[9/1995] Today I was walking across Claiborne Street to my office at the medical school (a narrow ‘closet’ with no windows, the only option on the Ob/Gyn Department’s main hallway) when I passed policemen walking three kids around the corner. The kids – who looked to be 12-14 years old – were handcuffed. The last of the three kids and I locked eyes for a few seconds. My oldest daughters turned thirteen a few weeks ago.
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Fragment -- #36
[9/1995] Today I was walking across Claiborne Street to my office at the medical school (a narrow ‘closet’ with no windows, the only option on the Ob/Gyn Department’s main hallway) when I passed policemen walking three kids around the corner. The kids – who looked to be 12-14 years old – were handcuffed. The last of the three kids and I locked eyes for a few seconds. My oldest daughters turned thirteen a few weeks ago.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Fragment -- #35
[8/1895] “He was a god-damned saint” – the comment of a friend of a former undercover policeman who (the latter) had left the police force to set up a sheltering ‘ranch’ for abused kids on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain (i.e., the K-Bar-B Ranch). He died at age forty-nine of a heart attack.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Fragment -- #34
[8/1995] Reflections on ‘engaged silence’ as a way to describe a ‘non-religious’ approach to spirituality and ethics:
Why ‘silence’? Because of the quietness and the limited energy true of wilderness existence (a metaphor that focuses on surviving, conserving, listening, observing, testing, . . .). Because sheer presence and action have a message. Because my inherited language (especially ‘religious’ language) had died.
Silence is inseparable from the ‘wilderness’/‘outer line’ life toward which the ‘religious’ sphere is hollow and has learned to avoid. The language eventually/gradually emerging out of the silence for me is radically different from my inherited language (especially ‘religious’ language). The price would simply have been too great to learn to live with the emptiness within the ‘religious’ sphere. Silence now results whenever I am within the ‘religious’ sphere in that ‘non-religious’ language is not understood within the ‘religious’ sphere. Is there no audience for writing about this new language?
Why ‘engaged’? I had to go on living/choosing even as my inherited language (especially ‘religious’ language) was dying. What held were the ideas/language of integrity, gratitude, vulnerability. This tension – ‘engaged silence’ -- was compounded by my role (gradually developing 1979-87, rapidly developing 1987 forward) as an observer/speaker/interpreter within the medical education and practice spheres. As my first wife’s incapacity became total and her death neared, my range of social motion and life shrank to very little more than that one relationship. What if I had not been in so constant a position to state/test what I thought as my teaching position – i.e., graduate professor with seminars in the history of theology, spirituality classics, philosophy of religion, ethics, human suffering, . . . -- permitted?
Why ‘silence’? Because of the quietness and the limited energy true of wilderness existence (a metaphor that focuses on surviving, conserving, listening, observing, testing, . . .). Because sheer presence and action have a message. Because my inherited language (especially ‘religious’ language) had died.
Silence is inseparable from the ‘wilderness’/‘outer line’ life toward which the ‘religious’ sphere is hollow and has learned to avoid. The language eventually/gradually emerging out of the silence for me is radically different from my inherited language (especially ‘religious’ language). The price would simply have been too great to learn to live with the emptiness within the ‘religious’ sphere. Silence now results whenever I am within the ‘religious’ sphere in that ‘non-religious’ language is not understood within the ‘religious’ sphere. Is there no audience for writing about this new language?
Why ‘engaged’? I had to go on living/choosing even as my inherited language (especially ‘religious’ language) was dying. What held were the ideas/language of integrity, gratitude, vulnerability. This tension – ‘engaged silence’ -- was compounded by my role (gradually developing 1979-87, rapidly developing 1987 forward) as an observer/speaker/interpreter within the medical education and practice spheres. As my first wife’s incapacity became total and her death neared, my range of social motion and life shrank to very little more than that one relationship. What if I had not been in so constant a position to state/test what I thought as my teaching position – i.e., graduate professor with seminars in the history of theology, spirituality classics, philosophy of religion, ethics, human suffering, . . . -- permitted?
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Fragment -- #33
[7/1995] ‘Community’ is a gift – i.e., ‘community’ happens, is given, results from the way a life is lived. In order words, such ‘community’ cannot be created.
[October 2005 addendum: The 1995 date for this comment about ‘community’ is significant. I was by then completely inside the medical education/practice sphere. I was discovering that ‘community’ is given or happens when one concentrates on being ‘with the world face to face’, on initiating/gesturing ‘community’ toward individuals without the expectation of reciprocity.]
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
A ‘non-religious’ view of Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- #14
Reflections from Journal Entries
Now for another set of ten reflections. These reflections have been selected/adapted from journal entries written during our years in New Orleans (January 1995-November 1997).
36 [5/1995] My move conceptually and relationally out of the ‘religious’ sphere (the roots of this move reaching back at least to the early-1980s) was completed with our 1992 move to Vermont. Crossing the threshold from ‘religious’ to ‘non-religious’ has been very difficult to explain even to my closest acquaintances within the ‘religious’ sphere. The parallel with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s hesitancy re explaining his covert resistance decisions and actions after 1939 to his Confessing Church associates (especially his Finkenwalde Seminary students) is one of the many reasons his 1939-45 experience (as traced/interpreted in his Ethics, in his December 1942 ‘After Ten Years’ essay, and in his Letters and Papers from Prison) has been pivotal for me since the mid-1970s.
37 [6/1995] Becoming conceptually and in other ways truly ‘outside’ the ‘religious’ sphere, I find the self-consciousness and the insincerity so widespread in that sphere increasingly evident and, as one previously invested there, disturbing. I am troubled by the investment of time, money, attention to buildings, needless duplications, and other ‘high maintenance’ traits of ‘religion’.
[Note: Can this self-consciousness and insincerity be seen from inside the ‘religious’ sphere? My experience and observation still lead me to answer, “To some degree, but not clearly/thoroughly”. I am reminded of the inability of the ‘religious’ leaders, as depicted in the Synoptic Gospels, to see the self-consciousness and insincerity ‘Jesus’ saw in the ‘religion’ of his day. ‘Religion’ – in denominational and congregational forms -- discourages radical (i.e., critical, into the root) questioning, does not value seeing its reflection from ‘outside’, capitalizes on the members’ investment ‘inside’ (e.g., time, resources, friendships, networks, traditions/routines, . . . the accumulation of which makes it increasingly difficult to risk being candid). Inside the ‘religious’ sphere, critical insight increases along the radius to the unorthodox/heretical outer edge of the ‘religious’ sphere. I am admitting in this 1995 journal entry that, though long anxious about the self-consciousness and insincerity characteristic of ‘religion’, I had not seen as clearly/thoroughly ‘inside’ as ‘outside’. I thought I saw more clearly/thoroughly when ‘inside’ than was the case.]
38 [7/1995] I have been thinking about the observation the philosophically educated (USC PhD, as I recall) ‘Toymaker’ in Norwich, VT, made during our last in the series of meetings for coffee and conversation we enjoyed while I lived in Vermont – i.e., “Doug, I think your work within the medical sphere would be considered subversive”. I have come to realize his assessment is accurate.
39 [6/1996] I have been thinking recently of ‘religion’ as analogous to physics’ black hole (i.e., the force pulling inward is so great that even light cannot escape a black hole and what falls into a black hole is distorted/crushed). Becoming ‘religionless’ has to do with breaking out of and away from the ‘religious’ black hole. (Note Hawking’s idea that a few particles do escape from black holes). Continuing this analogy, the necessary resolve/energy to break out and away from the ‘religious’ black hole may come from: (1) ‘religious’ abuse, (2) exposure to the crooked and tragic in the human story in such magnitude that ‘religious’ denials or explanations/justifications for the crooked and tragic collapse (e.g., Ecclesiastes), (3) more immediate/personal experience of tragedy, offense, . . . in such magnitude that integrity is radically challenged (e.g., the extended story/play Job).
40 [6/1996] My use of the term ‘religion’ relates most immediately to the organized/institutionalized ‘religious’ sphere. I would not/do not hesitate to extend the term’s interpretive use to the medical, business, education, political, sports, entertainment, arts, . . . societal spheres. Therefore, to become ‘religionless’ does not mean simply moving one’s place/alignment from the institutionalized ‘religious’ sphere into another societal sphere. Instead, ‘religionless’ has to do with a spiritual death and with an essence/way of being defined by (1) ‘wilderness’ and (2) by genuine/vulnerable ‘community’ with those who are (why are they?) by existential lot outside societal spheres (including but not limited to the organized ‘religious’ sphere). One without the other would be incomplete.
41 [6/1996] Options for relating to ‘the world’ that fall short: (1) being ‘religious’ and withdrawn from ‘the world’, (2) being ‘religious’ and in but not engaged with ‘the world’, (3) being ‘religious’ and selectively engaged with ‘the world’, (4) being ‘religionless’ and withdrawn from ‘the world’, (5) being ‘religionless’ and in but not engaged with ‘the world’, (6) being ‘religionless’ and selectively engaged with ‘the world’.
42 [6/1996] Breaking free from ‘religious’ controls, ‘religious’ filters, ‘religious’ interpretations is leading for me to a radical (i.e., into the root) ‘re-languaging’ experience.
The experience of becoming ‘religionless’ is severe, prolonged. The subtle vestiges of ‘religion’ must be found and laid aside. To do so is to go through a spiritual death/void. Why go through such? By the late 1980s, I had become convinced it is not possible to radically (i.e., to the root) consider or to pursue irreversibly a ‘religionless’ spirituality and ethics while remaining positioned within the ‘religious’ sphere. Instead, the experience of becoming in life and thought ‘religionless’ is as radical as is suggested by the analogy of completely resetting a computer’s defaults.
[Note: I had in mind in this journal entry the vocabulary, grammar, idiom, non-verbal, nuancing complexities associated with fluency in the use of a language. The language for interpreting life experiences I learned from birth still seemed credible within the 1950s rural, American, pre-modern, fundamentalist perception of ‘the world’ into which I was born. Pivotal experiences and exposure to new information eventually forced questions I could not avoid/ignore -- questions about what counted as ‘the world’ (i.e., the ‘reality’ before/against which ideas are tested) and questions about the credibility of the ‘religious’ language for interpreting life experiences I had learned from birth. The choices at the proverbial ‘fork’ became clear. I either had to recoil from pivotal experiences and new information in order to (attempt to) recover/protect as much confidence as possible in the language most familiar to me. Or I had to embrace/pursue pivotal experiences and new information, knowing the language most familiar to me would fail. I chose to venture time and again down the latter path, each time a bit further, until finally coming to the point/realization that I could only go on by not going back. The ‘religious’ language for interpreting life experiences I had learned from birth became rusty as I concentrated on the discovery (and, to some degree, the creation) of a language for spirituality and ethics that anticipates with enthusiasm pivotal experiences and new information.]
43 [6/1996] The ‘religionless’ approach to spirituality and ethics I am following focuses on the ‘displaced’ (unplaced? misplaced? replaced?) who are thereby outside societal spheres.
44 [7/1996] The ‘religionless’ approach to faith I am following engages (1) faith and doubt, (2) faith and reason, (3) faith and failure, (4) faith and parenting, (5) faith and community.
