Will the centre "hold"?

 

William Butler Yeats…The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed ride is loosed and

          Everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

 

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the

       Desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blanks and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again: but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, is hour come round at

     last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Written in the aftermath of WW I, as well as the beginning of the Irish War of Independence, following the Easter Rising of `1916, the poem also reflects upon the 1918-19 flu pandemic.

The social ills of modernity: the breakdown of the traditional family, the loss of shared religious faith, the collapse of collective purpose are all evoked, echoed and highlighted here.

Nick Taylor, in The Paris Review, April 7 2015, writes:

As for the slouching beast, the best explanation is that it’s not a particular political regime, or even fascism itself, but a broader historical force, comprising the technological, the ideological and the political. A century later, we see the beast in the atomic bomb, the holocaust, the regimes of Stalin and Mao, and all manner of systematized atrocity.

The poem has been referenced in many other pieces of writing, including Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which inverts the poem: ‘here African civilization is the one under threat, and the rough beast is the West. Achebe’s Nigerian warrior faces exile from his village and pressure from Christina missionaries who threaten the tribal way of life; he commits suicide. … (Joan) Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem (poses) Didion stand(ing) in the same position as Yeat’s narrator, describing a social disaster, feeling the centre start to give out. Didion reported the piece from San Francisco ‘where the social haemorrhaging was showing up,’ ‘where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves hippies’. /She tells of the disoriented youth she met there, including a five-year-old named Susan whose mother feeds her acid and peyote*. She muses that the hippies are dealing with ‘society’s atomization’ for which their parents are responsible. ‘At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing,’ she writes….Elyn Sak’s 2008 Memoir, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, concerning her bout with schizophrenia. Though these four words from Yeats surely resonate with Saks’s feelings, the ‘centre’ in question here isn’t the moral authority of the Western world, it’s one person’s sense of stability, (Taylor)

Today, if we were to adopt Yeat’s stance as narrator, we can see so many feasible, even existential threats to the centre:

the geopolitical universe including the nuclear sabre-rattling in Europe and South East Asia,

                 the climactic warming of the planet

                                                      the biological spectre of additional pandemics,

pharmacological umbrella and both legitimate/legal and illicit…with street drugs, gangs and warlords, as well as a plethora of pharmaceuticals for which minimal clinical trials have been conducted…

                                 the religious/racial divide and the open aggression of various individual and ‘cell’ terrorists seeking to wreak havoc, revenge and contempt for the ‘other’…whomever that may be

Whatever centre we might wish to reference, one of the more cliché is the “world order” of the last three-quarters of a century, since the end of the Second World War. However we might like to think about “the centre”, it implies a core, a focal point, a point in and through and by which some kind of ‘order’ and ‘balance’ and ‘stability’ and ‘security’ and ‘reliability’ and ‘predictability’ and ‘trust’ might be discerned, ascertained and sustained. The “sun” for example, as the centre of the universe, around which other universes circle, including the earth; we also speak and think of a “leader” as a centre-point in any group, classroom, board-room, lecture hall, sanctuary, Vatican, as well as Kremlin, White House, 10 Downing, or even a national capital, symbolizing the centre of that specific nation.

When these ‘centres’ are considered to be stable in what has been their normal configuration, patterns, language, and attitude, the world considers such a situation to be relatively ‘secure’. Whenever some or all of these ‘focal points’ (often positioned in the public mind as ‘polar opposites’ or ‘enemies’) start to shift and those shifts are documented in the most minute detail in real time, ordinary people, as well as poets and prophets and writers, tend to think that things are “spinning out of control”.

Meriam-Webster.com defines “centrifugal force” as ‘what keeps a string with a ball on the end taut when you whirl it around. A centrifuge is a machine that uses centrifugal force. At the end of a washing machine’s cycle, it becomes a weak and simple centrifuge as it whirls the water out of your clothes. Centrifuges hundreds of thousands of times as powerful are essential to nuclear technology and drug manufacturing. Part of an astronaut’s training occurs in a centrifuge that generates force equal to several times the force of gravity (about like a washing machine) to get them used to the forces they’ll encounter in a real space mission. M-W then goes on to reference Yugoslavia, then a county of six separate ethnicities, threatened by centrifugal ethnic forces (which ultimately resulted in six separate nationalities.

There is a case to be made that many nations are beginning (some have already entered a deeper phase) to see their ‘nation’s’ ethnicity challenged by the addition of thousands of refugees, and immigrants and asylum-seekers, from various regions and multiple tragedies. Similarly, the people of the world have been threatened by the onslaught of a pandemic virus for more than two years, that saw some two million deaths, and hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations, as well as many ‘long-haul’ cases that still linger, with research still learning about their prognosis. Fires, draughts, tornadoes, hurricanes, tropical storms, storm surges, record-rainfalls, floods and human devastation have all been visited on people on every continent and their number and intensity have grown in the last decade. The world faces daily, hourly news reports of nuclear ambitions in Iran, North Korea, as well as Russian attempts to blackmail the world into giving up on its support for Ukraine in this latest horrendous military massacre.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations declared on September 14, 2022,

“The solidarity envisioned in the United Nations Charter is being devoured by the acids of nationalism and self-interest. As fractures deepen and trust evaporates, we need to come together around solutions. People need to see results in their everyday lives, or they will lose faith in their governments and institutions, and they will lose hope in the future. This year’s General Debate must be about providing hope and overcoming the divisions that are dramatically impacting the world.

Unity, co-operation, collaboration, compromise, working for something ‘bigger than self-interest’….these are euphemisms juxtaposed beside the realpolitik of ultra-nationalism, white supremacy, stolen elections, closed borders, and the new leaders who are adamantly advocating such positions, and then winning more votes in many countries. In the U.S., for example, the Washington Post reported that some 277 Republican candidates for election to the House and Senate in November are “election-deniers” in that they believe the 2020 election of President Biden was fraudulently won, and of this number some 173 are running in Republican-leaning districts. These people are propagating the lie that elections, if they are not victorious, are inevitably fraudulent and must be overturned. Voter suppression laws have been passed in some 45 states, and outright bans on abortion have been passed in several states, immediately following the overturn of Roe v Wade by the Supreme Court, in their decision to turn the issue over to the states.

In Canada, a right-wing candidate has just been elected as leader of the United Conservative Party, and thereby the next premier of Alberta, who has committed to passing an Alberta Sovereignty Act, declaring the provinces right to ignore any law passed by the federal government in Ottawa. One political opinion writer in Canada, Althia Raj, is asking the rhetorical question (in a new podcost, “It’s Political”) about whether we (Canadians) are having a constitutional crisis while no one notices.

Today, it can be argued that we are unable to reference only one or two dramatic and centrifugal forces that might be spinning the centre to the point where it ‘cannot hold’. Indeed, the number and the relatively high score on any metaphoric Richter scale that measure earthquakes, is somewhat indeterminate. Each day, we learn of new dimensions of threats, new frequencies, while the “old” familiar geopolitical foes continue to jabber in the headlines about their own ambitions:  Putin in Ukraine and against NATO, the beast incarnate in his head; Xi Jin Ping, over Taiwan, indisputably part of mainland China, and under military threat for annexation by Beijing; Kim Jung Un, in North Korea, whose insatiable need for attention on the world stage is prompting his firing of missiles not only into the China Sea but actually over Japan prompting Japan, South Korea and the United States to upgrade their military manoeuvres in the region; Iran, where a woman was recently shot and killed for wearing her head scarf improperly and where the nation’s leaders determination to develop nuclear weapons continues unabated after the U.S. withdrew from the Iranian Accord under trump.

Thousand of lives, buildings including schools, hospitals, child-care centres, homes and infrastructure have all been destroyed, and the one of the largest nuclear stations in Europe is under constant threat from Russian missiles and rockets, while the IAEA declares the facility to be the property of Ukraine, and must not be turned over to the Russians. The Western media is fixated on whether or not Putin will carry out his rhetorical threat of deploying tactical nuclear warheads, or chemical or biological weapons on the people of Ukraine.

Biden says yesterday, the world is as close to the nuclear cliff as it was at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Only this time, instead of Kennedy and Kruschev, it is Biden and Putin who are facing off.

