Monday, August 8, 2022

The universe says 'no' too, so I learned

 It is not only the need, and eventually the habit, to say ‘No’ to whatever seemed ‘off the rails’ but also the inherent irascibility, scepticism and actually ‘fool’ that starts each moment with a sardonic ‘I don’t think so’. Without sensing a need for a rebellion, a revolution, or anarchy, in any situation, the ‘fool’ is, almost by archetypal identity and definition, familiar with, comfortable with and even bent in the shape of the ‘outsider’. The concept is articulately put in simonkidd.blog, the free-range philosopher:

There’s a well-known joke about a tourist in Ireland who asks one of the locals for directions to Dublin. The Irishman replies: ‘Well sir, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here’. Being Irish, (as am I) I can tell that joke with impunity! Indeed, like some others in this category, it’s hard to tell whether the joke is actually racist, since there is something of the ‘Wise Fool’ in the Irishman’s response. After all, if you want to get somewhere, then it’s better to start from a place where you have a good chance of reaching your goal.

It was not a self-conscious ‘fool’, and certainly not a ‘wise fool’ who agreed to debate, at thirteen, the resolution: “the Christian is to remain separate and apart from the secular society,” taking the negative side in the debate. And, on reflection, who would be such a fool to agree to debate that position in a church run by and dominated by a group of born-again men who clearly considered their recent conversion to put them outside of, if not actually superior to the secular society in the small town. It would be redundant to note that the negative side lost the debate, given the predisposition of the judges to the affirmative.

It was not a self-conscious ‘fool’ or again a ‘wise’ fool who, when invited to debate the ‘relevance of the Christian faith’ in a Lenten series, sponsored by the local ministerial association, some twelve years later, when I was twenty-six, and employed in the local high school, agreed to participate. And then, (even more ‘on edge’) to write and deliver a brief push-back against the kind of absolutism and dogmatism that too often accompanies ‘theology’ from a intolerant and unchallenged bigot (recall the Irish evangelical fire-brand), calling instead for the more collaborative, conciliatory and potentially moderating model of the seminar, from university days.

The Irishman, not to be upstaged, and without my knowledge, had secured the job of delivering the ‘clerical perspective’ to conclude the evening. It was only much later that I learned that the public/secular billing of the event had my last name and his in the banner headline of the street talk. And, it was only a matter of a couple of weeks that that Irishman, in collaboration with one of his recent ‘converts,’ the father of a co-ed with whom I had become friends, and to whom I had written a friendly note borrowed from one of Coleridge’s letters, directed the father to demand my immediately removal from the faculty of that high school or face a law suit.

Fortunately, another Irishman, a local family physician, who had also been on the panel on the night of the Lenten Study, admitted me to the local hospital upon learning of my dismissal, and then referred me to a Toronto therapist. Learning of  the story from back home, that doctor sent me back to be visible and present, when a story broke of a different and much more serious incident in an adjacent town and high school hit the news. My ‘innocence’ apparently needed to be demonstrated, before the same town that had expelled me. And it was the Investor’s Group agent who called to offer: If you want to walk down Main Street with another, I would be happy to accompany you on that walk.” And, together, we walked the full length of James Street, visible to any and all going about their business that morning in the Spring of 1968 in the time bookended by the murder of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. Those words, never fully appreciated in the moment, given the degree of stress under which I operated at the time, have echoed in my memory, along with the regret that I never fully thanked or fully appreciated their meaning and import, until much later.

The public side of the narrative played out while the levels of the private story, both in the marriage and in my psyche, remained out of the public domain. And, the discrepancies between those two narratives, is now and was then, a graphic illustration of how the world works. Shame, guilt, anger, frustration and public humiliation were the depictors of the public story, while a very different kind of frustration, anger, disappointment and alienation boiled under the public waves and winds. A three-year marriage that had converted a summer cottage into a permanent home on the shore of Georgian Bay, and seen both partners engaged on the same high school faculty, and had returned from a visit to the Montreal Olympics in the summer of 1967, seemed to be foundering, like a small cedar-strip boat on the rocks of different expectations, different perceptions of a shared future, and different professional levels of confidence in the expectations of the classroom. I became almost instantly immersed in the energy and the youth of the school environment, coaching and referring basketball, sharing duties to produce a variety show, joining a local Rotary Club, and chairing a planning committee for a Catherine Mackinnon vocal concert as part of the fundraising for the service club. If I recall, a fellow teacher, without my knowledge, had submitted my name as a potential candidate for the town council, a post I thankfully declined. Conversely, my then spouse was struggling with the ‘eyes of thirty adolescents on her in each forty-two-minute class period. And that ‘exposure’ was, for her, unbearable, without my being fully conscious of her struggle. Whether and when to have children was also a point of conflict, and it will not take a detective’s mind or intuition to infer which of us favoured having a family and which deferred. Some fifty-four years later, the heat and the bitterness of those interactions may have dissipated; the substance has faded ever so slightly.

So, at twenty-six, I had two rather histrionic divorces from the “Christian church’ to include in my resume. The first at sixteen, prompted by a bigoted, unforgiveable and irreconcilable homily, and the second prompted by the vengeance of a bigoted and vindictive clergy who had delivered that homily, and a born-again convert.

On the personal side of these events, flows the stream of both consciousness and unconsciousness about my own relationship to the female gender. As a young child of a dominatrix mother, along side an appeasing and passive-aggressive father, I never felt acceptance, approval and support from mother all of which was abundantly free from father. Melodramatic ‘spurts’ of sumptuous baking of such offerings as finnegans (a cinnamon-sugar spread on rolled biscuit dough), hockey gloves and the occasional knitted sweater or socks or mittens, while they were appreciated, were never fully appreciated by a naïve and sheltered and emotionally sensitive young boy. I seemed to have been known intuitively by my dad, and always a “project” for reclamation, like antique furniture, for my mother. And that project seemed to be guided by an unwritten mother’s user’s manual, that started from the position of adoption of the slogan, “spare the rod and spoil the child”! Trips to the Santa Claus Parade in Toronto, and to New York, including the touristy visit to the top of the Empire State Building, orchestrated by mother, ostensibly to visit cousins in Binghamptom N.Y., and  East Orange, New Jersey, while different, somewhat exciting and an ‘escape’ from the unpredictability in our little brick salt-box, were nevertheless, not the daily or the hourly pattern. That pattern was invariably of failed expectations, ticked notes and physical abuse, pounding meter sticks on the top of the piano as I attempted to learn a new piece, and as the neighbourhood girl with whom I played duets and I rehearsed for a recital or a festival competition. The home-front was also characterized by a turbulence in the dynamics that erupted between the two parents.

In grade nine, I recall numbers of body shape and size, for which I am both ashamed and somewhat angry. At 5 feet, nine inches, I weighed 195 pounds. And while I had had some modest success as a piano student, I was the antithesis of a young boy in whom any young girl might be interested and I was fully conscious of that disparity. In fact, like most young males, I suppose, I fantasized about one or two young girls whom I considered attractive, but only from the perspective of a fantasy, given that they were always and inevitably ‘going out’ with some other guy. A single date, to the Christmas Dance when I was in grade nine, with a benevolent and kind Ann, was more memorable for the frozen walk back to her home, some two miles from the school, in minus 20 F, than for our time at the Idance itself.

And then, at sixteen, while working in the Dominion Store, my summer employer for eight years, while I had only barely acquired my driver’s license, I decided to invite two friends to a truck-ride out to the Y.W.C.A. camp Tapawingo, just south of the swing bridge that connects the mainland to Parry Island. I had met a camp counsellor, at the grocery story, from Windsor, whose first name was Allison, and who had exhibited a glimmer of interest in me and proposed a Saturday night visit, after her shift ended. She had promised her friends would meet us behind the camp. All went as planned, until the return trip back into town, when, on coming over a small incline, and likely going too fast for the half-ton truck with the three ton engine to adapt, mixing in a neophyte and somewhat excited driver, after our  “Y” visit, I noticed a taxi cab coming up the other side of the incline. Immediately, I turned the wheel to the right, only to realize that the truck was slipping into the gravel ditch where it stopped against a huge boulder on the edge of the ditch. The truth rolled onto the driver’s side, where my red leather jacket was pinned to the ground under the door, making it impossible for me to remove it, before climbing up and out the passenger door.

