall the strong and lasting influence of Mohandas Gandhi on Mandela and the ANC in their long-standing and even longer-suffering struggle to bring about a democratic, non-racial, society where every person has a vote and all persons ‘count’ equally. In the headlines in the west the link to Gandhi centres around ‘non-violence’ and Mandela’s resistance to the use of violence for decades, until all other measures, strategies and tactics had been exhausted without effect.

Gandhi’s family practiced a kind of Vaishnavism, one of the major traditions within Hinduism, that waw inflected through the morally rigorous tenets of Jainism—and Indian faith for which concepts like asceticism and nonviolence are important. Many of the beliefs that Characterized Gandhi’s spiritual outlook later in life may have originated in his upbringing. However, his understanding of faith was constantly evolving as he encountered new belief systems. Leo Tolstoy’s analysis of Christian theology, for example, came to bear heavily on Gandhi’s conception of spirituality as did texts such as the Bible and the Qu’ran, and he first read the Bhagavadgita—a Hindu epic—in it English translation while living in Britain. (britainnica.com)

Tolstoy’s Letter to a Hindu, reads in part:

The aim of the sinless One consists in acting without causing sorrow to others, although he could attain to great power by ignoring their feelings. The aim of the sinless One lies in not doing evil unto those who have done evil unto him. If a man causes suffering even to those who hate him without any reason, he will ultimately have grief not to be overcome. The punishment of evil doers consists in making them feel ashamed of themselves by doing them a great kindness. Of what use is superior knowledge in the one, if he does not endeavor to relive his neighbor’s want and mush as his own. If, in the morning, a man wishes to do evil unto another, in the evening the evil will return to him. (marxists.org)

On livemint.com, Payal Seth, in a piece entitled, Gandhi and the Gits: The Art of Selfless living and dying, writes:

Gandhi’s love for the Gita: The Bhagwad Gita is a sacred poem in the form of a conversation between Krishna and his disciple Arjuna…Mahatma Gandhi referred to the Bhagwad Gita as the Gospel of Selfless Action and was often said that it offered him solace in the darkest hours. He referred to the Gita as his ‘eternal mother’, placing it at a position superior to his earthly mother…..Gandhi’s Gita-A gospel of selfless action: The Gita, according to Gandhi, teaches us that while man might be embroiled in running after futile material desires (like fame, money, relationships, etc.), the only desire worth having is to realize that we are the self (or the soul), aspire to become like Him (God) (i.e. gain his supreme qualities 0 and gain eternal peace. This is the process of self-realization, which entails understanding that we are the soul (not the body and mind) and are caught in the endless cycles of life and death due to our karma. Karma simply means that any thought, speech, or action undertaken upon others will have a corresponding result in our lives. Usually, the result from karma do not ripen instantly, and when they do at some distant point in the future, we are unable to connect them0 with the cause (out actions). Any unripened karma becomes the cause of future life births. So how does one gain freedom from the endless cycle of birth and death? Giving up action and hence accumulation of karma? No. The Gita acknowledged that the world to continue running, action (whether mental or physical) needs to be taken. Then how does one free oneself from the bondagsh of karma? The Gita says, ‘Do your allotted work—have no desire for reward and work.’ Renunciation of the fruits of one’s actions is the central message in the Gita. Renunciation does not mean indifference to results. But a renouncer is one who performs his duty with cheerfulness and thoroughness and remains desireless of the fruit of the action. That is he remains equanimous whether the result is favourable or unfavourable. Gandhi believed that when one enforces the Gita’s central teaching in life, one is bound to follow Ahimsa and Truth. Nonviolence of Ahimsa as per Gandhi Ji is described as the state to do no harm in thoughts, words and actions to all living beings. It is not just refraining from violent action but also a whole way of life. Sinc e it extends to all living organisms, it encompasses consuming vegetarian food, a sustainable lifestyle, and the protection of the environment. Because when there is no desire for fruit, there is no temptation for untruth or himsa (violence). The cause of any untruth or himsa will be rooted in the fulfillment of attaining a desire fuelled by ego. For instance, sins like murder, theft etc. cannot be performed without attachment. But the one who knows that he is the Self (soul) residing in the body and that this Soul is a part of the supreme Soul (God), he will dedicate everything to Him and be freed of ego and the cycle of karmas. Finally, Gandhi untiringly adhered to another message int eh Gita: We should serve God through the service of mankind. To this, he elucidated how the soul’s natural progress is towards selflessness and purity. This is why he was able to dedicate his whole lifer to the freedom and betterment of the lives of the people of India.

