Reflections on a "spiritual life"

Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life. (Buddha)

Like the flicker of flames on Plato’s cave, any attempt to elucidate a “spiritual life” will be incomplete, somewhat incoherent, mystical and never-ending. This is merely another mortal’s attempt at the impossible offered in both humility and deep reverence for the potential of the human spirit “not merely to survive, but to endure” (as Faulkner put it in his Acceptance Speech on receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature).

There are so many distractions and diversions, excuses and denials in the face of any discussion of a spiritual life. One of the principle clouds hanging over the notion is ‘what does one mean by a spiritual life?”  Does it mean and require some version of a conversion away from the natural ‘evil’ of human existence, toward some kind of personal relationship with a deity? Does it mean some kind of communion with the forces of nature, the winds, the natural elements and the awe that each individually and collectively inspire and evoke? Does it mean a deep and profound connection with another person, an activity that one considers the “passion” of one’s life? Does it mean the experience that one has in the face of a dramatic piece of art, music, theatre, dance or inspiring rhetoric?

Perhaps none of these “depictions” can be dismissed, and perhaps all, and more, comprise the notion of a spiritual life.

The experience of child-birth, for the father, is beyond being captured in words. It falls into the “ecstacy” of being in the place where a miracle is happening right before your eyes. No gynecological treatise about the specifics of the process can or will ever capture the ‘rapture’ of that moment. And yet, such a confluence of intimate details can only enhance one’s appreciation of its epic proportions. A new life, any new life, is at the heart of any spiritual “awakening”. And that ‘new life’ can and will take one or more of many specific forms, depending on the situation. Also, paradoxically, every new birth cannot be disconnected or removed or detached from the notion of death….beginning and ending are of a piece, a kind of connecting unity of the bookends of all existence.

Religion, all religions, attempt to portray some iteration of ‘birth’ into a life of a new kind of awareness, a different consciousness, a deeper appreciation of both who one is and how utterly inexplicable, given the limits of our comprehension, apprehension, imagination and aspiration, is this thing called “life”. And at the heart of any discussion of a spiritual life is a deep and growing, self-sustaining interest in and appreciation of the complexities and the beauty and the infinitudes of our beings and of the world around us. Space explorers take pictures and reverently express their overwhelming awe and breath-taking speechlessness at the majesty of the universe seen from their cockpit window. Scientists in their labs often express a similar kind of awe at the intricate and surprising evidence that creeps out of the lens of their microscopes. Pathologists in the course of their conducting autopsies, too, have to be deeply impacted by the complex and balanced and inter-connected systems of the human anatomy, most of which remains beyond our total comprehension and appreciation.

Whenever we are in the experience of being somehow overwhelmed, emotionally moved, deeply connected to and deeply impressed by another’s person, words, painting, musical composition, when in the presence of what we perceive to be an authentic, integrous, universal, timeless and uplifting moment, we have some realization of and appreciation for how our humanity is not confined to our anatomy, our intellect, our skills or even our highest ethic.

 Immediately, the critics will erupt with some version of the dismissive: “Emotions are so fickle and cheap and demeaning as to denounce and demean our inner ‘light’ and our deeper spiritual life”. A brief personal anecdote: An elderly man, upon hearing the words of a poet whose words were read to him by his long-deceased father, breaks into silent tears. He has re-united with a deep and memorable, even unforgettable and perhaps long buried emotional and literary connection to the words and to his father. His spouse, upon hearing of the tears retorts, “Well we all knew he was always a crybaby!” And that is the kind of reductionism that pervades much of our discomfort with any discussion of a spiritual life.

Because it is so impactful and so personal, so memorable and perhaps even frightening, or at least difficult if not impossible to describe and to explain, we are hesitant, maybe even loath to mention our “truth” lest we fall into the trap of being ridiculed as was this elderly man. So potentially transformative are such moments, they are often deeply imprinted on our memories, and on our “heart” (both the anatomical and the poetical one) leaving us vulnerable to their imprint. And these imprints can be deeply uplifting or profoundly saddening. Our spiritual life, far beyond or at least somewhat extra-territorial to our cognition, to our consciousness and to our physical comprehension comprises and expresses our deep and undeniable connection to the universe, to eternity, to our best angels, and perhaps even to God.

While we are as numerous as the grains of sand on a beach, we “hold” that each grain is unique and special to that beach. The poets have reminded us of “eternity in a grain of sand” and the philosophers have maintained that our “grain” (sometimes poppy seed, sometimes sand) is inextricably entwined with all other “grains” in the replicating processes of life including the human sphere of those processes.

And although we will never “dominate” the forces of nature,  (no matter how hard we may try and try to convince ourselves otherwise) we are intimately individually and collectively part of the universal concerto. The existentialists set out the notion that, as life is meaningless, it is our’s to inject, design, create, fall into, accept or invent our own personal meaning. And while that “meaning” is highly significant, it alone does not comprise our spiritual life. “Inalienable human rights” themselves, also do not comprise our spiritual life, although, without a place of safety and security from the many threats to our person, our spiritual life, like those places of the prisoners before their train-treck to Auschwitz, focuses on the blessing and bounty and the inviolable and utterly inextinguishable gratitude for our own life and all the promise it brings to us and to those in our circle.

Th symphonic synergy of our talents, ours energies, our imaginations, our bodies our traditions and culture are some of the “notes” that comprise the concerto that is our life….and for many there is an inescapable partner in this composition, and that partner is God, however the deity is conceived. Less those notes remain a cacophony, in part resulting from our hesitation to put “pen” to paper, or to pick the flowers of opportunity that are seemingly randomly scattered along our path, we have a plethora of models of creative expression that reach both the ethereal edges of the sky of human hope and imagination while at the same time touching some place in our being that, previously, we hardly knew was there.

And just to add lovingly and complicatingly  to the spiritual pilgrimage, “God” has injected the truth of love in all of its many forms and expressions including eros, agape, storgos and the incalculable reverence for the planet we all share. This mystery both magnetizes much of our time and energy, and flattens us with its power, sometimes for joy and ecstacy, sometimes for deep and profound grief and loss.

Just today, the Supreme Court of Canada denied a British Columbia aboriginal tribe’s petition to forestall a ski-hill development on land they claimed, if it went ahead, would destroy the spirit of the Grizzly Bear, a spirit central to this tribe’s spirituality.

Basing their decision on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the court declared that Canadians are entitled to worship as they see fit, but the Charter does not “protect” the object of that worship. The unfortunate intersection of law and spirit makes for disparate bedfellows. The “spirit of the Grizzly Bear” is not an object of the spiritual worship of the tribe (as, for example an icon, an altar or a “god”, but a much more important and pervasive energy in which the tribe finds comfort, courage and  connection with the “Great Spirit” and the continuity of their fore-fathers. The framers of the Charter were not thinking in those terms. They were more likely thinking in terms of traditional “Judeo-Christian” concepts of the deity, and the symbols associated with the worship of that deity.