Needing a police officer from the O.P.P and being yelled some curse words by the cab driver for having slid into the front of his cab, I impulsively ran the two or three hundred yards to the nearest house to phone the cops. On arrival, I met a mother and teen-age daughter standing in the doorway, both having heard the sound of the collision just up the road. Patiently and kindly, they offered their phone; the police came and drove the three boys back to their office. Claire Edgar, the officer on duty, kindly called my parents, to come a bring me home. My father appeared, sullen, angry and very silent through the four-block walk back home where my mother was waiting for her opportunity to pounce, this time in words, without physical punishment.

The ages sixteen (1958) and twenty-six (1968), as you might imagine, are indelibly etched on the calendar of my memory, and visits to my home town have been infrequent and mostly kept secret ever since. Their respective impacts on my life continue, however, to oscillate like the strings of a long-abandoned violin in an attic, only to be formally struck whenever an event, a word, a face or an incident triggers its vibrating sound. And it is not an altogether musical memory; rather, seeded with intense emotion, some impulsivity and certainly a sizeable if not a desperate need to be liked and appreciated by a female. All of that need, however, did not rise to consciousness until decades later, after I finally departed a twenty-three-year marriage to that daughter in the doorway on the night of the truck incident.

Saturday, August 6, 2022

The paradox of "No" in pursuit of an abundant life

 The ‘catch phrase’ abundant life which has been at the front of mind for many years, is a moniker that has so many different faces and applications, along with both circumstance and supplementing and complementing guideposts.

At first blush, for anyone to claim that s/he has attempted to follow such a potentially ambiguous and abstract notion, without having been formally coached, mentored and even classically conditioned into that perspective, seem arrogant and narcissistic and self-congratulating in the extreme. Thinking back, remembering a childhood trying to navigate between two parents of very different tendencies, approaches and attitudes, one highly vocal, somewhat spontaneous, verbal, physical,  demanding, and aggressive, the other more restrained, silent, tolerant, compassionate and passive, on reflection, the irony seems to have been that the assertive/aggressive kinetic parent in my family was the mother, while the more sensitive, collaborative, moderate and deliberate and retiring/reticent was the father. Given the traditional stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, these two people presented very paradoxical versions of their respective gender.

Verbal combat frequently erupted between these two ‘protagonists’ although, as might have been expected in the fifties and sixties, the public was curtained off, ignorant of the domestic violence and the daily and hourly tensions that could develop, against a backdrop of turbulent weather the extremes of which could/would appear without warning or forecast. Muscular opinions, with or without supporting evidence seemed to be counter-balanced by a vacuum of opinion, and this seemed especially evident when the subject of ‘other people’ was under consideration. Denigrating, demeaning and dismissive views of those of ‘lesser’ value were a normal part of the ambience were the expected verbal line drawings from mother, while silence, tolerance, and even kindness was the preferred attitude to others from father.

Into this cauldron, wrapped in summer with vibrant floral rock gardens and bountiful vegetable gardens, framed in disciplined rows of raspberry bushes, a highly disciplined and rigorous ‘work ethic’ dominated. In winter, sidewalks were meticulously shovelled, as were porch roofs, and a back-yard ice rink glistened under a single 200-watt light bulb hanging from the clothesline. The imposition of the work ethic for me emerged in a requirement of daily piano practice, increasing as the years passed, and invariably including Saturday mornings extending to three hours. It is not so much the notion of getting things done that prevails in memory, but the intensity of the emotions, mostly domineering, mostly critical and, on reflection mostly self-loathing projections onto the world that seems to have been at the heart of an over-achieving, insecure and highly ‘masked’ practical and professional nurse. The French phrase, “formation professionelle” addresses the influence of one’s training in any field, almost like a kind of branding with regard to the things that are important, and the lens through which the world is perceived, and the methods and the protocols one learns and masters, as integral to that ‘formation’ that then carry over into one’s daily, yet non-professional or domestic life.

Spending three years, interrupted by a full year of health-related illness due to severe eczema, under the tutelage of the nuns at Saint Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, after a first decade living in a boxcar in the bush in Brent in Northern Ontario with only a pet dog and dolls for play-mates, has to have been a recipe and a diet of considerable discipline, minimal social interactions, and exuding ambition for mother. Today, we might use words like anal-micro-management, including hygienic perfection that overflowed into scrutiny of ticked notes when I practiced piano, and cleanliness evocative of the hospital emergency room.

On the other hand, a son of a Baptist clergy father and a kindergarten teacher mother, born in Alvinston, and moved to Burgessville, Thornbury and then Parry Sound in the first decade of his life, the eldest of four, bore the bruises of scarcity, a stammer of social insecurity and a muscular and athletic body. Living in conditions of considerable poverty, recalling frozen water in wash basins on dressers in winter, and summers on sandy fields for baseball (later known as softball), my father was the epitome of the PK (priest-kid) who rarely spoke and if and when he did, he uttered mostly pablum epithets about the weather. Any emotive expression, especially those of anger and frustration, while rare, were usually extreme. Appeasing his partner was so familiar, having learned the ‘skill’ in his home, almost as a religion.

Into this familial melting pot of bombast and appeasement roared a hot-headed, highly articulate and charismatic protestant from Northern Ireland, the new clergy in the local Presbyterian church. Hell-fire and brimstone were the promised after-life conditions for ‘sinners’, according to him and his religiosity, himself the product of a very different ‘formation professionelle’ in an ethos of religious strife that sounded fifes-and-drums and rifles at home and spread dark clouds of religious hatred and bigotry and violence around the world. For the decade from six through sixteen, our family attended church regularly, and we were expected to attend “Sunday School” and Sunday School picnics, and sing in Christmas choirs. And, the Sunday morning ritual began with a one-mile-plus walk, (we did not own a car), to the service, irrespective of weather.

Steeped in the often over-heated home of unpredictable and often violent emotions and verbiage, not always easily or even partially understood, naturally I preferred being outside that home, including in classrooms, church, music lessons and playgrounds where I could be reasonably confident that I would be, in a word, ‘safe’…Safety, and the predictability of safety, might seem an exaggeration to some. However, the combined impact of being unable to have even a hint of the ‘mood’ of our mother whenever we entered the house, and the absolute conviction that to let anyone outside the family ‘know’ about the dynamic that was unfolding inside this little brick box, ‘mascared’ by lily of the valley, peonies, gladiolas, and evergreens throughout the double yard, was what comprised ‘normal’ for the first seventeen years. Little did I know that, while other kids may have endured different pain and struggles, this family of origin had some unique features.

 Unexplained and seemingly incoherent and irrational decisions were both gratifying occasionally and highly confusing at times. New hockey gloves immediately prior to a Saturday morning game, for example, like the over-laden plates at meal-time, especially if we had guests, were signs of a generosity that served as a counterpoint foil for the emotional volatility. Rejection of the invitation to an all-star hockey tournament in Collingwood from the coach, ‘because he (I) did not win the singing festival last week’, while never challenged, was also never explained or justified. When confronted by a suggestion to stop smoking cigarettes, her response rings hollow to this day: ‘If God had not wanted us to smoke, he would not have created tobacco!’ I had no rebuttal at eleven;  I have no other response than a bewildered shrug at eighty.

The tension, however, did induce, birth, generate or energize a continually ‘on-edge’ mind and sensibility that was then, and has never ceased to be, almost radioactive as a radar testing the ethos and the meaning of that ethos for my safety, acceptance, alienation and disapproval. Immediately upon opening the door to our house, I could “feel” (although I would not have ascribed the experience to my emotions as an adolescent) looming conflict, deafening and tomb-like silence, or that certain ‘weather-signal’ the false-jutting lower ‘plate’ and the doleful whistle…a sure sign of unhappiness totally unhinged from a specific trigger. That ‘sixth sense’ of basically fear and apprehension is more inextricably embedded in my psyche than the hairline, now having receded completely, on my head.

