View From My Windrow

Finger on the Pulse

2012-01-27T23:06:00.000-08:00

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I resolve periodically to never again read the “comments” section of anything posted on the internet. Too much exposure to the unbridled id of our culture can, after all, make it hard to get up and go to work in the morning.

And then I slip for some reason, and find myself scrolling through the 172 comments on some political post on Facebook. And I resolve all over again to resist that temptation.

There is the well-worn story about six men in a dark room with an elephant, each asked to describe the animal from the part he touches in his hands. Political commentary on the internet, more than anything else in life, makes me wonder what part of the elephant folks are touching. For my part, it’s hard to imagine that the underclass, the aged, and the disabled that I see every day are the same underclass, aged and disabled that generate such contempt from certain vociferous people on the right end of our political spectrum. Because in America, the “freeloaders” so hated by those who would promote not just the survival but in fact the unencumbered freedom of the fittest among us, are mostly just these--the underclass, the aged, and the disabled. From what I read, the moral narrative goes something like “Those people are lazy, short-sighted, or drug-addicted, and I shouldn’t have to pull their weight.”

Yes, there are people in America who are lazy, short-sighted, or drug-addicted, and who leech off a society to which they would better contribute. But where in the dark room does one sit and with what fingers does one feel the elephant in order to think most of the folks along the financial margins are there through a process of their own election? It baffles me. I guess it’s because the thing I have elected in life is treating the mentally ill (and occasionally addicted) poor that my sense of proportion is so different. I am shoulder-to-shoulder every day with exactly this part of our citizenry, and after twenty years I harbor no hatred of them nor of the system that tries to provide for their care. And when they are the object of contempt, I not only take a contrary view, but I’m truly confused. Just as Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” was an apocryphal anecdote told over and over until I guess he actually believed it himself, it seems to me that this “culture of freeloading” so many are fed up with is more myth than reality. Yes, our Social Security and Medicare systems are a demographic time bomb in need of reform if they are going to survive. But a plague of miscreants? I am too intimately acquainted with the true causes of disability to easily buy any story that the majority of folks in our social safety net are just too willfully lazy or self-destructive to get themselves out.

Here’s the reality I know: One of my patients with schizophrenia, I’ll call him William, told me yesterday that he’d had a really good Christmas. About a year ago he got out of the state mental hospital on conditional release after several months’ detention, after getting arrested for some illegal behavior while in a grossly psychotic state of mind. What brought on this episode? Maybe he had stopped his meds, or maybe not. Any number of individuals with schizophrenia have a major break despite taking their meds, and despite the efforts of their doctors to catch the first signs of the episode in time to ward it off. When he improved again and came to live in a residential program, he tried for months to contact his girlfriend of 15 years, who is also someone with chronic mental illness who lives most of the time in one supervised housing program or another. When he first tried to locate her, after falling out of contact for a year, he found that she had moved, and no one at her residential program could tell him where. Finally, Christmas came, and he tried calling her mother’s house on Christmas Eve. Ordinarily, her mother doesn’t answer the phone if it’s from a number she doesn’t recognize, but on Christmas Eve his girlfriend was there visiting and picked up the phone. Since he’s found his girlfriend again, he’s been taking three buses every Saturday to the other side of the county so he can meet her at a McDonald’s for lunch.

Certainly, William is by any standard a person who lives on the margins of our society, and depends on Social Security and expensive psychiatric interventions to keep hide and hair together. But largely, his lot in life is not one he chose. One percent of every population in every culture on the planet will develop schizophrenia, so truly, there but for the grace of God go you, my friend, or your children, or your children’s children. And somehow, I think William’s commitment to his girlfriend, although they live without the benefit of marriage (since marriage would bring them an immediate decrease in benefits), is a bit more tried and true than the commitment Newt Gingrich has demonstrated to any of his three wives.

William’s story is not just a heart-warming anecdote I pull out, as antidote to the apocryphal Reagan story about his “welfare queen.” William is typical of the disabled folks I treat. Just like he’s typical, more or less, of the patients I see who have less profound mental illness, but still don’t work because of another condition, like their severe obstructive lung disease or arthritic knees or advanced age or frequent dialysis. Our agency runs a vocational program for anyone who’s willing and able-bodied and financially eligible, and I have seen dozens of markedly impaired individuals make their way gradually off disability and into the job market, with sufficient time, assistance, coaching, and encouragement. And enough of my attention, which, as it turns out, is costly. Rehabilitation of the mentally ill is expensive.