Similarly, with the historic accreditation of the Decalogue, as the foundation of the Judeo-Christian faith and legal system, there is an indelible and copious trail of the writings of church fathers linking “faith” and “spirituality” to compliance with specific moral and ethical behaviour. Somehow, in the west, we have been indoctrinated into a way of conceiving of our spirituality as a path of obedience to the will of God. As many church parishoners have expressed it so succinctly, “I am here to try to reserve my place in heaven in the afterlife!” Life as a bargaining chip, as if the “good life” were a mock-up of the proverbial casino, over which God presides, seems to elude the finer and more life-giving potential of a “free spirit” whose emotional, creative, intellectual, social and altruistic motivations and synergies of one whose “spiritual” life is plugged into the Great Spirit, as that aboriginal tribe aspire to be.

Iterations of the churches’ many legitimate initiatives to provide leadership and insight for those seeking “spiritual direction” include lives of silence, chastity, poverty, social good Samaritanism, rigorous and disciplined academic study and reflection. Lives lived in celibacy, and in community, have generated many of the religious “orders” of both men and women. Many of the women’s sisterhoods have honoured a “platonic” marriage to God, as an integral component of their life of discipline. Of course, each of these disciplines requires a system of organization, management and discipline by others, themselves equally committed to the spiritual path of the respective order.

However, for the rest of us to sacralise, or to elevate the “religious” to a status of moral and spiritual “purity” of which the remainder of the human community is incapable of reaching is to fall into the trap of “externalizing” and judging the relationship of one (anyone, including the self) with or to God. Similarly, to reverence an iconic symbol, or a writer of the most lavish cheques to the church coffers, or a cathedral, or a musical composition, by itself, as “sacred” and at its core essentially sacred, is to place the significance on the “person” or the “thing”. A spiritual approach, at least from this perspective, seeks, waits for, expects and  rejoices in the transformative experience as the trail to the godhead we are all struggling to find and to follow.

It is those moments in which we “see” or “feel” or “touch” or “hear” or “sense” or “imagine” God-with-us no matter when or where. And those moments are in their first encounter, and as the memories and the cornerstones of our existence in the flowing now, continue to shine light into the darkness of our Shadows, and to flash light the eternal flame on President John F. Kennedy’s grave in Arlington Cemetery, or the Peggys Point Lighthouse in Peggy’s Cove, on the coast of Nova Scotia. We are all, after all, like tiny ships groping for our way on turbulent and tempestuous seas. And we cannot fail to notice and to record and to honour these moments of “spiritual” enlightenment as integral benchmarks of identity as we envisage the deployment of our unique light as the “flame” of our spirit, and the ‘soul-food’ of those we encounter.

Reflections on truth-telling

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

These are the words of Virginia Wolfe.

We blurt out what we believe to be true about others, in a way that suggests a compulsive and consuming cultural habit, as if to put the other down is to (falsely) lift ourselves up. We live in a time when extreme entertainment is an integral component of a force-fed diet of entertainment, political theatre, dramatic crisis exposure followed by “heroic” rescue and recovery measures that illustrate “our ability to withstand difficult challenges. And this pattern is so engraved into our ‘conventional’ pattern of conceptualizing ‘how things really are’ that we believe the inexorable and inescapable truth of our own “making”.

The truth, however, continues to suffer the ignominy of having billions (if not trillions) of dollars poured over it, in a vain and persistent attempt by those with the cash to either cover up the big truths of their existence. The big oil companies, in collusion with the big auto companies, we all know, were able to buy up the technological innovation that birthed transportation without the need for fossil fuels early in the twentieth century. A century later, we are just beginning to take the steps necessary to begin a transition off our dependence on fossil fuels to run our cars, buses, transports, trains, airplanes and ships and to heat and cool our homes.

Meanwhile, the evidence of our complicity in this ‘big lie’ has been repeated in other theatres. For example, the tobacco companies spent billions  both in advertising the ‘benefits’ of their products as social-greasing to sophisticated interactions and in drumming in the message that there was no evidence that smoking was dangerous for human health. All the while both of these messages were being injected and infused into the culture (even movie contracts contained clauses that specific tobacco products were to be used in specific Hollywood films) the scientific evidence was mounting in the laboratories and in the morgues that demonstrated the truth of the direct and indirect linkage between cancer-causing smoke and several fatal  health conditions including cancer, heart attack, stroke, COPD (formerly emphysema).

Centuries ago, the ‘flat-earth society’ held sway over the incipient evidence pointing to the planet’s circular character. Familiarity with flat surfaces as safe places to walk, plow, ride and by extension to ‘integrate’ into one’s imagination as the ‘reality’ of the world in which people live are at the core of every resistance to new evidence (not to mention the risk of having to give up one’s livelihood (or the corporation’s profits, or the town or village’s tax base).

Anyone over fifty reading this grew up in a world in which teen pregnancy was so abhorrent that the young women were sent out of their home towns to a ‘special place’ where they could and would receive care and deliver their babies, if they chose to carry to term. On the other side of this coin, there were the ‘back-street’ abortion clinics in which unsanitary conditions prevailed in their provision of the fetal abortion. Both alternatives were embarrassing, and could be emotionally devastating for the families and the young women, for the purpose of demonstrating the ‘evil’ of their ways, in conceiving in the first place. Bringing the truth that the definition of evil was a church-originated, human-manufactured evil and that other ways could (and would) be found to reduce the trauma and the danger of abortions that did not meet even minimal standards of hygiene would take centuries. Even today after most countries have agreed that therapeutic abortions ‘trump’ the previous dangers, and made their provision a part of public policy, there are still millions who work everyday to banish those provisions through the courts.

The belief that ‘life is sacred’ shines like a halo over the heads of these ‘right-to-life’ proponents, in the case of an unwanted, dangerous or criminal pregnancy while, their commitment in support of military killing knows no bounds. And the hypocrisy and the irony of their position is missing to their eyes. Similarly, most of the ‘right-to-life’ proponents believe in reducing the ‘size of government’ until it comes to ruling on a woman’s right to choose which decision is appropriate for her, in a pregnancy, given all the pertinent conditions of that event in consult with her doctor.

