Searching for God # 48

 Having struggled with letting go of the dogmatic traditional exegesis of the Original Sin, I have also to acknowledge another struggle, this time with one of the church’s unshakeable, immutable, and perfectly envisioned foundations, the sanctity of life.

In principle, who could fundamentally disagree, oppose or even contest the notion that life, with all of its beauty and confounding turbulences, is not worth herculean efforts to protect, preserve, enhance and explore its limitless opportunities and challenges. Whether, for Christians, considered a gift of God, and thereby sacred, or for others, a high value to uphold, like all other ‘absolutes,’ it seems to beg a more nuanced, less dogmatic, and more serious and critical examination.

Why?

I have struggled, as previously noted, with the male suicides in my community, by men whose character, reputation, sensitivity and sensibility seemed not even remotely deserving of being written off as medically ill, criminally insane, or even psychologically unbalanced. All lay terms, I acknowledge, and certainly, without professional qualifications and certifications, I have no legitimacy to make such a statement when all around me, only the word of the clinical experts, the psychiatrists, almost exclusively, have rendered a ‘medical judgement’ with which the law and society have concurred, mostly without serious debate.

Notwithstanding the recent ‘Medical Assistance In Dying legislation in some jurisdictions, and the rigorous criteria that more than one professional must concur, I am proposing that we look again, even from the perspective of ‘searching for God’ at this question. There are several foundational, yet still potential and unsubstantiated by the professional or the ecclesial communities, thoughts that have led to this both bold and timid place of probing.

We have created a society, especially the West, in which the individual has become a functional ‘thing’. It is not merely Margaret Atwood who can legitimately claim, following her heroic rise to fame and public ‘adulation,’ that she has become a thing. Funneled into careers that bring with them extremely high demands on the human brain, psyche and intellect, many of them designed with highly ulterior motives, millions of men and women, many of them highly educated, and even more highly sensitive and nuanced in their perceptions and observations and critical judgements of many of the tasks for which they have trained, have taken their own lives.

Stretching individuals to a ‘breaking point’ without regard either to where or why that breaking point has shown its face, the culture could not give a fig about that individual. Of course, there are family cries of despair, loss and shock, even guilt and shame that someone whom they love, found it necessary to terminate their life.

And, the public, too, has and does repeat its own shock, shame and degrees of guilt and confusion that anyone of their acquaintance, or even a stranger, would consider that s/he has been placed in a situation from which there seemed to be no other option but self-inflicted death.

Men and women returning from military combat with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, have, even after months or years of professional therapy, also found it necessary to take their own lives. And yet we continue to perpetuate our ‘love of war’ as another instrument in our insatiable quest for power, control, dominance, superiority and national security and what we persistently and hubristically, and with concurrent impunity, call, ‘national pride, honour and reputation and empire.’

The difference between national security and ‘national honour and reputation,’ however has become so blurred that, for many the two are indistinguishable. We pay little if any attention to the paradox that those most trained in military strategy and tactics, especially among the hierarchy, are those most opposed to the commencement of a military campaign. The (Colin) Powell doctrine, ‘you only can be permitted to start a war provided you have a preplanned and pre-conceived exit strategy’ seems to have suffered its own demise through the hands and policies of Putin, Netanyahu and trump.

Let’s look further at how we have, and increasingly are further deepening the angst, stress, anxiety, frustration and hopelessness of millions of people in so many jurisdictions. We strip environmental regulations away from polluting corporations, so that they can generate more profit and dividends for their share holders. We reduce corporate and income taxes on the very rich for a similar reason, to mollify and pander to the rich, given the faux-glory that money, fame and social insider-ship’ have become the near-religious idol of the very wealthy. We defund social programs, a process that did not start with the latest American administration. After all, from the point of view of ‘fiscally responsible politicians’ how can, for example, a government afford to provide free transportation to those who have neither a vehicle to drive or have a handicap that excludes them from driving, as the former Harris government did when it withdrew funding for Wheel-trans in Toronto shortly after winning its election? Sarcasm notwithstanding, that kind of gutting of social policy is not merely short-sighted and recriminatory, it sucks hope out of the system, not only for those directly deprived, but for all the rest who can understand the fundamental need.