If fear and apprehension, underlined with repeated ‘you’re no good, just like your father’ chants comprise the ‘soil’ in which this seed has been planted and expects to grow, then one quickly develops the vital and vibrant mask of how to perform when ‘in public’ so that no one will suspect the cavern of shame within. Performing at piano recitals, at special occasions for service clubs’ ladies nights, at music festivals including the CNE (Canadian National Exhibition), and the preparation that was required, along with regular if not yearly piano examinations under the aegis of the Royal Conservatory of Toronto, engendered a public mask of some modest acclaim. It also covered the dark interiority of life at home.

While these brief glimpses merely draw pencil lines illustrating the skeletal outline of childhood and adolescence, they might be helpful in ‘showing’ some of the impulses that energized my thoughts, feelings, fears and aspirations. And thoseb impulses came then, and have continued to accompany me, on the various and somewhat unpredictable and certainly unimagined journeys over the last several decades.

Facing fear and the unpredictable acts, words or especially attitudes of others, was a constant lens through which I viewed, assessed and responded to all others. Letting my guard down, rarely if ever, was on the occasion of what I now see as unexpected acceptance, even if merely minimal, and normal for others. A boss who wryly jokes, upon hearing a panting and grunting noise from a grocery store basement, ‘that has to be John’ to the laughing delight of co-workers, when I was thirteen, rings like a vote of confidence. A public-school teacher, after listening to a less-than-optimal performance of a Bach Prelude, at a Lions Meeting, comments sardonically and ironically in passing, ‘That was a nice piece’ to which I sadly reply, ‘Yeah, if only we could find someone to play it!”

In fact, that approach, soon to become a habit, of self-deprecating words depicting a less-than-perfect reality of performance, morphed into another facet of the same attitude: scepticism, questioning, debating both with self and others, and engagement with the world, partly as a fascination with the unknown, and partly as a way of ‘soothing’ and escaping from the pain of home life where the cacophony of the grinding parental tectonic plates of seemingly irreconcilable world views, faiths, and even ethics seemed to generate ‘emotional earthquakes’ that could not be forecast, prevented nor explained. And the residue of those several quakes, while unsettling and disturbing, and, in adolescence, pinned almost exclusively on the irrational and the unstable words, acts and attitudes and beliefs of mother, is never far from consciousness.

Where was there safe space? With whom? What did that look and feel like? What are the options available when one does not feel safe? And what actions must one contemplate and take in order to “feel safe”? These are not, on their surface, complicated questions. They become more complex when they drive feelings, perceptions, and potential actions. They impose a kind of invisible time clock on each moment; they evoke scenes in which escaping to a bedroom for quiet is clearly not an option when in public; alternative methods of ‘looning’ or ‘diving’ underwater, both physically and emotionally, served as surrogate. The gestalt of such questions has the impact of collapsing time, metaphorically, to the moment when, while, at eighteen, lying on a beach on and island in Georgian Bay, I uttered what I now consider a seriously flawed and yet also poignant prediction, ‘I do not expect to live past forty!’ without a spec of physical, financial, emotional or intellectual evidence of either mortality or danger.

Learning, almost embodying an impatience and a kind of energetic ambition to live in words that today would read, ‘on steroids’, in a very short period of time, has cast a shadow over a lifetime, exclusively from my own DNA and history. When the fire-brand evangelical proudly and unequivocally chanted what were totally intolerable judgements from his elevated pulpit, as I listened, at sixteen, in horror and disgust, I knew that ‘saying no’ was the only available option. Telling his congregants, most of whom ‘hung on his every word and faith utterance,’ that Roman Catholics were going to Hell, those who drink wine are going to Hell, those who attend dances or movies or prepare meals on Sunday are going to Hell, so light a fire in my belly that I vowed I would never attend another service in that church, while he was the clergy. And, although my father served on the Session of that church, and my parents had a long history of adherence there, nevertheless I never returned.  (Sadly, and regretfully, I relented and participated in a first marriage which he co-conducted!)

So, at the heart of this attempt to embody an abundant life beats the drum of when and how and where to say, “No!” for the sole purpose of being true to myself. And the repercussions of that pounding drum, both literally and metaphorically comprise the narrative of now eight-plus decades.

Thursday, August 4, 2022

Reflections on Christian scepticism as integral to faith

 There are so many intellectual critiques of Christianity that have been levelled for centuries, without actually eviscerating the institutional corpus of the faith, that some have posited the notion that, by default, the faith has proven to be both invincible and legitimate.

Historical inaccuracy, idolatry, disproving theism, incompatible with science, antidemocratic, literalism of scripture, historical Christian behaviour including colonialism, religious intolerance and bigotry, support for slavery, subjugation of women, support for capitalism, refutation of miracles and immaculate conception and the resurrection itself, and then there is the question of the eschaton* and soteriology#….these are some of the arguments against the Christian faith. Lastly, there is the overriding question of human “sin”, the study of which is called Hamartiology**

Arguments of apophatic/cataphatic terms, defining and describing God through negative (apophatic, what God is not) or positive terminology in referring to the divine have been into use around the subject of faith and religion, (and here we are referring to the Christian faith), that would leave many people exhausted and detached from the discussion, if not anxious and confused.

Whenever one wades into the turbulent waters of “God-talk” one risks considerable push-back, given that all arguments and positions proferred in words, even (or perhaps especially) words describing the indescribable, the ineffable, the absolute. And one of the questions at the core of any attempt to articulate a human relation/response whether conscious or unconscious or both, is the nature of any notion of a/the deity and the nature of man (human beings).

Perhaps my perceptions come from decades of both physical and emotional experience, as a child, an adolescent, and several chapters of adulthood, as those of all others would as well. And at the centre of my “views” continues to be the word and concept, the definition and applications of “power”. Humans have agency in thought and action, in feeling and imagination and we also have limitations to our several capacities both to understand and to accomplish. And, whether or not our notion of our identity includes/excludes our own agency, or perhaps some form of  evolution of both in states of internal harmony and angst, like a river of energy, we continually are in motion.

A common cliché is to hear people in extreme crisis pray to God to protect and  defend them from their unique exigency. Seeming to be in a situation which exceeds their concept of their own agency, and thereby at the whim of forces beyond their control, there is always a question of survival, and praying is one of the expressions of ‘agency’ to continue to exist. Psychological evidence abounds that suggests such prayer is calming, perhaps for providing a focus of thought and words and perspective away from the crisis, as well as offering a glimmer of something we call ‘hope’ (variously expressed as light, calm, peace, quiet, music, angels, memory, vision, slowing of heart-beat, etc.) The notion of being isolated in the face of extreme danger while remaining conscious and alert is one of the more difficult of situations each of us face. And the idea/notion/belief/conception that there is a loving and protective God (however we might conjure that God to be), is both supportive and necessary, for many of various faith communities.

Death, after all, is the last exigency we face in this physical existence and given that fear is attached to anything and everything with which we are unfamiliar, in Christian terms and concepts, whether or not we are going to a ‘better place’ in a heaven or not, may be part of our conscious and our unconscious apprehension. Often, it is and has been a central focus of consideration of death and an afterlife that has prompted many to conceptualize a good life, following some form of comprehended and assimilated and exercised morality. And that “good life” has not only been the subject of philosophy but also of religion and faith.

The intersection of “being good” and “being healthy in body, mind and spirit” continues to command much attention in both street and scholarly discourse. A similar intersection of the human being with the forces of nature including seeds, growth and development of both flora and fauna, the health and protection of land, water and air has increasingly captured much human attention, scholarly, politically, ethically and existentially. The question of how and whether God ‘speaks’ (and relates) primarily to individuals and/or groups (institutions, governments, nations, corporations is also a matter for considerable discussion and debate.

Indeed, there is virtually no aspect of man’s relationship to “God” however and whomever that entity is considered to be, that has not been written and spoken about, prayed about and fought over from time immemorial. Whatever words are tapped into this keyboard will never, and cannot be expected to have any impact on either individuals or the body of “mother church” or “father church”.