On tenterhooks, that state of uneasiness or suspense, is where we are today, and have been for many months, if not years. Our shared trust, and the loyalty that can only come with trust, is in tatters, as if it were a quilt patched together over decades of diplomacy, sewed together by various world leaders and their nations who, at the time of the inauguration of the United Nations following World War II, recognised the absolute need to work together for peace.

That need seems to have given way to a new narcissistic nationalism, narrow, frightened, cynical, selfish and short-sighted, embodied by many national leaders, some of them elected, others self-or-serf-appointed. And while we are all linked digitally in real time and thereby exposed to the granularity of world news, including many faux-pseudo-psycho-analyses of the “mind” of world leaders who threaten the ‘stability and security’ of world order.

Truth be told, nature herself, is far from stable, in the sense that ‘she’ is in a constant state of change, seasonally, and that change exhibits some predictable memes, not all of which are as relevant to the human world as others.

Size, for example, in nature, usually suggests dominance, power, and the need for smaller creatures to learn stealth and escape. In the human world, masculinity, as a symbol of and embodiment of size and physical power, is not assurance of equanimity, nor of the absence of its own fear. Indeed, some would argue that many of the most frightened among us are those with the most “hard power”…especially in terms of nuclear weapons.

The myth of size and dominance as a moral ethical and thereby national “value” will have to give way to a much more challenging modality of soft power, of the deeper need to collaborate, and to “get along” in order to survive. The stakes, now, are no longer boundaried by borders, fences, moats, and wire communications. All of the stakes, for everyone, cross all of the traditional boundaries between and among nations, Even cyber-tactics need no physical wires, pipelines, or physical weapons for their deployment.

We are already living in a ‘new space’ generated right here on this planet; and our will and our capacity to work through our fears and our imaginary superiorities, and our imagined inferiorities, in some shared and safe space, in a manner exemplified by the Haudenosaunee people in The Great Law of Peace, will determine how this act of the history of the human race ends.

For the sake of our grandchildren we can only hope and pray that the end is peaceful and effectively shared….we may have to generate a new “centre” that will hold, in order to survive.

Dipping a toe at the beach of the indigenous way of life

The white, European mindset that ‘we’ have to reconcile with the indigenous people in Canada, while honourable, and even ethical, starts from the wrong place. It has honour in that there is a documented, and experienced and incarnated history of intense abuse of the indigenous people, the emasculation of their culture, language, ethos and belief-system by that European ‘white’ mindset. 

Warranted as the process is, including reparations, and a recognition of the insufferable wrongs done in the name of God, nation and ‘civilization’ (as opposed to savagery), it lacks the kind of energy, legs, hope and gift that comes from a full appreciation of the indigenous attitudes, perceptions, philosophy and ethics that are, or at least could be, a dawning of a new age of enlightenment for North Americans.

Land treaties that have been abrogated, and repatriations and reparations that are necessary, notwithstanding, it might be helpful to unearth a few of the gems of indigenous writings, and the thoughts and beliefs and perceptions behind those writings, in order to shift the reconciliation process from one of “making up for past wrongs” to “acknowledging and openly appreciating the incredible insights of the indigenous way of life”….from guilt and shame to gratitude and appreciation. Legal cases that relegate Indigenous realities to “subjective beliefs” substituting ‘religious beliefs’ for indigenous protection of sacred mountains, for example, along with the preception ‘you’re just immigrants like everyone else’ are examples of attitudes and perceptions that demand both exposure and erasure.

 A reading from The Great Law of Peace, KAYANERENKO:WA, by Kayanesenh Paul Williams might shed some light: One fundamental principle that flows from the Creation story is the relationship between human beings and the natural world. The Book of Genesis gives human beings ‘dominion’ over all parts of the natural world and suggests that everything was created to serve the needs of humanity. More recent Christian thinkers have struggled to insert the concept of ‘stewardship’ into these words. While logic agrees with the approach, fundamentalists who see an obligation to develop and exploit wage theological war with environmentalists who feel a need to conserve. The Haudenosaunee Creation story places human beings squarely in the midst of a natural world in which they form an integral part, and in which each part has been given responsibilities. Sotsisowah (John Mohawk) explained: The Haudenosaunee Creation story….is replete with symbols of a rational universe. In the Creation Story, the only creature with a potential for irrational thought is the human being. All the other creatures of Nature are natural, i.e. rational. Nature is depicted as a threatening and irrational aspect of existence in the West’s cosmologies. The Haudenosaunee cosmology is quite different. It depicts the natural world as a rational existence while admitting that human beings possess an imperfect understanding of it. The idea that human beings have an imperfect understanding of the rational nature of existence is something of a caution to Haudenosaunee in their dealings with nature. Conversely, the idea that the natural world is disorganized and irrational has served as something of a permission in the West and may be the single cultural aspect which best explains the differences between these two societies’ relationships to Nature. The reason it’s so important to get people to cease fearing nature is that negative emotions invade one’s ability to think clearly. People who are afraid of nature have much more difficulty defending it than people who are not. All of those negative emotions giver you permission to enact violence on nature. (Williams, op. cit. p. 33-34)

 Attitudes to nature, as well as the attitude to human irrationality, may both seem ‘foreign’ to many whose childhoods have been conditioned by a very different perspective. However, as history has evolved, developed and shown itself, perhaps the “euro-white-christian’ perspective shows significant holes in both logic and empirical evidence. 

Williams borrows, too, from Neil Patterson’s ‘The Fish’ in Haudenosaunee Environmental Task force 2001: From a Haudenosaunee perspective, there is a personal mandate from the Creation to protect Mother Earth and all that inhabit her. We should all begin to look at what personal changes we can make to reduce waste that our waters will eventually receive….It there are doubts in the minds of our leaders about action like this on the Natural World, the answer is obvious. These past mistakes of history serve as a guideline for future generations: not only our grandchildren, but for the fish and everything that is in the Circle of Life. Lur elders have learned from their elders these rules and guidelines. (Williams, p. 35)

 While it is futile, today, to wonder about the condition of the planet if the admonitions of the indigenous peoples had been observed, as well as how the economic and political ‘norms’ would be radically different, as in any process of transition, we can start today to get our hands, minds and hearts looking through a different lens. And this lens, in part the gift from indigenous peoples, could be a new ‘birth’ in both perceptions, as well as in the foundational principles on which we base those perceptions and the actions of transformation that follow. It is not only a transformation of the climatic conditions of the planet that is needed; it is also a transformation of the basic premises on which humanity and nature co-exist that must precede the climatic changes.

Another significant difference in perspective and attitude, concerns the comparative attitudes to good and evil. Williams writes: Christianity has wrestled with the issue of how an all-powerful God who is absolute good could permit evil to exist and even to flourish. The Church answers: it is a mystery that we humans cannot fathom; we are told we must have faith. Haudenosaunee thinking recognizes that good and evil both exist, and have been here from the beginning. They are, and therefore the question is not why, but rather how to address them in our lives and societies, and how to find a balance. Evil will not go away: we must continue to recognize it, understand it, and guard against it. (Williams, p. 35)

 There is a degree of pragmatism grounded in the observational evidence that all around us, we witness, and too often participate either overtly or covertly consciously or unconsciously, in both good and evil, and, irrespective of the legal systems, the ethical instructions, the psychological research and theories, we not only have to confront evil but also to balance it with good. And while, the human approach is admittedly prone to irrationality, and thereby needing help and support from others, there is an element of embedding very different understanding, perception, attitude and relationship within the ‘christian’ context and the indigenous context. Another significant difference between the euro-christian mindset and the indigenous, is the relationship between the real and the spiritual or what Wade Davis has called an ‘inner horizon’.