Human rights, the prized by-word of the establishment, comprises much more than whether those in power comply with some specific law. Human rights commit both those writing the legislation and those beyond those charged with enforcement, but a culture generally, to grapple with its responsibility for ensuring that each jurisdiction respect, honours and dignifies everyone. And we are eons away from anything that might resemble that kind of aspiration. Indeed, we are drifting quickly backwards from that. Just this week, the American president told a former Somali refugee, now a member of the United States Congress that she should go back to her home country and was not welcome in America.

From a religious perspective, we have inherited a perspective on ‘sin’ that is private, personal and highly reductionistic, without in any way providing the necessary patience, or the tools or the training for the necessary investigations of the frequency and the manner and methods by which very injured people invariably inflict serious physical, emotional, financial injuries on even those they aspire to care for any love. We have also ‘jiggered’ an economy based on the success/failure quotients of individuals based on the ‘shoulders’ of the individual ego. If the ego is strong enough, then the person ‘succeeds’ while if the ego is weak, naturally the person fails.

Conventional wisdom entraps every single person between the two book-ends of private sin and personal ego as the fulcrums around which each human life is supposed to roll. And, accompanying both of those book-ends, there are many institutional edifices charged with enforcing both of those ‘shares’..private sin and personal ego.

Public debate rarely if ever even wonders about how much ‘pressure’ any single individual can sustain. And the question is absurd, given the capitalist, competitive and zero-sum game that has overtaken both politics and governance, and apparently also many ecclesial institutions. In the United States, the derision under which all forms of therapy struggle, in part has emerged from the Paul Szasz’s work:

From academic.oup.com, in a piece entitled ‘Szasz, suicide and medical ethics, by George J. Annas, January 2019,  we read:

Szasz (a trained professional and practicing psychiatrist) objected to the medicalization of suicide, the legalization  of suicide prevention, and especially the coercive role of psychiatry in this realm. He declared that by medicalizing suicide, we banish the subject from discussion.  What is meant by acceptable suicide and unacceptable ‘suicide’? Who has a right to commit suicide? How does suicide implicate freedom? Does it reflect abortion jurisprudence? How do psychiatrists become suicide’s gatekeepers? Current phenomena (e.g., new physician-assisted suicide legislation) illuminate these and other issues (e.g. euthanasia, informed consent, informed refusal, the ‘right to die’) all suggesting how Szasz would react to each. Suicide is legal, but is almost always considered a result of mental illness. Courts approve psychiatrists who want to commit ‘suicidal’ patients involuntarily. Granting physicians prospective legal immunity for prescribing lethal drugs is, at best, a strange and tangential reaction to our inability to discuss suicide (and dying) rationally. Szasz got it right. (https.//doi.org/10.1093/n\med/97801098813491.003.0006, pages 55-56)

And from madinamerica.com, a website whose subtitle is: Science, psychiatry and Social Justice, in a piece by  Keith Hoeller PhD,  September 17,  2022 entitled, “Thomas Szasz Versus the Mental Health Movement,” we read:

Szasz believed that the concept of ‘mental illness’ was a metaphor that became literalized due to the category error of applying disease to social moral and political behavior. The people who are labelled mentally ill do not in fact have not anything demonstrably wrong with their bodies or brains, and the standards from which they differ from others are not biological, but social norms.

From the same article, quoting from another of the author’s writing, ‘No Proof Mental Illness Rooted in Biology,’ we read: Psychiatrists have yet to conclusively prove that a single mental illness has a biological or physical cause, or a genetic origin. Psychiatry has yet to develop a single test that can determine that an individual actually has a particular mental illness. Indee, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders uses behavior, not physical symptoms to diagnose mental illness, and it lacks both scientific reliability and validity…..

As Szasz stated for many decades, ‘mental illness’ is the ideology used to justify a myriad of crimes against humanity in which people who have been afforded due process and convicted in court of law for specific offense and imprisoned for years, tortured against their will, and released only if they agreed to continue to take ‘chemical straightjackets’ once they are out.