And then there is the “hallowed” military budget in countries like the United States where the military is another religious organization, providing employment for millions, social status and income, along with educational opportunities and post-service employment in a trade acquired while in service. It is an unadulterated “job-generator” thereby reducing the pain of high unemployment figures on political leaders seeking re-election, an economic engine through the provision of bases, scientific research and development, manufacturing and sales for millions. And in times of military conflict (has there been a break in this theme for the last many decades?), all of these factors are enhanced in size and in economic “benefits”. Amassing more military capacity (in arms, personnel, technology and intelligence) that the sum total of all other countries in the world is not a sign of strength, but rather a sign of deep and profound insecurity, neurosis and perhaps even national psychosis. And then to argue that 7000 nuclear warheads is not enough, and that the number needs to be raised, at the moment when rogue states like Pakistan (already a member of the nuclear club) and North Korea and Iran, both impelling headlong toward nuclear weapons capability, as a matter of national “defence” is not merely preposterous; it is an outright defamation of the human need to survive, and ought to be grouped as ‘war crimes’ before an buttons are pushed.

It is not that there have not been whistle-blowers willing to risk public embarrassment, harassment and even legal action including dismissal from their legitimate employment, especially if they exposed the truth about those very employers.

And before any reader starts to squirm, let’s be clear that a culture in which the truth is hidden, covered, repressed and “protected” by those willing to shield its escape into the light of day, as this culture is and has been for centuries, will also foster, encourage, enhance, and support the repression of many other truths, including the truths that inhabit our homes, our schools, our churches, our hospitals, our courts and definitely our prisons. This business about public lies and dissembling that trump has so taken advantage of and exploded for his own purposes certainly did not start, nor will it finish with him. It is his lying about himself to himself (and to the world) that is so noxious, and potentially infectious.

I once received a letter from a family member detailing some serious tragedies in our family, focused on two generations back. The details were clear, tragic, sad and unsettling. However, when I asked another family member, who was present when those traumas took place, about their truth, he instantly, peremptorily denied there was anything to the story. Both the original source and the second source were about the same age; neither had lost any “faculties” like memory loss, or the ability to communicate. Neither had escaped the emotional and psychological damage these traumas had caused, and yet one was ‘open’ to the truth of the family while the other was not, for whatever reason. And we will never know the full extent of their truth, as both are now deceased.

On the other hand, I also listened to stories about the family’s history, from another source, berating one parent for extreme sensitivity in re-marrying ‘too soon’ following his spouse’s death. And yet, decades later, that same ‘despicable’ person had been elevated to near-sainthood, so transformed was the picture painted by an older offspring. What is/was the truth? Who knows? Opinions, perceptions, denials, distortions selective amnesia, selective memory and outright ‘coping’ skills will frequently, if not predictably, result in the truth’s defamation.

And once again, in a culture, family, society in which the truth about the family is distorted, it is only to be expected that the truth about one’s self is a difficult hurdle to mount, and to overcome. Our capacity to “present” the face that we believe the world wants to see, including especially our accomplishments (those reliable and predictable generators of compliments, acceptance, and reinforced social value) is so deeply ingrained into our “socialization” process as to be a virtual identity signature for the rest of the world. Our minor mis-steps, on the other hand, are frequently nested in comic narrative, in order to merely withstand the feelings of shame, embarrassment or even guilt that lingers long after the original mis-step. As for our major screw-ups, many of those are so buried in our unconscious that it will take years, sometimes decades, for them to bubble up into the light of day, often when we least expect such ‘eruptions’. (Jung notes this dynamic as our Shadow, that sack of repressed and painful memories, experiences and disasters that lie buried until recovery later in life.)

And while the original painful experience may take decades to unpack, it is to these moments in time that we have to pay special attention. Violations by parents, teachers, family members or those known to the family are often the most painful and the most buried events of our lives. And, although buried, they are nevertheless still pulsating somewhere deep in our psyche, rearing the head of their wound at moments of surprise, shock and even more dismay. Some of us are fortunate to have found ‘safe places’ in which to unpack some of these hidden dramas, with our spouses, perhaps with a therapist, a psychiatrist, or in times past, perhaps a clergy, or a lawyer, or a family doctor.

What constitutes a ‘safe place’? The issue of confidentiality is the first criterion for most of us to consider we are in a ‘safe place’ in that we are confident that our ‘truth’ will remain safe with the other person, that no one will become privy to our story, mostly because we are unwilling and often unable to bear the thought of select people knowing what we know about ourselves. The second condition is that our confidant will respect our need to take our time, will respect our need to tell our story, in the fullness that we can dredge up, without imposing an immediate or permanent judgement. It is in hearing ourselves tell our story, with all of its messy details perhaps for the first time, that we come a little closer to learning what we have been through, what that must have been like, how ‘successful’ we have been in keeping it buried for all these years, and what steps we might need to take to reconcile with those we have hurt, or with those who have deeply and profoundly hurt us. In a new sense, through such a process, no matter how many similar episodes it takes, we become more aware and potentially accepting of who we really are, and of how repressed we have been and of how we wish to learn from our trauma in order to live a life that builds on the gifts of the disclosure.

Not only are we more likely to accept our own failures, irresponsibilities, betrayals (those we experienced and those we inflicted) and both the acts we wish we had not committed and those we failed to take, but also we are thus more grounded, more human and more in touch with the rest of humanity, each of whom has a similar story (in their impact on the psych, the body and the spirit).

Ironically, since most of us spend the largest portion of our lives in pursuit of extrinsic goals and rewards, in a committed pursuit of whatever we consider our own success, it is in our greatest failures and in the coming to terms with their implications that we not only reveal to ourselves who we are and what kind of things help to define the patterns in our life, but we achieve a very different and far more significant ‘success’ than those that come in cheques, cars, houses, wardrobes, and our place in the organization chart or in the investment pools. The very wounds, bruises, broken dreams, failed relationships and painful vengeances that have been inflicted by us and on us are the ‘gifts’ that make us whole, real, authentic, compassionate, and far less dependent on exaggeration, deception, bravado and secrecy as crutches to help us walk those paths that are still beckoning.

And it is in the coming face to face with our deepest fears, anxieties, dreams, and wounds that we begin the process of telling ourselves the truth about ourselves. And, clearly unless and until we come to that place where we are strong enough to be vulnerable and open to such a deep dive into places previously hidden under the many rocks of our denial and our avoidance, our compulsivity and our escapism, then we actually fail ourselves and all others who love and matter to us, by our conscious or unconscious withholding of ourselves from ourselves and from those who profess to love us.

This deep dive is not one that is or can be engineered by chemicals, by voodoo, or by some extreme physical, emotional and psychological project, although some would argue for such a process. The dark night of the soul of which the mystics have spoken and written for centuries, requires and demands a level of faith and confidence that only “gold” will come from the encounter. And such a faith is, almost without exception, rewarded as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

How does such a profound dive into the darkest corners of one’s biography enable the telling of truth about the other?

First, knowing how incomplete and how wounded and how vulnerable and imperfect we each are, in all aspects of our lives (ethically, morally, intellectually, socially, spiritually and aesthetically) we are much more likely to appreciate fully the depths of another’s authentic person. Our consciousness of our “mask” brings a deep awareness of the “mask” of the other. Our consciousness of our stupidity,  insensitivity, our capacity to demean and to patronize, our openness to our failure to take into account many of the forces that have impacted our lives….all of these help to transform our perception of ourselves and have the potential of enriching our perception and conscious awareness of the fullness of the other.