It seems as though there ought to be some lesson to be taken from the fact that I, who walk daily with the folks who are carried in our social safety net, do not harbor the contempt for them that one finds on the airwaves of talk radio and in the comment sections of online media. I pay taxes, too. And trust me, it’s not a matter of a knowing wink between me and the folks who enable me to keep my cushy gig sucking the teat of government largess. There’s got to be an easier bureaucratic job than the one I have battling schizophrenia with funding through Medicare and Medicaid. Schizophrenia is mostly the shits, and navigating Medicare and Medicaid is an exquisite torture for any soul.

I do not consider myself a Christian, but I definitely read once that the King shall answer and say to them, “Truly I say to you, inasmuch as you have done it to one of the least of these my brothers, you have done it to me.” Seems a little at odds with the narrative that the least among us are the worst among us, but then I guess I just don’t really get Christianity. At least not right-of-center Christianity.

So there you have it-—my part of the elephant. The lesson I take from the life I’ve seen is that it is important to speak out against the caricature that the poor and disabled are shiftless, and that caring for them is an erosion of moral justice. If your part of the elephant is truly different, I'm all ears. But Reagan’s “welfare queen” was always just a mythical creature, and I, for my part, will both model and advocate for charity and compassion in place of meanness and self-concern, for William, and for all of the Williams I know (which number in the thousands) probably until my last day on Earth. (After which, from what I hear, I’m off to burn in hell. But there's always that "what have you done to the least of these, my brothers" card...)

The Devil in the Details

2011-11-13T14:04:00.000-08:00

"But good people, heroic people, are led into temptation by their very goodness — by the illusion, common to those who have done important deeds, that they have higher responsibilities than the ordinary run of humankind. It’s precisely in the service to these supposed higher responsibilities that they often let more basic ones slip away." –Ross Douthat, The Devil and Joe Paterno, The New York Times, Nov. 13, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-devil-and-joe-paterno.html

After reading a column like the one Mr. Douthat wrote for today’s paper, I am left wondering if his failings are intellectual, psychological, or both. Since Anna Freud published The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense in 1937, professional and amateur psychologists alike have had no excuse not to be aquainted with the concept of identification with the aggressor, the role it plays in individual moments of psychic conflict, or how for some it becomes the basis for pervasive aspects of character.

It can be difficult for anyone, when faced with the immolation of a victim by an aggressor, to take up identification with the vulnerable party and not identify with the powerful abuser. This is a human frailty in a moment of stress, and it might make us understand the psychic fortitude it would have taken for Mike McQueary and Joe Paterno to go directly to legal authorities and report a crime where a crime had been committed. We should not, however, engage in the ongoing idealization that Douthat evidences when confronted with the unsalutary effects of this psychic operation as it played out in these men’s behavior. No, it is not in service to higher responsibilities that a usually-moral individual fails the test of siding with a helpless innocent human being who is being violated; it is in fact an identification with the wrong party that leads to this behavior.

When such a pattern of identification is habitual it is evident in sociopathic behavior, and in individuals with such character, actual generosity and sacrifice are rarely seen.

When such a pattern of identification is aberrant, we might understand that it occurred in particular circumstances, where the identification with the aggressor was already strong for other reasons, as it was with McQeary and Paterno and their colleague Sandusky. Such an indentification with the wrong party, morally, might be out of character for an individual. What it is not, as Douthat lamely offers, is in any way a product of heroism, or superior moral character. That idea is an insult to all the individuals who would have made the right choice and called the police.

In the movie Female Perversions, Tilda Swinton plays Eve Stevens, one of two sisters struggling with the effects of growing up in the milieu of their parents’ marriage. In a pivotal scene, Eve is talking with her sister, Maddie (played by Amy Madigan), about events of a particular day in their childhood, which have come up recurrently in her dreams. As she asks her sister about her own memories of that day, she describes the first details as she remembers them: The girls were swimming in a backyard pool while their parents played cards with another couple at a poolside table. Their father got enraged and tipped the table over, causing playing cards to end up in the pool. Later that evening, they witnessed their mother coming out to the living room in her robe to try to soothe their father’s hurt pride. When Eve relates the next events that occurred, she makes a factual mistake, and then corrects herself: Their father struck their mother as she approached him in his chair, and she fell to the floor. Eve says, “And then I went to her;” but stops herself. “No,” she admits to herself and to her sister, “I went to him.” For Eve, her original moment of siding with her aggressive father gives her an important avenue into understanding the way in which this identification became generalized and has plagued her throughout her life.