 (Borrowing from Wade Davis, Shadows in the Sun: Travels to Landscapes of Spirit and Desire, New York, Broadway Books, 1998, p. 36). Williams continues: In ‘scientific; societies, things exist if their physical presence is provable. In most Indigenous societies, a thing that is dreamed also exists. The Haudenosaunee Creation story reflects a society that recognizes (as quantum theory suggests) that beings can move between out world and the spirit world, and that each world influences the other. And from Wade Davis, ‘Just as Aboriginal Australians assert that there was a Dreamtime before there was this age of the earth, so the Haundenosaunee Creation story takes place in a Dreamtime in which the animals are also spirits, and in which the formation of the world is happening at the same time as its first inhabitants are both already existing and taking shape. (Williams, op. cit. p. 36)

Rational/irrational….real/spirit…part of and protective of nature/dominant over nature….good/evil co-existing and needing balance….these are both a different way of perceiving, conceiving, considering and obviously of enacting a human existence on this planet…. In a footnote, Williams writes, in response to the Canada Health and Protection Act that required clinical testing by ‘science and objective observation’, Haudenosaunee medicine, which sees a partnership between the patient, the healer, the plants and the spirits that assist the healing, would have a difficult time providing scientific proof of its effectiveness. (p. 36)

 And these notes, observations and reflections are a mere ‘scratching the surface’ of the indigenous world view, by one still in ‘kindergarten’ as far as becoming steeped in the indigenous culture. I have not even acquired the moccasins that will be needed in order to ‘walk a mile in the moccasins of the indigenous peoples, in order to begin to understand first, and then to appreciate fully the import of their potential enhancement of our world view. For decades, I considered the grafting of a few symbols onto a liturgy in a Christian church service as another (albeit well-intentioned) patronizing crumb of meagre acknowledgement of the indigenous people, effectively a superficially polite and condescending form of colonialism. I never encountered anything but authentic and deep appreciation from indigenous individuals who attended services; however, on reflection, a more integrous, authentic and honourable approach would be to plan liturgies together, thereby integrating, incorporating and synthesizing two very different ‘cosmologies’ as well as perspectives. 

No doubt, others are already attempting to accomplish this ecumenism; however, any efforts in this direction would have to acknowledge the substantial differences in perspective, attitude and belief…while creating a liturgy that serves that end. The two perspectives differ so considerably that, it now appears, the Christian church has a long way to go to reflect upon, and to openly discuss and even to consider the relationship between what are two very different world views among very different histories and mythologies. And they each point to a very different application in the conduct of world affairs. 

It would seem that, the ‘establishment’ church would do well do relinquish the lead in the hypothetical process of attempting to reflect upon and to work toward any kind of compatible liturgy, as deemed to be compatible by the indigenous participants. Indeed, there is so much of profound value and authenticity in the indigenous cosmology, creation story, and especially in the significance the indigenous people ascribe to tat the need for healthy, supportive and honest relationships.

Paul Williams writes too: The Haudenosaunee do not believe (as the Bible seems to assume, in saying that we were made in God’s image) that we are the ultimate beings in the world, the end of all evolution. Things change. Sotsisowah John Mohawk observed: Things flow from sources which have roots deeper than individual talents or society’s gifts’ They flow from nature, and the sacred beings who designed nature. If one embraces the initial premise, that human beings were extremely lucky that of all the places in the universe, they have a home just the right distance from a sun of just the right intensity, that there is enough easter, grass and enough of everything. From there, it’s a small step to accept that whatever created all that is a force of unexcelled sacred dimensions and the will of that force is something people should try to cooperate with to perpetuate life. The way a group expresses its cooperation is through ceremonies which recreate the conditions present when people first came to consciousness of these things. Humankind’s relationship to nature projected in this precolonial pre-patriarchal, pre-modern story carries a fundamental and unchanging truth, but one which subsequent generations would need to relearn over and over. Humans exist in a context of nature and not vice versa. Everything we have ever had, everything we have, everything we will ever have—our health, our good looks, our intelligence, everything—is a product not of our own merit but of all that which created our world. That which created our world is not society, but the power of the universe. Nature, which is the context of our existence, is sacred. A significant manifestation of nature, the regenerative power of life, is also sacred, and we who walk about on the earth are not without obligations to perpetuate this system, the ‘work’ of the Giver of Life, in the greater scheme of things. (Williams, op. cit. p. 37)

 Is it too much to envision, to dream and to imagine a world in which these perspectives, along with their supporting cosmologies, legends, myths and ceremonies might be seen, embraced, integrated and celebrated, not as a redemptive path to reconciliation, but more as a gift from the peoples who were here before the European conquerors and whose wisdom and culture warrant our humble observance and respect?

Reflections on racism and its tentacled tumor on our body politic

 On this second year of a Day to Commemorate Truth and Reconciliation in Canada, it is long past time for “white” men and women to open both their hearts and minds to begin to welcome a respect for indigenous ways, indigenous thought, indigenous spirituality, not as an act of cognitive reprogramming, or as an act of political treaty-making, nor as a patronizing and condescending gesture of masked colonial arrogance, but rather as a humble prayer of gratitude and hope and surrender.

Indigenous traditions of respect for the earth and for all life offer a depth and breadth of wisdom that the world needs, and seems so resistant to embrace.

Marie Battiste, in a paper entitled, Maintaining Aboriginal Identity, Language and Culture in a Modern Society: Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, Marie Battists, ed. Vancouver BCL UBC Press, p. 201-202, as quoted in John W.  Friesen and Virginia Lyons Friesen, Aboriginal Education in Canada, p18:…

Immigrant society is sorely in need of what Aboriginal knowledge has to offer. We are witnessing throughout the world the weaknesses in knowledge, based on science and technology. It is costing us our air, our water, our earth; our very lives are at stake. No longer are we able to turn to science to rid us of the mistakes of the past or to clean up our planet for the future of our children.

The contemporary political culture, deeply embedded in a kind of patronizing and condescending model of patting the head of a child, as if, eventually that child will learn the appropriate ways of modern commerce, modern political vernacular and debate, of adapting to the demands of an economy that provides jobs to millions through technological innovation and heavily funded marketing will eventually have to bow on bended knee, stop talking and start listening, reading, reflecting and even engaging in a conversation whose agenda including both content and method will be offered by those indigenous men and women as a freely-given gift. And in order for that process to begin in earnest authenticity, surrendering and abandoning preconceived perceptions, attitudes, beliefs and practices that once dominated North American life among the powerful will need to be seeded as a precondition for further growth.

The German people surrendered to a process of denazification, as a way to turn the page in their collective history. The philosophy and the actions of the Third Reich are so horrendous, contemptible and disgusting, that the colonizing history of indigenous peoples in Canada, in the light of the Third Reich, might seem pallid, tepid and therefore tolerable. It is not tolerable; however, the process of reconciliation to which the Canadian government has expressed a full commitment, may well be sabotaged if a process of embracing, comprehending, acknowledging and formally discarding, and even burying all of the perceptions, needs, aspirations and fatal errors of that colonial mentality is not an intimate and integral feature of the process.

Colonialism has application to a stereotypical European, white, ambition to explore, conquer and subdue the ‘whole world’ primarily for the self-interested purpose of “using” the bounty and the treasure of the “new world” to enhance the wealth of the powerful back is Europe. Empire building, royal acclaim, profit-engineering, as well as the inherent drama and excitement including considerable risk, supported and nurtured by a variety of forms of patronage from wealthy/royal sponsors may have been the ‘light’ side of the initiative. The dark side, however, was the rape, pillage, murder, and religious conversion and complete emasculation of indigenous people, both individuals and the supporting and sustaining culture, beliefs, perceptions, languages and identity. This pursuit of dominance, competitively enacted, carried with it the strings, ambitions, expectations and hubris of both the sponsors and their people, as well as the adventurers themselves. Empires, like kingdoms, royal families, corporate and institutions, have behaved in a manner that, in many cases, was then free from the kind of critical examination, exposure and public disdain that needed investigation and a vehicle for communicating the impact of these expeditions, in real time. And, this pattern of competitive domination, control and the pursuit of power by those whose wealth and influence enables the ventures, is embedded in the political and economic and normative culture in the West today.

Targets of the neo-colonial ambition, as well as the strategies and tactics available, have changed, from indigenous to all those who have come to “need” the meagre wages the behemoths grudgingly concede. Capitalism, including the perpetuation of the wealthy and powerful class, (defined as the source and the stability of the normal order), continues to colonize industrial workers, farmers, transportation workers, in order to maintain the perceived need for control and dominance, that lies at the core of the colonial mentality.

And it is not only the business community that holds these views as normal, ethical and ultimately essential. The academic world, the ecclesial world, the health care field….they are all operating on a system of pyramidal top-down power, albeit with the more recent injections of modest ‘crumbs’ like the number of hours per week for work, and the injection of modest benefits for workers, in some instances.