[Note: The influence of Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith is evident in this journal entry. Though never inspired by his less than honorable life story, I continue – thirty years after my first reading of Dynamics of Faith – to find Tillich’s analysis of ‘faith’ thought provoking. ‘Faith’ for me has to do with the ideas on which I stake my life day to day, the ideas implied in my actions, the ideas that hold when face to face with the breadth/depth of suffering so widespread among human beings. The telephone pole climbers I watched as a child at my father’s side (he was a group manager for the phone company) remain my most vivid symbol of trust. After ‘walking’ to the top of the tall utility pole to get to the phone lines in need of repair, the lineman would turn loose of and lean away from the pole with all his weight pressing against the leather work belt looped around the pole. Secure and hands free, he did his work. Reflection on my dissertation is also evident in this journal entry. I studied the impact becoming a churchman – first a priest and soon after a bishop – had on Augustine’s exercise of critical reasoning. I was sobered by the conclusion I drew – i.e., that the exercise/purpose of his critical reasoning became increasingly polemic as he had to defend the ‘religious’ institution/constituency he represented/led.]
45 [10/2005] I found the phrase ‘with the world face to face’ during one of my early readings of Dietrich’s prison correspondence. As Christmas 1943 neared, Dietrich prepared a few prayers for his fellow prisoners at Tegel Prison. One prayer recalled the words from a Paul Gerhardt (1606-76) hymn --
Every Christian in his place should be brave and free, with the world face to face.
Though death strikes, his spirit should persevere, without fear calm and good.
For death cannot destroy, but from grief brings relief and opens gates to joy.
Closed the door of bitter pain, bright the way where we may all heaven gain.
I do not recall that Dietrich used the phrase ‘with the world face to face’ as I do, but I see the resolve to be ‘with the world face to face’ (1) in the determination he expressed in his prison letters to stay focused on ‘the outer line’ rather than turn to ‘the inner line’ piety of the broken Confessing Church, (2) in the prison reflections he shared with Eberhard on ‘the world come of age’, (3) in his last words before being executed.
I was privileged to be invited to Eberhard’s 90th birthday celebration (August 1999). The celebration was conducted in the Godesberg Castle a few kilometers south of Bonn. There were @150 invited guests present. Immediate and extended family members constituted the largest group. There were also numerous individuals from across Germany with whom Eberhard had worked during his churchman years. One former Finkenwalde student – Albrecht Schonherr – was present. Several university professors were present (including one who, I was told, opposed Eberhard’s efforts to make Dietrich’s life and work accessible).
I did not know anyone present for the birthday celebration other than Eberhard and Renate. I happened to sit at a table with two very interesting couples – (1) a theology professor and his wife from Wuppertal, both educated in the 1950s along post-war Confessing Church lines (she with enthusiastic appreciation for Dietrich’s prison letters, he as a student of Barth and Moltmann before being exposed to Dietrich through Eberhard); and (2) a couple in their mid-70s (he a recently retired architect who was a seventeen-year-old soldier conscripted at the war’s end and who studied architecture in Berlin between 1947 and 1951).
Renate introduced to the gathering each person present. During a break in the program, I asked her what she had said about me (as I could not keep up with her German comments to the audience). Drawing from our many conversations and letters, she had first described my discovering the imprisoned Dietrich early in the course of my first wife’s losing battle with multiple sclerosis. She had then told the audience, “Douglas lives in the United States like Bonhoeffer, a theologian to the world.”
Renate could not have chosen a more affirming and humbling way to introduce me. During subsequent conversations at the table during dinner, both couples asked me, “What does it mean to ‘live as Bonhoeffer’? to be ‘a theologian to the world’?” My response then -- as would be the case now -- began with the resolve to be ‘with the world face to face’. This resolve is the cornerstone of the approach to spirituality and ethics I have been tracking since 1992 in journal entries. No idea or action is for me more basic, more centering.
Now for another set of ten reflections. These reflections have been selected/adapted from journal entries written during our years in New Orleans (January 1995-November 1997).
36 [5/1995] My move conceptually and relationally out of the ‘religious’ sphere (the roots of this move reaching back at least to the early-1980s) was completed with our 1992 move to Vermont. Crossing the threshold from ‘religious’ to ‘non-religious’ has been very difficult to explain even to my closest acquaintances within the ‘religious’ sphere. The parallel with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s hesitancy re explaining his covert resistance decisions and actions after 1939 to his Confessing Church associates (especially his Finkenwalde Seminary students) is one of the many reasons his 1939-45 experience (as traced/interpreted in his Ethics, in his December 1942 ‘After Ten Years’ essay, and in his Letters and Papers from Prison) has been pivotal for me since the mid-1970s.
37 [6/1995] Becoming conceptually and in other ways truly ‘outside’ the ‘religious’ sphere, I find the self-consciousness and the insincerity so widespread in that sphere increasingly evident and, as one previously invested there, disturbing. I am troubled by the investment of time, money, attention to buildings, needless duplications, and other ‘high maintenance’ traits of ‘religion’.
[Note: Can this self-consciousness and insincerity be seen from inside the ‘religious’ sphere? My experience and observation still lead me to answer, “To some degree, but not clearly/thoroughly”. I am reminded of the inability of the ‘religious’ leaders, as depicted in the Synoptic Gospels, to see the self-consciousness and insincerity ‘Jesus’ saw in the ‘religion’ of his day. ‘Religion’ – in denominational and congregational forms -- discourages radical (i.e., critical, into the root) questioning, does not value seeing its reflection from ‘outside’, capitalizes on the members’ investment ‘inside’ (e.g., time, resources, friendships, networks, traditions/routines, . . . the accumulation of which makes it increasingly difficult to risk being candid). Inside the ‘religious’ sphere, critical insight increases along the radius to the unorthodox/heretical outer edge of the ‘religious’ sphere. I am admitting in this 1995 journal entry that, though long anxious about the self-consciousness and insincerity characteristic of ‘religion’, I had not seen as clearly/thoroughly ‘inside’ as ‘outside’. I thought I saw more clearly/thoroughly when ‘inside’ than was the case.]
38 [7/1995] I have been thinking about the observation the philosophically educated (USC PhD, as I recall) ‘Toymaker’ in Norwich, VT, made during our last in the series of meetings for coffee and conversation we enjoyed while I lived in Vermont – i.e., “Doug, I think your work within the medical sphere would be considered subversive”. I have come to realize his assessment is accurate.
39 [6/1996] I have been thinking recently of ‘religion’ as analogous to physics’ black hole (i.e., the force pulling inward is so great that even light cannot escape a black hole and what falls into a black hole is distorted/crushed). Becoming ‘religionless’ has to do with breaking out of and away from the ‘religious’ black hole. (Note Hawking’s idea that a few particles do escape from black holes). Continuing this analogy, the necessary resolve/energy to break out and away from the ‘religious’ black hole may come from: (1) ‘religious’ abuse, (2) exposure to the crooked and tragic in the human story in such magnitude that ‘religious’ denials or explanations/justifications for the crooked and tragic collapse (e.g., Ecclesiastes), (3) more immediate/personal experience of tragedy, offense, . . . in such magnitude that integrity is radically challenged (e.g., the extended story/play Job).
40 [6/1996] My use of the term ‘religion’ relates most immediately to the organized/institutionalized ‘religious’ sphere. I would not/do not hesitate to extend the term’s interpretive use to the medical, business, education, political, sports, entertainment, arts, . . . societal spheres. Therefore, to become ‘religionless’ does not mean simply moving one’s place/alignment from the institutionalized ‘religious’ sphere into another societal sphere. Instead, ‘religionless’ has to do with a spiritual death and with an essence/way of being defined by (1) ‘wilderness’ and (2) by genuine/vulnerable ‘community’ with those who are (why are they?) by existential lot outside societal spheres (including but not limited to the organized ‘religious’ sphere). One without the other would be incomplete.
41 [6/1996] Options for relating to ‘the world’ that fall short: (1) being ‘religious’ and withdrawn from ‘the world’, (2) being ‘religious’ and in but not engaged with ‘the world’, (3) being ‘religious’ and selectively engaged with ‘the world’, (4) being ‘religionless’ and withdrawn from ‘the world’, (5) being ‘religionless’ and in but not engaged with ‘the world’, (6) being ‘religionless’ and selectively engaged with ‘the world’.
42 [6/1996] Breaking free from ‘religious’ controls, ‘religious’ filters, ‘religious’ interpretations is leading for me to a radical (i.e., into the root) ‘re-languaging’ experience.
The experience of becoming ‘religionless’ is severe, prolonged. The subtle vestiges of ‘religion’ must be found and laid aside. To do so is to go through a spiritual death/void. Why go through such? By the late 1980s, I had become convinced it is not possible to radically (i.e., to the root) consider or to pursue irreversibly a ‘religionless’ spirituality and ethics while remaining positioned within the ‘religious’ sphere. Instead, the experience of becoming in life and thought ‘religionless’ is as radical as is suggested by the analogy of completely resetting a computer’s defaults.
[Note: I had in mind in this journal entry the vocabulary, grammar, idiom, non-verbal, nuancing complexities associated with fluency in the use of a language. The language for interpreting life experiences I learned from birth still seemed credible within the 1950s rural, American, pre-modern, fundamentalist perception of ‘the world’ into which I was born. Pivotal experiences and exposure to new information eventually forced questions I could not avoid/ignore -- questions about what counted as ‘the world’ (i.e., the ‘reality’ before/against which ideas are tested) and questions about the credibility of the ‘religious’ language for interpreting life experiences I had learned from birth. The choices at the proverbial ‘fork’ became clear. I either had to recoil from pivotal experiences and new information in order to (attempt to) recover/protect as much confidence as possible in the language most familiar to me. Or I had to embrace/pursue pivotal experiences and new information, knowing the language most familiar to me would fail. I chose to venture time and again down the latter path, each time a bit further, until finally coming to the point/realization that I could only go on by not going back. The ‘religious’ language for interpreting life experiences I had learned from birth became rusty as I concentrated on the discovery (and, to some degree, the creation) of a language for spirituality and ethics that anticipates with enthusiasm pivotal experiences and new information.]
43 [6/1996] The ‘religionless’ approach to spirituality and ethics I am following focuses on the ‘displaced’ (unplaced? misplaced? replaced?) who are thereby outside societal spheres.
44 [7/1996] The ‘religionless’ approach to faith I am following engages (1) faith and doubt, (2) faith and reason, (3) faith and failure, (4) faith and parenting, (5) faith and community.
[Note: The influence of Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith is evident in this journal entry. Though never inspired by his less than honorable life story, I continue – thirty years after my first reading of Dynamics of Faith – to find Tillich’s analysis of ‘faith’ thought provoking. ‘Faith’ for me has to do with the ideas on which I stake my life day to day, the ideas implied in my actions, the ideas that hold when face to face with the breadth/depth of suffering so widespread among human beings. The telephone pole climbers I watched as a child at my father’s side (he was a group manager for the phone company) remain my most vivid symbol of trust. After ‘walking’ to the top of the tall utility pole to get to the phone lines in need of repair, the lineman would turn loose of and lean away from the pole with all his weight pressing against the leather work belt looped around the pole. Secure and hands free, he did his work. Reflection on my dissertation is also evident in this journal entry. I studied the impact becoming a churchman – first a priest and soon after a bishop – had on Augustine’s exercise of critical reasoning. I was sobered by the conclusion I drew – i.e., that the exercise/purpose of his critical reasoning became increasingly polemic as he had to defend the ‘religious’ institution/constituency he represented/led.]
45 [10/2005] I found the phrase ‘with the world face to face’ during one of my early readings of Dietrich’s prison correspondence. As Christmas 1943 neared, Dietrich prepared a few prayers for his fellow prisoners at Tegel Prison. One prayer recalled the words from a Paul Gerhardt (1606-76) hymn --
Every Christian in his place should be brave and free, with the world face to face.
Though death strikes, his spirit should persevere, without fear calm and good.