Szasz believed that ‘mental illness’ was not possible, that ‘minds’ cannot be diseased only bodies can. If medicine was to discover that some constellation of symptoms were to be caused by bodily disease, then this would be added to our known compendium; it would no longer be treated by psychiatrists, but by regular doctors.

What we do not understand, and for which we have no empirical explanation, we, historically, assign a god or goddess or, as James Hillman does, an archetype which might ‘have us’ in its grip, and which may be having us reenact a narrative for which today’s cultural norms are both ill-prepared and quite ready to assign some ‘label’…..and for Hillman, those labels have been clustered under the broad title, “abnormal psychology’. Hillman argues that such academic developments are, at least in part, designed to enhance the profession of psychology. Prescribing pharmaceuticals as part of the treatment ‘naturally’ follows.

In a world awash with science, empiricism, positivism, and STEM educational and training models, in order to feed the economic needs of a capitalist, corporate culture and ethos, it hardly seems surprising that the ‘mental health field’ is exploding measured both on ‘aberrant behaviour’ as well as more and more labels and interventions to subdue, medicate, mediate and tolerate such ‘abnornal behaviour.’

As complicity in operating within the norms of the North American culture, the established churches have, for the most part, adopted the ‘mental illness’ model of perceiving and regarding individuals, both laity and clergy.

And suicide, for both social and theological reasons, qualifies in the church as an especially noxious, nefarious and sinful act, with which and from which the sole response is to ‘disown’ both the act and the perpetrator.

What if, as a consequence, or at least a corollary, to the ‘sanctity of life’ theology and the application of that dogma to ‘abortion,’ suicide has become victim to a distaste, detachment, and disavowal of acceptable  norms within ecclesial circles? And what if the church, and ensuing from that organ, millions of devout and even skeptical adherents learned and were indoctrinated into such a framework of normalcy, now whether overtly or imperceptibly, haloed by God, as another of the legitimate applications of the ‘sanctity of life’ foundations, and perhaps may, or already are foundering on the shoals of that underwater escarpment?

And what if, for hypothetical purposes at least, and for serious consideration at best, we were to listen to some of the words of James Hillman in his elucidation of the notion of the human soul, that ‘aspect’ of the human individual the churches have both laid claim to and have attempted to direct it to an everlasting life in heaven for the ‘saved’?

Taking a soul history means capturing emotions, fantasies, and images by entering the game and dreaming the myth along with the patient. Taking a souls history mean becoming part of the other person’s fate. Where a case history presents a sequence of facts leading to diagnosis, soul history shows rather a concentric helter-skelter pointing always beyond itself. Its facts are symbols and paradoxes….Soul history emerges as one shed case history, or in other words, as one dies to the world as an arena of projection. Soul history is a living obituary, recording life from the point of view of death, giving the uniqueness of a person sub specie aeternitatis. As one builds one’s death, so one writes one’s own obituary in one’s soul history. Case history classifies death by car crash differently from death by overdose of sleeping tablets. Death from disease, death from accident, and from sujicide are called different kinds of death—and so they are, from the outside. Even the more sophisticated classifications (unmeditated, premeditated, and submeditated death) fail to give credit to the involvement of the psyche in every death. These categories do not fully recognize that the soul is always meditating death. In Freud’s sense, Thanatos is ever present: the soul needs death and death resides in the soul permanently. (James Hillman, suicide and the soul, pps. 62-63)

“Building one’s death” seems like a phrase that would be considered heretical even to contemplate, let alone to utter within the confines of a church sanctuary. And yet, what if perhaps unconsciously, we are in some unknown and unmapped ways, envisioning a needed image of our own death, and that energy is so potent, individually and so reprehensible theologically and thereby ethically and morally, that our ego’s and our spirit are stripped of our dark ecentricities, our demons, our personal underworld, which, for Hillman, is the realm of the soul. For Hillman, spirit looks skyward, aspires to heaven, and risks being in danger of detaching from the soul.