Power at the top of the social, political economic gradient has always been able to, and also willing to “do whatever it can get away with” in order to serve its own primary interests. Benevolent dictatorships too have proferred meagre and modest ‘crumbs’ to their people, and then sung their own praises lustily.

Add to the campaign to grow and burnish the range of empire, the inherent racial superiority of white Europeans when confronted with people of a different skin colour, and significantly different ways of valuing each other, their environment and their spirit(s). Prejudice, bias, superiority, and power have throughout history maintained a degree of enmeshment and co-dependence for which those in power have never had to account. Of course, there are occasional exceptions of individuals and corporations who/which ‘valued’ their employees by building company towns, and by injecting medical supports, within clearly described and enforced limits. And by comparison, viewed through a lens of comparison with nearby corporations not engaged in similar initiatives, these ‘benevolent’ companies accrued an aura of humanity and compassion and worker appreciation.

When social and political forces like labour unions are considered sinister and anathema to the pursuit of corporate profit, however, as they are today, and have been for decades in North America, the stench of the abuse of power, similar to the stench of racial colonial empire-building abuse continues to hang over the contemporary and modest shifts in acknowledging, and accounting for the deep and ineradicable stains of colonialism.

 
It is not considered colonialism if and when a sole shooter attacks a synagogue or a mosque; however, it is a lingering and growing sign of the same ‘lethal social/psychological poison’ that inhabits the colonial mind. It is not considered  colonialism when a Prime Minister refuses to support his Attorney General, who just happens to be the first indigenous woman in Canada to hold that office, when she attempts to uphold the boundaries of her office(s) when faced with an applications fora deferred prosecution of SNC Lavalin. And yet, who can effectively and honourably argue that vestiges of colonialism do not infect that whole chapter in Canadian history?

It is not considered colonialism when a premier exempts long-term care institutions from inspection only then to witness excessive numbers of sickness and deaths in those homes resulting from conditions conducive to the spread of COVID.

It is not considered colonialism if and when hospitality workers have to scrape and beg for reasonable wages, and even for the tips they have been paid by patrons, (when withheld by employers)…and yet it is a similar kind of abuse of power.

Is it not considered colonialism when tax breaks for the rich are built into legislation, thereby funnelling public funds toward padding the portfolios of the wealthy, while eviscerating public programs to feed, to school, to house, and to provide health care for the disadvantaged…and yet it is.

While failing to provide safe, secure and abundant water for indigenous communities is obviously another vestige of colonialism, the length and duration of the failure has now become systemic, and so embedded into the culture that, for more than a century, governments have failed to act and have never been fully held to account….and so the initial impact of colonialism has been revisited on indigenous peoples for more than one hundred and fifty years impacting generations of young men and women, many of whom now dwell in Canadian prisons.

Law enforcement’s penchant for seeking and arresting people of colour at a rate far in excess of the proportion of such demographics in the national population, while obviously a blatant and open wound based in racism in the national body-politic, is nevertheless, another of the cancers for which we have not discovered, and applied even a repressive intervention. Just how serious can this country be about acknowledging, and then addressing the multiple complexities of racial attitudes, first to indigenous and also to minority groups, including new immigrants and refugees, if we continue to walk past these social and cultural “boils” as if they were normal, expected, tolerable and resistant to all curative measures.

Perhaps, rather than a ‘cure’ in the medical sense, the Canadian culture needs to consider the questions around “Truth and Reconciliation” to be matters needing a permanent and revolutionary perspective…Can we as Canadians begin to see our betrayal of indigenous families, and their children, not only as our worst and most heinous night-mare, but also as a path of light to re-imagine how our people with the least ‘political voice and influence’ are our most important and most valued and most resilient and most creative and most prophetic and poetic among us.

IT is not enough to build water lines, with reservoirs, in order to provide clean water for people living on reservations; it is not enough to hold public artistic ceremonies of song and dance in the nation’s capital, while wearing orange shirts; it is not enough to continue to hold wealthy and highly esteemed individuals as most important in our culture, while watching men and women sleeping on grates with temperatures near or below zero F.

The colonial mind-set, attitude, practice and its many implications continue like a barely recognized and acknowledged tumor pushing against both the brain and the heart and the lungs of the body politic. It is emasculating our sense of self-discipline, our sense of self-worth, our sense of our potential and our belief in our shared identity as a self-respecting nation. And its cells are continuing to replicate each time we turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the obvious abuses of power over those whose voices we ignore or dismiss.

And there is no medical faculty or hospital, no ethics professor or consultant, and no court or  legal measures that can or will ameliorate our dependence and reliance on the abuse of power, for which we are all responsible, both for its incarnation and for its erasure…

We have to see, to feel, to think and to act our way out of this protracted night of darkness whose tentacles reach far beyond the imaginary ghosts and goblins and vampires of hallowe’en.

We actually are those vampires and sinister and ‘real’ human apparitions in the lives of millions of our own people….We can do better!

 Every conscious recognition, by each of us, that we are abusing power, is a step forward in neutralizing our hardwiring for power over. And while that recognition need not and must not erase our past, including words and phrases that were integral to the colonial mind-set. We have to sail between the Scylla of the contemporary “sanitizing” of our past, and the Charybdis of those clashing rocks of our innate insecurity that seems insatiable, in its appetite for ‘victims’ to assure us of us our unique and uncontestable (ironically and satirically) value. Our personal, familial, institutional and community reality and identity all depend, to a degree that we have thus far failed to acknowledge, on our disciplined commitment to take each step. And we must do it, not to patronize our indigenous peoples, nor our racial minorities, but to rescue ourselves from our own sabotage of our authentic better angels.

Reflections on transactionalism...in public affairs

 The transaction theory signifies that both the reader and the text play important roles in the formation of meaning. Meaning is produced by continuous transaction between the reader and the text, employing the meaning potential of the text and the reader’s experiential reservoir. While the reader is active in selecting and synthesizing the potential in his reservoir, the text contributes to the shaping of his selection and hypotheses, resulting in an interplay between them. Reading and writing are interrelated skills in which the transactional theory is applicable. (researchgate.net)

From the Australian Journal of International Affairs, (abstracted on tandfonline.com) in a piece published November 28, 2019, by Galid Bashirov, we read:

We define transactionalism as a foreign policy approach that favours bilateral to multilateral relations, focuses on short-term wins rather than longer term strategic foresight, adheres to a zero-sum worldview where all gains area relative and reciprocity is absent, rejects value-based policymaking, and does not follow a grand strategy.

Writing in anthropological-theory.fandom.com, in a piece entitled Transactionalism,  Lamonica Stackhouse writes:

Transactionalism is a psychology idea that humans are social, multifaceted that change when in contact with another person in their world. There were some criticisms about this theory. Some were that the transactionalism theory ignores long term historical processes; while some have criticized it for paying ‘insufficient attention to the structure of class and property relations in society…(I)t is also important to acknowledge the symbolic cultural and religious ideas that might govern peoples’ choices and decisions in their social interactions. Transactionalism was criticized because of it being of social exchange but stressed self-interested actions.

From btd.consulting, in a piece entitled Move beyond the Transactional Mindset, we read:

The Transactional mindset is a way of thinking and behaving that looks as M(ergers) and A(quisitions) as cutting deals, buying and selling companies, hiring and laying off people-make a deal, get it closed, hire & fire. It’s a management paradigm that seeks efficiency, standardisation and continuity….It has a way of diminishing understanding, eliminating complexity and reducing the quality of decisions….The Transformational Mindset, on the other hand, represents a more expansive view (of M &A). It’s like widening the aperture of a camera. When we widen the aperture more light comes in. This provides a greater awareness fo the surroundings, enhancing the ability to see new perspectives and different shades. More light allows you and others to see opportunities that would otherwise be shrouded in darkness. By widening the aperture, the mind is illuminated by new possibilities.

Action, efficiency, productivity, ‘best and most productive use of time,’ because time is money…these are the phrases that rule in business, and increasingly in government perceptions and language, and also in public service organizations funded by public funds where budgets have become both the judge and the sword to construct personal resumes, indicating the successful capacity to reduce spending, while increasing service numbers.