A number of individuals at Penn State need to ask themselves why they came to the aid of Jerry Sandusky and not the boy he was raping in the shower. I am sure they might find layers of rationalization and denial along with their core identification with the offending party. It is an error we all might fall prone to under the right circumstances of psychological vulnerability. What it would not ever be is a product of too much heroism and its effect on our view of daily events.

Mr. Douthat is free to live in a world where powerful institutions that have his sympathy are deemed to be worthy of moral authority. For the life of me, what I can’t understand is how he contrives to consider himself an intellect worth listening to when he lives in a world that is also doggedly pre-Freudian.

My Personal Thanatopsis

2011-10-30T03:38:00.000-07:00

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One could look in the mirror today
And wonder if he has loved enough
And in the right way
Regret his foolishness and his failures
Wonder what lies ahead
What the sum will amount to

But why engage in vanities?
Should this moment be wasted on such things
As a puddle of fears?

Time is inescapable
As soon as I lift my gaze from the immediate
From this particular carrot I’m peeling for dinner tonight
And thinking of how it will taste with butter and lemon
I know it will not matter tomorrow
It hums its melody only today
And only to we three who share a table
And, come mealtime,
Will any of us even be paying attention?

Time claims its markers
Five decades!
Surely a person must do something, say something
Think something particular on such a day
Even he who wakes up alone
Making his best case for feeling useless and unloved
Must give it note
Feel more defeated than on other days, perhaps
Accept ignominy notably, not heedlessly

And what will I note?
Fifty years pass into the ether
Leaving so many traces of what was loved
And has passed on
Tragically or quietly or simply through neglect
We each can count the ways to oblivion

I walk my ten acres on an Indian summer afternoon
My son playing games of imagination
In the teepee he has made of fallen branches
And dried weeds and grass
Where he collects and caches the baby frogs of autumn
(So seemingly ill-prepared for coming hibernation)

And captures the mammoth praying mantis
Who, having laid her eggs for spring, munches the last leaves of senescent fall
And awaits the stopping of the clock
Is she the image in my mirror now?

The eastern white pine and the weeping willow
I carried to this place
In the Chrysler I bought to ferry my son in his car seat
Have grown improbably big
Defy me to remember the 2-gallon pail
And the stakes that nurtured them
While the car has meanwhile met its obsolescence
And lies barely in the reach of recollection

I prune the beginnings of a hedge
And curse the deer, my enemies
Who leave me gaps where my effort must begin afresh
New seedlings must be planted

I dream that the hedge will line a driveway
And the driveway lead to a house
Where days of retirement might be spent in some version of bliss
If only time grants me that circumstance

But really there’s just today
And the single aspect that fully lives now
Some talent I cultivate and consecrate
For keeping an image in my head
Of things that matter
And might be brought to pass
With enough devotion and faith
And conviction that it connects to someone else
Even if they have to be cajoled

I find it hard to believe in a heaven or hell
Where a tale will be written of my actions today
Or actions of a lifetime
Where eternal and particular consequence
Attaches to something so anonymous as the fleeting days of my life

And while the poet urged me take my solace
In company with the molecules of the earth
Where all the living come to communion, in time
(And where, in time, I know I’ll gladly go)
Part of me still seeks a moral resonance
A difference in the world that might proceed
From what I have chosen or done

And the only one I am assured of is this:
That I can hold a picture in my mind
And insist on a frame
And say to someone who might listen, “Look at life!
Smell the leaves of October!
Take note of the company one can choose to keep.
Just for the asking.”

My son says he’s adopted
And I am his guardian only for the present
But someday he might admit
There was more to it than captivity
And someday he may choose and frame
His own October day
And look at it with love and hints of celebration
And feel gratitude in a deep way
That the day was given and well-spent

I will be with the worms and the molecules
Not with him or the company he keeps
Except, perhaps, in the imitation one might see
In the movement of two hands
Holding a frame up to an aspect of the world
And thinking the words
“Precious. So precious to me.”

R. S. Hoffman
October, 2011

Am I religious? Should anyone care?