The notion of a singular God, as opposed to multiple gods, a tradition from Greek and Babylonian histories, is also one that has confounded thinkers and pilgrims for centuries. And while people like James Hillman, through the vehicle of archetypal psychology, have attempted to separate religion from psychology, by ascribing multiple mythic gods and goddesses, as archetypes (metaphors) working in and through our lives at various times, the separation of the human psyche from the human gestalt of a relationship with God, remains one of the more perplexing questions needing far more intellectual rigor and fervor than this scribe’s remaining time and energy permit.

It is at the intersection of human thought/action/attitude with theological ‘dogma/theory/creed/liturgy/language/archetype of God that this piece is specifically focussed. Immediately, one confronts the mountains of evidence of hypocrisy between what people of faith say and how they/we live their lives. And while it might be feasible to make an historic judgement of the relative merits of more or less hypocrisy between faiths, and even among different branches of a faith (e.g. conservative v. liberal; orthodox v conservative v. reform); Sunni v Shia), such an exercise seems at this point to be analogous to the ‘how many angels can one put on the head of a pin?’ sophomoric inquiry….somewhat specious, tendentious and hollow. One clergy of my acquaintance summed up Christian hypocrisy this way: “Church is the best place for Christian hypocrites to be, given that they might actually come face to face with their hypocrisy there and then.”

One cannot begin to reflect upon the intersection of a human being with a faith/God/Allah, without acknowledging that there are no traffic lights, no ‘cops’ and no standardized vehicles intersecting. What one can attest to, however, is that the intersection is a beehive of thought, reflection and especially judgement. And it is in the sphere of judgement, of one human being by another, that one could view as the nexus of how faith is both incarnated and demonstrated. What we each think, feel and express (through words or actions, and/or their withholding) offers one perspective on if and whether and how a faith has been, is and potentially will be enacted.

And in the busyness of our lives, bombarded with information, threats, dreams, temptations, losses, hopes and fears, coming from outside and intersecting with those on the inside, we can be compared in this light to a gnat zipping over the surface of a pond, lake or river, as the water (representing the world) lies dormant, circles in eddies and whirlpools, and flows or rushes and tumbles, depending both on the forces of its own energy and the state of our own individual perception. Perhaps our “faith” or our religion could be considered to have implanted a kind of geodesic dome or map of how the world works, not merely physically, and astronomically, but also inter-personally, and even organizationally and politically. And embedded in this map is our notion of what constitutes ‘right’ and ‘wrong’....no matter how strongly or tentatively we hold on to those guardrails. Notice, too, that, even among all faiths, whatever guardrails have been ‘established’ by those who have paved the way for the specific faith community, history and the ‘flow’ of culture and new learning, as well as new sensibilities tend to change the shape, the hardness, the elasticity and even the location of those previously considered ‘sacred’ guardrails or moral imperatives, depending on the faith and the moment in history.

It is more than a little interesting to read, this week, in coverage of the Pope’s visit to Canada, on his pilgrimage of penance, that the Roman Catholic church does not issue revocations of previous papal edicts, but rather issues ‘new teachings’ that are intended to have the impact and import of demonstrating that the church’s theology and practice has changed. The current application of this method of declaring the evolution of the faith regards the question of the revocation of the Doctrine of Discovery, which permitted Christians to colonize indigenous peoples, the affects of which have stained both thousand of individual lives, as well as the ‘standing’ of the church itself.

The question of the ‘church’ as an institution, or as a collection of individual humans, too, ranks as prominent in whether or not the Pope has asked for forgiveness and sought penance for the institution in addition to that sought and prayed for on behalf of misguided Christian men and women. Does the church bear responsibility for the actions of individual humans or not? There are many church writings that separate the ‘value’ and the sanctity and the sacredness of the sacraments at the Eucharist/Mass from the personal purity and/sin of the celebrant/priest. This attempt to separate the holy from the human is one of the more perplexing aspects of all discussion and reflection on the Christian faith.

On the other side of that coin, (separating the human from the holy) is the notion, widely expressed (think Tolstoy and Fox, Quaker ‘father,’ among others) of the in spark of the divine being inherent in each human being. How to seek and find that spark, depending first on the conviction that it does indeed reside within, obviously as metaphor, is another of the several complexities at the heart of each pilgrim’s journey. And here is where the issue of the perspective/interpretation/understanding/acceptance/tolerance-intolerance/belief/conviction/adoption/sharing of who we are as people of faith (or not) has to reckon with another feature of human existence: the truth that truth comes in many different forms, faces, and levels of language, including allegory, metaphor, archetype, fantasy, dream, illusion, documentary, letter and poetry.

Any conscious or unconscious reduction of any notion of a deity, of whatever faith, that attempts, as a botanist to pin the various component parts onto a slide for microscopic viewing, is not only reductionistic. As Graeme Gibson once told a grade twelve student in North Bay, “You have to murder (the poem) in order to dissect it.” Whether individuals ‘see’ God as a judge, a teacher/mentor, a healer or a shepherd/pastor, cannot be contained in any single perception, given that we all have the capacity to consider God through eyes and ears and sensibilities that encompass all of those roles. Perhaps it is feasible to rank our perceptions, and thereby to follow up by searching for and possibly even finding a church community that tends to have a similar ‘ranking’ of the role and identity of God.

However, that search is highly dependent on the kind of relationship one seeks in a faith community, which search is also dependent on the early formative years of one’s exposure and experience with ‘church’.

Doubtless, the evolving panorama of perceptions of both God and the identity of the individual is one common to millions. My own, having been apparently undergirded by a scepticism of whatever was being delivered as “hard and fast truth” tended then, and continues even today, to ask not so much for proof, as in empirical proof of the validity of the proposed theological statement, thought, observation or especially sanction and threat or prediction. My own scepticism comes from a conviction that I do not and must not etherize my mind, brain, heart, emotions and even my demons if and when I enter a church, a seminary, a retreat, a counselling session as counsellor or client. Indeed, my neon banner of how I envision God starts with, and clearly does not end with the exhortation.

I had to look up the scriptural reference (John 10:10) and I have and continue to consider this promise to be relevant, applicable and verifiable in the life of each and every human regardless of their specific religious/faith convictions:

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy: I came so that they would have life, and have it abundantly.”

In truth, I have no idea and certainly no historical conviction that Jesus, himself,  actually uttered these words, nor that whoever wrote and transcribed them witness their original issue. I also have no need to “submit” my conviction to a literal and thereby a legal interpretation of that dictum. Indeed, I consider it less a dictum than an ‘ideal’ by which I have tried to live, however imperfectly and intermittently and however insensitively and injuriously to others. Indeed, the pursuit of an ‘abundant life’ (not a life filled with investments, cash, mansions, BMW’s, yachts, titles, offices and power over others) as the prime motivation of the last eight decades. And, with or without a church community, or a faith seminary, or a spiritual mentor and guide, or a professional colleague or a life partner, this simple phrase has provided a bridge between my darkness and my unknowing and my own turbulence and whatever deity God may be envisioned, imagined, prayed to, engaged with and debated.

Does that epithet negate a Christian faith, prove a Christian faith or merely offer a secular guidepost?

The limits of my own ‘knowing’ prevent a final answer, but clearly prompt a continuing and searching walk in the forest…and preclude any attempt to foist my views on any others. 

Tuesday, August 2, 2022

Is the Christian church in need of transformation, rebirth and 'resurrection'?

Are Samuel Alito and Steve Bannon singing from the same hymnody?

No doubt, neither man wants to see his name in a sentence with the other. However, based on a sceptical connection between speeches delivered by both men, one back in 2014 and the other just last week, it seems reasonable to ask about the relationship of the two speeches, and their shared implications for the United States polity.