For death cannot destroy, but from grief brings relief and opens gates to joy.
Closed the door of bitter pain, bright the way where we may all heaven gain.
I do not recall that Dietrich used the phrase ‘with the world face to face’ as I do, but I see the resolve to be ‘with the world face to face’ (1) in the determination he expressed in his prison letters to stay focused on ‘the outer line’ rather than turn to ‘the inner line’ piety of the broken Confessing Church, (2) in the prison reflections he shared with Eberhard on ‘the world come of age’, (3) in his last words before being executed.
I was privileged to be invited to Eberhard’s 90th birthday celebration (August 1999). The celebration was conducted in the Godesberg Castle a few kilometers south of Bonn. There were @150 invited guests present. Immediate and extended family members constituted the largest group. There were also numerous individuals from across Germany with whom Eberhard had worked during his churchman years. One former Finkenwalde student – Albrecht Schonherr – was present. Several university professors were present (including one who, I was told, opposed Eberhard’s efforts to make Dietrich’s life and work accessible).
I did not know anyone present for the birthday celebration other than Eberhard and Renate. I happened to sit at a table with two very interesting couples – (1) a theology professor and his wife from Wuppertal, both educated in the 1950s along post-war Confessing Church lines (she with enthusiastic appreciation for Dietrich’s prison letters, he as a student of Barth and Moltmann before being exposed to Dietrich through Eberhard); and (2) a couple in their mid-70s (he a recently retired architect who was a seventeen-year-old soldier conscripted at the war’s end and who studied architecture in Berlin between 1947 and 1951).
Renate introduced to the gathering each person present. During a break in the program, I asked her what she had said about me (as I could not keep up with her German comments to the audience). Drawing from our many conversations and letters, she had first described my discovering the imprisoned Dietrich early in the course of my first wife’s losing battle with multiple sclerosis. She had then told the audience, “Douglas lives in the United States like Bonhoeffer, a theologian to the world.”
Renate could not have chosen a more affirming and humbling way to introduce me. During subsequent conversations at the table during dinner, both couples asked me, “What does it mean to ‘live as Bonhoeffer’? to be ‘a theologian to the world’?” My response then -- as would be the case now -- began with the resolve to be ‘with the world face to face’. This resolve is the cornerstone of the approach to spirituality and ethics I have been tracking since 1992 in journal entries. No idea or action is for me more basic, more centering.
Fragment -- #32
[7/1995] Here at LSU and Charity Hospital, one of the most disturbing sights for me day after day is when I walk by and glance into a windowless square building (through a slightly opened door) where orange-clothed criminals are milling around – shackled and under guard -- waiting to have medical examinations.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Fragment -- #31
Fragment -- #31
[7/1995] I have been thinking about the observation a philosophically educated (USC PhD, as I recall) ‘Toymaker’ in Norwich, VT, made during our last in the series of meetings for coffee and conversation we enjoyed while I lived in Vermont – i.e., “Doug, I think your work within the medical sphere would be considered subversive”. I have come to realize his assessment is accurate.
[7/1995] I have been thinking about the observation a philosophically educated (USC PhD, as I recall) ‘Toymaker’ in Norwich, VT, made during our last in the series of meetings for coffee and conversation we enjoyed while I lived in Vermont – i.e., “Doug, I think your work within the medical sphere would be considered subversive”. I have come to realize his assessment is accurate.
A ‘non-religious’ view of Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- #13
Reflections from Journal Entries
Now for another set of reflections selected/adapted from journal entries written during my Vermont years (1992-95).
31 Being ‘religionless’ means: (1) being past the point of return to the ‘religious sphere’, (2) not being able to get home to the ‘religious sphere’ by supper time, (3) experiencing a spiritual death, (4) facing the death of the language, securities, confidences, . . . offered/promised by ‘religion’, (5) suffering the diminishment/loss of ties (e.g., family, friends, . . .), (6) surrendering the professional, financial, employment securities associated with ‘religion’. I think such transformation was not yet complete for Koheleth in Ecclesiastes, or for the ‘scrapheap’ Job at the end of the story/play, or for Bonhoeffer by the end of his prison correspondence.
32 A ‘religious’ view of being human builds off of and centers on human weakness (which leads to timidity, false pride, a cultish co-dependency). A ‘non-religious’ view of being human builds off of and centers on human strength.
33 Core theses of a ‘non-religious’ spirituality and ethics -- (1) Give expecting nothing in return. (2) Repentance is the clearest witness to the vision about which ‘Jesus’ spoke. The point here is that a ‘community’ deeply conscious that living with integrity ‘face to face with the world’ falls short of the life together envisioned in a Sermon on the Mount text retains its humility and protects the ethical challenge inherent in the vision. (3) ‘Community’ precedes ‘conversion’. The point here is that being ‘face to face with the world’ means living as if in ‘community’ with individuals one does not yet know and who may be adversarial. The motive behind these gestures of ‘community’ is not conditional or calculated (e.g., evangelistic). (4) A ‘community’ engages its mission when dispersed. (5) Every individual has infinite worth. (6) Failure is an inevitable and essential component of a well-lived life.
[Note: I have learned that such traits are difficult for physicians to maintain in the medical education/practice sphere. ‘Give expecting nothing in return’ cuts across the grain of budget accountability as well as widespread profit seeking. The enculturation that begins with medical school hardly fosters humility. Risk-management counsels caution with strangers. With the clinic or the hospital analogous to the cathedral/church building, physicians engage their mission far more often ‘in house’ than in dispersion. Living out the conviction that ‘every individual has infinite worth’ must be tested by disposition toward the most difficult patients (e.g., patients who are not compliant, not grateful, offensive, adversarial) and workers lower in the hierarchy (e.g., students, nurses, front desk staff, sanitation workers).]
34 How closely does a ‘non-religious’ approach to spirituality and ethics correlate with Frankl’s analysis of the search for meaning within such nihilistic realities as Auschwitz?
35 References to ‘transition of power’ and ‘Clinton takes command’ raise questions about the meaning of ‘power’ for the ‘non-religious’ approach to spirituality and ethics I am pursuing.
Now for another set of reflections selected/adapted from journal entries written during my Vermont years (1992-95).
31 Being ‘religionless’ means: (1) being past the point of return to the ‘religious sphere’, (2) not being able to get home to the ‘religious sphere’ by supper time, (3) experiencing a spiritual death, (4) facing the death of the language, securities, confidences, . . . offered/promised by ‘religion’, (5) suffering the diminishment/loss of ties (e.g., family, friends, . . .), (6) surrendering the professional, financial, employment securities associated with ‘religion’. I think such transformation was not yet complete for Koheleth in Ecclesiastes, or for the ‘scrapheap’ Job at the end of the story/play, or for Bonhoeffer by the end of his prison correspondence.
32 A ‘religious’ view of being human builds off of and centers on human weakness (which leads to timidity, false pride, a cultish co-dependency). A ‘non-religious’ view of being human builds off of and centers on human strength.
33 Core theses of a ‘non-religious’ spirituality and ethics -- (1) Give expecting nothing in return. (2) Repentance is the clearest witness to the vision about which ‘Jesus’ spoke. The point here is that a ‘community’ deeply conscious that living with integrity ‘face to face with the world’ falls short of the life together envisioned in a Sermon on the Mount text retains its humility and protects the ethical challenge inherent in the vision. (3) ‘Community’ precedes ‘conversion’. The point here is that being ‘face to face with the world’ means living as if in ‘community’ with individuals one does not yet know and who may be adversarial. The motive behind these gestures of ‘community’ is not conditional or calculated (e.g., evangelistic). (4) A ‘community’ engages its mission when dispersed. (5) Every individual has infinite worth. (6) Failure is an inevitable and essential component of a well-lived life.
[Note: I have learned that such traits are difficult for physicians to maintain in the medical education/practice sphere. ‘Give expecting nothing in return’ cuts across the grain of budget accountability as well as widespread profit seeking. The enculturation that begins with medical school hardly fosters humility. Risk-management counsels caution with strangers. With the clinic or the hospital analogous to the cathedral/church building, physicians engage their mission far more often ‘in house’ than in dispersion. Living out the conviction that ‘every individual has infinite worth’ must be tested by disposition toward the most difficult patients (e.g., patients who are not compliant, not grateful, offensive, adversarial) and workers lower in the hierarchy (e.g., students, nurses, front desk staff, sanitation workers).]
34 How closely does a ‘non-religious’ approach to spirituality and ethics correlate with Frankl’s analysis of the search for meaning within such nihilistic realities as Auschwitz?
35 References to ‘transition of power’ and ‘Clinton takes command’ raise questions about the meaning of ‘power’ for the ‘non-religious’ approach to spirituality and ethics I am pursuing.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Fragment -- #30
Fragment -- #30
[1997] Each narrative we created in the Miami effort to assist the cocaine-abusing women developed around the same set of questions -- Who is this mother? What does she value? How does she make sense of her experiences? In what social context does she live? How does she view parenting? What aspirations does she have for herself? for her child/ren? How does she define key words (e.g., hope, joy, success, power, freedom, fear)? How does she view her involvement with drugs (e.g., a fact, a recreation, a coping mechanism, a threat to well-being)? Does she want to be drug-free? Does she want her child/ren to be drug-free? What barriers does she face? Why does she try or not try to benefit from available resources? Why do her attempts succeed or fail? How does she define success or failure?
Here is one mother’s story. She enrolled in the program in 1991. We completed her life narrative in 1996. A fictitious name was chosen to protect the mother’s confidentiality.
Lakesha was born in 1962 to what she remembers as ‘a loving family’. She was the fifth child in a family of eight daughters and one son. “We had a good family life. Both of my parents worked. We’d go to Orlando three or four times a year. We had family picnics. We were involved in the church.” Lakesha fondly remembers going to youth camps and being president of the youth choir. She did well in school. “I admired my history teacher. She always wanted to take me home for the weekend, but my parents never let me go. She cared. She listened to me.” Lakesha recalls her father being excessively proud of her accomplishments. But his discipline could be severe. “Now I catch my five-year-old boy hitting at me and I try to talk to him rather than beat him. A beating, it don’t do anything but make them more rebellious. I got four or five of them a day. It made me more rebellious than ever.” She remembers enduring numerous belt-whippings, in spite of her efforts to please him. “My mom was a homebody, afraid of society. She was fragile and easy to manipulate. But she never abandoned us.”
Lakesha and her family lived in Liberty City, a section northwest of downtown Miami. Since the mid-1980s, Liberty City (along with neighboring Overtown) has been a drug-burdened and dangerous place to live. As a street-living friend recently reminded Lakesha, “There is no hope for people in Liberty City”. But during her childhood, Liberty City had not yet so deteriorated. Neighbors watched out for each other. Unemployment had not yet become the norm. Teenage pregnancy had not yet become epidemic. Illicit drug dealing had not yet become the dominant ‘business’. Only the older generation now remembers how Liberty City used to be.
Lakesha rebelled before reaching her teens, often slipping away from home when her father was out of town. “I don’t think my family was very dysfunctional. I was the dysfunctional one. I wanted things, but was either too young to have what the older kids had or too old for what the younger kids had. Attention. All along I was looking for attention. I started cutting school in the first grade -- hanging out in the park, going to the house for a snack when school was out, and then taking off again on my bike. My parents never knew.”
Lakesha had the first of her six abortions -- a home abortion -- when she was just twelve years old. “I was five months along. My mom called in a midwife. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. The midwife inserted something she said would make the baby come out. The baby was fully developed. It looked good. They tried to pump it, but nothing happened. When it was all over, my mom went on to work at the dress factory.”