Conversely, our failure or avoidance of such deep dives, restricts us to lives of mere gnats, darting over the surface of the pond under whose surface swim the creatures of our woundedness. And as a consequence our perceptions of the depth of the others in our world will be impaired by our own willful or unconscious impairment of our own ability to both perceive and to conceive.

It is not a process of judging, or competing, or winning and losing with the others in which we are engaged. It is rather a process of our own growth and development into sentient, vulnerable, authentic and yes very wounded individuals whose uniqueness and whose creative genius is available to the world only from this single, unique, rare and still-unfolding flower that is me.

And the garden in which I will flourish seems quite far out of reach, when surveying the horizon of the public discourse. And the full flourishing of each of our truths about ourselves, with those in whom we have confidence, will provide the needed water and sunlight to nurture the flower of truth in each of us.

Hillary Clinton, the most earnest and qualified candidate, blocked by history...more obstructionism

“We are in a global struggle between liberal democracy and a rising tide of illiberalism, authoritarianism and dictatorship.” Those are the words of Hillary Clinton to a Montreal audience last night, as reported by the Toronto Star. Urging activists and kneelers and protesters whom she sees around the world, Clinton posits a victory since, “we are on the right side of history”.

Promoting her book, “What Happened,” and hobbled by a broken foot, Hillary soldiers on, as much to vindicate her astounding defeat in the November 2016 presidential election, as to embolden women activists in every field of human endeavor. She embodies the archetypal feminist, ambitious, intellectually brilliant, assiduously prepared and studied, extremely hard working and disciplined, and the target of every projectile from the testosterone-infected male political establishment.

Both heroine and tragic victim of a culture which seems incapable of sorting the wheat from the chaf, if the election of trump is any indication, Hillary Clinton, the first woman on the ballot as a bonafide presidential candidate of one of the two established parties, nevertheless, will pass into the history books as one of the best presidents American never had.

Caught in and by the vortex of anger, myopia, narcissistic hubris and a converging tide of lies from both the trump bunker and the Kremlin, the illiberalism she identifies has some visceral and deep-seated misogyny that knows no nationalism, no geographic boundaries and no specific political party. It is an intimate component in the white supremacy movement, the oligarchic disease of the Kremlin, the racist anti-immigrant street protests in Europe, and the war-mongering in the middle East and north Africa. It is fostered, nurtured and illicitly reinforcing the rush to military arms, gun sales, and the addictive embrace of hard power for its own sake.

The “hard-power” culture is so pervasive that Ms Clinton herself became known as more “disposed” to the use of force than the president under whom she served as Secretary of State, Barack Obama, the reluctant warrior, undoubtedly to demonstrate that, just because she was a woman did and does not mean that she is weak or “mamby-pamby,” as many hardliners would like to think in order to dismiss her as a potential world leader. (Remember Margaret Thatcher!)

When Mika Brezinski disclosed, on CBS’ 60 Minutes this Sunday that she had learned her  male counterparts on the Morning Joe political talk show on MSNBC were paid fourteen times what she was getting as co-host with her now life partner, Joe Scarborough, she shone a light into the dark corners of the deep divide that still haunts the American culture and workplace. That disparity between men and women at the top of a long-running television talk show where salaries climb into the six or seven figure stratosphere regularly, undermines both the legislative protections of women workers and the semblance of equality that sees women serving in the top positions in the military.

Public fantasies, like the parade to which the world is being subjected by the current ‘actor’ in the Oval Office, highlight the truth beneath the surface of the mascara and the lip-stick,  given the insulting veneer of “respect” that fails to give cover to the pretender(s).

Ms Clinton, almost the inverse of her presidential rival, in her Methodism, her scholarship and her attention to  and mastery of the many details of the many policy fronts to which a chief executive must attend, evoked echoes of her brilliant and polished immediate predecessor, at a time when intellectual excellence, including the threats borne out by respected science and the academic community seem to be too discomfiting for the average voter, especially those in the middle of the country. Policy, and the policy-wonks who write it, are both much less than magnetic and charismatic than the glib “entertainers” and “hucksters” like the current president. To many, they are boring, dull, uninspiring and easily dismissed. (That was also the fate of former Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff, a human rights scholar from Harvard, when he returned to Canada and ran for the Prime Minister’s office. He was obliterated in a vote that elected a right-wing conservative aardvark, Stephen Harper.)

To Ms Clinton’s global conflict of illiberalism, authoritarianism and dictatorship, we must cautiously and respectfully add, a pervasive conflict between the genders.

Male autocracies can and do exist under many political, ideological and military banners; in fact, war and tribalism are two of the primary ingredients in many military and quasi-military conflicts….based as they are on fear, insecurity, desperation and the need to overcome perceived injustice. The notion of fairness, satiety, and the pursuit of equality are all anathema to the warmongers among us and to the macho “tribe” of which trump seeks to be ‘chief’. And there are so many highly sophisticated instances of how men are still upbraided if they do not conform to the “macho” creed:

·      Sports network hosts berate the protection of NFL quarterbacks, as if they have become prima donna’s (under the rule changes)

·      In the bars and pubs men who choose elementary teaching or nursing still have the “fag” barbs shot their way, although the marksmen are a little less obvious in their taunts.

·      Young boys are still being “coached” with the parental aphorism, ‘real boys don’t cry” if they suffer an accidental injury.

·      Don Cherry continues to champion the hockey player who takes a shot to the head, and gets back up to block another, before heading to the dressing room…”that’s my kind of player!”

·      Professional athletes who have suffered a head “blow” and are required to submit to a “concussion protocol” are still prone to minimize their symptoms, in spite of the serious danger to their lives from traumatic brain injury

·      Police forces have been militarized to the tune of some $5.1 billion in the U.S. since 1997….police in the U.S. have fatally shot 782 people this year (according to the Washington Post, as quoted by Chris Hedges in his truthdig.com column, Our Ever-Deadlier Police State, October 22, 2017)

·      LGBT persons continue to suffer human rights violations, including employment restrictions, and in many countries, imprisonment…just another example of the “right” masking its inherent sexism and racism.

Some observers (including Malcolm Gladwell) have argued convincingly that the Obama elections in which many white voters cast votes for their first black president, ironically and paradoxically were then ‘freed’ from the stigma of being a racist (simply be casting that single vote) both socially and in their own minds. And that tokenism may also have contributed to the election of trump, given the illusion of an ethical and moral escape route for some voters.

trump’s braggadocio about his blatant disrespect for women was horrific and was also magnified by the Clinton campaign, with a  blow-back from those who persist in seeing liberals as effetes, snobs, self-righteous and to clever by half. It is an obvious show of inverted snobbery when the voters without college degrees find a candidate who panders to their kind of snobbery, bigotry, sexism and racism as if he were one of them. The irony is that he is even less ‘one of them’ than Ms Clinton who comes from a lower middle class family, and with excellent grades, hard work and the discipline to graduate from Yale Law, along with her husband has left a significant mark in United States history as a public servant.