Reading from The Guardian, December 7, 2016, we find these words:

During a 2014 conference hosted by the very conservative Human dignity Institute at the Vatican, Bannon laid out his belief in ‘traditionalism’. To him, it signifies, among other things, a third-way attempt to counter the ‘crony capitalism’ of neoliberalism, and the ‘state sponsored capitalism’ of the Soviet Union and China….He argues that a form of ‘enlightened capitalism’ defined western political economies from the second war until roughly the downfall of the Soviet Union. This type of capitalism was predicated on the Judeo-Christian tradition, which, for reasons Bannon does not explain, was adequately able to represent the culture and economic interests of the working class. However, increasing secularization in the west eroded the Judeo-Christian tradition. This set the stage by the 1990’s for enlightened capitalism to be supplanted by a new form of political economy, namely neoliberalism. The defining feature of neoliberalism, as Bannon describes it, involves the establishment of an international class of political and corporate elites- the ‘Davos Party’- who presumably lack the values necessary to represent the economic and cultural interest of anyone else besides themselves….A return to Judeo-Christian traditionalism will allow for the necessary economic forms that will pave the return to enlightened capitalism, which in turn will ‘wipe out’ the racist elements of the right-wing partiers. It will also provide the necessary virtues, Bannon argues, to resist the global threat of ‘radical Islam’. …He aims to destroy the political establishment and infuse the re-established state with Judeo-Christian traditionalism…..(H)e references none other than Julius Evola, one of the intellectual godfathers of European fascism who promoted a spiritual type of racism-whose reception in Russia under Putin has inspired a traditionalist movement from which Bannon believes there is much to learn. The most bothersome feature of Bannon’s talk is the fact that a Catholic group at the Vatican responded to it with enthusiasm…

 

And while the thrust of his argument, in this piece, is economic, the thrust of Alito’s recent address, also in Rome, is about morality.

slate.com, July 29, 2022,  reports in a piece entitled, Alito’s Speech Mocking Foreign Leaders Has a Deeper, Darker Message” by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern.

Last Thursday, Justice Samuel Alito gave a talk in Rome sponsored by the University of Notre Dame Law School’s Religious Liberty Initiative. Alito mocked western leaders like Boris Johnson, Emanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau and Prince Harry, for their criticisms of his majority opinion in the Supreme Court Decision on Roe, effectively gutting that constitutional right of women to choose an abortion established for nearly a half-century.

Hayes Brown, writing in msnbc.com, July 30, 2022, writes:

“Alito’s actual lamentations were saved for the decline in religiosity in the United States and Europe. ‘This has a very important impact on religious liberty because it’s very hard to convince people that religious liberty is worth defending if they don’t think religion is a good thing that deserves protection, he said.’…(Salon’s Amanda Marcotte is quoted in the Brown piece:

The cultural clashes that Alito referees as a Supreme Court justice have often pitted conservative Christians, particularly evangelicals, against those in favor of expanded rights for everyone regardless of sex, sexuality, gender and race….The more both Republicans and the Christian establishment reject these basic rights, the more they can expect to be rejected themselves, especially by younger people, Marcotte writes. And Brown continues: Moreover, the recourse that Alito all too often favors appears to be less a protection of religious freedom than an imposition of one religion as the baseline of morality and public policy.

Both speakers had a highly respected Roman Catholic audience; both received favourable receptions; and both, while coming at the cultural/political file from different directions, are nevertheless, evoking the Roman Catholic church as the embodiment of and the enforcer of public morality, and traditional Judeo-Christian values, for different reasons. Their shared goal, however, is the enlisting of the Roman Catholic church in the preservation of “traditions” that are not and cannot be ascribed exclusively to the Roman Catholic church.

Indeed, many who previously held Judeo-Christian values as ‘foundational’ and the sine qua non of western civilization, especially in North America, have moved away from their previous support and respect.

Alito’s speech converges, in time, with the visit of Pope Francis to Canada on what the Vatican calls a ‘pilgrimage of penance’ to apologize for and to ask forgiveness for the genocide on indigenous children in residential schools, operated under the aegis of both the Government of Canada and the Roman Catholic church, as well as two other mainline protestant churches. While issuing his apology in several sites, the Pope never once uttered the words that would have conveyed something all indigenous people were expecting: that the church itself (and not isolated individuals within the church) was indeed responsible for these abuses. Further indigenous people expected, and continue to demand, the revocation of the Doctrine of Discovery.

What is the Doctrine of Discovery?

Writing in cbc.ca, July 30, 2022 Mark Gollom, writes:

The doctrine, dating back to the 15th century includes a series of edicts known as papal bulls, that were later used to justify colonizing Indigenous lands….(Gollom continues) …But Steve Newcomb, an Indigenous scholar who has spent much of his career studying the Doctrine of Discovery, says he believes the Pope’s potential hesitation to rescind the doctrine comes from his reluctance to remind the world of the type of language used by his predecessors. ‘They issued languages of that sort that has had a destructive devastating impact for centuries on all of our nations and peoples, Newcomb said. ‘Because what it does is it rips the veneer off the Vatican to reveal the true nature of the institution,’ he said. Newcomb also suggested subsequent edicts released by the church following the papal bulls of 1493 (ostensibly abrogating the doctrine) had little impact, and that the original doctrine of discovery served for decades as the basis of ‘the most horrific genocidal acts against the original nation. He (Newcomb) said, despite its statement to the UN on 2010, the Vatican continues to try to evade responsibility for the doctrine. ‘They have never publicly acknowledged what’s in those documents. They simply want to refer to the titles of the documents, but not the substance. ….

If we use the lens of the current Papal visit, the refusal to state publicly that the ‘church’ as an institution, is responsible, accountable and thereby a candidate for the penitential, as an institution, along with the Doctrine of Discovery, and its history, as a lens through which to begin to examine the addresses of both Bannon and Alito…it seems eminently reasonable to “see” and to both contemplate and reflect upon a ‘red flag’ of growing hints of a theocracy in the United States. And that theocracy, regardless of the premises on which it is postulated, as nevertheless an exclusive, historically powerful and impactful, considerably arbitrary, hierarchical, and unidirectional institutional ‘influencer’…

Before this piece is relegated to the trash, as an Anti-Roman-Catholic screed, let’s take a deep breath. All institutions, in decline, reach for what can be depicted as extreme measures, positions that will seem to those being threatened, to restore a kind of lost lustre, lost gild on the historically and religiously once revered lily. In the midst of a pilgrimage of penance, while articulating that individuals within the church, (along with government officials, and governments as well) are responsible and accountable, it is also reasonable to observe that the Pope may need to draw a boundary line between those individuals and the ecclesial institution, in order to protect the larger reputation, honour, and even the sanctity of the church.

That proposition, however, to borrow a cliché from the vernacular, has already sailed. And the proposition is applicable, not only to the Roman Catholic church, but also to other protestant churches, (Anglican and United, for starters), for many theological and operational aspect of their birth and existence. The Garden of Eden story, for example, interpreted by many mainline churches, begins a process of human depravity, in desperate need of recovery and forgiveness. The notion of sin, as a starting place, almost like a cultural DNA for many, is not merely inhibiting but downright disparaging, denigrating and demeaning. While writers, like Tolstoy and others, have asserted the divine spark within each human, the institutional church has been locked into a punitive, judgemental and alienating/ostracizing theology not becoming a deity worthy of the name and worship.

The tension, too, between the manner in which and by which God speaks to humans, as a cornerstone of the dynamic relationship between man and God, is another of the militating features of taught, practiced and incarnated theology. Whether the God-message is intended to individuals or to the church and society as an entity, is a perhaps micro-irritant, yet nevertheless, serves as a launch-pad for the individualism that dominates North American capitalism. Another feature of most, if not all mainline churches, is the determination to prosletyze, to convert those considered heathens to the religion, whether that religion is considered a surrogate for civilization, or for moral purity and perfectionism, or for social and political endorsement, or for highly entertaining liturgies with even ‘prosperity gospel’ sermons. Paul may have had some legitimacy in sending out disciplines two by two, to bring people into the fold of the new church; yet, that too is highly suspect, given the measures, tactics, strategies and propaganda (truth-twisting) that has seeped into those ‘selling practices’ over the centuries.