Injecting ‘soul’ into the dialogue, discussion and reflection of theological issues, from an archetypal psychological perspective, may to some seem both frivolous and heretical, even an apostasy. Men and woman have been hanged for being heretics and for espousing apostacies……until they weren’t’ either heresies or apostasies.

………….

Next, we will attempt to look at some of the ways suicide might be perceived, assessed and still remain within the domain of Christian theology. And we will do so at our own risk!

Searcing for God # 47

I am usually ‘slow’ to join the party of conventional thought, perception, attitude and belief.

I have resisted as long as I possibly can, denouncing the theology of Original Sin, the belief that all of humanity is cursed with the stain of evil, apparently justified by the Augustinian interpretation, supported by others, that The Fall is the moral, ethical, theological and spiritual starting point of and for humanity.

The thought… ‘how can both the cliché that ‘God don’t make no junk’ and that God created us in his image be congruent with the notion of Original Sin?… has rambled through my cranium for decades. Some, likely mostly men, attempted to square that circle many centuries ago…..a project that, at least finally for this scribe, no longer holds either water or credibility.

Defining sin is one of  the most problematic and enigmatic challenges facing the human race, if it needs a formal, written, proclaimed and punished definition at all. And the implications, repercussions, residual fears, anxieties and self-loathings that have at least a portion of their seeding and gestation in the theology of Original Sin could legitimately been considered to lie at the heart of human history.

Strewn with the blood and bodies, the ink and weaponry of hate, contempt, jealousy, deceit, excess ambition, neurosis and even psychosis, history forms a very dark mirror into which we all have to peer, whether or not we are comfortable with the challenge. Empirical and literal narratives, written primarily by victors in all forms of human conflict, comprise the archives, the tombstones, the museums the libraries and both the human collective conscious and collective unconscious.

We each are awash in blood, shame, infamy, deception of both self and others, and are hourly, daily, monthly and yearly attempting to shed the stain and the shame and the guilt of those wounds in a process that seems only to enhance our need for and even obsession for more ‘self-justification. The number and degree of human conflicts seem only to escalate as our awareness of their nefarious nature is enhanced significantly by the 24-7-365 obsession we all have with the purveyors of what is called ‘news’.

And what if we are ensnared on our own petard: the petard of a theological notion that is both errant, unjustifiable and unsustainable?

OF course, the establishment Christian churches could not and would not accede to anything close to a positive concurrence with that ‘what if’. Traditional Christian theology is steeped in the archetype of the Crucifixion and the salvation from sin in and through the shedding of the blood and life of Jesus. The premise holds as the imprimatur of and for those who ‘believe’ in the historical and the mythical iterations of the New Testament gospels. And the theology, bridging various denominations in the Christian world, has been taught, re-taught,  preached, and re-preached by those who have qualified, been certified and ordained as clergy in the various ecclesial institutions. Belief, the concept of accepting the truth of the story, the implications of being saved from our personal sins, and the testifying to that faith has been the hallmark of both protestant and Roman Catholic religions for centuries.

Supplement that forgiveness with the added commitment to spend eternity in heaven with God and all others who have ‘been saved’ and/or ‘have converted’ to the theology of ‘resurrection, rebirth, transformation and eternal life. The package is a highly radioactive, seductive, provocative and powerful impulsion for many millions who seek to reconcile their lives with God, in and through their faith in Jesus Christ Resurrected.

Having attended hundreds of church services that breathed and sang, nodded and even applauded this story, never once have I been prompted or felt an impulse to take that walk to the front of the sanctuary, or the stadium to identify with those who were demonstrating their ‘conversion.’ Many moments through eight decades, I have wondered if the ‘imposter’ archetype applies to me for my resistance to the theology and the practice and the social blessing that ensues such public conversions.

Now, at the place where the ineffability and unknowability of God, the mystery of God has a prominent place in my thought-feeling-experience-perception of the universe, I am feeling slightly less ‘imposterish’ and am a little more open to the notion that not knowing about the certitude of such a salvation process, linked to a privatized notion of sin, while the world drowns in its/our own self-sabotage, I wonder if we need to take a step back from the urgency of such a dramatic and, for those who have entered and confirmed their ‘conversion’ certainty, and re-think the notion that salvation for the whole world may not have been intended to have a one-person-by-one-person application.