Ms Clinton prefers not to focus on the global evidence of misogyny.,…preferring a more personal accounting by pointing fingers at Comey and Putin among others. Comey’s letter late in the campaign announcing his re-opening of the email investigation, and Putin’s alleged interference in the social media campaign, while significant, do not take into account of some macro factors such as:

·      “Clinton-fatigue” that hung like a low-lying fog over the political landscape,

·      the significant gap in “personal connection” that voters had with Obama as compared with the more reserved and more ‘court-room’ stiff stump persona of Ms. Clinton

·      the failure of the Clinton campaign to take seriously the hollowing out of the manufacturing sector and the job losses from outsourcing in states like Michigan, Wisconsin an Ohio

·      the millions from private donors to the ‘right’ ‘small government’ attitude, following presidential executive orders from Obama in a time of obstruction by Republicans on every idea that came from the White House

The notion that one heard often throughout the campaign was that although trump was ‘bad’ Ms Clinton was ‘worse’ demonstrates just how distorted was, is and continues to be the prevailing myth’s power over an electorate whose “drain the swamp” attitude (ironically it was Republicans who held power in both houses of Congress for most of Obama’s term in office) has effectively ham-strung all attempts at governance.

Now that we see both Bannon and trump committed to overturning the Republican establishment and paradoxically and likely intentionally chortling privately that ‘nothing is being done’ there is every reason to believe that had Ms Clinton become president, the world would be breathing more easily, the government would be making serious attempts to move to “normal order” (as John McCain so fervently urges) and respect for public institutions (in addition to the military) would be starting to return to something measureable on public opinion polls.

Of course, that kind of speculation is of no comfort to Ms Clinton or her supporters. It does, however, illustrate the distance off course the United States has fallen, and without compass, or normal navigating instruments, and a pilot untrained in instrument flying at night, the U.S. “airforce One” as metaphor for the state, is merely a flying stage show seeking circus crowds in campaign rallies as its substitute for authentic and reconciling leadership.

Reflections on self-sabotage

How do we know if and when we are committing self-sabotage? We all do it; we probably do it everyday. We likely do it without being conscious of how or why we are doing it. Our prisons are filled with case studies, biographies, depicting the depth of its impact on the lives of otherwise intelligent, creative, courageous and caring men and women. So are our homeless shelters, our emergency rooms, our half-way houses, and the refrigerator cardboard boxes under overpasses in too many cities.

Hillary Clinton’s chosen title of her recent book, “What Happened” can and must be asked about each of those lives. That, of course, will never happen. Those people, the underbelly of our society, are unworthy of such detailed, conscientious and compassionate investigation. We isolate the issues that combine in their lives, and thereby we take away the human being by replacing him or her with a number, a case number, a cell number, a “diagnosis” that names the ‘presenting symptom’ for the professionals, a name and number on a criminal case in the courts, a name on a bag in a morgue, when it is too late to ask the important and dangerous question, “what happened?”

Teaching individuals and by extension the perspective of “consequences” to actions, thoughts, visions, dares, experiments, prescriptions, words uttered, exams passed or failed…..is a task for which we, collectively and too often individually, are ill-prepared to take seriously. Consequently, we are faced with the enigma of having to deal with crises, when, potential, preventive and much more far-sighted interventions would significantly reduce the number of crises we have to face.

There is, however, sadly, a monumental dramatic energy, excitement, and “sexy” quality to the interventions we undertake in a crisis. Is it our obsession with melodrama, the soap-opera quality of too many of our personal and public narratives that undergirds this dynamic? Are we living lives bereft of meaning and purpose to such an extent that we crave a diet of “adrenalin” or the proverbial “testosterone” to remind us that we are still “alive”? Have we capitulated to the cliché narcotic of the perpetual orgasm as our preferred dramatic narrative? Are we so intellectually and socially flabby and lazy and disinterested when the issues we face seem barely noticeable, that we adopt the conventional “so sweat” attitude, preferring to leave the matter alone until it becomes so threatening that we simply have to act in order to survive?  Or are we simply so preoccupied with our own little bubble of a universe that what is happening outside that bubble is left to the “experts” whose responsibility we have licensed as our way of off-loading our own responsibility, so that we could dedicate our energies to more pressing issues like our wardrobe, our career, our car brand, our jewellery, our favourite movie, or our treasured vacation destination? Pandering to our own fetishes, it says here, is just another way of self-sabotaging, while we rationalize our fantasies as ‘our contribution to the national income, the national GDP, the way to ‘fit in’ with the corporate propaganda machine’s compelling and creative advertising seduction. (If the GDP is 75%+ dependent on consumer purchases, that argument is difficult to refute!)

However, it is our missed potential to envision beyond the next five minutes, the next five weeks, or even years, that so cripples our willingness and our capacity to face large and shared treats in a creative, pro-active and collaborative manner. And this dynamic reveals itself not only on a national and geopolitical stage, but in the more intimate and personal lives we live in our families and our communities. If there is one lesson that cultures like those of our indigenous people, and of some foreign cultures like the Japanese and Chinese cultures, that we would do well to respect, and to adopt to a much greater degree, it is their concept of their place in time.

For Canada’s aboriginal people, who have been here for some 15,000 years, the celebration of our 150^th birthday is a mere hour or two on their nations’ calendars. For the Chinese to celebrate some 5000 years of their evolving and considerably stable culture is, to many in the “modern” west, simply unimaginable. We are not able to wrap our minds or our imaginations around such breadth of temporal landscape. And, if we are short-sighted, geared to our next moment, as a culture, how can we escape our responsibility for projecting that model, motif, way of being normal, onto our children and our grandchildren? We simply can’t!

Compacting our perspective on “time” has other consequences too. It imposes limits on what we are prepared to endure, to what we are willing to consider as “doable” or as “worth doing” and on what we are willing to embrace as our civic responsibility. Of course, we can and do see the immediate benefits to volunteering to pour the footings for a new civic arena, if our village needs one. There are kids waiting for the opportunity denied to previous generations in our community, to skate and play hockey on such a pad of ice. And we can and do see the benefits (to community and to our own lives) of designing and building a civic park.