The individual in any conversation about an idea, a public issue, or a treatment plan, for example, is seen from the perspective of his or her agency, his power to comply or conflict, and the perceptions that form the arguments and the presentation of issues, are based on the ‘reductionistic perception that this person is either an ally or an opponent, or possibly a neutral. It reminds one of the old adage that there are three kinds of people in the world: some symbolized by ‘red’ light, for STOP, and these will disagree no matter the argument. A second group, represented by “green light” are more likely to be open and thereby more susceptible to becoming an ally. A third group, “orange lights” are those categorized as neutral, who could fall into the “red” or the “green” light categories.

From the perspective of red-orange-green, (child, adult, parent from Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis), people are then no longer seen as whole persons, capable of discerning the merits of an idea, without being manipulated by some “extrinsic” and empirical “offer” in order to induce (read seduce) them into agreement. Ally, agent, vote, supporter, or opponent, source of conflict, defamer….these are are “roles” into which people are then cast, on the basis of the power broker.

Just today, Axios.com has published a new book entitled, Smart Brevity, in order to tutor and mentor leaders, teachers, public officials in how to get the attention of readers, by summing succinctly, authentically, and simply the core of any piece of information. Analogous to the headline of a newspaper article, when constructed with creativity, sensitivity and authenticity, or the “sell line” in an advertising campaign which trumpets the primary benefit of any product or service, all in the name of magnetizing the cognitive and emotive and psycho-social gestalt of the viewer/reader/consumer/student/client.

Efficiency, once again, lies at the heart of their prescriptive menu for communicators: that is the efficient use of the time of the reader etc.? Busy people, they argue, being bombarded with cataracts of information, are unable and unwilling to take the time to digest each issue fully, and thereby have to choose from a menu of bullets, designed to “grab” their attention, and then for the reader to pursue additional information related to their interest from pieces like those in The Atlantic, or The New Yorker, where substantive pieces are the norm.

Similarly, local politicians, in their role as community leaders, often take the position that, rather than consider the whole person, and what a healthy relationship might entail, dumb down to “how is this person likely to be leveraged” on this issue. Individual persons, then, are reduced to “actors” operating with an script which is designed to simplify and to expedite and to “move” their agenda along, depending on the compliance of those people whom they may have assessed appropriately or not. Margaret Atwood, after achieving a high degree of public acclaim, noted that she had become a “thing” in the public mind.

The concept of short-term, leveraged, decisions, based on the perception of immediate “benefits” as a template for governance, the base definition and operative model of transactionalism, is not merely flawed; it is counter-intuitive to the public interest. First off, anyone who has an idea can be and is dismissed by some minimal superficial piece of information that suggests, infers and/or outright states that the idea has no merit, in the mind of the “other” (the listener). So the immediate response, reflexive and protective, is “No! that idea will not work because…!” “We have already tried something that looks like that, and it went over like a lead balloon!” ,…inferring that a similar idea, in a different context, with different people will consider it abhorrent just as history did.

Humans have evolved many highly sophisticated and highly seductive, and even smiling words, phrases and perceptions both of the issues and how they must be addressed and how the people who might have a different ‘take’ on an issue can and will be “administered too” in the most efficient manner.

This is not an argument for “hand-holding” by every public servant on each public issue, in which a person might have an interest or a complaint. Direct contact between elected officials and their constituents, however, warrant an organized and effective “intake” system, that includes a series of “format” answers to frequently asked questions, providing public information for those needing it, without consuming the time of the elected official, or the public staff, to explain. Also, with an ’intake’ system, following the education of the public on both how to access it, and how to formulate questions and inquiries, concerns and complaints, there could/should be a follow-up data-collection and curation of the input, both for the purpose of detecting and diagnosing the public perceptions, interests and concerns, as well as their aspirations. Should an issue require further investigation, there needs to be a formal process of research, public input, with a time-frame and a dollar-frame for both the investigation and the decision-making.

This kind of approach, call it a system if you like, uses the honouring of both the individuals and the ideas on a common basis, and to the degree possible, skates around the “crony” aspect of all politics, especially local politics.

In this moment, I am facing the difficult question of how to “educate” those men and women who are courageous enough to offer their names to the public for consideration on the ballot, to reframe their approach from a minimal form of transactionalism to something more akin to transformationalism.

Originally, transactionalism was designed as a template for addressing how individuals respond and react to each other, based on the child-parent-adult model detailed by Eric Berne, in The Games People Play. It was never  designed to be or become a template for political schmoozing by men and women intent on their career enhancement as their first priority, and only secondarily or even further down their priorities, the best interest of their community. 

The concept of trust between individuals, more likely to be thwarted by “making the deal” in the short term, by offering some “carrot” as motivation. Similarly, over a period of time, and not a long period, such a system quickly devolves into that “red-green-orange” devaluation, really another model of colonization, without the spectre of nationalism or religious conversion or even profit-loss statements.

I recently heard a local candidate refer to a colleague as one who “knows the inner workings of municipal government, including the financial and taxation and provincial government regulations, but who does not see the municipality as a “business” to be operated on business premises.

The conflation of the business model, into both the governance of the nation and its municipalities, risks many valued perceptions, attitudes and opportunities. First, public money, through taxes, is an established revenue, to be used to provide essential services, not to raise the profits and the dividends of those making the decisions or those providing the services. Needed services, especially in a period of economic stagnation, are still needed and their legitimate costs have to be included in the tax assessments and bills. What is too often missing, however, from the mind-set of elected officials is the courage and the creativity and the sensitivity to put themselves in the shoes of their voters, and consider why such services are needed, how to demonstrate that need, and how to educated the electorate on the complexities of the long-term tax bill, rather than to take the short-term, easy, uncomplicated and even “lazy” way out…by dodging the essential need.

In a northern Ontario town, back in the 1980’s, finally, after nearly a century, the sewer and water services on the main street needed to be replaced. So serious was the issue that, when engineers dug up the original “pipes” they discovered that there were no longer pipes, but merely “tunnels” where the pipes had been after they had completely rusted out. Of course, the story made news, but the decades of local councils that had avoided the issue were no long dead, and therefore had avoided, evaded and denied their legitimate responsibility.

This story, while true, is merely an example of similar stories in too many municipalities, especially after the provincial government, at least in Ontario, off-loaded many of its original responsibilities onto the towns and townships, as a slick, slimy and sleezy way to dodge their own responsibilities. If I recall, this despicable initiative came during the Harris administration in Queen’s Park, a government whose refuse continues to haunt towns across the province, regardless of how their approach might have served them in the short, transactional and ultimately cynical run.

Even the most perfect and absolute is partial and incomplete....

 We have been raised, taught, and deeply immersed in a world in which opposites, dualism, and the dominance of the human will are considered absolutes. We tend to frame our thoughts/arguments/debates on whatever propositions lie at the heart of the theorist’s primary lens, or perspective. This approach tends both to need and to foster a notion that on one side of each dualism is “good” while on the other side of the dualism is “evil”. Axioms such as God is good, man is evil, tend not only to portray a conventional premise, as well as a theological dictum; they also form part of the foundational footings for a western culture. And indeed, if one is to compare God and man, then there is an obvious consensual disparity on any continuum of ethical virtue. This disparity, in the comparison, however, may not be absolute, and yet, given that the proposition has been included in the Christian belief ‘system’, it takes on a kind of elevated significance, and becomes a totem of the faith. Faith language, because it has the aura, and the ethos, and the history and the tradition, the liturgical and rhetorical vestments that have become the norm, takes on a resonance, and indeed even a penetration into the shared consciousness and unconsciousness of many who may or may not subscribe to the faith itself. How often have we heard, for example, Joe Biden, president of the United States, comment, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, but compare me to my opponent!”

And while Biden’s plea is political rhetoric, it has significant application to the nature of our use of words in our public discourse, whereby we all engage in a debilitating process of comparing both ourselves and others with something or someone outside of our perception and conception of human reality. For the past ten days, the world has been watching something approaching an epic, historic, liturgical, and religious drama, in the death and mourning of Queen Elizabeth II, after a reign of 70 years. The most minute details of each person’s role, costume, parade routes, liturgical scripts and the timing of each event have all been pre-programmed, not only for centuries in some parts, and also with the complete concurrence and oversight of the deceased monarch. 75 footsteps per minute, for example, measured the procession from Whitehall to Westminster Abbey, thereby making it possible to estimate precisely the time it would take to make that part of the sovereign’s last journey, eight minutes.