What if a gestalt, a collective conscious and collective unconscious awareness that we indeed are ‘in this together’ and face what can only be described as an existential crisis, (even for those who are not existentialists)? What if rather than Original Sin, we are empowered with, by and from a kind of innate inheritance that rather than claiming to know God, claims rather to know ‘evil’.

The phrase, you will know when the ‘right person comes along’ or  ‘when the house feels right’ or when ‘things are in a flow’ have a ring and a perception that something beyond cognition, intellect and even social confirmation lingers in each situation, if we are open and confident enough to be ready to ‘see’ it and to ‘respond’ to it? Our lives are much more than our answers on examinations, and diseases in our gut, and stipends on our trust accounts, and births, confirmations and marriages on our ancestry pages. There is another ‘phase’ or ‘hidden mystery’ to which we may or may not have conscious ‘access’ to its meaning and/or purpose.

And given that the universe of belief in a deity itself, is a stretch far beyond our cognitive, perceptive, emotive and social consciousness, this ‘otherness’ of some kind of synchronicity, ‘stars-aligning’ or improbable surprises over which we have neither control nor comprehension, seems to have some ‘connection’ or relationship to whatever or whomever of however that deity might be.

The church as leader, followed by a plethora  of public institutions, academic faculties, professional practitioners, and rules and regulations have together formed a formidable phalanx of warriors to combat evil. And, as the cliché asks, ‘How is that monstrous edifice working for you?

Has the Original Sin concept not become a self-fulfilling prophecy? Are we not issuing evidence in torrents and tsunamis that we are capable of such heinous, detestable and hateful evil, some of which is apparently so egregious as to have been both untried and unexpected, and for which we are certainly ill-prepared?

Blaming the other guy, as is our shared complicity, is generating precisely the inverse of what it is intended to generate…more intensity in both the evil and in the self-declared impunity for those embedded in the evils. It emboldens those engaged in the worst evils, and fails to take account of our shared conviction that only ‘others’ can and will commit evil.

We may certainly not have access to the mind of God, although some profess to have ‘insider’ information and credible information as they see it. What we do have, however, and this may cause discomfort, anxiety and even significant distress, is a kind of inner awareness to recognize, to name, to identify, and to confront evil, whether it is originated by us ourselves, or by others.

And that innate certainty, a certainty which knows neither national, nor religious, nor ideological, nor generational, nor cultural nor ethnic boundaries, could just be the common trait, bond, shared identity, and transformative ‘perception’ and awareness that we all share. If we were each and everyone, everywhere, all ages, social and academic and economic and political statuses, all faiths, to acknowledge that inherent metaphoric DNA, cand when we ‘see something say something’ a reductionistic cliché for bumper sticker purposes, we could even shift the playing field from favouring those who are determined to do evil to a field that makes doing evil very difficult.

Instead of the occasional ‘whistle-blower’ for whom we have to institute laws for protection from the revenge of the establishment whose evil they have and will continue to expose, we could all accept the challenge, and the opportunity to engage in a different, certainly unconventional by the last two thousand years of history, way of seeing ourselves, and the evils that surround us and threaten to take us down, every day.

This vision is not a political movement! It is not a denominational conversion call! It is not an ideological deposition for the ‘plaintiff’ or a counter-argument for the defence. It is not an academically certified, credentialled and verified degree project for which one must pass through the academic institutional hoops. None of us is ‘unqualified,’ ‘inadequate,’ ‘uncertified,’ or either inappropriate or incompetent to open our own eyes to a very different way of seeing and appreciating our identity. And that identity has for millions been hidden behind a cloud of ‘fear of embarrassment, fear of reprisals, fear of revenge and outright ‘lethal retaliation’ for opening our mouths.

Writing more laws in more law books, following exhaustive debate in political circles and governments will only challenge those committed to doing evil to enhance the use of their imagination to prove that they are ‘smarter’ than the rest of us. It is not laws we need, especially as we can all see that many if not all of the important ones are being abrogated by the hour.