If the people who are ostensibly “leaders” in the North American polity, on both sides of the 49th parallel, are interested in seeding a new, hopeful, life-sustaining and life-giving theology that embraces what we already know about various faiths, they, working with the faith leaders, begin conversations toward a spirituality and a belief system that is free from the dogmatic abuse of power, in the name of God, and also free from the notion that humans are primarily evil, sinful and ‘going to Hell, unless they are saved.

Clearly, even by the most minimal expectation of the notion of redemption and forgiveness, the Roman Catholic church’s current iteration, as well as the expectations suggested, if not actually imposed on the institution by both Bannon and Alito, suggest that coming clean of institutional responsibility, accountability and transparency, as well as the concomitant forgiveness and re-integration into the family of humanity, not to mention the reconciling process with Indigenous peoples has barely even begun.

And, even a massive reparations payment to First Nations people in Canada, if indeed it ever transpires, will not, just as the tokens of other symbols (such as the withdrawal of the Doctrine of Discovery) if offered, suffice as an adequate transformation of both the church and the theology of sin it embodies and enforces.

Whether through the colonization of the indigenous people or the domination of millions of minds and hearts and spirits, or through the deliberate and cunning definition of boundaries of ‘guilt’ and judgement, the church(es) have more than their share of confessing and engaging in the act of penance, not only from an individual perspective, but also from an institutional perspective.

Or, has the time for such a transformation passed?

Thursday, July 21, 2022

Shedding masculine stereotypes...slowly...but not at the top?

 Well over twenty years ago, scholars were writing about the ‘strait-jacket’ in which boys were being judged against outmoded ideas of masculinity and what it takes/means for a boy to become a man.

In his book, Real Boys, William Pollack writes ‘by placing a boy in this gender strait-jacket, society is limiting his emotional range and his ability to think and behave as freely and openly as he could, to succeed in the ever-changing world in which we live….Boys are pushed to separate from the mother prematurely. …As early as age five or six, many boys are pushed out of the family and expected to be independent—in school, in camp, at all kinds of activities and situations they may or may not be ready to handle. We give our boys in early adolescence a second shove—into new schools, sports competitions jobs, dating travel and more. The problem is not that we introduce our boys to the real world—that’s what parents should be doing—it’s how we do it. We expect them to step outside the family too abruptly, with too little preparation for what lies in store, too little emotional support, not enough opportunity to express the feelings, and often with no option of going back or changing course. We don’t tolerate any stalling or listen to any whining. That’s because we believe that disconnection is important, even essential, for a boy to ‘make the break’ and become a man….I believe that boys, feeling ashamed of their vulnerability, mask their emotions and ultimately their true selves. This unnecessary disconnection—from family and then from self—causes many boys to feel alone, helpless and fearful. And yet society’s prevailing myths about boys do not leave room for such emotions, and so the boy feels he is not measuring up. He has no way to talk about his perceived failure; he feels ashamed , but he can’t talk about his shame, either. Over time, his sensitivity is submerged almost without thinking, until he loses touch with himself. As so a boy has been ‘hardened’, just as society thinks he should be…..While we may joke about how adult males won’t ask for directions when they’re lost, it is not laughing matter that so many of our boys feel they cant reach out for the emotional compass they so desperately need. (William Pollack, Real Boys, Henry Holt, New York, 1998 pp.xxiv-xxvi)

Two matters need to be addressed at the outset:

First, there is no justification for the reader response that reads and sounds like ‘here we go again having a boy-pity-party’ from those who adhere to the very modality Pollack is describing. The truths he is telling are like social and cultural DNA for many, if not all, of the many men in leadership positions in corporations, academia, education, the church and especially in government. (More about that later.)

Second, world events, mostly manipulated by men who have been cut off from their inner lives, their emotions and their vulnerabilities, and then ‘masked’ them with bravado and braggadocio using whatever means and methods available for that task, one they consider absolutely essential to their individual survival, however that might be defined and envisioned.

There are legions of writers/therapists/coaches who write and speak about how the dynamic of ‘being damaged in our youth very often ricochets into actions and attitudes that hurt both self and others later’. Indeed, in some schools, both literal and in those of thought, the prevailing approach is based on a credo that young children need a surfeit of cheer-leading in order not to develop as damaged adults, inflicting pain on their peers as well as on themselves. (Naturally, opponents of such ‘touch-feely’ approaches, too often fall into the ‘tough-love’ category, as if an ‘either-or’ solution is either adequate or even professional or ethical. Simplifying the question of how to ‘raise’ a young boy in order to survive and to thrive in the real world, into a single mantra (hard or soft), is about as ethical and effective as telling an adult to take a daily dose of children’s aspirin to avoid any chance of a cardiac arrest. So, before we begin, let’s agree that silver bullets, and reductionisms, both in assessing the nature of masculinity and in moving forward with ideas and approaches that might begin to address some of the inherent individual, familial and societal issues facing masculinity and ‘it’s’ relationship with the world.

Many writers and scholars have noted the imprisonment of stereotypes of gender roles and expectations that constrict both men and women into cardboard cut-outs of their complexities. For example, in a January 22, 2021 piece in Forbes, entitled, “The Future of Masculinity: Overcoming Stereotypes,” Shelley Zalis writes:

One study found that men who cried at work were perceived as less competent than women who cried. More than one-third of boys think society expects them to be strong and tough, ‘be a man,’ and ‘suck it up,’ according to a survey by Plan International USA…Research finds that while half of fathers think men should take paternity leave, only 36% actually take all their permitted leave….’It’s time to talk about the kinds of men we want our sons to become,’ says Gary Barker, President and CEO of Promundo*. ‘For our daughters, we have promised a new world. We’re still about 200 years off from full equality at the current rate of change according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap report, but were making some progress….The truth is that some gender stereotypes can hold both men and women back from being the best that they can be—and impact our  mental health. For example, new guidelines by the American Psychological Association say that men socialized to conform to the ideals of ‘traditional masculinity,’ such as not wanting to appear weak, are more likely to suffer issues such as cardiovascular disease, engage in heavy drinking and even commit suicide.”

And while there is mounting evidence that both education and socialization of men as part of a global initiative to reduce violence in all of its nefarious forms, and more research into health masculinities being conducted at both psychological and sociological levels, world-wide, there continues to be also a growing body of evidence and opinion that many men are even more divided about how to be a ‘real man’. Women, too, have conflicting notions and aspirations about what constitutes ‘authentic masculinity’ and many help, whether consciously or not, to uphold the traditional masculine stereotype of “alpha male”.

One of the glaring gaps, however, in how the culture approaches issues of gender stereotypes and gender equality, however, is to consider such issues, and the studies applicable and relevant to the business community where office politics plays a prominent role in how things happen there, and in the family where the traditional family of parents and children continues to thrive, is that gender issues are not generally discussed or even considered a force in the political discussions including the geopolitical discussions about how to address global issues. And just as  such discussions and opinion pieces need not revert back to the Freudian “sex drive” in a reductionistic dismissal, nor do they need to be considered the most dominant factor in any political debate, nevertheless, the question of how power is envisioned, defined, executed and projected definitely applies.

And men and women, it seems by definition, have different modalities, conceptions, depictions and applications of how to deploy power effectively. Also men and women have different skill sets, attributes and blind-spots in their conception and deployment of power and influence. Neither gender has either a monopoly or a stranglehold on the exercise of power, nor can either gender really aspire to full effectiveness without the strengths and the weakness of both genders being considered, integrated and then deployed.

Words like collaboration, conciliation, compromise and androgyny, however, have somehow slid off the radar of the political establishment, even with political parties, and certainly between political opponents. And yet, amid such epic crises all of them threatening as existential, it is long past time for both evolved and imaginative and courageous and creative men and women to demonstrate a deeper and more nuanced and more complex appreciation of the strengths and the weaknesses of both genders from a perspective of magnanimity, appreciation, tolerance and support. The war of the genders, regardless of whom the initiators and the combatants might be, is another of the many sabotages we are inflicting on ourselves and on the planet.