By age thirteen, Lakesha had permanently left home. “I moved in with an older girl who lived three blocks away. My father had warned me to avoid ‘project kids’ because ‘they turn out to be nobody’. I told him, ‘You can’t pick my friends for me. If I think you are going to try, then I’m getting out of here’. That’s really what pushed me down the wrong street. I wanted to prove I didn’t have to do what he said. I knew young women were dying out there, but I did not feel at risk. My older brother regularly checked on me. I continued to go to school. My parents would pick me up every Sunday morning to go to church. I was having the time of my life. A fake ID made it possible to hang out with the big girls. Older guys paid me special attention. I was going to be someone’s princess.” Lakesha was using beer by age twelve; marijuana by age thirteen; cocaine, by age fifteen; crack, by age seventeen. “I was transporting drugs for some older men, giving them to girlfriends, when I decided to try them.”
Lakesha dropped out of high school six months shy of graduation. “I was living two very different lives. I was frantic, scared. I think my drug use put me back a lot. I knew by that time that I was in danger, but I thought I could always get back to safety. I was smoking crack every day. I just marked time -- didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, didn’t care. Then the guy I was with was shot dead and I blamed myself. At first I thought about suicide. Then I tried to recover myself. An older physically handicapped man in Bay Point supported me.” She eventually joined the Job Corp, earned her high school equivalency diploma, and stayed clean for over two years. Then a cousin visiting from New York City wanted to try crack. Lakesha remembers warning herself, but decided to supply her cousin. Soon after, she was back on the street. She met at a party the man who would father her three children -- all cocaine-exposed. They have sustained a stormy relationship together since 1985. She enrolled in a RN program at Florida College of Business, but never completed the program.
Lakesha became pregnant with her first live-born child while living in Connecticut (1988). “We didn’t know anybody there, so we came back to Miami. I was really smoking big time. I realize now that I was trying to smoke myself to death.” She delivered a baby girl at twenty-eight weeks gestation. After six months in an outpatient treatment program, she remained clean for a while, attended follow-up meetings, and found a job. However, she had started using again (1991) just before becoming pregnant with her second child (the delivery after which she was enrolled in the intervention program the University of Miami neonatologist had just started). “DCF (Florida’s Department of Children and Families) kept my case open. I’m busting my ass to try and make sure I stay halfway right. I thought maybe this time I had really crossed the line. Then I learned about a woman with three crack-exposed kids who was using, but DCF closed her case. That was the excuse I used to get high. If she can get high, I can too. I lost my pride. I was still getting high thirty minutes before I went into labor.” She delivered a baby girl at thirty-five weeks gestation. "At first, I thought Baby Steps (the name of the University of Miami program) was just one more part of ‘the system’. I refused to sign any papers. I think I told the person she could sign it. After a nurse explained a bit more about the program, I enrolled.” Though Lakesha faithfully kept the appointments for her children, she was not yet receptive to efforts to engage her in intensive case management.
DCF had referred Lakesha to a short-term residential treatment program during this pregnancy. After another few clean months, she again relapsed. “I remember coming to a Christmas party at Baby Steps the day I started getting high again. My kids were dressed in red and green. Later that day, I went around my neighborhood, running my mouth about getting high.”
Now carrying a third cocaine-exposed baby, Lakesha arranged for intake at a different residential treatment program in order to strengthen her chance of retaining custody. She delivered a full-term baby boy (1993). When she was turned down from yet another residential treatment program because she had not ‘hit rock bottom’, Lakesha finally turned in desperation to her Baby Steps case manager who had remained diligent in her attempts to engage Lakesha in spite of repeated resistance. “If she had not been at my doorstep early that morning, I don’t know what would have happened. I begged her for help.” The Baby Steps case manager succeeded in getting Lakesha into a recently established nine-to-eighteen month residential treatment program (i.e., The Village) that was based on the therapeutic strategy of making the inside experience as stressful as possible in order to empower the women for being on the outside. The case manager remained in regular communication with Lakesha during these months and served as a resource person for the treatment staff. While at The Village, Lakesha began to make plans for entering Florida International University with the hope of getting a social work degree.
Since successful completion of The Village’s program (July 1994), Lakesha has been clean. However, avoiding relapse has not been easy. Housing, childcare, and employment have presented obstacles that she, with her Baby Steps case manager’s assistance, has had to overcome. “It was very difficult at first, after leaving the structure of The Village. My expectations were too high. I had to move in with my mother. I still live from paycheck to paycheck. I often feel stuck between dependence on the system’s financial aid and the independence I know I need. The scary part is relaxation. When I relax, I relapse. The pre-Village world is not necessarily inside you, but it’s all around you, closing in on you. Why can’t there be a half-way house for women who are really trying to change?”
While in the treatment program, Lakesha was diagnosed with a form of clinical depression (which is responding well to medications). Knowledge of this condition could have made her more dependent on ‘the system’. Instead, she has tried to stay employed -- which has meant losing food stamps, a subsidized apartment, AFDC, and Medicaid. She has battled through periods of suicidal ideation and debilitating depression with the assistance and occasional intervention of the Baby Steps staff. She knows that the realization of her aspirations necessitates long-term independence. She has earned certification as a child-care provider. She is dealing responsibly with past student loans from a training program that went bankrupt. She is now working as a recruiter in a program serving HIV+ drug-using women in Liberty City. The Village asked her to serve on its Advisory Board. Lakesha has become a model PTA mom. She was selected by her children’s school as “Mother of the Year”. She goes to all the meetings, volunteers at the school, goes on field trips, helps out in the classroom and the library. “When my daughter saw me one day in the school library, she shouted, ‘Mom! Mom!’ It was really nice. It made me feel like gold. I love my children and now I love me.”
When asked what she shares with mothers in life circumstances similar to her experience, Lakesha answered, “If I can change my life, anybody can change their lives. I want them to think, ‘Maybe I can do it. She did it and she’s got those kids. She was right there on the same street as me.’ You can fix yourself up and look OK on the outside, but be all messed-up on the inside.”
When asked what Baby Steps has meant to her, Lakesha explained, “Baby Steps has been the stepping stone for me. Without Baby Steps, I would still be high and running or even dead right now. I didn’t have nobody to care for me. Baby Steps is like somebody’s on my side. Baby Steps can make you change, make you a success.”
[1997] Each narrative we created in the Miami effort to assist the cocaine-abusing women developed around the same set of questions -- Who is this mother? What does she value? How does she make sense of her experiences? In what social context does she live? How does she view parenting? What aspirations does she have for herself? for her child/ren? How does she define key words (e.g., hope, joy, success, power, freedom, fear)? How does she view her involvement with drugs (e.g., a fact, a recreation, a coping mechanism, a threat to well-being)? Does she want to be drug-free? Does she want her child/ren to be drug-free? What barriers does she face? Why does she try or not try to benefit from available resources? Why do her attempts succeed or fail? How does she define success or failure?
Here is one mother’s story. She enrolled in the program in 1991. We completed her life narrative in 1996. A fictitious name was chosen to protect the mother’s confidentiality.
Lakesha was born in 1962 to what she remembers as ‘a loving family’. She was the fifth child in a family of eight daughters and one son. “We had a good family life. Both of my parents worked. We’d go to Orlando three or four times a year. We had family picnics. We were involved in the church.” Lakesha fondly remembers going to youth camps and being president of the youth choir. She did well in school. “I admired my history teacher. She always wanted to take me home for the weekend, but my parents never let me go. She cared. She listened to me.” Lakesha recalls her father being excessively proud of her accomplishments. But his discipline could be severe. “Now I catch my five-year-old boy hitting at me and I try to talk to him rather than beat him. A beating, it don’t do anything but make them more rebellious. I got four or five of them a day. It made me more rebellious than ever.” She remembers enduring numerous belt-whippings, in spite of her efforts to please him. “My mom was a homebody, afraid of society. She was fragile and easy to manipulate. But she never abandoned us.”
Lakesha and her family lived in Liberty City, a section northwest of downtown Miami. Since the mid-1980s, Liberty City (along with neighboring Overtown) has been a drug-burdened and dangerous place to live. As a street-living friend recently reminded Lakesha, “There is no hope for people in Liberty City”. But during her childhood, Liberty City had not yet so deteriorated. Neighbors watched out for each other. Unemployment had not yet become the norm. Teenage pregnancy had not yet become epidemic. Illicit drug dealing had not yet become the dominant ‘business’. Only the older generation now remembers how Liberty City used to be.
Lakesha rebelled before reaching her teens, often slipping away from home when her father was out of town. “I don’t think my family was very dysfunctional. I was the dysfunctional one. I wanted things, but was either too young to have what the older kids had or too old for what the younger kids had. Attention. All along I was looking for attention. I started cutting school in the first grade -- hanging out in the park, going to the house for a snack when school was out, and then taking off again on my bike. My parents never knew.”
Lakesha had the first of her six abortions -- a home abortion -- when she was just twelve years old. “I was five months along. My mom called in a midwife. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. The midwife inserted something she said would make the baby come out. The baby was fully developed. It looked good. They tried to pump it, but nothing happened. When it was all over, my mom went on to work at the dress factory.”
By age thirteen, Lakesha had permanently left home. “I moved in with an older girl who lived three blocks away. My father had warned me to avoid ‘project kids’ because ‘they turn out to be nobody’. I told him, ‘You can’t pick my friends for me. If I think you are going to try, then I’m getting out of here’. That’s really what pushed me down the wrong street. I wanted to prove I didn’t have to do what he said. I knew young women were dying out there, but I did not feel at risk. My older brother regularly checked on me. I continued to go to school. My parents would pick me up every Sunday morning to go to church. I was having the time of my life. A fake ID made it possible to hang out with the big girls. Older guys paid me special attention. I was going to be someone’s princess.” Lakesha was using beer by age twelve; marijuana by age thirteen; cocaine, by age fifteen; crack, by age seventeen. “I was transporting drugs for some older men, giving them to girlfriends, when I decided to try them.”
Lakesha dropped out of high school six months shy of graduation. “I was living two very different lives. I was frantic, scared. I think my drug use put me back a lot. I knew by that time that I was in danger, but I thought I could always get back to safety. I was smoking crack every day. I just marked time -- didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, didn’t care. Then the guy I was with was shot dead and I blamed myself. At first I thought about suicide. Then I tried to recover myself. An older physically handicapped man in Bay Point supported me.” She eventually joined the Job Corp, earned her high school equivalency diploma, and stayed clean for over two years. Then a cousin visiting from New York City wanted to try crack. Lakesha remembers warning herself, but decided to supply her cousin. Soon after, she was back on the street. She met at a party the man who would father her three children -- all cocaine-exposed. They have sustained a stormy relationship together since 1985. She enrolled in a RN program at Florida College of Business, but never completed the program.
Lakesha became pregnant with her first live-born child while living in Connecticut (1988). “We didn’t know anybody there, so we came back to Miami. I was really smoking big time. I realize now that I was trying to smoke myself to death.” She delivered a baby girl at twenty-eight weeks gestation. After six months in an outpatient treatment program, she remained clean for a while, attended follow-up meetings, and found a job. However, she had started using again (1991) just before becoming pregnant with her second child (the delivery after which she was enrolled in the intervention program the University of Miami neonatologist had just started). “DCF (Florida’s Department of Children and Families) kept my case open. I’m busting my ass to try and make sure I stay halfway right. I thought maybe this time I had really crossed the line. Then I learned about a woman with three crack-exposed kids who was using, but DCF closed her case. That was the excuse I used to get high. If she can get high, I can too. I lost my pride. I was still getting high thirty minutes before I went into labor.” She delivered a baby girl at thirty-five weeks gestation. "At first, I thought Baby Steps (the name of the University of Miami program) was just one more part of ‘the system’. I refused to sign any papers. I think I told the person she could sign it. After a nurse explained a bit more about the program, I enrolled.” Though Lakesha faithfully kept the appointments for her children, she was not yet receptive to efforts to engage her in intensive case management.