Intervening non-violently to counter evil by force does not mean taking up military arms, waging war, or even imposing tariffs or sanctions on our enemies. It does not and need not result in arms production and sales that put a weapon in the hands of millions, ‘as false protection’…..the only shield and spear we need is already in our minds, our hearts and our imaginations….the truth.

If Tolstoy’s reading and rendering of the Sermon on the Mount has any relevance, significance and potency, the time for that relevance, significance and potency is now!

It is not a matter of converting bad people to being Good’ before God! It is not a matter of some new intellectual or scientific research project! It is not a program of ‘food aid for the starving’ from the United Nations! It is not a new economic fiscal or monetary policy from the Federal Reserve, or the European Bank, or the Bric Bank. It is not a matter of the supremacy of the Chinese over the Americans, or of the Russians over the Ukrainians, or the Jews over the Palestinians.

There is a levelling aspect to a universally inherited imaginative DNA that finds the muscle it needs to begin to express itself. There are already thousands of especially young people who, like Greta Sundberg, and Malala Yousafzai, and thousands of others who, upon seeing an evil have chosen to confront it non-violently with force.

Before them, Mandela and Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were all moved to articulate the relevance, significant and potency of the Tolstoy homily to their people in their time. Of course, each of these men and young women have their circles of influence, all of which need to be highlighted. We need to begin the process of identifying those who have already crossed the line between complicit silence in the face of evil, evil that no one can dispute stares us in the face, and start championing them, rather than muddying the waters further by micro-reporting on the evils of those who are intent on gaining complete control of the world stage.

Perhaps it is in our silence and complicity and blindness to our own inherent consciousness and unconsciousness of evil, more than in our overt revenge and hatred, bigotries and exclusions, our defamations and our pettiness that bespeaks our own self-sabotage and evil.

We are blessed with a different vision, and the courage to enact and embody its promise.

Searching for God # 46

In the last post words like agency, intervention, action, birthed and nurtured under several banners such as ‘purpose, meaning, training, ambition, imagination, commitment, and occasionally prevention.’ The church, too, has a vocabulary and a mind-set to ‘intervene’ and to ‘save’ and to ‘comfort’ and to ‘accompany’ and to ‘support’ and to ‘remember’ and also ‘to prevent’….

Institutional growth, however it might be measured, is presumed to be a matter of designed plans, processes, training, interventions and hard work. Similarly personal growth, whether it be of a psychic or spiritual or intellectual nature, is premised on ‘doing the work’ as if we are each expected to consider ourselves our own special ‘project’ as an indication, perhaps to God, that we take ourselves seriously and operate under the belief that God also  takes each of us very seriously. High standards, high criticisms and retribution and reformation and rehabilitation programs abound for all of us, depending on our specific lists of ‘deficiencies’.

And we have trained and mentored and supervised millions of professionals in many fields to assist with our ‘remediation,’ ‘reformation,’ ‘rehabilitation,’ and ‘development’….as if each of our lives were a design piece on a continuum of normality. Age stages, imagined and researched by various academics, like Erikson, and Piaget, Montessorie, have helped ‘define’ norms by which we attempt to ‘gauge’ the relative development of many young boys and girls.

And, normalcy, like some kind of ‘mannah’ from heaven, both physically, emotionally, psychically, and intellectually has become a kind of ‘obsession’ especially for those who have either been told, or have observed that a particular child is ‘different’…..almost like the Green Witch of the West. Her archetype is so familiar to so many that one is tempted and even prompted to ask, ‘Who among us has not felt ‘different’ depending on the perception, attitude and insensitivity of others?’ I recall, in my sixties walking up a street near the downtown core of a modern middle-sized city, when  I heard a male voice, that I thought I recognized, cough briefly and then exclaim, ‘There is an ass I would recognize anywhere!’ as he passed me. It was a colleague of some two decades from a previous life, who, one supposes, was attempting to crack a joke about an obese body, as his way of ‘greeting’.