Speeches given by the new King, Charles III, have been scripted, edited, rehearsed and likely edited again, prior to final delivery. We have been watching a highly professional, highly political, eminently psychological, and hopefully religious enactment of the burial of a monarch, in real time and in full view, universally. Hundreds of thousands camped out in quite cold temperatures, (also likely damp air) for hours or even days, in order to witness and participate in this drama. And while the royal family and their acolytes are the actors/participants, the public, too, has an integral part in the full enactment. Whether those thousands saw themselves as both spectators and actors or not, is an observation likely unique to each person.

The royal family, however, has been charged with the responsibility of carrying out their assigned, detailed, rehearsed and expected and anticipated roles, including their different costumes for different occasions, different intonations for different speeches, different faces for different greetings, and different irritations for different spilled ink or leaky pens. Following the script, however, is a duty to which each of them has been schooled and drilled for their whole lives. And, as for the public, we too have been schooled on what to expect from the ‘firm’ which is engaged in the death of its sovereign.

Words like duty, honour, humour, loyalty, family and faith in Jesus Christ, have all been echoed throughout the coverage. And naturally, their meaning, as abstracts, have all been heard and interpreted by each of the millions within earshot, in the way in which they have context and meaning for each person. At the heart of the whole funeral, grieving, supporting, and gratitude experience, is the relationship between ultimate realities of life and death. Linking those, in the Christian frame, are words and concepts and experiences of “belief” and “trust” and conscious awareness: “If we believe in God and in His Son, Jesus Christ, we shall not die”…is the summation of many of the theological notes uttered in the funeral ceremony in Westminster Abbey, earlier this morning.

Immortality, then, is implicit in those words. Another of the many numinous, ethereal, indescribable, unmeasureable, and rarefied notions of eternal life, linked intimately and intrinsically to a “meeting” with God,…. ‘we will meet again”….is both an expected notion accompanying any funeral liturgy. And underlying the promise of eternal life, is the expectation of belief and faith, and a life of discipline and worship and celebration of that faith.

So, we are witnessing an example of the historic and religious and faith “bridge” between human existence and a life beyond time and space, as we know them. And this example, embodied in the deceased queen, is testament to the durability, the credibility, the veracity, the validity and the truth of the Christian faith. Indeed, her life serves as evidence of the virtues and the rewards and the emulation and commitment of others, in this case, those engaged in the process, of the life of a Christian disciple. God-Queen-Country have been metaphorically married in both liturgy and in faith, as a path to personal and national and global righteousness…and also hopefully peace.

Noble, honourable, authentic, and worthy of our attention and our participation…even if we are not fully embracing the whole picture. A perfect performance, in terms of ceremony, liturgy, homiletics, and musicality, as well as military pageantry, can and does offer pictures of stability, hope, aspiration, and collaboration. And these images are not merely needed; they are essential to our individual, familial, social and cultural aspirations. However, just as we are spectators and participants, we are also conscious that underlying this pomp and ceremony, the beauty and the pageantry, there is a darker side, not only to the royal household, and to the body politic and to the world’s history, in which both the monarchy and the rest of us are also spectators and participants.

We hear about the brutal abuses of power by the British Empire, some of it endorsed and practiced by previous occupiers of the same throne as Elizabeth II. We also know that the knighted (Sir) John A. McDonald endorsed religious schools for indigenous children in Canada where violent and inexcusable crimes were committed in the name of the same God and Church as celebrated the life and death of Elizabeth II. And while we are fully engaged in the somber, sullen and grateful remembering of the virtues and the gifts of the deceased monarch, we are also fully aware that these are human beings, underneath those crowns and robes and rituals and liturgies, listening to those sacred readings and those sacred hymns, as are we.

And while the language and the authority and the apparent clarity of the words and the belief system in which they are contained and uttered, seem inscrutable, beyond argument, and of the highest purity and thereby ethical and moral virtue and veracity, they are, and cannot be construed as, “perfect” or “absolute” or dispositive (in the sense of fully resolving any controversy). These words, and both their denotative and their connotative meanings, whether in reading, chanting, singing or even in body language and attire, are essentially human attempts to search for, to reach for, to imagine and to attempt to incarnate what is considered by ordinary human minds and ordinary human spirits and hearts, the best and most complete depiction of God that the church fathers have delivered to us.

These words, and the liturgy in which they are embedded and delivered, are not and cannot be considered ultimate and final and indisputable and unexaminable and God-given notions and beliefs that command and demand universal adherence, obedience, submission or total exclusivity. They are “partial” in the sense that human beings, albeit honourable, ethical, diligent, studious and imaginative (mostly) men have arranged their thoughts and their convictions for us to integrate into our consciousness, and hopefully into our unconsciousness, both individual and collective.

And in so far as these words and the liturgies and the music hold us, and lift our spirits and embrace the fullness of our various and deep emotions, we are extremely grateful. And, we also know, and believe that our cognition, and our studies and our obedience to ritual and to liturgy and to tradition, while helpful and supportive, cannot be expected to be the exclusive and solitary expression of either the mind or the will of God. And while, for the first time since Henry VIII, a Roman Catholic Cardinal attended the funeral this morning, and while the Queen herself visited and worshipped in both the protestant cathedral in Edinburgh and then crossed the street to worship in the Roman Catholic cathedral immediately after, the remaining faith communities were not included in this funereal. Again, honourable and authentic, as a funeral service for the British monarch but partial, as is each and every human act by each and every human being, in each and every town and country in the world.

The churchs’ (faith communities in general) aspiration and incarnated attempts to present a perfect image of their faith, as if it were not only the best but the “one and only” way to God, remains unresolved this morning, while we watch the procession of vehicles moving to Windsor Castle, and the final service in St. George’s Chapel, and the burial in the royal vault, alongside Prince Phillip.

And it is the “unresolved” and the “partial” and the “imperfect” and the “limited” and the “mysterious” and the “unknowing” as the “infinity” and the “ultimate” and the “final word” to which we barely catch a glimpse, that humans are blessed with…and not with the absolutes to which we seem to addicted.

And, in that sense, even by raising the questions left unanswered, that by prodding us into the unknown, and into what life and death mean for each of us, and into the mystery of all searches for God, however we might conceive that deity to be and to exist or not, we have been invited and ushered into a space, a time, and an ethos with which most of us are decidedly unfamiliar.

There is a distinct difference between the chaos and the uncertainty about whether and if and how the war in Ukraine will end, for example, or the pandemic will slow, or global warming will be slowed or minimized and the uncertainty and the mystery of the relationship between humans and God. And we have to be conscious of those differences and not confuse or conflate our anxieties or our attitudes about the differences.

Faith, hope and charity are the ingredients on the menu of all world religions:

fear, despair and narcissism are on the menu of too many of the world’s power brokers.

And irrespective of which faith community we adopt or which one will have us, our human capacity to stretch to the light of faith, hope and charity is and has always been at the heart of the reign of this honoured and devoted monarch.

And for that the world is thankful.

Reflections on the parable of the Good Samaritan...

The Queen’s death, as does the birth and death of personages who are, by their stature, ‘larger than life,’ evokes public attention, scrutiny, grief and reflection. We pause, at a moment like this, and we pay attention, even if we are not in complete grasp of what it is that is happening, beyond the bare fact of the end of the life of a monarch, after nearly three-quarters of a century of her reign.

Queen’s, in the historic and traditional sense, are not a commodity, nor a rock star, nor a political legislator, but rather a somewhat ‘mythic’ and mystical figure, whose personal identity, while important, underlies her public persona. Every word, gesture, card, visit, public opening of hospital, factory, as well as each public disaster, if and when visited (think the burning of the apartment tower in London), are recorded for history by the encounter with the ‘crown’.

