Cactus Juice

Of Grace: Invited, Accepted, and Spurned

Mt. Calvary Monastery from Santa Barbara Sacred Spaces.

After reading The Prior's Column for the last few months, I feel more acutely the pain of his community upon the loss of their Mt. Calvary Monastery.  The sudden disruption of the prior's was similar to the shock of suddenly reading the words of Chuck's wife Carren after having read his nearly-daily posts.  Chuck had been badly injured in Iraq.  It's the personal that is personal.

Last week, The Story aired a show (link to audio of the show and photos of the individuals) about a heart transplant.  The father of the young woman who died was a surgeon himself, and it was he that laid his brain-dead daughter on the operating table to have her heart removed.  As the transplant surgeon recounted his observation of the father's final act, I immediately burst out sobbing.  Not tears, sobbing.  Tears now, remembering the story again.  The girl who received the transplant (and her sister- both had a heart disease that required them to obtain transplants) are active for transplants and blood donation.  For them it is very, very personal.

Ah so, the Bill Ayers interview on Fresh Air.  I didn't know anything about him, except that somehow he got himself from terrorist to intelligentsia without hardly a moment of shame.  The absence of shame was primary to the interview.  Ayers is quite slick.  He enrages people with his slickness, and he enraged me with his misdirection of contingency.  When challenged to admit that he made a poor choice, perhaps even an evil choice, in terrorizing his own nation, he turns it back on the questioner and the listener in the format of "He that is without sin among you..." But that is what Jesus said (John 8:7), and Jesus said it precisely because he was perfect.  Contingency is not nihilism.

Ayers either has to justify himself, or he does not.  That is for him to decide, and my argument for his sake is that he should choose the latter.  But to dabble in the rhetoric of justification only to tell your audience that they are unworthy to judge both insults the audience and takes something precious away from yourself.  Demanding that the audience humble themselves to the level of your own debasement reduces everyone.  Asking the audience for mercy both calls them to mercy (something they cannot give without humility, as it happens) and provides you the opportunity to obtain mercy.  It transforms sneaking around in the night sowing destruction into an experience of grace.

Ayers' choice not to give himself this experience is surely a more complex psychology than can be heard in one radio interview, but in the interview one way that he did break the personal link between the listener and himself is to reiterate over and over again that he did not kill.  This is the point upon which he removes himself from communion, from community, with his listener.  Unfortunately it is surely not even true:  Ayers' over-sized home kills, the rest of his bloated Hyde Park lifestyle kills, and when Bill Ayers' bomb knocked out air support communication in Vietnam for a day it is possible that not only that did Ayers kill but that you can find exactly the names of who he killed on a big black wall in Washington, D.C.

After Ayers tells me that he is nothing like me, that to form community with me is to reduce himself to association with people less than himself, people who are murderers, he calls me to repentance.  Ayers spoke of the irony of a police officer driving past his home and holding up his book about his former underground life.  He didn't seem to note the irony of the officer seeking his approval from the street for reading his book while Ayers himself stood enthroned in his mansion.  A mansion that exists in the American community.  A community that I am a part of.  Malcolm X is one of history's greatest examples of the power of repentance.  Jesus is history's greatest example of communion, where God forms community with many.  In these acts, they acquire a moral authority that Ayers does not have.  They also acquire an ethical justification, a true peace, which Ayers denies himself.

One of the first posts I read in The Prior's Column was about a cruise ship and a certain kind of pleasure in trotting out his white habit for a dressy meal.  I don't understand monks on cruises, but I do understand the pleasure of the unexpected and of being the unexpected yourself.  Br. Mudge tells the story in his own joy; he is sharing, giving.  Chuck, at the moment, expresses himself with an edge.  His blog used to be subtitled "life and observations from the pointy end of the spear" and now he's amended to "not-so-pointy end."  The experience of being a reader has been the reverse, but in the present roughness he continues to put himself out there to interact with the world as he might find it.  And in doing so he also creates his own kind of grace.*

On The Story, host Dick Gordon asked heart transplant recipient Liz Carpenter directly whether she felt any guilt for being alive.  Implicit in the question is whether she needs our forgiveness, as listeners, for being alive.  She hadn't asked for it, because she does not need it.  She said that she has never felt guilt and she attributes this to the special relationship she has with the donor family.  She has mercy from the people that matter; her story that started with a young woman near death and the bodily destruction of another on a dark highway has also ended in grace.