In her exhaustive and insightful work entitled The Lost Art of Scripure, Karen Armstrong writes:

The Bhagavad Gita….challenges the radical separation of humanity and divinity, since in the person of Krishna, God is as aspect of the human. Indeed, the scripture contrasts the humanisation of God with the inhumanity of war. The Gita acquired its high status in India relatively recently. It is in many respects a ‘colonial text,’ because it spoke directly to the predicament of the people of India during the period leading up to their struggle for independence of British colonial rule. While it functioned as a foundational text for anti-colonial politics, it also addressed the problems of any post-colonial society. By putting the issue of war squarely at the centre of a debate about India’s future, the Gita forced Hindus to face up to the unwelcome realisation that they would have to fight the British…..The Gita was also a revelation to Western people, because it challenged the Orientalist paradigm of the ‘passive spirituality of the East,’ often patronisingly contrasted with the ‘active ethos’ of the Protestant, rational West. It dealt squarely with the problems of violence, the individual’s duty to society and its limits, and the tension between the individual and fate. It therefore challenged Locke’s separation of religion and politics…. (Armstrong, The Lost Art of Scripture, p.429)

Not only was Mandela influenced by the teaching and writing and reflections of Gandhi and his honouring of The Gita, he was also impacted by his own religious experience in the Methodist faith. First, though, his father remained aloof from Christianity and instead reserved his own faith for the great spirit of the Xhosas, Qamata, the God of his fathers. My father was an unofficial priest and presided over ritual slaughtering of goats and calves and officiated at local traditional rites concerning planting, harvest, birth, marriage, initiative ceremonies, and funerals. He did not need to be ordained, for the traditional religion of the Xhosas is characterized by a cosmic wholeness, so that there is little distinction between the sacred and the secular, between the natural and the supernatural….While the faith of the Mbekela brothers (Christian) did not rub off on my father, it did inspire my mother, who became a Christian. In fact Fanny was literally her Christian name, for she had been given it in church. It was due to the influence of the Mbekela brothers that I myself was baptized into the Methodist, or Wesleyan Chruch as it was then known, and sent to school. (LWTF, p.13)

He was a student at Mqhekezweni, a mission station of the Methodist Church and far more up-to-date and Westernized than Qunu. People dressed in modern clothes. The men wore suits and the women affected the severe Protestant style of the missionaries: thick long skirts and high-necked blouses, with a blanket draped over the shoulder and a scarf wound elegantly around the head…..The Two principles that governed my life at Mqhekeweni were chieftaincy and the Church. These two doctrines existed in uneasy harmony, although I did not then see them as antagonistic. For me, Christianity was not so much a system of beliefs as it was the powerful creed of a single man: Reverend Matyolo. For me, his powerful presence embodied all that was alluring in Christianity. He was a popular and beloved as the regent (the central force in the world of Mqhekezweni), and the fact that he was the regent’s superior in spiritual matters made a strong impression of me. But the Church was as concerned with this world as the next: I saw that virtually all of the achievements of Africans seemed to have come about through the missionary work of the Church. The mission schools trained the clerks, the interpreters, and the policemen, who at the time represented the height of African aspirations. (LWTF p. 18-19) ….At Qunu, the only time I had ever attended church was on the day that I was baptized. Religion was a ritual that I indulged in for my mother’s sake and to which I attached no meaning. But at Mqhekezweni, religion was a part of the fabric of life and I attended church each Sunday along with the regent and his wife. The regent took his religion very seriously, In fact the only time I was ever given a hiding by him was when I dodged a Sunday service to take part in a fight against boys from another village, a transgression I never committed again. (LWTF p. 20)