As a mid-adolescent, at fifteen and sixteen I was 5’9” and weighed 195 pounds. I knew that ours of piano practice had contributed to my ‘body image’ and a menu of home cooking that would rival a castle for richness and tastiness only added to the issue. As if by some ‘accident’ or some other ‘blip’ in the universe, I had an accident while driving my father’s half-ton pick-up, after which the now-disposable vehicle was parked, it seemed for weeks, (perhaps only a few days) on the lot of a prominent car dealership, complete with his name printed in bold letters on the side of the box. For the next three weeks, while working a summer job in a Dominion Store (now they have all disappeared), I lost 25 pounds and was then able to enter the school track meet in the fall.

Prior to that accident, given a likely longer list of objections to date than I can conceivably imagine, my ‘dating life’ was non-existent. Who would have wanted to go out with an obese kid whose only hobby or interest seemed to be the piano? I recall standing against the wall at a teen-town dance in the Oddfellows Hall, in the summer of grade nine, wearing the brown flecked sport jacket and open-necked seersucker shirt over the jacket collar (a wardrobe insisted on by my mother), neither approaching a young girl of my acquaintance to dance, or certainly even being asked to dance by anyone else. In that same grade nine school year, while taking part in dancing classes at noon in the high school, I also recall the female PE teacher asking me to dance, presumably as part of her designed purpose to integrate everyone into the program. Testing dance students on their grasp of the dance steps was likely another of her purposes in asking.

Being ‘different’ in body shape and size was also supplemented by my not joining other young males in their hunting and/or fishing adventures. Oh, I was also among the small few, until sixteen, who were regular church attenders, ‘courtesy’ of my parents’ requirements. So in one calendar year, I publicly ‘left’ the church, has the truck accident, lost 25 pounds and was determined to begin some kind of athletic activity, starting with track and then with basketball, all of in my graduating year.

Private hours, however, during adolescence, were filled with popular hit tunes primarily aired over radio station CKEY out of Toronto. Hosts with names like Stu Kenny, Russ Thompson, Carl Bannis, were as familiar to me as the local mayor, or the local law fraternity. Voice modulation of those hosts, tone, tempo, and resonance, although none of those words were familiar, was something to which I was drawn, and would compare inside my own imagination…trying to ascertain what each of the hosts ‘looked like’ and what kind of person they might be.

At the same time, of course, I was following, apparently somewhat assiduously, the various solo singers and their rotating entries into the pop charts. I even sent away an order for a special magazine featuring and comparing Pat Boone and Perry Como. I had ‘graduated’ from Toronto Maple Leaf players photos and photo rings of players like Harry Watson and Sid Smith and Teeter Kennedy and Max Bentley to popular vocalists.

Imaginary ‘relationships’ with mere visions of men I admired, emulated and wanted to know more about comprised a ‘social life’ long before social media was a glint in anyone’s eye or imagination. I did not think about it then, being different was an almost imperceptible way for one to have more than one ‘path’ of life simultaneously. I was a radio ‘geek’ (in today’s parlance, secretly) and a hockey fan publicly, and a private piano student as a ‘performer’.

Apparently, I was also growing a muscle that was completely unfamiliar, whether because it was unconscious or whether it did not want to be ‘known’ to its human. That muscle was ‘critic’, that jumped out in my rebellion to the specific bigoted homily from the church pulpit. It jumped out when I heard my dad tell me, ‘You are being raised by Hitler and Chamberlain,’ a moment that clarified so many things that had puzzled me.  It had started to climb out of its ‘womb’ when I silently protested about ‘that drunken hockey player’ observation from my mother, to which I silently retorted, ‘what do you know about him and his pain?’

It was growing in both strength and clarity when I opposed the termination of the Arrow jet by the Diefenbaker government, an engine production facility with British engineers had already been operating only about 7 miles from town. It gathered some more resilience when I asked my mother to stop smoking DuMauriers, in our family kitchen. It gathered some confidence when, in a conversation with a visiting African clergy on the deck of my aunts’ cottage, I asked him about the possible relevance of the American ‘separation of church and state’ to which he affirmed it was impossible to separate. In grade thirteen, I asked the history teacher a ‘why’ question about the United Nations, and received a blunt and unappealable reply, ‘We do not have time for that question; we have to prepare for the final examination!’