So, it is also, that people like the Governors General, and the Lieutenant’s General, representatives of Her Majesty, convey a hint, a glimmer, and a connection with and to the crown, as Her representatives in Canada, and our provinces. And yesterday, the former Governor General of Canada, David Johnston, was asked for his reflections on her passing. After the usual expressions of gratitude, and grief, and celebration, he launched into the Queen’s Christian faith, by way of the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

Detailing the Jew taken for dead in the ditch, and passed over by the priest and the Levite, while rescued by the Samaritan, a mortal enemy of the Jew, the former Governor General endorsed what he believed was the Queen’s adoption of the model of reaching out, not only to friends in difficulty, but also to one’s enemies, as the model guiding the Queen in her life and performance of her duties. And that ‘reading’ of the parable had been the long-standing and traditional interpretation of the famed biblical story from the New Testament, for centuries. Valid, honourable, somewhat challenging and clearly, worthy of monarchs and her subjects around the world. It exhorts each of us to consider whether and how we might regard those less fortunate among us, if we were to ‘look’ through the lens of this interpretation of the story. And for most of us in the west, the ‘ideal’ so embedded in the Good Samaritan story has been the beacon guiding the governments and the social and conventional wisdom for centuries. Indeed, whether and how governments have lived up to that ideal has, in part, been the benchmark by which those governments have been measured by their publics. Similarly, Christian churches too, have been held to a standard of ‘care’ that uses the metaphor of the Good Samaritan as both a teaching moment as well as a guiding principle of social justice ministry. For young people in church education programs, and their teachers, the lesson has been considered ‘integral’ to many if not most curricula. And, for that history and tradition, we can all be grateful. It does call us to reach out in compassion, care and hopefully empathy. In fact, the Greek word ‘agape’ (the fatherly love of God for humans, and the reciprocal love for God) has been one of the guiding beacons of Christian theology, based at least in part on this interpretation of the parable.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, a group of scholars, known by the name, The Jesus Seminar, studied the New Testament from the perspective of a variety of academic disciplines including linguistic, historic, systemic theology, anthropologic, and revisited the many stories and parable in the New Testament. One of their focuses was on the parable of The Good Samaritan, and one of their members, John Kloppenberg, who taught at Saint Michael’s College at the University of Toronto, brought some of their insights into his classes. Rather than hold to the historic interpretation of the parable, these scholars offered a very different ‘take’ on the story. For them, the figure of Christ was embodied, not so much by the Samaritan, but by the Jew taken for dead in the ditch. Passed over, rejected, abandoned, and left to die by those whose professed lives, the priest and the Levite (representing Old Testament prophets, a lesser class of priests, did chores at the temple), the Jew lying destitute in the ditch, for the Jesus Seminar, (and following them, for their students), the ‘revised’ version of the parable carries a far different message and theme.

If the Christian life is envisioned as a disciplined emulation of the life of Jesus Christ, then, it is not only through the love of one’s enemies (Samaritan for Jew) that exhorts us to consider. It is also to consider the place, the condition and the implications of the “taken for dead Jew”…the completely broken and abandoned one, that lies at the heart of the theology, when viewed from this perspective.

And the two perspectives, while not absolutely incompatible, require considerable adaptability both of mind and heart, from the pilgrim. Think for a moment, about how the official realm of our churches and our culture has attempted to incarnate the traditional interpretation, without considering the revised perspective. Think for a moment about how that traditional view of extending care by an enemy for a desperate person (family, town, nation) has been held up as an emblem of ethical and moral and spiritual heroism, evocative of the kind of love (agape) that we all aspire to express. And think about the ‘extrinsic’ and transactional features of that interpretation. And then, pause to reflect on the second vision of the parable, that expresses a very different model of spiritual “abandonment” and “rejection” and a form of death that lies in the ditch with the Jew…as the metaphor for Christ. In this view, one’s own life, ‘ditched’ by and in whatever manner that might be, determined by whomever and whatever circumstances that seemed beyond one’s control, is the subject of the perspective.

And if we are to parse at little further, this view of the Christian faith is less about “transacting” a kind, generous, empathic ‘good deed’ for someone in difficulty, than it is about ‘becoming’ that abandoned, rejected, ‘taken for dead’ posture of the Jew. And think for a moment about how that interpretation would radically shift our perceptions, attitudes and real comprehension of those whose lives have been ‘left for dead’ in the ditches of our towns and cities and neighbourhoods.

We hear phrases from indigenous peoples, about ‘walking a mile in another’s mocassins’ if we are to get to know the other. And such mantras are both helpful and also somewhat easily passed over. Too often, we hear people say, “I know just how you feel!” when they have no comprehension of the totality or the depth of the feelings of desperation of the person whom they are addressing. We may want to express support and through something like identification with the other, we are attempting to offer our support. And yet, what does it mean to “walk a mile in another’s mocassins’ if not actually to “be” (through the time-sensitive, deliberate, imaginative and poetic identity in the details of the other’s moment). And to “be” that other person is an act that reaches way beyond the act of giving care, of providing sustenance, of enacting a program that seeks to help….(even if it is also a hand-up and not a hand-out).

And herein lies the challenge for each of us, not merely to engage in a public act of generosity, kindness, compassion and agape, but to take the time, to breach the threshold of the door that separates our lives from the lives of those ‘taken for dead’ in the ditch, as an act of the imagination. And in the moments and the hours in which we engage in the discipline of seeing and feeling and hearing and weeping as we enter the space of the ‘taken for dead in the ditch’, our lives with or without our consciousness, or our wills or our consent, change.

The notion that we are “social” creatures has so many layers of meaning that we have barely begun to scratch the surface of our potential for relationship. We have, it would appear, fallen into the spectre of ‘giving, writing cheques, volunteering for a worthy cause, and for ‘transacting’ models of rescue that pervade our culture. And while many of those causes, agencies, and organizations, both for profit and not-for-profit, have honourable and worthy goals, they rely on a transactional exchange of time for service.

And what is too often missing is our deeper and inner selves, in and through the very demanding, challenging and even mountain-top (or valley bottom) encounter with the totality of being lost, abandoned, re-and de-jected, and we view this state as the ultimate one to be avoided and protected against at all costs. And, part of our resistance, denial and avoidance of ‘going there’ is our attitudes to death…the state and circumstance of Queen Elizabeth II, whose passing evokes tears and sadness, along with gratitude and leadership of a kind seldom seen these days.

It is not a ‘death-wish’ to identify with the Jew in the ditch. It is rather an opportunity to go where our culture, and even for some, their faith, does not expect or require them to consider ‘going’. And, it might be possible to transcend the level of violence, hatred, bigotry, contempt and derision that stalks both our public and our private lives, if we were open to seeing both interpretations of the parable of the Good Samaritan without regarding one as superior or inferior to the other.

After all, who among us can say with conviction that we know the absolutely correct version of the story? And who among us would not welcome an opportunity to reflect upon and to dialogue about two seemingly different versions of a story we have all been familiar with for decades, without any of us having to recede into the false safety and security of being absolutely ‘right’ in our views and in our theology.

Is both-and even among those concepts we might tolerate today?

One wonders how the former Governor General would respond to the juxtaposition of the two interpretations of the parable. 

Testing the waters (again) of archetypal psychology...

 Public discourse, including the cataract of words in mass media, is focussed primarily on the extrinsic, empirical and observable data in any given situation, always seeking some kind of meaning or purpose, motive or implication of the act/word/attitude/bill/photo or whatever.

Actions, especially those actions that have a big sound, a big impact, a tragic or a romantic impact, are the things of public notice, public reflection, public journalism, political rhetoric, and the debates around those issues, dominate our consciousness and our watercoolers.

Numbers of dollars, numbers of refugees, numbers of missiles, drones, cancelled flights, pandemic deaths, numbers and dimensions of forest fires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes…these are apparently the benchmarks of our achievement and our worst fears, hightest aspirations and dreams. Even the degrees of temperature (heat or cold) and the number of inches of precipitation have a significant impact on many of our decisions.

As our ‘technical capacity’ to measure, record, and then both store and curate things we call ‘data points’ has exploded exponentially, we have dived even more deeply into the multiple rivers of data where the rivers themselves have also evolved more and more into threatening eddies, whirlpools and under-currents. Those who have official, public and disclosed information abut those who have a completely different vault of data, on the inside, that is classified, secret, and proprietary, at least to those who have the clearances to be trusted with this bank of information.