From the World Council of Churches, we learn:

The MCSA (Methodist Church of South Africa) rejected the apartheid ideology from the    beginning adn was a vocal critic fo government policy throughout the nationalist supremacy. Faced by governmnet pressure to divide along racial lines, the 1958 conference declared its 'conviction that it is the will of God for the Methodist Church that it should be one and undicvided, trusting to the leadering of  God to brin gthis ideal to ultimaate fruition.' Six years later the first African to serve as president of conference was elected. The life of  the MCSA reflects the strains and tensions of an apartheid society. In spite of this, the conference connexional executive and synods have long since been non-racial. The ideal of a one adn undivided church has still to be realized at the congregational level. (from oikoumeme.org)

Mandela had to have felt and appreciated the support and guidance of his affiliation with the Methodist Church of South Africa, throughout his life.

It is not surprising, nor is it far beyond the obvious that both men, Mandela and Gandhi, were imbued with an intense, life-long commitment to ‘free’ their respective ‘people’ from bonds and shackles of oppressors. It is also clear that both men were inculcated in faith ‘systems’ of different names and sources. And yet, the convergence of their ‘personal identities’ and the personal ‘fires’ that burned in their minds, their hearts and their souls seem to have been birthed from a similar, if not the precisely “same” match….The light from those fires, of idealism,  of endurance and persistence, of courage in the face of deeply threatening and powerful opponents, and of personal conviction and sacrifice, continues to light the paths of many decades later.

What must not pass unnoticed or unnoted, is the sham of the kind of ‘radioactive’ passion that infuses many among the so-called Christian right, the Dominionists, the Seven Mountainists, and those who are committed to birthing and generating a theocracy in the United States, analogous to the ‘caliphate’ that is envisioned by many Muslims. Even to conceive of and then to begin to enact a movement determined to ‘save’ the liberal democracy of the United States (and likely beyond) in the name of the Christian God, and then to prosletyze, under the deceptive ruse that trump has been chosen by God to ‘free the American people’ from the ravages of evil, is a proposition and a project that both Mandela and Gandhi would have trashed.

Their (Mandela’s and Gandhi’s) independent yet comingled vision, imagination, education, formation and discipline, in the service of destroying what were real, factual, historic and legal, if tragic, forms of oppression, depression, dis-empowerment and alienation, in pursuit of the authentic freedom, equality, and equity of their respective people, so eclipses and denigrates and defies everything that the current ‘Christian nationalists’ are about. Indeed, the comparison is an insult to both men!

Nevertheless, the Speaker of the House of Representatives has declared himself to be embodying the image of Moses, as the liberator of the people of Israel.

As vice-presidential candidate Lloyd Benson remarked to his Republican opponent, Dan Quayle, who in a debate in 1988 compared himself to President Kennedy, “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine, Senator you are no Jack Kennedy!...so too, can the sentient, conscious, thinking and reflective men and women of the world, especially within the United States, retort to the Dominionists and the Seven Mountainists, and to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, “You are not, and never will be worthy of the name Moses!”

Saturday, March 2, 2024

cell913blog.com #31

For the last two-dozen-plus pieces in this space, the focal point has been the character, life, exploits and identification with the story and the mythology that has grown up following the life and death of Nelson Mandela. Born and raised in the Methodist faith, while deeply imbued and indoctrinated in the tribal rituals, customs, myths and legends of the Zulu tribes in the Transkei, highly respectful of the role models of elders like his father, his mentors, and his many African peers, including even his political opponents, Mandela is a bright ‘light’ of courage, reason, and especially both modesty and compassion, especially for relieving or perhaps terminating the apartheid system which enshackled his people. Never did Mandela even once, assume the mantle of working and struggling and fighting as a “God warrior”. His own mantra was as a ‘freedom fighter’ and his methods, both strategies and tactics were legal, political, rhetorical, deception and subversion, as well as leadership, even to the point of studying the works of Marx and Lenin, in order to better understand the communist allies, while continually disavowing any personal membership in the communist party. He, reluctantly, after decades of struggle without any significant impact in ameliorating the oppression of South Africans, finally agreed to engage in violence, and went off to learn military leadership, strategies and tactics, in order to provide more effective leadership.