The Mt. Calvary Monetary website currently opens to a scene of flames and the following verse:

My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking in nothing. (James 1:2-4)

Endurance not only by ourselves, but as these Benedictines surely know, endurance that in community truly has the ability to overcome all things and to lack nothing.

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*And gives you a chance to as well: Part of Chuck's injuries involved damage to his hands.  He has become active with Project Valour-IT, a charity that provides laptops to injured soldiers, and voice-controlled laptops to soldiers with hand injuries.  Donate here.

Danger All About, and a Pit Underfoot

It is an axiom of psychology that a person will maneuver those around her to experience the same emotions she does.  It can provide useful information if you are sitting in a meeting and unexpectedly become angry or anxious- that's a good time to take a step back and assess what is going on across the desk.  It can also be dangerous- mental health care workers can absorb the angst of their patients; those who surround the mentally ill can begin to exhibit similar symptoms even though they are "well."

I've always taken this concept as good wisdom for difficult interpersonal interactions and as useful in business.  Just one more factoid of the "self-help" and "business motivation" category.  Until I tangled with a distressing world view and fell into a pit of despair a few blog posts ago.  It has become painfully clear that I am not hopeful because it is a natural personality trait, or because I have some inborn moral goodness, insofar as hopefulness is moral, but because I stand too near the pit to be anything else.

Meanwhile, Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist saw this principle at work in the events of 9/11.  His novel weave together the dangers of losing one's soul in the interplay between east and west, between one fundamentalism and it's homonym, while at the same time exposing his character to the psychology of the west.  It isn't just the religious zealot that has fundamentalism, and it isn't just the suicide bomber that has necrophilia.

Hamid's protagonist leaves the end of the book deeply scarred, at best.  It is a terrifying warning in a world where the best hope for peace is claimed to be dialog and where the best hope for truth is claimed to be dialectic.  It has been a crashing realization for me that dialog is personally dangerous.  Though even the love-your-neighbor ethic of the New Testament recognizes this and gives precise advice on drawing the line, it is a line that is scoffed at in modern society.  This is not how we do things, because this is not what we believe.

As I fell into the pit, none of rather puzzled friends (How was it that you fell?) that reached out to me could break my fall.  I ended up a mashed up mess, with doctors buzzing over me and propping me up.  Now I look around to a universe that is completely different from what I thought it was.  The lesson I could have learned on 9/11 was squelched by a dozen peace marches and by the blind eye I turned to retribution cloaked in the ethics of justice.  Instead I was shoved off a cliff through the dull everyday experiences of my individual life.  What is this place?  Either it is much more horrible than I had imagined, or my soul will be rehabilitated by those kind friends that gather around me even now and who can only be imagined in the future.  My best guess is some combination of the two.

As promised, I've recently picked up the first volume of Arthur Koestler's  autobiographical work, Arrow in the Blue. In it, he refers to the personal dialectic that he discovered as a young child facing terrifying medical procedures:

...I have learned to outwit my obsessions and anxieties--or at least to come to a kind of modus vivendi with them.  To arrive at an amicable arrangement with one's neuroses sounds like a contradiction in terms--yet I believe that it can be achieved, provided one accepts one's complexes and treats them with respectful courtesy, as it were, instead of fighting them and denying their existence.  It is my profound believe that man has the power to pull himself by his own hair out of the mire.  The Baron in the Bog [a children's story that helped Koestler through his troubles]... has become for me both a symbol and a profession of  faith. (p. 53)

The only hope in this horrible world is that an individual can experience the sanity of one-truth and wholeness in herself.  By pulling the dialectic into herself, she turns it into oneness in her one being.  (That is seconds away from the atheism of much of existential thought, but it doesn't have to be.)  Back to the work of the individual-  Koestler wrote:

The path of excess does not always lead to the palace of wisdom, as Blake held; but there can be as much harmony and rhythm in the oscillations of a pendulum from one extreme to the other as in the turning of a wheel on smooth bearings. (p. 63)

There is a reason to engage the world with openness: to gather up all the dialectic that is possible.  Indeed, people who do that appear considerably more sane (and whole) than those who chose to embody one side of it.  It is true that the dangers are greater than I had understood, but perhaps the final possibilities for personal wholeness are as well.  In the oneness that is a human consciousness, there is the possibility of final synthesis.  It may be only the individual, and not the totality of earthbound interplay, that can have truth.  The unrelentingly damaging and dangerous world of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is not my world.  There is not only truth, but also happiness, out there for me yet.