It is not only in the office politics arena, nor on the dating scene, nor in the academic research lab, nor in the competition for employment in institutions like the church, the military, the health care system, and certainly the media, and in the public discourse that men must support other men, to a degree and with a conviction previously missing (MIA), just as women are increasingly vocal in their support of other women whose character and accomplishments warrant such support. And, in the light of the divide between the ‘straight’ and the ‘gay’ classifications, and the potential for mutual respect and honour, (not mere silent tolerance) is it not time for many of those traditional masculine ‘alpha models’ to fade into the oblivion we need them to wander.

And yet, on the world stage, especially in geopolitics and media coverage, men like those clinging desperately to the far right, whether in America, Canada, Russia, Brazil, North Korea, Hungary…can no longer be allowed to hide behind a faux political ideology or agenda that attempts to mask their ‘desperation’ at losing the traditional stereotypes and thereby potentially their identity.

Putin’s strutting, and then insulting western leaders who would look like losers with their shirts off, is only considered peripheral to the war in Ukraine, another almost irrelevant example of the heinous brutality of the wannabe czar. And yet, is it only a peripheral aspect of this war?

And is the MAGA movement merely a post-modern-deconstructionist movement to eliminate “woke” liberals and their ideology from power for the next century? Is there any difference, for example, between bannon strutting into the court and putin strutting on the world stage, or trump strutting in both vocabulary and body language, as evidence of the typical and traditional and stereotypical mask that adorns the young male adult in the college athletic locker room whose vulnerabilities and insecurities are hidden deeply behind a muscular Adonis-like body and a determination to ‘kill’ his opponent in battle?

 

The strutting, the bravado, the compulsive and desperate narcissism of too many weak and frightened men, all of them with far too much power, having arrived in those positions sometimes by inheritance and too often by the complicity and the insouciance and the indifference, and the projections of other weak men and women who see their fantasies being realized in and through these hollow men. Upon reading T.S,. Eliot’s The Hollow Men, my picture of those men (and women) was of the vacuous and tendentious and specious and meaningless chatter and gossip we commonly dub “small talk”…without ever have transferred my picture onto the international political stage of geopolitics.

Of course, that view was naïve, immature, inadequate and dangerous. And in the recent decade, I have had to revise both my vision and the proportion of ineffectual men who have positions of power and authority more as a consequence of their emptiness and the complicity of others who prefer ‘no drama and no ruffled feathers’ to the prospect of transformation brought about by authentic leaders who can and do consider the big picture and the finer details necessary to take the journey to a better place.

Parents, teachers, supervisors, and male and female colleagues have an opportunity to walk beside men who are determined to break out of the stereotype of chained masculinity and to foster, nurture and applaud those break-out’s whenever they witness them.

And they are happening everywhere….but fast enough? Time alone will tell!

 

*Promundo: a Brazilian-based non-governmental organization with offices is Brasilia, Brazil, that work in collaboration to promote caring, non-violent and equitable masculinities and gender relations in Brazil and internationally. Equimundo: Center for Masculinities and Social Justice (formerly Promundo US)

Wednesday, July 20, 2022

Memo to Mr. Harrison #2

 Two days ago, I asked the Chair of the Democratic National Committee to lead an full-court press against the terror/tyranny that is both implicit and explicit in the bannon/trump et al attempted coup. Democrats are in a highly paradoxical position, having enlightened policies and an approach to government that respects civil order and institutions as well as the players on that states, while at the same time being hamstrung internally and externally both by their own “wokeness” and the culture’s seduction to their own addiction to the politics of personal destruction and demonization freely translated as “weaponization”.

Just as NATO is caught between their shared (at least partially) commitment to defend Ukraine in the face of the Russian state terrorism, and yet refrains from treating Ukraine as a full-fledged member of their organization, fearing the spark that ignites a third world war, with obvious nuclear deployments, so too the Democrats are in a similar bind, between their ambition and campaign to hold on to the seats in both the House and Senate, (or even to increase those numbers) and the risks of adopting an open-warfare approach to attacking the opposition, fearing (or at least envisioning) an all-out political war that threatens the very stability of the American body politic and the union itself.

Fear of the nuclear option has been the guiding light in geopolitics for at least the last half of the twentieth century, and into the first two decades of the twenty-first. And while there is evidence that that fear has acted as a brake on political aggression on steroids, it has not prevented or precluded the development and deployment of biological/chemical weapons. Nor has it prevented the surge in terrorism some of it seeded in religious nationalism and some of it seeded in national anarchy. It has taken the U.S. decades to begin to include ‘home-grown’ terror as a political and legal threat, after 9/11, when their focus was on international terrorism. Such is the avoidance/denial/wish-hoping of a nation who finds it very hard to contemplate and then to address the possibility that its own people are, were and will continue to be potential and actual terrorists. Is it possible that now that that delusion has been debunked, and everyone knows that a person became president through American votes who was/is/and continues to be committed to the dismantling of the American institutional state as we know it, it might also be possible for the American political class, led by the Democrats, to open to and to embrace the previously unthinkable notion that such a cabal does have detailed and demonstrable links to forces around the world that are committed to the surreptitious and also the overt undermining of the American state, in particular and in general.

Finding the opponent’s Achilles heel, and then exploiting that weakness is a war tactic and strategy as old as time itself. And doing that deceptively, while the opponent ‘sleeps’ is also part of the code of warfare. No doubt, most political strategists in most countries are familiar with The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Not only brains and brawn are essential for a successful conflict strategy, but ‘victory without direct fighting is the most advantageous way to win. And in order to win, one has to have the support of those ‘warriors’ through clear rules, discipline, a consciousness that if the flame of any campaign burns too hot for too long it will burn itself out as protracted battles without success will wear out the resources available. Using the enemy’s resources to sustain your forces, and destabilizing the opponent is more important than killing him are two more of the arrows in the Sun Tzu arsenal. Weakening the opponent’s resolve will evoke respect for victory won through integrity than through total destruction. One of the best ways to establish a defence is to appear formless, while forcing the opponent to follow the path you create for them can generate momentum. The classical conditioning of a dangled carrot to convince them of ‘faux gain’ will provide evidence of their next move….

Taking the perspective of the battlefield, currently, from north of the 49th parallel, it would seem that the last five years, at least, have witnessed a highly effectivetdeployment of the strategies and tactics Sun Tzu laid out centuries ago, by the Republican-Putin-Orban-Bolsonaro-et al…forces to destabilize the United States of America, with implicit and explicit help from China, Brexit, nationalist populism, the internet, and the lack of preparation of the American body politic.

In a nation in which the geopolitical theatre is only a headline in an extreme incident, without the undergirding cognitive and creative energy of the population, and the speed of change far outstrips the glacial-knee-jerk oscillation of the political class, glacial in its traditions and knee-jerk in its hourly/daily reactions, there is much work to be done for the Democrats to mount an offensive/defensive plan both to win the November mid-terms and to prevent the decapitation of the American body politic and the respective institutions that provide the engine and the compass and the wheel for the ship of state.

Leadership on the world stage requires strength, energy, creativity and courage. It does not require or respect dominance. Nevertheless, internal/national dominance has already been achieved by the deconstructionist cabal conceived and scripted and emboldened by men like bannon who is himself now both willingly and enthusiastically participating in his own ‘show-trial’ while calling the trial itself on the part of the justice department a show-trial. How blatant, flagrant and narcissistic a model do the American people need to disqualify this approach and the people who prosletize the approach from ever taking charge of the reins of power?

Nevertheless, while such a proposition may seem obvious on this side of the U.S.-Canadian border, inside the war-room of the DNC, these observations are little more than idle chatter, fodder for the enemy to chortle over contemptuously.

Indeed, it is the contempt of these people for the very ‘stability and trustworthiness’ and legitimacy of the institutions of democracy, however inadequate and suspect they may be, and their determination to replace them with the raw, indiscriminate and abusive deployment of their own power, in all of its nefarious applications (suffocate the environment, deny free choice of women, deny access to the ballot by minorities, worship and enrich the rich, deprive the underclasses, barricade the borders and transform democracy into dictatorship, ‘for one hundred years’ according to bannon)…that must be the primary motivation of the Democrats.