University ‘questions’ were more about ‘what do I need to know’ and ‘will memory work ‘do’ here, especially memory work to regurgitate the professors’ notes? And why is there not more ‘challenging intellectual’ opportunity inside the classroom? It seems to be a repeat, at a more condensed level, of the pedagogy of that history teacher. Learn, memorize, write papers, something I fully engaged in, although not often with high grades, and then how to fill out a need to be engaged with the campus.

Fraternity membership was a Christmas gift from my parents, and minor responsibilities, like organizing a weekend conference, and then, helping to plan and organize a campus-formal were at the centre of my years as an undergrad.

Learning to teach, coach and supervise residents in a private school took time and energy, as a finished my degree with a correspondence course in Canadian History. Challenging the local clergy in a public debate on the subject: ‘Is the Christian faith relevant today?’ as part of a Lenten Study program, organized by the local clergy, stretched my ‘pushing the envelope’ muscle’ as did a Rotary classification ‘talk’ on education in which I invited two high school students, a vocalist and a guitarist, to perform ‘Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They are a’Changin’ and Gordon Lighfoot’s ‘In the Early Morning Rain’ as bookends to my little offering.

Now engaged in the teaching profession, I was determined to resist a path detailed by ‘salary incentives’ to complete a ‘specialist’ qualifications, in a specific subject. I chose instead, to the dismay of colleagues, to enroll and complete a master’s degree in administration. I had no idea that there even was such a program at that time in Counselling. I simply wanted more ‘education’ and more opportunity to learn, and I somehow thought broadening was more important than specializing. I had this nagging voice in my head saying, ‘you teach kids’ not ‘you teach English, or History’…

And then, surprise, I had an opportunity to ask questions as a requirement in a free-lance television journalism job covering local city hall. Wow! I was, without a single minute of formal training, asking local politicians why they were voting ‘this way’ or ‘that way’ on local issues. My Walter Mitty had found a playground for my curiosity! And then, I was invited to write a weekly opinion column from city hall, and also some radio editorials on public issues. And, to some it likely seemed that I was more interested and engaged in my ‘Walter Mitty’ life than I was in my profession as an English teacher.

In the vortex of deadlines, issues, personalities and trying to find my own voice, I found many opportunities to object to a decision, or to question a non-decision, through more than a dozen years of this Walter Mitty free-lance escapade.

Throughout these various ‘chapters’ (certainly not stages!) I was also exploring my curiosity about God, faith, religion, and questions about the meaning and purpose of death. These subjects were at the centre of much of the literature that was included in the curriculum of senior English students. And, as any teacher knows, the teacher needs to learn what s/he is teaching as much as the students might wish to learn. Indeed, we teach best what we need to know….and we also learn, likely more than some students who seem merely to attend class is their maximum commitment to their learning.

I bought into the cultural, and intellectual concept of ‘activity, intervention, agency,’ as it seemed integral and inherent to the process of ‘teaching’ and then ‘reporting’ as a freelancer. The world is  fast-moving kaleidoscope of colours, faces, words, sounds, ideas, and even prayers petitions to God…..and the human ‘separation’ as observer, curator, consumer,  reporter, interpreter and even gardener seemed to be the primary ‘lens’ through which I and many others perceived the world and attempted to find a place of ‘agency’ within that world.

And as I began to ‘experience’ a sense of hollowness in my own commitment to that process of being both an agent and an employee in a world dominated and tyrannized by economics, by amount of dollars as the primary criterion for so many decisions, both personal and public, I wanted to withdraw, to step back and to reflect both on my obsessive needs for ‘gratification and applause’ and how  I might live my life by peering through a different lens.

And as the years have flown, I have watched a changing horizon on both my perceptions and on the horizon itself. And those changes have some over-laping common characteristics. Although I was appalled with I heard a post-secondary educator-executive ponder that many issues, if left alone without especially urgent intervention, would probably resolve themselves, without much turbulence or disturbance.

And that whole ‘lens’ of ‘non-intervention’ has been taking more and more prominence in my perceptions for several decades.

To be continued……