There is another parallel poverty of perspective stemming all the way back to our narrow and absolutist view about our propensity for evil or sin. According to more than two thousand years of evidence, the ‘christian’ world has been unable or unwilling to view the Garden of Eden story as anything more than a picture of a punishing deity enraged as human defiance/pride/hubris as the archetypal starting point for relations between man and woman and also between man and God.* Our shared capacity to bring a poetic imagination to our exegesis of what we consider holy writ is so impoverished that there must have been eyes rolling in heaven for centuries. Locked into a shame compact for our natural engagement in our most natural and creative act, the act of love, it would seem that it will take more than history to dig ourselves out of our self-generated abyss.

For the ‘fathers of the church’ (‘Saint’ Augustine has so much culpability here) to insist and to persist in a prurient view of human intercourse, linked inextricably to their inordinate control needs is, has been and will continue to be a faulty premise for both deity and humanity. Based on the specious theological notion of the human depravity/evil and the need for the church’s agency in proferring a transformative and reformative relationship with Jesus and God, the church has “assumed” a political/ethical/psychological/historic/archetypal role of critical parent to a mass of innocent and frightened sycophants, more to their parenting power and control than to a supreme being.  Casting human beings in a black/dark/sinister/evil and hopeless mode, without God, and thereby desperate to reconnect and be accepted and loved by that God (whose love is ubiquitous, unrestrained and undeserved) promulgates a segregation, separation and power imbalance that a healthy theology would not tolerate.

The separation of the divine and the human is a basic posture that is unsustainable. Our acknowledgement of, celebration of and humble gratitude for “that of God within” could be our starting point in all of our personal, familial and political/cultural self-talk, reflection and public debate. Our failure/refusal/denial/obstruction of that potential starting point holds us individually and collectively hostage to our intellectual, spiritual, moral and ethical blindness.

Such a self-sabotaging posture, however, does trumpet its own “purchase” of salvation and a heavenly afterlife through indulgences, artifacts, bribes and negotiations between desperate humans and their perverted version of a deity. It also boasts the slaughter of millions of innocents in the name of God, murders and crusades and excommunications and indiscriminate trashing of human lives, both within the confines of the church courts and in the public criminal systems, based as they are on a limited interpretation of God’s law and will. Pointing moral and ethical grenades at specific human acts, based on a strict legal definition of right and wrong, without a full reckoning of the complex contexts in each situation, renders some (usually in robes and possibly even wigs, and more recently with guns, mace and tazers) with a kind of power and dominance that far exceeds the need for control. However, having established such an inappropriate imbalance for their (ecclesial and civic authorities’) own purposes, and not for the purpose of reconciliation and healing whenever power is abused, now the snake of tradition, habit, convention and righteousness has dug such a deep trench in our individual and collective consciousness and unconsciousness, that these words will be considered not mere apostasy, but treasonous in some quarters.

It is the concomitant “transactional” feature of our bargaining, negotiating, pleading, and objectifying obeisance to the divine and to the representatives of the divine, in all ecclesial forms, that obliterates our capacity to focus on our “being” and “holding” and “shining” and “sustaining” and “reinforcing” that of God within. We have fallen into the trap of sacrificing our potential “unity” with the divine  to our transactional/objective/narcississtic/fearful beings and our modus operandi.  And in so doing, we have sacrificed our “being” to our “doing” in a flagrant and obsessive attempt to “prove” our worthiness to the divine whereas, if we were to accept that we are already more than acceptable to the divine, our subjectivity would be free to energize our lives, and to lift our potential out of this constant neurotic pursuit of okayness. God (any deity worthy of the name) has not, does not and will not ever hold such manipulative power over our individual or our collective existences.

Turning our religious institutions, and our personal lives into “functions” that are starting from a “not-okay” stance (psychologically, morally, ethically, spiritually) is a self-fulfilling and tragic “prophecy” under which humanity has struggled for centuries. The ascription of a inherent and dominant “evil” nature, (‘we are all sinners, having come short of the glory of God’) to all humans, in all cultures, ethnicities, nations and geographies in all time, with an range of ecclesial  institutions positioned to set that dissonance right, buttressed by secular institutions dedicated to ameliorating, mitigating that evil may have seemed appropriate centuries ago. Not any longer!

Throughout history, the Christian church has demonstrated a penchant for aligning with the forces of social and political establishments, whether they are in city hall, hospital presidencies, university chancellories, corporate boardrooms, judges’ chambers and of course, law enforcement agents of all stripes. In that myopia, the church has also forsaken the very voices of the mot vulnerable, the most endangered, the most abandoned and the most poor, uneducated, unrefined, and undisciplined. In this model, the church has also emboldened parents, teachers, and other “care-givers” to justify abusive behaviour as an agent of reform, including the design and construction of prisons, the exaggerated and unmitigated deployment of physical, emotional, psychological and moral abuse, in the ‘name’ of God, and the narrowest of interpretations of what they considered ‘holy writ’.

So umbilically linked to “power” in all of its many forms is, has been, and will continue to be the churches’ preferred ‘position’, that the church has “sanctified” wars, ethnic cleansings, tortures, be-headings, abdications, and all manner of “respectable” and “politically correct” injustices….under some religiously justifiable epithet or maxim or dogma. And of course, this “Siamese” connection has been aided and abetted by the flow of cash from those in positions of power and wealth to the churches whose existence has come to depend on the flow of those cheques. Doubtless, there has also been some modicum of “ministry” in the form of liturgical rituals (baptisms, weddings, confirmations, and burials….oh and also penitentials) giving a semblance of ordered “markings” in the growth and development of the offspring of church families. Occasionally, there have also been moments of sheer insight and “aha” relief that have emerged from moments shared deeply by a ‘religious’ and a mendicant. Symphonies, concertos, and other pieces of musical composition have also been dedicated to the “glory of God” as have cathedrals, monuments, theses, and hospitals.

It is the abrogation of the divine, in the role of critical parent, in all of its many manifestations that demonstrates the long-standing history of human hubris, given our narrow, and even crippled imagination of a deity “who don’t create no junk”.  In order to comport with the “teachings” of the church we submit (in perjorative act of submission allegedly to God, and also to the authority of the church) and then ask for forgiveness for sins that have their origin in our human metaphysic.

In successive period of human history, various human behaviours have been labelled “evil,” “sinful,” and “criminal” depending on the relative political readiness and acceptance of the new standard. Child labour was once appropriate and approved by those in power, (in both the secular and ecclesial domains). Slaves were once permitted and were bought and sold by the same establishment. Corporal punishment was once the ‘norm’ in both home and school, enforced under the rubric, “spare the rod, spoil the child” and “devout” parents were the most violent offenders. Any behaviour that brought social “shame” and embarrassment on the ecclesial institutional reputation was considered “sinful,” “evil,” and often spilled over into the secular law enforcement domain. Separation of “church and state,” a matter taken up with considerable energy in the United States, while not considered as important or even worthy of consideration in countries like Great Britain (where the monarch is also the Head of the Church of England) and Canada where there have been two ‘state’ religions, the Roman Catholic and the Anglican churches.