2011-08-07T13:21:00.000-07:00

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Wherever you go, I will go; And wherever you lodge, I will lodge; Your people shall be my people, and your God, shall be my God. (The Book of Ruth, 1:16)

My husband and I recently bought our first house together. Now, more than ever, we are each other’s family. I not only lodge where he lodges, I pay a mortgage where he pays a mortgage. Our decorating decisions have taken on increased significance in this, our third actual residence together, because having bought the house, there are intimations of permanence where there were once intimations of transience. No longer is there a landlord in our midst whose ultimate ownership of the property might attenuate our ownership of the particulars, down to the size and color of the pillows on the couches. I suppose it is some kind of acknowledgement that we are a mixed-faith couple that the crucifix he bought in Croatia for his late mother and the menorah on our kitchen window sill has each found its place in our home. His people have become my people—a fact never more in evidence than it was last weekend when we flew to Wisconsin to attend the wedding of his youngest cousin, and my 10-year-old son reunited instantly after a year's absence with Jack, his 10-year-old second cousin on my husband’s side. But is my husband’s God, my God, too? One of the reasons I identify with Judaism instead of Christianity is because it leaves room for skepticism about the existence of an afterlife, and it does not consider such skepticism to be the very definition of “lacking in faith.” My sense is that my husband is not a skeptic on this subject, and retains much more identification with the Christian faith in which we both were reared. Whatever disparity there is between us, however, it is not one that causes us consternation.

On the other hand, I hear from my sister that a source of consternation to my 92-year-old Roman Catholic mother is that she might die and go to purgatory. It’s not that she can’t accept that the Almighty might think she has some faults in need of purging—her own righteousness is not a necessary part of her religious views—but instead the prospect that she will need the prayers of the living to help her get to heaven. She fears she’s not inculcated enough of this view in any of the living she’ll leave behind for us to spend the requisite time praying, after her death, for her admission into paradise.

Of this I am fairly confident: The God image that comes to my husband’s mind when he looks on whatever religious symbol he encounters in our home or out in the world is more similar to my image of God than it is to that of my mother, with whom he nominally shares a Christian faith. And this is true even though I identify with the Reconstructionist movement in Judaism most because it holds that God is not supernatural, and puts forth the fairly radical idea that religious traditions as we know them represent not God’s attempt to communicate His nature to man, but instead man’s attempt to articulate the nature of God for ourselves, and therefore that all religious precepts about God are more or less anthropomorphic, and only tenuously Divine. How can I say that my husband’s image of God is more like mine than it is like my mother’s? In the terms of normal discourse on the subject, his view is more like hers: God is supernatural, personal, and intends His own revelation. Furthermore, He created us as individuals for personal immortality. None of this do I share. But it is exactly this normal religious discourse—which would lump my husband with my mother as believers, in contrast to me, in the company of mere humanists—that I would have change.

It has long seemed exceedingly curious to me that so many teachers and leaders who claim for themselves the title of “religious” relentlessly draw a line of distinction between the faithful and the non-believing, when what seems to me much more compelling is the distinction between those who see God principally as strict, jealous, vengeful, and unforgiving and those who believe that any God worth the name must certainly be at least as loving and forgiving as we are at our best. Whether the latter group believes such a God is real or is a fiction, they seem to me to behave more in concert with each other than they do with those who believe in the other, darker God.

Sitting at that family wedding last weekend and listening once again to the familiar Pauline text from 1 Corinthians on the nature of love (Love is patient, love is kind; It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud; It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs; Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth; It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres) I reflected again on its inspired and wise description of mature and sustaining love. In this letter, Paul attributes anthropomorphic characteristics to God, for sure, and yet seems to think of God as being like us in our best moments, and to see us as created in His image, if only we could refine ourselves into our best selves, not our worst selves.

If my mother’s anxieties prove to be well-founded, it would mean on the other hand that God is a stickler for a game that is played according to arcane rules: She can be admitted to paradise only if enough entreaties come from the living for God to allow it; Mere good will, mere loving intentions would not move Him. It seems to be an image of an omnipotent but capricious Ruler, a “gotcha” God, not at all in keeping with the mature loving attitudes Paul exhorts us to emulate in 1 Corinthians.

It is not to trivialize my mother’s concerns about possible eternal deprivation that I point out that she could take a view of God that made Him even more imperious and peremptory: The news every week is full of reports of religious persons who believe piety demands that the righteous undertake immediate and harsh punishment—in this life, not leaving it to the hereafter—for offenses to Godly ways, from adultery all the way down to the lesser offense (as most of the planet’s population would see it) of dating a boy outside one’s own sect. But even the horrific reality of honor killings committed in the name of the Deity does little to sway the normal discourse about who gets to wear the mantle of faith and piety. What would it take for the dominant contrast drawn in discussions of faith to switch from belief and non-belief to the contrasting outcomes between equating Divinity with vengeance and equating Divinity with love?