And their infighting, whether initiated and sustained by the right or the moderates cannot and must not be tolerated for the sake of the country. This notion that the country precedes the party, and certainly the individual, the rights guaranteed by the nation and the opportunities envisioned for all can no longer be merely a slogan, some kind of wishful dreaming. The fight, just as in Ukraine, has come home to the front door of each and every American, Canadian and citizen of western democracies. And the Ukrainians are carrying the torch, and losing their lives on our behalf.

For us, each of us, our duty to uphold our right to exist in a free and open and respecting community, both locally and internationally, includes those driveway signs “we stand with Ukraine dotting the highways in Ontario, and the flags on poles in towns in Ontario, and families being integrated into the cities of Ontario, and the weapons being shipping from Canada to Ukraine…and it also includes the Democrats committing to such a creative and courageous strategy and tactics and attempt what has been so difficult to envision previously.

The intersect between a system’s capacity to deliver strategies and tactics in a unified force field, without sparking the holocaust that everyone imagines, at the geopolitical level, and at the constituency level, the state level and the national level of American politics, is hurdle needing to be jumped.

Like the General Relativity Theory and the Quantum Mechanics Theory in physics that are considered irreconcilable, and yet warrant intense study and potential resolution, potentially through the new Quantum Gravity Institute, so too this proposition that the application of new and steroidal-injected political muscle, (not necessarily rhetoric) need not lead to the total destruction of the democratic system need immediate resolution.

And the best instrument, with the resources, the need, the perspective of the landscape and the ‘weather’ and with the most creative and courageous personnel resources in the world, to carry out such a mission, with the help of the waiting army of supporters in all political persuasions and parties, is the Democratic Party of the United States.

And yet, Mr. Harrison, no pressure eh?

Tuesday, July 19, 2022

Iacocca and bishop #4

 Iacocca: While we were apart prior to this next meeting, I have been doing some considerable reflection. Not one to shy away from the most challenging hurdles, nor one who knows the answer to many important questions, I am nevertheless very curious, and while that may be considered one of my personality traits, it is also integral to my relationship with God. That may sound both ironic and surprising coming from someone who has spent his career in the corporate world, after completing a degree in mechanical engineering. In my pursuit of how to participate fully in these somewhat engaging, if also highly loquacious, conversations, I did some reading. And following my preliminary discovery, I thought that perhaps we could both explore the ideas, concepts and perceptions together. In a comprehensive piece of work by the religious writer, Karen Armstrong, specifically her book entitled, The Case for God, and in the chapter entitled, Unknowing, I discovered a quote from Einstein quoted from, “Albert Einstein, ‘Strange is our Situation Here on Earth,’ in Jaroslav Pelikan, ed. Modern Religious Thought, (Boston 1990,) p. 225, and found on page 268 of Armstrong’s book:

“The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the sower of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger..is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the centre of all true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of devoutly religious men.”

We are all trying, however haltingly and experimentally, tentatively and resolutely, to bring about some kind of appreciation of our weaknesses and our perceptions of our place in a vast universe, not merely by adopting disciplines and rituals, liturgies and donations, but even more importantly by finding the attitudes and perspective that encompass and celebrate our human-ness and our limited grasp of both eternity and holiness and any deity worthy of the name. It is in the sense of fullness that Einstein’s words depict that I find both comfort and allegiance. I wonder why such an expansive, comprehensive, challenging and inspiring perspective seems absent from the experience of many, including me, in our relationship with the church. And while the premise of “emotion” is fraught with disdain in many quarters, especially among many male colleagues, I would argue that the ‘mystical,’ categorized as an emotion, is foreign to most men, at least of my acquaintance. Further, I would suggest that such a default position is rare and even more rarely acknowledged, whether by estrangement, alienation, fear, assumed and presumed superiority or inferiority, or by the minimal acquaintance they might have had through their limited reading, not to mention the dearth of such words, attitudes and perspective inside the church itself. Is there something so threatening, so dangerous and so off-putting to suggest that the church would do well to consider not only such depictions of the religious “attitude and relationship” by bringing such challenges into both the pulpit and the education programs within its purview?

 I have noted that, in his acceptance address for the 1921 Nobel Laureate in Physics, Einstein also uttered these words: “A human being…experiences himself..as something separated from the rest---a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness…Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature.

Here is another word-depiction of the paradox of being a human….experiencing ourself as a “kind of optical delusion of (our) consciousness”….If, as it seems, Einstein might mean that we are limited by the ‘delusion’ of our own consciousness, that could mean that our consciousness embraces only or exclusively, the empirical, the senses, and the demonstrably evident and that such a consciousness while not necessarily excluding the unconsciousness, to which Jung and Freud gave voice and support to and for. Encircled and engaged and often even obsessed with and by what we consider our “duties,” and our “responsibilities” and the demands and exigencies of each hour and each day, in the perception that those ‘to-do’ lists both justify and define our existence, leaves us both in fact and in concept, denied access and openness and vulnerability to those experiences which takes us ‘out of ourselves,’ into another state of mind and heart and emotion and sensation and wonderment and awe, what in contemporary vernacular might be called the “aha” moment. Such moments as the birth of a child, the majesty and mystery of both a sunrise and a sunset, the intricate and complex beauty of a flower, and the cocked head of a furry pet, fully grasping whatever we might be thinking and/or feeling. A friend once told me about a moment when, as part of his training, he attended an autopsy; resisting at first because he had never crossed that threshold previously, he was ‘coached’ by his supervisor to attend, ‘and give himself permission to leave at any moment he felt that need’. Not only did he attend, but moved physically, emotionally and intellectually further into the experience as it progressed. Assigned the task of writing a theological reflection on his experience, he wrote almost entirely about how both the complexity and the inter-connectedness of the human being over-awed him with both wonder and humility. For him, this ‘moment’ will remain one of his most memorable and impactful moments in his life. And, for him, it seems to have ‘brought’ him closer to the ineffable, the inexplicable and what we would call God. Have you had such an experience, in your pilgrimage prior to, during or following your path to the Christian ministry?

Bishop: Talk of mysticism, and the optical delusion of consciousness, while compelling and engaging, connecting and exciting, is not what I have found to be the central current of conversations within the church. The ‘aha’ moment, from my limited experience over the last three or four decades, in Christian churches, has become that moment, captured by Paul in the New Testament, that while on the road to Damascus, he saw a great light and was ‘converted’ to becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ, after having lived a life of intense criticism and disdain for the faith. There have been a plethora of paths, strategies, tactics, including sermons, hymns, retreats, classes, prayer sessions, Bible study sessions, in which the primary object of the exercise was to ‘enlist, or at least to enrich’ the notion that God in and through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ saved each of us from our sin through forgiveness made available through the grace of God. Incarnating such a faith “premise”, embodying such a “belief” has taken ‘centre-stage’ amid the competing strategies to attract and to retain adherents, hopefully members, and thereby the cash that keeps the bills paid. Celebrating inspiring art, as, for example, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or even the architecture of our many cathedrals, or the elevated talent and skill and musicality of the more inspiring vocal solos, all of these being ‘part of the ethos’, nevertheless receive must time or attention. Conversion to a formal belief that requires both public acknowledgement and personal commitment has become the ‘bottom line’ of our business, to put the matter into corporate/business terms. Monks, nuns and ‘the religious’, I suppose, are considered to have both the time and the inclination to reflect upon the things of the mystery, the awesome in the daily lives of their people. The rest of the church seems pre-occupied with those secular concerns of most contemporary organizations. And, a reasonable and substantial case can be made that, in that regard, the church has lost much of the potency of the religious and spiritual potential of our calling. There are specific experiments, like Cursillo, which you may have heard of, that have some minimal comparison with what we are calling the mystical, that, perhaps we could explore in another conversation. In the meantime, however, the irony of having this conversation with a corporate tycoon is becoming so engaging, challenging and even awesome, from my perspective that I cannot fail to thank you for participating. It is the kind of conversation that has not been available in my term as bishop, and I have considerable doubt that it will be something to which I can look forward to as an expectation during my episcopate.

Until next time….