Truthfulness, today.

One thing that being married to someone who was born and raised in another country taught me is that cultural differences are real.  It's peculiar that people tend to come back from my ex-husband's native land talking about all the ways they were ripped off, while my ex and his compatriots come to America and spend their first few years having the same experience.  It was a full time job getting my ex's money back from the get-rich-quick schemes, the car repair shops, even a dentist!  And just when I thought I had it under control along came the warning letter from the Postmaster about a pyramid letter.

My ex came from an over-populated and under-resourced country where you get ahead or you die.  Getting ahead by your wits is okay, and getting ahead by using your wits on American tourists is even better.  The people who do so are then hurt and baffled when the Americans think that something unfair has happened.  Americans are so rich and so successful, how is it possible for them to be so stupid as to fall for my tricks, and then to not only be stupid but to blame me for it?

Upon arriving in America, these wily foreigners are told that things don't work the same way in this country.  In this country, we have very strict laws and a culture of fairness.  Honesty is valued.  It appears to be a totally different landscape and so the same person who had an appropriate level of caution in his home country becomes an easy mark in America.

How is it that we view other cultures as less truthful than our own, when our own culture falls so far short?  Definition of truthfulness is central.  For example, if a pharmaceutical company advertises that a drug is 80% effective at treating a chronic condition after three months of use, we expect that to be absolutely true.  What if the drug is only 70% effective at four months, is it still true?  In general, we would say yes.  What if the drug is only 5% effective at four months?  At that point, we start to think we've been lied to, even though the statement itself is still true.  A statement being true in and of itself is not enough for it to meet our cultural standard of truthfulness.  We expect more out of truthfulness.  Or, as Bill Clinton said while evading truthfulness, "It depends on what the definition of 'is' is."

Apparently a Pennsylvania college professor has decided to take his own dabble into the subject of American truthfulness in The Ethics of the Lie.  I came across this bookforum review via Arts and Letters Daily just as I was saddened to watch Andrew Sullivan's credibility wilt in his London Times article on the topic of Sarah Palin.  Reading some other reviews that were more about the book made the book seem potentially dull, but the bookforum review remains a delightful little conversation starter and reminded me of my interest in the topic.

One of my primary influences in discovering what I think truthfulness means is the philosopher Douglas N. Walton, who has written an excellent series of books on argumentation and logic (and, as an aside, a fabulous book titled Courage: A Philosophical Investigation which I would encourage anyone to read).  What I discovered reading his books is that first of all truthfulness takes a considerable investment of time.  Truthfully imparting information requires a commitment to time in dialog which I realized I do not have even for my best friends.  And that pharmaceutical company?  If they are going to tell me the truth they need to give me the entire dose response curve and also I have to pay attention.  Neither of those things are going to happen.

Putting a deadline on communication is the deathblow to truthfulness.  A thirty-second advertisement is either art or a lie- it is more about all the things it does not and cannot say than about the one thing it chooses to say.  Chat rooms are doomed from the start.  And election day brings out the very worst.

Truthfulness comes in the context of other values.  The heroes that march up the steps of congress to blow the whistle on some particular nefarious action represent a certain kind of ethical failure- the only moral good left is truth.  I think we a Americans have a very difficult time seeing that.  For us, the person with nothing but truthfulness left is seen as a kind of a saint rather than a crazed zealot who could not possibly have actual truth.  When someone makes a career of promoting truthfulness after one of these appearances, they have cut themselves free of ethics.  Ethics is the balance of values against each other- truthfulness, but also things like compassion, courage and loyalty.  If you could have them all in perfect harmony, there would be no need for ethics.  When only one exists, ethics is dead.

I find the bumper sticker "Well behaved women seldom make history," now the title of a book by the originator of the phrase, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, particularly repellent.  It is exactly well-behaved women- Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jane Addams, to name a few of my heroes- who have made history.  I should add Gandhi, Malcolm X and Rosa Parks as heroic, regardless of gender.  They exhibited commitment, and also dignity.  Two attributes required to carry truth. (Apparently Dr. Ulrich cites some of the same examples in her book and book reviewers have pointed out the same conflict.)