Punishment of those who committed evil deeds has historically been extreme when church leadership was responsible for the legal boundaries of that punishment. (An example, solitary confinement in prison was a legacy of the Quaker religious movement.) Purity of motive, on the part of self-righteous authority, has too often led to the imposition of life-destroying punishment, too often without the benefit of review, remediation, reconciliation and the requisite healing. “Perfection” in the pursuit of religious conformity and ethical “comportment” has resulted in repressive and exaggerated and extreme enforcement regimes supported by both ecclesial and secular authorities. And as the cliché asks, “How is that working for you?”

Both church, and subsequently, society, have started from the premise of the innate “evil” of the human species and built structures that also adopted that premise, justified by their argument for the “order” and “control” of the civil society. Of course, there are also natural models, like sickness, accidents and mortality that feed into the model. However, we have so stretched both the “evil” dimension of the species and the concomitant and “necessary” enforcement mechanisms to the point where the zeitgeist now is so obsessed with human malignancy, and the monstrous efforts to minimize its impacts.

It says here that a reverse, opposite focus, on the “that of God within each human being” concept would provide a different launch pad for our interventions into human activity, one dedicated to the reconciliation and the remediation and the healing of the aberrant, deviant and ‘evil’ attitudes, and behaviours. Such a starting point would expect, indeed require, a diligent investigation into the contexts that prompted the acting out, a comprehensive interpretation of the roles and shared responsibility for those abhorrent abuses of power, and a commitment to support and to remediate everyone and anyone from their “self-sabotage.”

Love, in its widest and deepest meaning, definition and incarnation starts from acceptance, not from the position of “correcting” the unacceptable behaviour. Love, if it is to be tested and strengthened, needs to be tried from the beginning of any offensive incident, by the culture, and by implication, by the school and the family. Merely pandering to what makes us feel good, and makes us proud, and makes us puff up our sense of importance and worthiness, while reinforcing whatever events and behaviours engendered those feelings, is far too easy and glib. It in fact requires a mere robotic repetition of those words and attitudes that pat us ourselves on our own backs, through the association with the other whose behaviour we approve.

Every act that demeans an individual is an act that demeans all of us. And if, as we do, we leave aside, detach from such acts, and take no responsibility for the forces that produced such acts then, it follows that those forces will not be taken as seriously as they could be. And, while we appear indifferent and unconcerned because the offender is “bad” or “evil” or “deranged” or “depraved” or “sick” or (and our infusion of psychiatric code words has grown to an epidemic) a sociopath, a psychopath, a deviant and an “irredeemable” monster.

Our capacity for empathy, and our willingness to find the time and the energy and the mechanisms to take into account our shared responsibility for the conditions which engendered such horrific and abusive acts, when we are disconnected from the worst evidence in our towns and cities, naturally atrophies, and even grows.

If the laborer who starts late receives the same stipend as the one who began at break of day, and the blind and the leper are healed, and the prostitute is forgiven and urged to ‘sin no more’ then why are we so obsessed with our admitted capacity to hurt others. 

If we were to see that of God within everyone, and if we were to begin our relationships from that perspective, we would be far more likely to withhold our vindictiveness, our thoughts of getting back or getting even. If we were concerned about how others impact us, and were to investigate fully, linked to our humble and sincere request of our ‘enemy’, and we were to come to a full understanding of the “wounds” (emotional, psychic, physical, intellectual, perceptive, and cultural) of the “other” we would be far more likely to engender empathy, compassion, and reconciliation than if we adopt the legalistic, moralistic and self-righteous stance of absolute “rectitude” when faced with the onslaught of the other’s enmity.

We have developed a culture in which ‘doing wrong’ is invariably and inevitably berated, disdained, separated from, and alienated when we all know that “there but for the grace of God go I”….and, yet, when that is merely a tokenism, another maxim that we say without meaning or purpose or even authenticity, we fall into our own trap of “superiority” as a cover for our attitudes, our thoughts, our self-talk and our “rectitude.”

And then we build structures to embody the Critical Parent, sanctifying them as agents of a deity, when, if we were fully open, fully vulnerable and fully honest, we would engender a kind of scepticism, and a degree of both humility and togetherness that, rather than dividing the “born-again’s” from the “heathens” and promising a place in “heaven for the former and a place in hell for the latter, we would potentially come to a shared perspective that whatever afterlife there might be is not either earned or received by some act of penance, and the over-riding grace that has to have emanated from the Cross and the tomb and the Resurrection.

On top of this “critical parent” structure, we also construct skill-sets of knowledge and specialization that endow a few with special powers, and permit another group to infantilize ordinary people, most of whom have the kind of decency, common sense and imagination needed to provide valuable insight into whatever crisis they area confronting.

However, if and when there is an stock market tumble, like Black Monday in 1987, we do not hold individuals or specific institutions culpable. Rather we gloss over the cumulative greed of thousands of persons, whose rampant speculation and risk-taking contribute significantly to the financial downturn. Researchers in Cambridge, on the other hand, were reported to be studying the thesis that the 2008 financial recession resulted directed from an exaggerated injection of testosterone, another way of calculating the dynamic, one that would presumably delight feminists while demeaning the male segment of the trading floor, financial services sector.

In a similar manner, we have all felt as if we deserved to seek and to wreak revenge on an institution, or perhaps an individual for some tragic betrayal we have gone through. And, as illustrated so many times in many dramas, the pursuit of revenge carries the weight and the prospect of its own destruction. Iago and Othello both found that out tragically. And while the audience experienced the accompanying and authentic pathos vicariously, the display of both revenge and self-sabotage there will echo through the centuries.

While this is speculation, there is parable that receives much attention in the Christian community, that carries a different and freeing freight, far from the conventional one ascribed to it. The parable is the Good Samaritan, in which a Jew, having fallen in the ditch is passed by by both priest and Levite, and rescued only by the passing Samaritan, the most hated by the Jewish community. Many references to this story have linked the Christ figure to the Samaritan, whereas, the Jesus Seminar generated a very different view. According to one of their members, Professor John Klopperberg, once a professor at St. Michael’s College Seminary at the University of Toronto, the one who comes closest to the “Christ figure” in the parable is the Jew taken for dead in the ditch.

Rather than pontificate the “Christian virtue” of hospitality, rescuing and kind generosity, the Jesus Seminar interpretation emphasizes the vulnerability, the desperation and the need for help, rather than the triumphalism of the rescuer. Not an easy piece of theology to “entice” new recruits to the church, perhaps, but a perspective that, if fully adopted by all Christians, (as examples for others) would reverse the blatant superiority and patronizing attitude that exudes so much of our “caring” for others, both within the church community and, by inference, in the wider world.