And so public debates have shifted from the relative importance and relevance of specific ideas of how government, for example, best spends public money, to what are the  legitimate facts, opinions, emotions and manipulations in any situation. Opposing sides, both official and informal, now have become engaged in the validation of their ‘unique’ and ‘truthful’ verification of the facts….and most of those justifications amount to little more than the collision of dramatically exclusive opinions that are designed to manipulate their “base”.

Indeed, we have replaced a public discourse about ideas on how to govern with a flood of incendiary and fact-devoid utterances designed, at least in the radical right, to inflame, to incite and to foment what is perceived as a repressed volcano of residual anger, frustration, bitterness and alienation. And while there is some validity in the acknowledgement of residual anger and resentment, many of those who pander to this most base and nefarious political well-spring, are attempting to manipulate the votes of the dispossessed for their own retention and/or acquisition of power.

Underlying the words and attitudes, perceptions and beliefs of the forces representing the radical right and those attempting to hold the ground for the moderates and the left are mythical figures in their collective unconscious about which the public and the participants themselves are either unaware or wish to keep secret.

My tentative view is that, for the most part, they and the public are largely unaware, unconscious of the “gods” that undergird the worldviews and the approaches on both sides.

 “A God is a manner of existence, an attitude toward existence and a set of ideas….A God forms our subjective vision so that we see the world according to its ideas. A Saturn will shape order slowly overtime, so the puer eternus (eternal boy), winged and fiery, will turn matter into spirit-quick now, here now, said the bird.’   The child will see the future in each event and thereby force its coming, while each of the Goddesses will form a distinctly different vision of relationship, nurture and interiority….(S)ince ideas present archetypal visions, I do not ever truly have ideas; they have hold, contain, govern me. Our wrestling with ideas is a sacred struggle, as with an angel: our attempts to formulate, a ritual activity to propitiate the angel. The emotions that ideas arouse are appropriate, and authentic, too, is our sense of being a victim of ideas, humiliated before their grand vision, our lifetime devotion to them and the battles we must fight on their behalf.” (James Hillman, Revisioning Psychology, p. 130)
Also from Revisioning Psychology, we read:

“The liberating hero sees repression everywhere, while the old king sees the very same events as order, duty, and tradition. He has a different role to play in events because he has a different idea; both role and idea are archetypally governed…..So too might we proceed with basic psychological ideas about the nature of soul: that the soul is a harmony or a multiple and varied unity, that it is born in sin, that it is divine and immortal, that it is a quest for meaning or self-knowledge, that its essence is life and warmth, that its essence is death, that it is structured in three or more parts which enjoy a psychomachia in strife of oppositions, that it is in enigmatic relations with the body, that it is fundamentally like air or water or a vaporous mixture of them.”(p.126-7)

Conversation seems to be saturated with feelings about various projections onto specific individuals, a loathing and contempt for trump and his MAGA crowd, and a hatred and vilification of Biden and democrats. People who retain some hope and trust and moderate view that the extremes will eventually burn themselves out are a diminishing breed. We are in a situation in which the rhetoric itself, including each word, the timing and the staging of each public utterance, is weaponized, and the public is left with the cynical and desperate task of discerning which side each spokesperson is on in what is projected as an existential war of elimination. It is not rocket science to observe that in many ways the model of thought, idea and action of radical Palestinians to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, and Israelis attempt to continue to exist and to forge a future in the face of such an existential threat has been transposed onto the political landscape in America and beyond.

Analogous to the elimination of Israel are those in the radical right who, in their attempt to gain permanent control of the levers of power, seek to block immigration, who seek to preserve a ‘national’ racial and ethnic purity on their national turf, who seek to retreat from globalization and its perceived unfairness and who reject the open border-open ideas-open opportunity melding of the most desperate with those already established, and who see opportunity in a world that tries to work together on global issues to the degree that such a posture is feasible.   

Behind and driving these gestalts, we hear words of fear, exclusion, white supremacy, racism, exploitation and nationalism, however they might be defined by whoever is taking leadership positions. The spectre of a violent incursion from outside imposing devastation on the allegedly innocents within, while focused directly on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, hangs over much of the perception elsewhere, as if it were a parallel process. Will China invade Taiwan? Will global warming and climate change finally wipe out millions of people, crops, species and resources? Will economic disparity generate such scarcity that food supplies will be so costly that many will be unable to survive? Will some “accident” of incompetence, willfulness, design or complicity trigger something that ignores national or even regional borders without a co-ordinated and meliorating and neutralizing response?

The internal, reflective and untameable conflicts within each of us about what and whom to trust, what and whom to listen to, what and whom to believe and what shared goals to invest our time and energy in….these interior questions that seem to stretch our capacity to cope, are the questions we are all having to include in our secret lives.

And the manner of our perception, and the manner of the embrace of these “gods” (as it were), is as important as the side to which we consent to join. AS Hillman continues to instruct:

(But) psychology cannot be one department among others, since the psyche is not a separate branch of knowledge. The soul is less an object of knowledge than it is a way of knowing the object, a way of knowing knowledge itself. Prior to any knowledge are the psychic premises that make knowledge possible at all. Most disciplines try, as Jung says, ‘to forget their archetypal explanatory principles, that is, the psychic premises that are the sine qua non of the cognitive process.’ These premises keep knowledge humbly situated within the psychic precincts, where it is linked with all the follies of human subjectivity, the ironies of pathology, but also in the imaginative richness of the soul. These psychic premises, or ‘inalienable components of the empirical world-picture’ as Jung calls them, are a discomfort to the intellectual spirit, which would think them away in order to have intellectus purus (Augustine), ‘pure act’ (Aquinas), ‘pure reason’(Kant), ‘pure being’(Hegel), ‘pure logic’ (Husserl), ‘pure prehension’ (Whitehead), or ‘pure science’…..The archetype is a psychic premise with many heads: one we see in our dream imagery, another in emotion and in symptoms, another styles our behaviour and preferences, while still another appears in our mode of thought….Psychologizing sees through what is taught; it is a learning beyond any teaching. If psychology can be learned everywhere, then it has no field of its own. Rather it is a perspective on all field, parasitical to all  fields, drawing from everything in the universe for its insights…(as Jung said in his Terry lectures), the psyche is both the object of psychology and also its subject. (Revisioning Psychology, p.131-133)

This “lens” in and through which we all ‘see’ and ‘interpret’ and ‘base’ our observations, if we are to open our embrace to its ‘calling’ is not a political ideology, a religious or theological ideology, an economic ideology, or even a literary criticism ideology. Nor is it an empirical, materialistic ideology. Indeed, it seems to transcend all ideologies, as well as all personalities, and their personas, and, like an ever-flowing river flows in and through everything we see and think and say and do, whether or not we are conscious of its existence/significance/reality or not.

And, if, as Hillman asserts, that it is only by reading a life backwards, reflecting upon the situations, people, activities and beliefs and perceptions in which each of us was engaged, only then can we become even modestly and tentatively clear which “gods” had us in their embrace.

For example, the liberating hero will, does and always has ‘seen’ repression everywhere, as integral to his/her romantic notion of a role to liberate those enduring such repression. The notion of ‘chaos’ has obvious connection with the old king archetype which considers tradition, stability and order a very high value, and seeks to preserve it.

Rather than a conventional perception of brokenness, needing to be unified into a coherent, stable and therefore respectable human being, through some form of ‘fixing’ in therapy, through prescriptions, or through some form of re-programming, archetypal psychology, it seems to this amateur scribe, to prefer to look for, to open to and to acknowledge the ‘gods’ in whose embrace we are/were/will be held, as an integral discernment of our human existence.

Rather than circumscribe human behaviour as needing either a legal or a medical intervention, as a starting place, we might look more closely and also sensitively, as which archetypes might be undergirding the various situations in which we humans are engaged. For example, if the archetype of the crucifixion is central to the religion, is it not conceivable and even probable that such an act would be feasible if a Christ figure were projected onto a specific individual…and such an archetypal perspective might have considerable implications for a religion whose followers are unaware of and unconscious of such a dynamic?

From this perspective, our headlines and our public discourse seem like tepid tea, while we engage in heated rhetorical scorched earth conflict that pit one kind of archetype (perhaps the Old King) against the romantic hero, as an example, without acknowledging that such engagements are both necessary and inevitable. And if we were to step back, could we dilute the white heat, the contempt, and the utter disdain for ‘the other’ regardless of whom that other might be to us?