I admit to taking those values and then finding myself at a loss on precisely what I am supposed to do with them.  The issue always comes down to time.  Last week a crazed woman screamed at me in a parking garage.  My options were to ignore her, which was really the reason she was screaming at me to start with, or to engage her in a longer conversation about what was going on, which neither of us had time for and which, in the state of decompensation she had arrived at, would have likely resulted in her getting arrested.  The "ignore" choice had dignity (for both of us), but it did not have commitment and it did not have truth.  I'm still working on this.

(This post approved by the ex-husband discussed.)

Gaia and the Sweet Girl

To describe what I've learned about the "sweet girl" it is necessary to go back to the beginning... of time!

To a Mother Earth that birthed us all, to a Goddess Gaia that fed us on her bounty.  And then onward to a Hebrew God that killed the Goddess to become the judge of all, but took human form and in infancy was nursed by a simple woman of Judea, the Mary to whom many still appeal to make merciful intersession on their behalf.

Romantically, blind justice is portrayed in female form.  But realistically, judgment in the Western world is masculine.  Certain parts of the east may cut off a woman's genitals or prevent her feet from forming, but in the West we cut off her reason.

Gaia is harsh on mankind; we must work for our bread, and even then we may well starve.  She does not suffer fools gladly: they die; or they are maimed and then they die.  This is the warm embrace we seek??

The JudeoChristian God is more rational.  He judges us on our thoughts and on the intent of our actions.  If we suffer, it is for our own good, or it is the creation of Satan.  Or so the story goes.  It is to this kind of judgment that the Western world submits.

And yet, despite the masculanization of judgment, it is the judgment of women that is sought out.  It is commonly recognized that women respond to the judgments of women- they dress, eat, drive and date that which other women will approve.

It is less commonly recognized that men respond to the judgments of women.  Certainly the image of the man dressing for work each morning, living for the validation from his wife that he is a good provider is common enough.  But there are some others: Think of the man who asks/encourages his female co-workers to comment on his outfit.  Think of the drunken husband who begs his wife to tell him he's a good man anyway.  I have male friends who call me to confess (their word) various indiscretions: a one-night stand, a rant in an airport, driving home drunk.

What makes me the proper recipient of a confession?  It is that I am female.  I am meant not to apply any (masculine) reasonable judgment.  I am meant to embrace.

Not as Gaia embraces.  Everyone knows that the Goddess isn't as kind as we've made her out to be.  The opposite of justice may be mercy, but there is logic that makes mercy feminine.  The opposite of reason, which has been made masculine, is chaos, and chaos has been left to the feminine.  Who would subject themselves to a judgment rooted in chaos?!  Only someone who thought the feminine had been subdued millenia ago.  Only someone who wanted to lay in a field of daisies under the sunshine.  Only someone who felt certain that a woman could be counted on to be "sweet."

That which the Goddess has wrought is not so sweet.  Poverty, disease, disorder- of course, all of these are meant to be absorbed by a sweet woman.  Woman is chaos; woman is the barrier to contain chaos.  The woman who fails to be sweet fails to be feminine- and there will be no shortage of enraged men and censorious women who will tell her so.

A few sociological studies to call upon:  A woman who is equally assertive as a male peer is seen as gruff and abrasive, even aggressive.  I recall one time having an issue at a gas station (I don't recall the specifics) and very calmly and evenly stating to the attendant what the problem was and the solution I expected.  He was beside himself telling me to calm down.  It was, in a word, insane.  I work well with others, so I rarely have this interaction, I know that as a woman flirting is required first, then business.

To continue with the sociology:  Obese women are supposed to be "jolly;" those of average temperament are seen as unhappy or ill-tempered.  Ah, the obese woman.  We are, quite often, "sweet."  I believe that there is a correlation between sweetness and obesity, but it is different from the BBC image of the cheerful rotund woman.  The sweet girl has been asked to personify an insanity, and she has done it.  But she cannot tolerate the assault on her humanity, and so she eats.

Regaining full humanity as a rational equal is not easy.  It comes in fits and stutters, sometimes with outbursts of aggression as assertiveness is sought and overshot.  Sometimes with bizarre apologies for assertiveness.  And sometimes insanity lingers- when a women finds it necessary to explain how assertive or aggressive she is, it is almost certain that she is neither.