DCF had referred Lakesha to a short-term residential treatment program during this pregnancy. After another few clean months, she again relapsed. “I remember coming to a Christmas party at Baby Steps the day I started getting high again. My kids were dressed in red and green. Later that day, I went around my neighborhood, running my mouth about getting high.”
Now carrying a third cocaine-exposed baby, Lakesha arranged for intake at a different residential treatment program in order to strengthen her chance of retaining custody. She delivered a full-term baby boy (1993). When she was turned down from yet another residential treatment program because she had not ‘hit rock bottom’, Lakesha finally turned in desperation to her Baby Steps case manager who had remained diligent in her attempts to engage Lakesha in spite of repeated resistance. “If she had not been at my doorstep early that morning, I don’t know what would have happened. I begged her for help.” The Baby Steps case manager succeeded in getting Lakesha into a recently established nine-to-eighteen month residential treatment program (i.e., The Village) that was based on the therapeutic strategy of making the inside experience as stressful as possible in order to empower the women for being on the outside. The case manager remained in regular communication with Lakesha during these months and served as a resource person for the treatment staff. While at The Village, Lakesha began to make plans for entering Florida International University with the hope of getting a social work degree.
Since successful completion of The Village’s program (July 1994), Lakesha has been clean. However, avoiding relapse has not been easy. Housing, childcare, and employment have presented obstacles that she, with her Baby Steps case manager’s assistance, has had to overcome. “It was very difficult at first, after leaving the structure of The Village. My expectations were too high. I had to move in with my mother. I still live from paycheck to paycheck. I often feel stuck between dependence on the system’s financial aid and the independence I know I need. The scary part is relaxation. When I relax, I relapse. The pre-Village world is not necessarily inside you, but it’s all around you, closing in on you. Why can’t there be a half-way house for women who are really trying to change?”
While in the treatment program, Lakesha was diagnosed with a form of clinical depression (which is responding well to medications). Knowledge of this condition could have made her more dependent on ‘the system’. Instead, she has tried to stay employed -- which has meant losing food stamps, a subsidized apartment, AFDC, and Medicaid. She has battled through periods of suicidal ideation and debilitating depression with the assistance and occasional intervention of the Baby Steps staff. She knows that the realization of her aspirations necessitates long-term independence. She has earned certification as a child-care provider. She is dealing responsibly with past student loans from a training program that went bankrupt. She is now working as a recruiter in a program serving HIV+ drug-using women in Liberty City. The Village asked her to serve on its Advisory Board. Lakesha has become a model PTA mom. She was selected by her children’s school as “Mother of the Year”. She goes to all the meetings, volunteers at the school, goes on field trips, helps out in the classroom and the library. “When my daughter saw me one day in the school library, she shouted, ‘Mom! Mom!’ It was really nice. It made me feel like gold. I love my children and now I love me.”
When asked what she shares with mothers in life circumstances similar to her experience, Lakesha answered, “If I can change my life, anybody can change their lives. I want them to think, ‘Maybe I can do it. She did it and she’s got those kids. She was right there on the same street as me.’ You can fix yourself up and look OK on the outside, but be all messed-up on the inside.”
When asked what Baby Steps has meant to her, Lakesha explained, “Baby Steps has been the stepping stone for me. Without Baby Steps, I would still be high and running or even dead right now. I didn’t have nobody to care for me. Baby Steps is like somebody’s on my side. Baby Steps can make you change, make you a success.”
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Fragment -- #29
Fragment -- #29
[1997] For four years (1993-97), I worked with a neonatologist at the University of Miami School of Medicine. My work with her – which included three days onsite in Miami each month -- began during my Vermont years when a mutual friend recommended me to her and extended through my years in New Orleans with the LSU Ob/Gyn Department.
[1997] For four years (1993-97), I worked with a neonatologist at the University of Miami School of Medicine. My work with her – which included three days onsite in Miami each month -- began during my Vermont years when a mutual friend recommended me to her and extended through my years in New Orleans with the LSU Ob/Gyn Department.
“Dr. Brown, I am losing the vision. I am stumbling as a leader. My staff is floundering. I am exhausted. What can you say or do that would matter?”
Just a few minutes into this April 1993 conversation – our first – my new physician friend made it clear she was far beneath the heroic glitter often associated with high-achieving academic physicians. This no-nonsense neonatologist had neither time for nor interest in softing platitudes about medicine. She knew better and intended to determine quickly if I did. The look in her eyes said, “Think twice before answering.”
Working with this neonatologist and her staff over the next several years shook my foundations – in the heart as much as in the mind. For the first time, championing individuals trapped and desperate in oppressive circumstances carried for me a real element of personal danger. The target population – cocaine-abusing women living in a violent part of Miami who were prematurely delivering cocaine-exposed babies.
- Individual Factors. These women and their children were at serious risk to undervalue education, to see women treated as inferior to men, to absorb the language and assumptions of racial prejudice, to underutilize primary healthcare services, to lack proper nourishment, to thirst for genuine attention, to cease to dream. Childlike resiliency, concreteness, and a sense of humor insulated them somewhat from the full impact of their circumstances.
- Family Factors. These women and their children were at serious risk to carry parenting responsibilities for younger siblings, to suffer physical and/or psychological abuse, to witness/experience domestic violence, to not know one or both parents, to lack family support for educational achievement, to never have celebrated a birthday, to feel betrayed, to regard adolescent pregnancy as normal. The incidence of adolescent pregnancy could, ironically, be reinforced by family members (whose behavior toward the pregnant girl often became dramatically more gentle and affirming) and by the expanded availability of societal resources. Many of these women desperately wanted to retain parental responsibility for their children. Few, if any, wanted their children to experience their way of life. Extended family members (esp., grandmothers) often shielded their children from at least the most severe disadvantages and conveyed to them that they were loved and wanted.
- Education Factors. These women and their children were at serious risk to have attended school irregularly, to have been taught by demoralized teachers, to have attended improperly equipped schools, to have formed poor study habits, to have had discipline problems, to have lost their intellectual curiosity.
- Peer Factors. These women and their children were at serious risk to form relationships based on ‘macho’, to link self-image to strength, to resort quickly to violence when in conflicts, to be taunted toward destructive misbehavior, to be suspicious of others, to find street-gangs attractive. Community-based athletic programs, religious organizations, substance-abuse support groups (e.g., TRUST Groups), and community-based social organizations (e.g., Big Brother/Sister, YMCA/YWCA, Boys/Girls Club) made constructive peer relationships at least a possibility.
- Neighborhood Factors. These women and their children were at serious risk to lack a sense of pride in their community, to live in deteriorated housing, to change residence frequently, to regard violence as normal, to have a street name, to ‘work’ on a lower rung of the drug-world ladder, to have a family member and/or neighbor who had died a violent death or who had AIDS, to regard the police as the enemy. Their neighborhoods did vary in the degree of risk they posed. Even in the most hostile neighborhoods, local groups -- some formally established, others ‘street-organized’ -- could be found working to insure a measure of safety and encouragement for these women and their children.
- Society/Media Factors. These women and their children were at serious risk to have no sense of membership in the larger society, to have never visited other parts of the city, to have learned by watching closely the adults around them how to ‘work the system’, to have a surreal worldview shaped by television, to be influenced by militant music, to place no value on newspapers or news magazines. Harsh predispositions against them -- widespread in the larger society -- made interactions across social lines predictably adversarial. Sustained efforts to introduce resources and options (e.g., businesses, vocational institutes, and community colleges) could be found attempting to create fresh start opportunities.
In that first conversation, my new physician friend spoke candidly about her struggle to launch the second of two multi-million dollar federal grants for which she was the principal investigator. Soon after beginning her academic year in the late 1980s, she had become alarmed by the incidence of babies being admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit at Jackson Hospital after testing positive at birth for cocaine exposure. When discharged, their mothers took them home to Liberty City or Overtown . . . inner-city wastelands on the northwestern edge of Miami that were plagued by violence, depressed by grinding poverty, organized around an illicit drug ‘industry’, threatened by devastating sexually transmitted disease epidemics.
Headlines from major cities across the country warned of frightening ‘crack baby’ scenarios. Scientific data were needed to test the escalating societal fears or to rein in the speculation. Her first federal grant allowed her to organize a research team to track the medical and psycho-social consequences of cocaine exposure for @300 babies through their first five years of life. Responses from her department chair and colleagues were supportive. The research would be clearly scientific. The subject matter was pediatric, if not neonatal. Her academic career would be enhanced.
A year later, she successfully added a second federal grant to fund a five-year intervention project designed to break into the personal and parental dysfunction of @120 cocaine-abusing mothers whose babies were compromised by premature birth as well as by cocaine-exposure during pregnancy. Responses from her department chair and colleagues chilled considerably. Little hard data would be generated. Few scientifically derived conclusions would result. They considered the subject matter public health, not medical; for social workers, not neonatologists. Her academic career would stall.
She pressed on. She had seen too much to turn back without sacrificing her integrity. She had access to these mothers at an emotionally receptive moment. She had an idea that just might work:
Premature birth put these babies at risk for more reasons than cocaine exposure. If we concentrate for five years on the interests of the babies, might the wary mothers notice the value we are placing on their children? Might we eventually break through their suspicion that we are yet one more hollow gesture from ‘the system’ with the intent to manipulate? Might they stay near enough for our example to strengthen in them the maternal instincts necessary to justify their keeping their children?
But moving this noble idea into reality proved rough. Shortly after the proposal was funded, two medical school collaborators abruptly abandoned her leadership team, pulling critical legs out from under the project. Then Hurricane Andrew slammed through Miami, leaving the city in utter chaos. Six months later, signs of recovery in the city were still scant. With the cocaine-abusing mothers scattered by the storm and difficult to locate, her turf battles with other researchers intensified. And her case management staff had completely turned over.
My first task was to help my new physician friend regroup. We went back to basics. Could she answer the five questions of a forceful/centering mission statement – i.e., Who/what are we? What do we do? For whom do we do what we do? To what end do we do what we do? Within/upon what values do we do what we do? Only then could she determine what (if any) goals were still feasible.
We tested her answers during a two-day retreat with the entire staff. In fact, their being a ‘staff’ was a crucial issue. Each one knew how to do just enough to stay employed. But their leader needed more. She needed them to be a staff analogous to the staffs used by the hikers on the Appalachian Trail I saw passing through our Vermont village each fall. Why did she need them to ‘buy into’ the project? Because the intervention could work only if we all shared a respect for the cocaine-abusing mothers that would protect us from keeping them at a safe distance, that would steer us away from prejudging them, that would challenge us not to leave them conveniently ‘boxed’.
We proposed to rebuild the intervention project around writing life narratives with/about the mothers. Each mother’s story was badly broken. But it was her story. And we were convinced there was more to each mother than her cocaine addiction. Piecing together these narratives meant being fully present with the mothers. The case managers and I had to risk going again and again to where the mothers lived – to ‘Dirt City’ under an I-95 overpass where homeless individuals and families lived in crates, to the women’s jail cells, to treatment centers, to public housing apartments flanked by drug runners and heavily-armed drug guards, to abandoned lots dotted with packing boxes for shelter, to elementary schools isolated by towering chain-linked security fences, to corner stores that fronted for drug deals, to cocaine dens, to . . . . In doing so, most of us had to clean out biases deep within ourselves – biases against the poor and against African-Americans -- that had never before been so disturbed or challenged.