Apartheid, the system generated and legally enforced by the white supremacy government of various leaders, was a system wholly seeded and operated by while men. Mandela’s life was dedicated and committed to the removal of chains of oppression imposed by other men. In it essence, Mandela’s was an historic and political, a philosophic and psychological/sociological conflict.

For months, if not years, in 2024, the world has been engaged in a political/rhetorical/philosophic/ideological/economic and obviously moral conflict between government systems (and leaders) considered on the one hand, ‘autocratic’ or ‘despotic’ or ‘tyrannical’ or ‘oligarchic’ versus on the other hand, government systems and leaders generally considered ‘democratic’. And while the western media has been deeply focused on this ‘battle-field’ as if it were the crucial and pivotal confrontation of our age, another ‘war’ has been going on at a different level of both public acknowledgment and intelligence, as well as appealing to a far different psychological/spiritual and sociological target.

After 2001, and the bombing of the twin towers, on 9/11, we began to hear about the radical Muslim terrorist movement, under titles like Al Qaeda, Isis, Al Shabab, and others. While engaged in the ‘elimination’ of terrorists cells dedicated to advancing the cause of a caliphate, we also learned about the apparent divide between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and the respective countries in which each sect dominated the population and the government. Implicitly connected, as well as explicitly related to this conflict, is the relationship of Israel and her most prominent advocate and protector the United States. We could hardly even consider the Sunni/Shia conflict without also being aware of the shadow of deep and profound anti-Israeli sentiment, even contempt for the state of Israel.

It has not been the religious conflict that we know exists in the Middle East, and in Africa, alone, that has occupied both religious scholars and thinkers. There has been another growing conflict within the so-called Christian religious communities. We have, for decades, if not centuries, known about a tension between what are called ‘conservative’ Christians and ‘liberal’ Christians’…defined primarily by a different ‘reading’ and interpretation of scripture…the former being generally more ‘literal’ and authoritative, while the latter is considered more ‘metaphoric,’ and ‘mythic’ and guiding rather than legally binding. And while that tension has beset the Christian churches for centuries, with various applications, creeds, rituals, idols, and figure-heads in opposition, in person and through their writings, another profoundly disturbing conflict has opened up in the last few years, rearing its ugly head more recently in various quarters, including the United States, Australia, Canada.

The question of how a revivified Mandela would regard this conflict inspires what follows.

Writing in independentaustralian.net, on May 25, 2022, Bilal Cleland,  we find:

The Pentecostal Chruch’s Seven Mountains Mandate is an affront to democracy and a danger to society….A branch of dominionism, which sees adherents of their variety of Christianity as entitled to dominion over the Earth, interprets the Seven Mountains as aspects of human society. The Seven Mountains over which they claim dominion are education, religion, family, business, government and the military, arts and entertainment and the media. This is an important part of American evangelical Christianity. It is widely supported by adherents of the collection of churches known as Pentecostal…..Amn article on Christianity.com reveals: ‘According to the New York Times some four million Americans belong to classical Pentecostalism….Roger E Olson, professor of theology at George W Truett Theological Seminary of Baylor University in Waco Texas writes:

The fourth aspect of Pentecostalism’s dark side is its tendency to emphasise the spiritual over the physical in terms of the Kingdom of God’s ‘alreadyness’. The Kingdom of God is often viewed as present where there is much manifestation of the supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit and many people being spiritually converted and filled with the Holy Spirit—the to the neglect of social justice. For most of its history, the Pentecostal movement in the U.S. was obsessed with anti-communism and its main form of social activism. Racial equality was not a major focus of Pentecostalism and, in general, Pentecostals have been complacent about segregation—even among themselves…..According to Philip Almond, Emeritus Professor of Religious Thought at the University of Queensland…(points out) that Morrison’s (Australian Prime Minister) ‘have a go’ philosophy ‘sits squarely within Pentecostal prosperity theology.’ This is the view that belief in God leads to material wealth. Professor Almond adds: the godly become wealthy and the wealthy are godly. And, unfortunately, the ungodly become poor and the poor are ungodly. Only those who  have been saved by Jesus (generally those who have had a personal experience of being ‘born again’…) have any hope of attaining eternal life in heaven….Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, atheists, and non-born-again Christians are doomed to spend an eternity in the torments of hell….Steve Davies warns about one extreme aspect of the Seven Mountains Mandate, the Extreme World Makeover: ‘No the whole deal is, again, he has told Satan I am going to do this great thing with my sons and daughters. They are going to awake; they ae going to arise and they will begin to shine. And they will operate my light in my authority and my power and they will change everything. I will not have to exert my own direct muscle. They will carry my muscle. They will crush you…..The subjugation of society to such an interpretation of Christina scripture would destroy any notion of participatory democracy, multiculturalism or religious freedom. It is basically medieval totalitarianism.

(Bilal Cleland is a retired secondary teacher and was Secretary of the Islamic Council of Victoria, Chairman of the Muslim Welfare Board Victoria and the Secretary of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils.)

On npr.org, Odette Yousef, December 5, 2023, in a piece entitled, “Speaker Mike Johnson draws scrutiny for ties to far right Christian movements’…

in a transcript of a conversation quotes Ari Shapiro, Host, House speaker Mike Johnson is the keynote speaker at an event fort the National Association of Lawmakers tonight. The group is working to take conservative Christian control at every level of government.

Quoting Ailsa Chang, Host: Now, their views go further than abolishing abortion nationwide or walking back same-sex marital rights.  At a group held earlier this year, one speaker defended the idea of the death penalty for gay people. Johnson’s ties to far-right Christian movements are unprecedented for a lawmaker in such a high position of authority.

Quoting Fred Clarkson, from Political Research Associates, a non-profit that tracks the far right, who has followed  the Christian far right for many years: I’ve seen a tremendous uptick in the rhetoric of violence among prominent Christian right leaders…..Dominionist sorts of the New Apostolic Reformation in particular where they’re predicting civil war and they’re clear the need(ing) to take out God’s enemies in the end times.

Youseff: (But) the movement has also seen in recent years that there is another path to power, and that path was the presidency. Andrew Whitehead of Indiana University-Purdue University says Donald Trump was actually   a perfect test of the power of Christian nationalism.

Removing any mantle of Mandela, and delving into my own personal experience with the far-right Christian evangelical fundamentalists, I have a long record of direct confrontation, protest, public denunciation, and their vengeful push-back.

One of their number public dubbed my homilies, “heretical” while another left a phone message on my answering machine ‘You are the Anti-Christ”….Another called titles to which I had been introduced in theology school, such as “People of the Lie” and “The Road Less Travelled,” heretical…and the phrase ‘new age’ was generally deployed in discussion of the homilies I prepared and delivered.

In the spirit, courage, defiance, and determination of men like Mandela, I join others whose determination is to detour and to defeat these various theocratic movements to transform western liberal society into a Christian nationalist compound, a la Waco itself.

And the first test at the ballot box to express determined opposition to the New Apostolic Reformation and to the Seven Mountain Mandate is to defeat all of those candidates who subscribe (formally, informally, secretly, or openly) to this religious scourge that knows no limits to its self-proclaimed self-righteousness.

And we call on responsible, thoughtful and courageous church leaders to speak out about this nefarious attempt to take over any government at any level, municipal, state/province, federal/national.

For God’s sake, this movement from the radical elements of any and all religions has no place in our world!