This last point is of most concern.  If a woman thinks she has been assertive or aggressive, and yet nothing about her world has changed, it is a confusion.  Should she just eat?  Should she just be "sweet"?  It is of vital importance that women support other women, first, in sanity.  We should not label something assertive that isn't- "I'm sorry dear, you did what you could but it had no effect."  No!!  Assertiveness is like prayer- it always changes something even if that something is you.  An assertive woman is a hopeful woman, ready to face the world as it really is.

P.S.

*Everything I've said about assertiveness of course also applies to men.  But a mousy man is much more like to be called out with a dose of reality.  It is women who are fed insanity and thrown in the "sweet girl" brier patch.

*Hugo Schwyzer, gender studies professor,  recently wrote a blog post titled "'I'm not like the others': Nice Guys, self-flattery, and the myth of uniqueness" which was the second in a set of two posts on the topic.  One aspect of his review of the topic is the nice guy that seeks female approval of his uniqueness in the form of romantic love, and the rage that follows when he is not give it.  Hugo isn't talking about men seeking out women as judges, but it's right there.

And then this post on asking his female student to keep a list of when the say "yes" when perhaps they should have said "no."  He calls it "people pleasing," but isn't that just all about the Sweet Girl?

Strength as a Barrier to the Human and the Humane

To be Freudian about it, entitlement in infantile.  We all at some point make the transition from a world where our every whim is met as quickly as possible into that era when we first hear "no" and find that our behavior is judged and sometimes disliked.  To interact with this new reality of the world, we as toddlers become something else from what we were as infants.

If we did not change, we would be immortals.  Not God, in his perfection, but demons.  Unable to comprehend either limitation and differentiation, our only possible output would be destruction.  It is because of our imperfection that we are human; it is because of the process of becoming that we are humane.  Empathy for the "other" comes from the internal experience of seeing previous iterations of oneself as othered.

In 12-step, there is a saying that "it is weakness that brought us together," usually followed by a statement about the strength found in unity.  In the New Testament, "For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many mighty, nor many noble, are called: But God hatch chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty..." (1 Corinthians 1:26-27)

It has been my observation that errors in thought or behavior generally come from weakness, but the power to play them out in reality come from strength.  As a little demon or as a big demon, destructive only to oneself or to others, destruction is an expression of power.  It is strength that leaves one feeling entitled to destroy and having the ability to destroy; whether that destruction is for good or ill is another matter.

Breaking through strength, true change, generally seems to require two things 1) a profound, often shattering, experience in reality, (something equal in strength to that original toddler trauma) and 2) enough commitment to reality to obtain what one might call sanity.

It is truly possible to ignore almost any experience of reality.  An example: the parent who continues to punish their child in exactly the same way for a behavior that continues.  One more example:  A couple of years ago Hamid Karzai, the President of Afghanistan, was nearly killed when he ventured out into the community to attend the wedding of a relative.  As almost the only person who is sustainable as the leader of Afghanistan at this time, his death would be disaster to the wellbeing of the nation.  A report asked if, considering his importance, it was irresponsible of him to go out of the presidential residence.  His reply: "It's not dangerous."  Not a philosophical discussion of the dangers, of the possibility that it is important for him not to be a prisoner in his residence (a possible argument), but simply "It's not dangerous."  Denial of the reality that he had recently been inches away from death.

It is nearly impossible to voluntarily give up strength. And thus we honor those who do: Baba Amte, Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama and of course the God-concept displayed in the story of Jesus Christ.

As someone with a fundamentally existentialist outlook, my commitment is that individuals must survive off their strength.  The only thing that can regulate that, and allow for continued growth, is a radical commitment to reality.  Yet, as I become both stronger and less exposed to the possibility of shattering experiences (as an economically self-sufficient adult, in America, the danger of entitlement is extreme), even commitment to reality may not be enough to save me from myself.

Over the week I had several opportunities to observe destructive, entitled, strength.  A few of these situations requested my input, and I found that there was absolutely nothing to say.  I could not think of any philosophy, any novel, any work of art that could break through entitlement.

I am of course in the same boat in my entitlement, a horrifying fact.  The first thought tends to be that the othering of the self is what is fundamental to the experience of alienation.  Is it really?  There is an alienating othering of the self that is pathological.  I'll be writing about a version of it later this week as I discuss the "sweet girl."  But it is entitlement that creates alienation from humanity, from reality and, in that it disables the possibility of growth, from hope.