David Brooks writes about the concept of humans being social, seeking opportunities to offer help to others, as an innate and compelling human trait. Given the Jesus Seminar’s interpretation, one is prompted to ask, and not merely rhetorically, whether our proclivity for socializing is not better accounted and posited in our shared vulnerability, dependence, need and weakness. Given that we have so sacralised the ‘samaritan’ rather than the ‘Jew taken for dead’, we have in the process (although, admittedly not based solely on this parable) elevated, championed and idolized those whose lives, like that of Mother Theresa and hundreds of others incarnate the ‘messianic’ care-giver.

It is the inverse of what could be attained, if we were all to acknowledge “the light of God within” as our essential truth, operate from that premise, support that premise in every person with whom our lives interact, write and design those pieces of art that depict our walking into that truth, not as some uber-utopia, but as a starting place for a more healthy, and ultimately worthy of support and sustainability in all our thoughts, actions and associations.

Think about the unpacked human potential, that any deity worthy of the name would welcome being released, that could accompany a shift in our perspective from personal, political, cultural and institutional self-sabotage to a perspective in which we have no need to “prove” ourselves to any deity, or to any extrinsic power!

*There have been attempts, citing Matthew Fox as one prominent example, in Original Blessing, to reverse the tide of judgement, punishment and shame.

The Wisdom of our Indigenous teacher: Mother Earth Jurisprudence

Tom B.K. Goldtooth* in an interview with Chris Hedges, reported in Hedges’ column in truthdig.com, October 16, 2017, in quoted as saying:

This world is heading towards economic systems that continue to eat up life itself even the heart of workers, and it’s not sustainable. We’re at that point where Mother Earth is crying out for a revolution. Mother Earth is crying out for a new direction. As far as a new regime, we’ll need something based on earth jurisprudence, a new system away from property rights, away from privatization away from financialization of nature away from control over our …DNA, away from control over seeds, away from corporations. It’s a common law with local sovereignty. That’s why it’s important we have a system that recognizes the rights of a healthy and clearwater system, ecosystem. Mother Earth has rights. We need a system that will recognize that Mother Earth is not an object. We have an economic system that treats Mother Earth as if she’s a liquidation issue. We have to change that. That’s not sustainable.

*Tom B.K. Goldtooth is a Native American environmental, climate, and economic justice activist, speaker, film producer and indigenous rights leader.

“A liquidation issue”….as if every natural resource is available to anyone with the money to purchase at the lowest possible price, without regard to replacement and then spew the effluent from whatever process those resources undergo wherever and however is also the cheapest.

Goldtooth has put his finger, his brain, his conscience and his native culture on the target and on the line: our economic systems are eating up life itself. We are collectively, willfully (if completely unconsciously in a drugged state) and compulsively enmeshed in our own demise. It is an exercise of self-sabotage the like of which we have never witnessed in history.

·      The weapons of mass destruction (in our own arsenals and not undetected, unreported or unacknowledged) that can and will wipe civilizations from the planet,

·      merged with the unrestrained, unbridled ambition to acquire nuclear weapons by rogue states

·      linked to the persistent demolition of the clean air, water and land that we all need to survive,

·      linked to the political perversion into personal narcissistic ambition and instant gratification of the politicians and the complete disregard and even contempt for the people and the public good,

·      umbilically linked to an economic system that favours the rich and the powerful at the expense of the ordinary people,

·      linked to a level of detachment, disengagement and a total lack of trust in the system by ordinary people,

·      while the notes of terror, human rights violations, ethnic cleansing and the blatant defiance of the rule of law ring in our heads,

·      while we watch the undermining of all legitimate supports for truth, ethics and a common set of facts that measure our common reality (while the inverse, reality television, plays out on our screen).

And in the midst of such a stew of chaos, the nationalism that was so virulent in the 1930’s and 1940’s, at the heart of World War II, rears its ugly head, aided and abetted by unscrupulous (and elected) people like trump, aided, abetted and enhanced also by a new technology that invades our privacy, robs our credit cards and turns every person on the planet into both surveillance agent and potential criminal.

Epithets like “the rule of law” and a “nation of ideals” and “the land of the free and the brave” have been trashed and replaced by a Darwinian jungle of survival of the richest, the most corrupt and the least accountable. Tribal politics under the “cover” that political parties compete on a level playing field now has morphed into an internecine war of rape and pillage by the rich of the poor. And, without a formal voice at the table of our decision-making, Mother Earth is counted as completely expendable.

Literacy, of the kind that takes words, their meaning on both a literal and a symbolic and metaphoric level is sliding like the glaciers into the rising oceans of self-interest, identity politics and a culture of ‘gimme or I will kill you’….that, on its surface and in its deepest implications is a culture of death (the Greeks called it Thanatos, the will and the desire to die).

It takes all of our best energies, our most fervent prayers, our best brains and our health imaginations, not to mention our most profound hope to begin to conceive of a world that is not set on self-sabotage leading to self-destruction.

Extreme activities that challenge our physical and emotional limits, leading to the edge of death evoke Hemingway’s African hunts, bull-fights and all activities that demand that one pursue life to the edge of death, as if that recipe generates the fullness of one’s life and potential. (Ironically, and paradoxically, Hemingway took his own life, in 1961.) Surely we have moved past such an antedeluvian definition of masculinity and know the many positive impacts of that evolution.

Instead of putting our individual personal pursuit of our physical and our emotional limit, risking death itself, can we begin to redirect this deep reservoir of human potential and energy into something far more life-giving, life-sustaining and honourable legacy generating: providing a healthy and sustainable future for our grandkids?

Technology pretends to “connect” us, merely at such a minimal and fleeting and ethereal level as to author its own irrelevance. Our worship of these devices, as our new and most fascinating altars of worship in a religion that defies all deities, while we put our energies into our self-gratifying resumes, as just more steps on the “adventurous” hike to ‘success’ only to learn that our objectification of our very persons is and will continue to be our undoing.

The subjective is not confined or restricted to our need for baubles, BMW’s, corner offices, multiple degrees, sun-drenched homes and vacations, bigger diamonds and trophies both metallic and spousal. We are limiting our perceptions of our very human identities, by trying to do everything, say everything, buy everything and trumpet everything that we believe will get us the “best reviews” as if our comportment with the “best practices” of customer relations is the limit of our potential.

And while we have been doing this self-defying ritual and liturgy, turning our lives into sycophantic disciplines of the corporate ideology and even the corporate theology, we have filled our cancer wards, our cardiac wards, our bars and drug treatment centres will millions of prematurely dying human beings.

Do we even care?

Certainly, we cannot be uninformed about the damage we are both participating in and being victimized by. The evidence dominates our newscasts, our health reports, our economic forecasts and our research into our shared future.

Will voices like Tom B.K. Goldtooth finally be strident and melodic and rhythmic enough to register on our individual and our shared radar screens?