The gamble -- that enlarging our hearts with respect for the mothers as survivors would trump burdening our hearts with insight into the layers of utter tragedy carried by the mothers. The gamble -- that a passionate vision would overcome crippling burn out. So we restarted the project. We all wrestled with defining success. We all questioned whether trying to keep these mothers and their children together was the right thing to do. We all cared.
Friday, May 23, 2008
Fragment -- #28
[1996] I wrote these reflections for the chair of the LSU Ob/Gyn Department when he was particularly discouraged about the lack of medical school administrative support as we sought to separate the department from fraudulent entanglements.
(1) Stress is inevitable and often irresolvable when trying to live with integrity and compassion ‘face to face with the world’. (2) Such stress originates from the struggle between honorable and dishonorable values/goals. Such stress can/must be managed. Such stress cannot be eliminated/avoided without retreating from concrete places associated with being ‘face to face with the world’. Such stress may not be vindicated in the lifetime of the one stressed. (3) Such stress is increased and made more complex by pride, impatience, fatigue, duplicity, fear, guilt, denial, anger, ingratitude in the attitudes/behavior of the one stressed. (4) Unmanaged stress physically kills by overtaxing the body. Unmanaged stress spiritually kills by isolating the one stressed, by exposing the conditional/superficial friendships/alliances trusted by the one stressed, by luring the one stressed into behavior that contradicts his/her honorable values/goals, by trapping the one stressed in a paradigm by which s/he sees schemes on every side, by narrowing reality to the ‘tragic’ and the ‘crooked’ for the one stressed, by numbing the sensitivities and fading the memories of the one stressed, by tempting the one stressed with a prideful sense of being martyred. (5) Stress can be managed by the discovery of and habitual return to symmetry between engagement and contemplation/meditation. Through such discipline, the one stressed seeks to recover humility, modesty, patience, sight, anticipation, thankfulness, forgiveness, self-respect, memory, fellowship, peace.
(1) Stress is inevitable and often irresolvable when trying to live with integrity and compassion ‘face to face with the world’. (2) Such stress originates from the struggle between honorable and dishonorable values/goals. Such stress can/must be managed. Such stress cannot be eliminated/avoided without retreating from concrete places associated with being ‘face to face with the world’. Such stress may not be vindicated in the lifetime of the one stressed. (3) Such stress is increased and made more complex by pride, impatience, fatigue, duplicity, fear, guilt, denial, anger, ingratitude in the attitudes/behavior of the one stressed. (4) Unmanaged stress physically kills by overtaxing the body. Unmanaged stress spiritually kills by isolating the one stressed, by exposing the conditional/superficial friendships/alliances trusted by the one stressed, by luring the one stressed into behavior that contradicts his/her honorable values/goals, by trapping the one stressed in a paradigm by which s/he sees schemes on every side, by narrowing reality to the ‘tragic’ and the ‘crooked’ for the one stressed, by numbing the sensitivities and fading the memories of the one stressed, by tempting the one stressed with a prideful sense of being martyred. (5) Stress can be managed by the discovery of and habitual return to symmetry between engagement and contemplation/meditation. Through such discipline, the one stressed seeks to recover humility, modesty, patience, sight, anticipation, thankfulness, forgiveness, self-respect, memory, fellowship, peace.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Fragment -- #27 – ‘Community’
[The following 1994 ‘fragment’ describes four ways I experience (and understand) ‘community’. These four ways are presented in order on a spectrum from unconditional to conditional and reflect a sequence from praxis to reflection.]
The first and primary experience of ‘community’ for me occurs whenever/wherever I am unconditionally ‘face to face with the world’. The specifics and peculiarities of this experience of ‘community’ necessarily and richly vary. This experience occurs whenever/wherever I take the risk to initiate and sustain a relationship, a covenant, a friendship that is genuine and without regard for return.
The experience of ‘community’ for me that is nearest to this first and primary experience of ‘community’ forms when I discover others whose way of being ‘face to face with the world’ so resonates with mine that when together we support each other in our shared strengths, our shared weaknesses, our struggle with loneliness. The shared way of being creates and defines this experience of ‘community’. How we have come to this way of being does not define or determine having a place in this ‘community’. This distinction encourages and protects the liberty of each one to speak freely (i.e., without competition) about the traditions, convictions, and resources that make his/her journey special. The shared way of being certifies the validity of each one’s ‘story’. No one in this experience of ‘community’ hears another’s story with a disposition to criticize, undermine, or correct.
The conversations in this experience of ‘community’ nearest to being ‘face to face with the world’ may disclose that some (perhaps many) interpret their life’s core/center -- which is essentially human in focus -- in transcending terms. Such disclosure should be included in the chronicling and communication that overflows from the experience of ‘community’ nearest to being ‘face to face with the world’. Participants are free to explore the proposed association of ‘phenomenal’ and ‘noumenal’ realities that inspire awe and contemplation. The point of reference remains the shared resolve to be ‘face to face with the world’. This more intimate experience of ‘community’ nurtures a perspective that includes room for doubt, ensures a healthy penitence, is modest (i.e., can envision sacrificing its existence to a higher cause), values leavening hiddenness.
If these three experiences of ‘community’ form consistent with the traditions and resources of the participants’ ‘religious’ journeys, then recourse to an experience of ‘community’ within the ‘religious’ sphere becomes appropriate. Given the ‘outsider’ position, the tendency toward idolatry within the ‘religious’ sphere, and the lack of time to spend this far removed from being ‘face to face with the world’ (i.e., the first and primary experience of ‘community’) – such fourth-order experiences of ‘community’ within the ‘religious’ sphere are most likely to be found either in gatherings perceived to be marginal and/or unorthodox by the larger ‘religious’ sphere.
This layered experience of ‘community’ hinges on a view of being human that is not satisfied apart from attention to the human geist and that, therefore, anticipates the possibility of authentic encounters with every human being. This layered experience of ‘community’ promotes a way of being in which the intent (L., to reach or to stretch) is:
The first and primary experience of ‘community’ for me occurs whenever/wherever I am unconditionally ‘face to face with the world’. The specifics and peculiarities of this experience of ‘community’ necessarily and richly vary. This experience occurs whenever/wherever I take the risk to initiate and sustain a relationship, a covenant, a friendship that is genuine and without regard for return.
The experience of ‘community’ for me that is nearest to this first and primary experience of ‘community’ forms when I discover others whose way of being ‘face to face with the world’ so resonates with mine that when together we support each other in our shared strengths, our shared weaknesses, our struggle with loneliness. The shared way of being creates and defines this experience of ‘community’. How we have come to this way of being does not define or determine having a place in this ‘community’. This distinction encourages and protects the liberty of each one to speak freely (i.e., without competition) about the traditions, convictions, and resources that make his/her journey special. The shared way of being certifies the validity of each one’s ‘story’. No one in this experience of ‘community’ hears another’s story with a disposition to criticize, undermine, or correct.
The conversations in this experience of ‘community’ nearest to being ‘face to face with the world’ may disclose that some (perhaps many) interpret their life’s core/center -- which is essentially human in focus -- in transcending terms. Such disclosure should be included in the chronicling and communication that overflows from the experience of ‘community’ nearest to being ‘face to face with the world’. Participants are free to explore the proposed association of ‘phenomenal’ and ‘noumenal’ realities that inspire awe and contemplation. The point of reference remains the shared resolve to be ‘face to face with the world’. This more intimate experience of ‘community’ nurtures a perspective that includes room for doubt, ensures a healthy penitence, is modest (i.e., can envision sacrificing its existence to a higher cause), values leavening hiddenness.
If these three experiences of ‘community’ form consistent with the traditions and resources of the participants’ ‘religious’ journeys, then recourse to an experience of ‘community’ within the ‘religious’ sphere becomes appropriate. Given the ‘outsider’ position, the tendency toward idolatry within the ‘religious’ sphere, and the lack of time to spend this far removed from being ‘face to face with the world’ (i.e., the first and primary experience of ‘community’) – such fourth-order experiences of ‘community’ within the ‘religious’ sphere are most likely to be found either in gatherings perceived to be marginal and/or unorthodox by the larger ‘religious’ sphere.
This layered experience of ‘community’ hinges on a view of being human that is not satisfied apart from attention to the human geist and that, therefore, anticipates the possibility of authentic encounters with every human being. This layered experience of ‘community’ promotes a way of being in which the intent (L., to reach or to stretch) is:
To hope rather than to despair
To give rather than to take
To unite rather than to divide
To enrich rather than to deplete
To care rather than to ignore
To heal rather than to harm
To listen empathetically rather than to speak presumptuously
To educate rather than to force
To trust rather than to suspect
To build on strengths rather than to build on weaknesses
To be thankful rather than to be demanding
To forgive rather than to seek revenge
To revere all life rather than to devalue any life
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Fragment -- #26
[The following thoughts were prepared for an April 1993 presentation I was invited to give in Vermont to the Norwich Congregational Church.]
Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. The day chosen marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – widely considered the most courageous act of Jewish resistance to Hitler’s strategy of mass murder. Fifty years ago today, the Nazi forces were making final plans for the next day’s assault. The previous twenty-one months had witnessed the virtual disappearance of Warsaw’s Jewish population. 100,000 Jews had already died of disease, starvation, slave labor, or execution. 300,000 had been deported to concentration camps. The beleaguered survivors of the torn families prepared bunkers and weapons. These poorly equipped and starving fighters would hold off a powerful German occupation force for several weeks before finally succumbing to the inevitable.
Holocaust Remembrance Day -- this special day’s title recognizes our ability to look back, to remember past experiences in and beyond our lives. Before attempting to focus on ‘holocaust’, a few thoughts about memory seem in order. “Why do we remember?” “How should we remember?” “What if we do not remember?” -- these are critical questions. Remembering enlarges our sense of self as we reestablish membership with past experiences. The past is, as Tevye sang in Fiddler on the Roof, “laden with happiness and tears”. It is a sign of maturity to remember without falling under the tyranny of the past or without manipulating the past.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer – executed April 1945 by the Nazis for his complicity with the 20 July 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life -- proposed that we should remember the past with the dispositions of thanksgiving and contrition (a theme frequently referenced in his prison letters). I would add honesty, vulnerability, and courage.
I did not grow up remembering the Holocaust in this way. My sense of self was first challenged by the Holocaust seventeen years ago. I was traveling for the first time in Europe. I was alone. I took the earliest train out of Munich for the few kilometers to the location of what remained of Dachau concentration camp. The gates into the camp were open. The grounds were silent. No one else had arrived. I walked quietly into the past. The photographs, the lectures, the memoirs, the documentaries to which I had been exposed were transformed into a shocking consciousness of the horror that shook my foundations. Curiosity quickly gave way as I made the decision to cross that threshold in remembering beyond which the past irreversibly impacts the present. Gawking was no longer a risk. However, looking and listening was awkward, embarrassing. It even felt disrespectful. Honest words are painful.
The word ‘holocaust’ -- which gained English currency in the mid-1950s -- literally means completely consumed by fire. What images do we associate with ‘holocaust’? Piles of shoes/glasses/suitcases, nakedness, starvation, rape, experimentation, dulled eyes, beatings, disease, ashes, mass graves? Or perhaps brutality, slaughter, innocence, dehumanization, darkness?
Where were their friends? Who were their friends? Eli Wiesel -- a Holocaust survivor and now persistent witness -- has said that the opposite of life is not death; the opposite of life is indifference.
The images of the Holocaust correspond strikingly with the image of Job. Though (or perhaps because of being) personally hedged about with excessive good fortune, he had dreaded catastrophe (3:24). The initial blows come without warning -- loss of children and property. Lamenting in sackcloth and ashes, he grits out what previously had been an easy prayer: “The Lord gives, the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Then his health fails. Weeks and months pass. He shrinks to a shadow of his former self. He can get no relief from the open sores that cover his frail body. He eats little, as food has lost its taste. Nightmares keep him from deep, refreshing sleep. Acquaintances and family abandon him. Some forget. Others gawk and ridicule. His foul breath offends even his wife.
The three individuals for whom Job had reserved the most intimate meaning of ‘friend’ meet together and hurry to their stricken friend. When close enough to see but far enough not yet to be noticed, they hesitate in horror. They cannot recognize Job. After steadying themselves, they approach their friend. For seven days and nights, they sit with him in silence. Finally, Job utters words of pain and despair. Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar stumble and fail. Job senses their fear and feels their attack on the one thing left to him -- his integrity. He says:
What verdict is drawn when we place our attempts to be a friend alongside this challenge?
References to the starving in Somalia, the raped and slaughtered in the former Yugoslavia, the degraded victims of gang crimes in Los Angeles must have a place when we ask, “Who does Job represent for us?” However, such references alone may keep the issue at a safe distance. We can turn away with an easy conscience, satisfied by a hollow prayer or an extra dollar in the offering. No. If we are to feel the full pressure of Job’s words, we must focus on concrete relationships -- relationships present in this gathering or waiting for us when we leave. To whom are we bonded by vow, even if ‘holocaust’ strikes? How different from Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar are we prepared to be?
Quakers call their congregations ‘societies of friends’. Do we constitute a gathering of friends? I am not asking if we are all devoted to each other as Job defined friendship. To suggest such would be presumptuous and would neglect the wider network of relationships we all have. I am asking if we are gathered here as individuals deeply concerned to learn how to be the sort of friend who remains loyal when face to face with the despair imposed by ‘holocaust’.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer participated in a covert effort, organized within a branch of the military’s secret services, to bring Hitler down by coup or assassination. He was arrested April 1943. After two years in the grip of the Gestapo as a political prisoner, Bonhoeffer died by hanging 9 April 1945. Just a few weeks before his arrest, Bonhoeffer had written a reflection piece entitled ‘After Ten Years’. His point of reference – Hitler’s takeover in January 1933. He closed the essay with a question I want to put alongside our thoughts about remaining loyal to a despairing friend. The question – “Are we still of any use?” To this question, Bonhoeffer wrote:
These are piercing questions. Many ‘communities’ or ‘gatherings’ in our society set tables that have no place for a person whose despair is manifest in painfully honest words. May we be granted the humility and the courage to set tables at which despairing men or women, boys or girls, feel no expectation other than to simply and honestly be themselves.
Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. The day chosen marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – widely considered the most courageous act of Jewish resistance to Hitler’s strategy of mass murder. Fifty years ago today, the Nazi forces were making final plans for the next day’s assault. The previous twenty-one months had witnessed the virtual disappearance of Warsaw’s Jewish population. 100,000 Jews had already died of disease, starvation, slave labor, or execution. 300,000 had been deported to concentration camps. The beleaguered survivors of the torn families prepared bunkers and weapons. These poorly equipped and starving fighters would hold off a powerful German occupation force for several weeks before finally succumbing to the inevitable.
Holocaust Remembrance Day -- this special day’s title recognizes our ability to look back, to remember past experiences in and beyond our lives. Before attempting to focus on ‘holocaust’, a few thoughts about memory seem in order. “Why do we remember?” “How should we remember?” “What if we do not remember?” -- these are critical questions. Remembering enlarges our sense of self as we reestablish membership with past experiences. The past is, as Tevye sang in Fiddler on the Roof, “laden with happiness and tears”. It is a sign of maturity to remember without falling under the tyranny of the past or without manipulating the past.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer – executed April 1945 by the Nazis for his complicity with the 20 July 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life -- proposed that we should remember the past with the dispositions of thanksgiving and contrition (a theme frequently referenced in his prison letters). I would add honesty, vulnerability, and courage.
I did not grow up remembering the Holocaust in this way. My sense of self was first challenged by the Holocaust seventeen years ago. I was traveling for the first time in Europe. I was alone. I took the earliest train out of Munich for the few kilometers to the location of what remained of Dachau concentration camp. The gates into the camp were open. The grounds were silent. No one else had arrived. I walked quietly into the past. The photographs, the lectures, the memoirs, the documentaries to which I had been exposed were transformed into a shocking consciousness of the horror that shook my foundations. Curiosity quickly gave way as I made the decision to cross that threshold in remembering beyond which the past irreversibly impacts the present. Gawking was no longer a risk. However, looking and listening was awkward, embarrassing. It even felt disrespectful. Honest words are painful.
The word ‘holocaust’ -- which gained English currency in the mid-1950s -- literally means completely consumed by fire. What images do we associate with ‘holocaust’? Piles of shoes/glasses/suitcases, nakedness, starvation, rape, experimentation, dulled eyes, beatings, disease, ashes, mass graves? Or perhaps brutality, slaughter, innocence, dehumanization, darkness?
Where were their friends? Who were their friends? Eli Wiesel -- a Holocaust survivor and now persistent witness -- has said that the opposite of life is not death; the opposite of life is indifference.
The images of the Holocaust correspond strikingly with the image of Job. Though (or perhaps because of being) personally hedged about with excessive good fortune, he had dreaded catastrophe (3:24). The initial blows come without warning -- loss of children and property. Lamenting in sackcloth and ashes, he grits out what previously had been an easy prayer: “The Lord gives, the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Then his health fails. Weeks and months pass. He shrinks to a shadow of his former self. He can get no relief from the open sores that cover his frail body. He eats little, as food has lost its taste. Nightmares keep him from deep, refreshing sleep. Acquaintances and family abandon him. Some forget. Others gawk and ridicule. His foul breath offends even his wife.
The three individuals for whom Job had reserved the most intimate meaning of ‘friend’ meet together and hurry to their stricken friend. When close enough to see but far enough not yet to be noticed, they hesitate in horror. They cannot recognize Job. After steadying themselves, they approach their friend. For seven days and nights, they sit with him in silence. Finally, Job utters words of pain and despair. Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar stumble and fail. Job senses their fear and feels their attack on the one thing left to him -- his integrity. He says:
14When desperate people give up on God Almighty, their friends, at least, should stick with them. 15But my brothers are fickle as a gulch in the desert – 16one day they’re gushing with water from melting ice and snow cascading out of the mountains, 17but by midsummer they’re dry, gullies baked dry in the sun. 18Travelers who spot them and go out of their way for a drink, end up in a waterless gulch and die of thirst. 19Merchant caravans from Tema see them and expect water, tourists from Sheba hope for a cool drink. 20They arrive so confident – but what a disappointment! They get there, and their faces fall! 21And you, my so-called friends, are no better – there’s nothing to you! One look at a hard scene and you shrink in fear. 22It’s not as though I asked you for anything – I didn’t ask you for one red cent – 23nor did I beg you to go out on a limb for me. So why all this dodging and shuffling? 24Confront me with the truth and I’ll shut up, show me where I’ve gone off the track. 25Honest words never hurt anyone, but what’s the point of all this pious bluster? 26You pretend to tell me what’s wrong with my life, but treat my words of anguish as so much hot air. 27Are people mere things to you? Are friends just items of profit and loss? 28Look me in the eye! Do you think I’d lie to your face? 29Think it over – no double-talk! Think carefully – my integrity is on the line! 30Can you detect anything false in what I say? Don’t you trust me to discern good from evil? (Peterson translation)
What verdict is drawn when we place our attempts to be a friend alongside this challenge?
References to the starving in Somalia, the raped and slaughtered in the former Yugoslavia, the degraded victims of gang crimes in Los Angeles must have a place when we ask, “Who does Job represent for us?” However, such references alone may keep the issue at a safe distance. We can turn away with an easy conscience, satisfied by a hollow prayer or an extra dollar in the offering. No. If we are to feel the full pressure of Job’s words, we must focus on concrete relationships -- relationships present in this gathering or waiting for us when we leave. To whom are we bonded by vow, even if ‘holocaust’ strikes? How different from Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar are we prepared to be?
Quakers call their congregations ‘societies of friends’. Do we constitute a gathering of friends? I am not asking if we are all devoted to each other as Job defined friendship. To suggest such would be presumptuous and would neglect the wider network of relationships we all have. I am asking if we are gathered here as individuals deeply concerned to learn how to be the sort of friend who remains loyal when face to face with the despair imposed by ‘holocaust’.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer participated in a covert effort, organized within a branch of the military’s secret services, to bring Hitler down by coup or assassination. He was arrested April 1943. After two years in the grip of the Gestapo as a political prisoner, Bonhoeffer died by hanging 9 April 1945. Just a few weeks before his arrest, Bonhoeffer had written a reflection piece entitled ‘After Ten Years’. His point of reference – Hitler’s takeover in January 1933. He closed the essay with a question I want to put alongside our thoughts about remaining loyal to a despairing friend. The question – “Are we still of any use?” To this question, Bonhoeffer wrote:
“We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learned the arts of equivocation and pretense; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use?”Which way are we to look -- toward the heavens or back to our places in the world? Bonhoeffer’s question breaks our gaze toward the heavens. Are we still of any use -- to our partner? to our children? to our parents? to our neighbors? to our colleagues? to a stranger whose life becomes entwined with ours?
These are piercing questions. Many ‘communities’ or ‘gatherings’ in our society set tables that have no place for a person whose despair is manifest in painfully honest words. May we be granted the humility and the courage to set tables at which despairing men or women, boys or girls, feel no expectation other than to simply and honestly be themselves.
“Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward
slaughter. If you say, ‘But we knew nothing about this’, does not he who weighs
the heart perceive it? Will he not repay each person according to what he
has done?” (Proverbs 24:11-12)
Sunday, May 4, 2008
FRAGMENT #25 -- A MEDITATION ON MARRIAGE
A gathering that celebrates the decision of two individuals to journey through life together – the essence of marriage -- creates one of the all-too-infrequent opportunities to pause in the midst of busy routines to ponder the deeper realities of life. Over against any judgment that life is essentially tragic, futile, or mundane – two individuals consecrate both their individuality and their life together. Faded pictures, quiet reminders, humorous stories, private thoughts -- all such priceless reflections on swiftly-flown days are safely tucked away as the celebrated individuals mark the completion of their separate narratives -- with many dreams fulfilled, some unfulfilled -- and the beginning of their shared narrative.
The French have a beautiful word -- L'Abri -- that means ‘shelter’. Family and friends pitch a welcoming L'Abri, a sturdy shelter, a loving canopy over the celebrated individuals as they merge themselves in marriage.
Two individuals vow before family and friends to share the return of their work, to pick each other up, to keep each other warm. But why trust each other? Their mutual trust is anchored by their shared resolve to remain centered by respect, empathy, fairness when they are weary and worn as well as when they are exuberant and overflowing.
Three terms from antiquity give texture to the ‘love’ so essential to this way of being together -- i.e., eros or sensuality, phileo or friendship, and agape or steadfast devotion.
To love is to be sensual – to have keen eyes, alert ears, refined tastes, a gentle touch. Ideally, two individuals committed to each other in marriage have grown up with dance, merriment, song, feasts, wine . . . delight in creativity . . . appreciate the subtleties of color and composition . . . are refreshed by art and music . . . see nature’s allegories as they sit, walk, run, ride. Jewish poets produced a timeless poem of romance -- The Song of Solomon -- that speaks of being ‘faint with love’. When love between two individuals committed to each other in marriage is full and complete, their love is sensual.
To love is to aspire for exceptional friendship. Jewish storytellers produced a timeless study of what it means to be such a friend -- The Story of Job. This story’s main character is reduced by tragic suffering to being tossed aside on the ‘scrap heap’. He clings nonetheless to the idea that “a despairing person should have the devotion of a friend, even though s/he forsakes the fear of the Almighty.” Job’s closest friends fall short. His spouse falls short. Unrestrained openness and freedom make unconditional friendship a rare gift. When love between two individuals committed to each other in marriage is full and complete, their love is expressed in the special friendship envisioned in the story of Job.
To love is to remain true to the steadfastness that has been promised. Jewish prophets found in marriage a profound metaphor for imagining the unwavering faithfulness of ‘God’ to Israel, even when Israel wounded her spouse by straying or being distracted from steadfast devotion. When love between two individuals committed to each other in marriage is full and complete, their disposition toward each other is authentic, not calculated; self-sacrificing, not self-serving; respectful, not biased; longsuffering, not erratic.
And so -- sensuality; friendship; steadfast devotion. What do these reflections mean for me? I am resolved to remain open to these near mystical experiences; to keep them etched in my memories. Doing so is not easy. Sustaining the vigor in a way of being together that enlarges rather than exploits, that frees rather than controls, that hopes rather than despairs is an uncommon achievement. The social spheres in which I live and work routinely promote a very different way of being together – e.g., the way of competition, self-assertion, pretense, manipulation, suspicion, secrecy. Two individuals committed to each other in marriage must instead be resolved to cherish one another in mutual esteem, to bear with each other’s infirmities, to comfort each other in sickness and accident, to encourage one another to live as an heir of grace. For me --
The French have a beautiful word -- L'Abri -- that means ‘shelter’. Family and friends pitch a welcoming L'Abri, a sturdy shelter, a loving canopy over the celebrated individuals as they merge themselves in marriage.
Two individuals vow before family and friends to share the return of their work, to pick each other up, to keep each other warm. But why trust each other? Their mutual trust is anchored by their shared resolve to remain centered by respect, empathy, fairness when they are weary and worn as well as when they are exuberant and overflowing.
Three terms from antiquity give texture to the ‘love’ so essential to this way of being together -- i.e., eros or sensuality, phileo or friendship, and agape or steadfast devotion.
To love is to be sensual – to have keen eyes, alert ears, refined tastes, a gentle touch. Ideally, two individuals committed to each other in marriage have grown up with dance, merriment, song, feasts, wine . . . delight in creativity . . . appreciate the subtleties of color and composition . . . are refreshed by art and music . . . see nature’s allegories as they sit, walk, run, ride. Jewish poets produced a timeless poem of romance -- The Song of Solomon -- that speaks of being ‘faint with love’. When love between two individuals committed to each other in marriage is full and complete, their love is sensual.
To love is to aspire for exceptional friendship. Jewish storytellers produced a timeless study of what it means to be such a friend -- The Story of Job. This story’s main character is reduced by tragic suffering to being tossed aside on the ‘scrap heap’. He clings nonetheless to the idea that “a despairing person should have the devotion of a friend, even though s/he forsakes the fear of the Almighty.” Job’s closest friends fall short. His spouse falls short. Unrestrained openness and freedom make unconditional friendship a rare gift. When love between two individuals committed to each other in marriage is full and complete, their love is expressed in the special friendship envisioned in the story of Job.
To love is to remain true to the steadfastness that has been promised. Jewish prophets found in marriage a profound metaphor for imagining the unwavering faithfulness of ‘God’ to Israel, even when Israel wounded her spouse by straying or being distracted from steadfast devotion. When love between two individuals committed to each other in marriage is full and complete, their disposition toward each other is authentic, not calculated; self-sacrificing, not self-serving; respectful, not biased; longsuffering, not erratic.
And so -- sensuality; friendship; steadfast devotion. What do these reflections mean for me? I am resolved to remain open to these near mystical experiences; to keep them etched in my memories. Doing so is not easy. Sustaining the vigor in a way of being together that enlarges rather than exploits, that frees rather than controls, that hopes rather than despairs is an uncommon achievement. The social spheres in which I live and work routinely promote a very different way of being together – e.g., the way of competition, self-assertion, pretense, manipulation, suspicion, secrecy. Two individuals committed to each other in marriage must instead be resolved to cherish one another in mutual esteem, to bear with each other’s infirmities, to comfort each other in sickness and accident, to encourage one another to live as an heir of grace. For me --
- When my peers live tangled in self-interests, may I demonstrate the self-transcending ideals of peace, mercy, and justice.
- When my peers hold strangers and strange ideas in contempt, may my home be hospitable to a rich diversity of persons and ideas.
- When my peers languish with no holy places, may my home ever be a sanctuary.
- When my peers aimlessly and recklessly yield to their impulses and passions, may I remain loyal to the ideas that I in calm moments have discerned to be true and ennobling.
- When my peers invest their lives in shortsighted aspirations, may I remain wedded to the intention to treat as most important each day what will still seem important on my last day.
Marriage can/should be a sacrament, indeed a conveyor of grace, for two individuals sharing life together and for their acquaintances who are searching for insight into how to live life well.
A ‘non-religious’ view of Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- #12
“ . . . anti-Semitic of some stripe”?
Thorough-Going Nazi -10 -7 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 10 Resistance/Conspiracy
DISPOSITION –10: No personal association with Jews. Ideologically driven to the point of calculated violence against Jews. Harsh verbal abuse. Ready to risk personal loss to reinforce security/control.
DISPOSITION –7: No personal association with Jews. Hostile to the point of being incited to violence against Jews. Taunting verbal abuse. Ready to risk personal loss to reinforce security/control.
DISPOSITION –4: Minimized personal association with Jews. Approved segregation and restriction on civil rights of Jews. Nervous verbal abuse. Approved actions that reinforced security/control.
DISPOSITION –1: Isolated personal association with Jews. Not seriously hostile toward Jews. Preferred segregation. Playful verbal abuse. Quiet about actions that reinforced security/control.
DISPOSITION 0: Naïve personal association with Jews.
DISPOSITION +1: Occasional personal association with Jews. Not openly opposed to segregation of and restriction on civil rights of Jews. Perhaps objected in private to abuse. Avoided personal loss/risk.
DISPOSITION +4: Sustained personal association with Jews. Supported desegregation of Jews. Opposed restricting civil rights of Jews. Cautiously outspoken in private to abuse. Easily intimidated.
DISPOSITION +7: Valued personal association with Jews. Supported integration of Jews. Responsive to institutional (collective) ‘evil’ re abuse. Willing to risk personal loss/risk.
DISPOSITION +10: Solidarity with abused Jews. Resistance/conspiracy (covert or overt) against institutional (collective) ‘evil’. Ready to risk personal loss/risk.
I understand Dietrich Bonhoeffer to have considered the ‘German Churches/Christians’ to have been spread across the ‘-7 to +1’ range of dispositions and the ‘Confessing Churches/Christians’ to have been spread across the ‘-3 to +5’ range of dispositions. He and the Bonhoeffer family were among those with the ‘10’ disposition.
DISPOSITION –7: No personal association with Jews. Hostile to the point of being incited to violence against Jews. Taunting verbal abuse. Ready to risk personal loss to reinforce security/control.
DISPOSITION –4: Minimized personal association with Jews. Approved segregation and restriction on civil rights of Jews. Nervous verbal abuse. Approved actions that reinforced security/control.
DISPOSITION –1: Isolated personal association with Jews. Not seriously hostile toward Jews. Preferred segregation. Playful verbal abuse. Quiet about actions that reinforced security/control.
DISPOSITION 0: Naïve personal association with Jews.
DISPOSITION +1: Occasional personal association with Jews. Not openly opposed to segregation of and restriction on civil rights of Jews. Perhaps objected in private to abuse. Avoided personal loss/risk.
DISPOSITION +4: Sustained personal association with Jews. Supported desegregation of Jews. Opposed restricting civil rights of Jews. Cautiously outspoken in private to abuse. Easily intimidated.
DISPOSITION +7: Valued personal association with Jews. Supported integration of Jews. Responsive to institutional (collective) ‘evil’ re abuse. Willing to risk personal loss/risk.
DISPOSITION +10: Solidarity with abused Jews. Resistance/conspiracy (covert or overt) against institutional (collective) ‘evil’. Ready to risk personal loss/risk.
I understand Dietrich Bonhoeffer to have considered the ‘German Churches/Christians’ to have been spread across the ‘-7 to +1’ range of dispositions and the ‘Confessing Churches/Christians’ to have been spread across the ‘-3 to +5’ range of dispositions. He and the Bonhoeffer family were among those with the ‘10’ disposition.
Personal experience/reflections/observations re anti-Semitism:
- Among my close circle of childhood friends was the son of the Jewish family who owned the sporting good store on the town square (i.e., a schoolmate and fellow football player in my hometown of Mayfield, KY).
- I recall little or no discussion of anti-Semitism – either in antiquity or in the modern era – during my childhood. In discussions or presentations re Christianity, the ‘religious’ discourse in which I was raised disenfranchised the Jewish community (e.g., references to ‘the Old Testament’ rather than ‘Jewish/Hebrew scripture’, to Jews as ‘them’, to “they rejected/killed Christ”, . . .) and left anti-Semitic attitudes/comments unaddressed/unchallenged.
- My sensitivity and appreciation for Jewish history/experience deepened/broadened when the methodology for my study of history became increasingly careful/critical in a scholarly way during my final two undergraduate years at Murray State University and matured further during my doctoral work. My ongoing study of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life/thought since 1976 has ‘kept open the Jewish question’ (adapting one of his phrases). My special friendship since 1985 with Sheldon Korones, MD (whose grandparents emigrated a century ago to New York City’s Lower East Side from Czarist Russia) remains a centering/defining/pivotal gift/experience for me.
- The ‘Pharisees’ are presented in reductionist and biased ways in the Synoptic Gospels, as are ‘the Jews’ in the Gospel of John and in the Acts of the Apostles. Note how such writings (which as canonical are considered authoritative within the ‘religious’ sphere), if considered uncritically and without attention to the wider historical context/resources, lead either to anti-Semitic attitudes and behavior or permit such to develop/occur unchecked.
- Are there any individuals/groups for whom it is justified to isolate, segregate, attack, eliminate? Answering this question ‘No’ (which I do) is one of many reasons I became estranged from the ‘religious’ upbringing of my youth. Note that to answer this question within the ‘religious’ sphere a decision has to be made re the nature and use of Jewish and Christian scripture. In other words re anti-Semitism -- if one takes a ‘flat’ view of Jewish and Christian scripture, these biases will not be seriously questioned. If one takes a more critical/modern view of Jewish and Christian scripture, such biases are more likely to be questioned.
- I align myself with efforts (1) to protect and assure every individual’s/group’s freedom of speech, but (2) to restrict, discipline, and prohibit discriminatory behavior (including verbal abuse and exploitation as well as violence) in the public/common domain. This alignment implies confidence in the outcome of open and free thought (which in turn implies cultivation of a thirst to be fully informed and a resolve to learn the art of critical thinking). This view permits and supports legislative/judicial decisions to restrain ‘fundamentalist’-rooted discourse and behavior in the public/common domain.
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