What is the supposed importance of confessing belief in God? Could any God at least as loving and mature as the best among us really care? Why would He need it? And if the way we live our lives and treat our fellow man and make our moral decisions were otherwise identical to our belief-confessing neighbor, why would any but a self-preoccupied and most unloving God be hung up on us believing in His existence? Many of the doctrinaire would have us believe that it is faith that makes us moral, and secular existence that makes for amorality or immorality, but evidence is generally to the contrary—there are bad deeds issuing from the believing and non-believing in equal proportion. When the pope decries the secular West, why does the normal media discourse grant him the presumption that he represents piety more than our more liberal, tolerant Christian leaders? It seems to me that we abandon some depth of meaningful discourse when we implicitly accept that a punitive and intolerant view of human sexuality is more “religious” or represents a position of faith more than more tolerant ones. The Catholic hierarchy can say the pope speaks for 1.3 billion believers, and therefore represents the perspective of Catholic faith, except that on the morality of contraception, he clearly doesn’t speak for Catholic believers, since the vast majority disagree with him. The same goes for our habitual equation of Islam with Islamic “fundamentalists.” The very word gives them some presumptive right that is not logically theirs.

What does it matter if false distinctions are commonplace and other, more apt distinctions are lost? I think there is important value to be found in drawing the distinction between a mature spirituality and its immature opposite, for a lot of reasons. One is the evil perpetrated in the world in the name of certainty about a jealous, angry, vengeful, punishing and unforgiving God. Would that we could agree to name and to criticize these evils without having to accede to being the straw man the “true believers” would have us be, namely, an impious lot, who have no regard for Divinity or for morality. The flip side would be the ability to advance peace and human cooperation by positively preaching tolerance and the importance of entertaining sufficient doubt that we can defer damnation and punishment to the Deity, instead of taking them into our own hands. We could advocate addressing conflict in terms of competing interests and an explicit secular and religious consensus about the dignity and rights of the human person, and explicitly advocate that there is sufficient doubt about Divine imperatives for us to leave them out of our plan of action. Philosophers disagree about whether it makes rational sense to believe the human person is sacred if one does not posit the existence of God (see http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/the-sacred-and-the-humane/), but rational or not, what is empirically true is that atheists are just as likely to value human rights as are believers.

I personally find it hard to imagine that if there is a God, He is less forgiving and loving of my fellow man than I am. That He is less appreciative or capable of comprehending mutuality than the best of us humans. By mutuality, I refer to an idea technically described in psychoanalytic theory, but I think one fairly easily understood by anyone capable of the trait, which is regard for another with empathy and mutual trust, although we fully know they are themselves and are neither a part of us nor in fact just like us—only enough like us for us to know they should be treated as we would like to be treated.

Would most of those who, unlike me, believe that God is personal and that there is individual immortality after death, actually cast their lot with the man who seeks the “honor killing” of his own teenage daughter for dating a boy from another faith, rather than with me? Am I really the one closer to their idea of an enemy of the kingdom of God? If I am not, then let’s begin to change our discourse about faith so we can discuss the distinctions we actually believe are most important, instead of the often-specious demarcation between who is religious and who is secular. Am I a religious humanist or a secular humanist? It is a distinction truly in the eye of the beholder. If a God who is not supernatural is no God at all to you, then you’d say I am secular. It’s an issue of semantics to me, because I believe in my God, who isn’t a God who cares. To you it may be more than semantic. But if you care, have you asked yourself exactly why that is? And is it possible that we could start a discourse that unites us, you and me, against the influence on our world of the darker view of God, the God of our basest anthropomorphic projections, the God who is gratified by suffering and appeased by destruction? I am optimistic and hopeful that we can. We just need to find the words, and more than occasionally the gall to speak them.

Voir Dire: My Day In Court

2011-01-14T21:37:00.000-08:00

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When I reported for jury duty this morning, I was fairly certain of the stakes. Last night I’d been surprised that my high summons number didn’t give me a pass on even having to show up, but once I listened to the pre-recorded message from the clerk’s office and adjusted to the news that my presence was actually required, I thought my day at court would play out predictably. I thought the commitment would surely be just for today, and that any chance of being placed on a jury was remote. My one previous experience of being brought into the courtroom for voir dire had ended predictably, with the judge sending me back to wait with the jury pool on the basis of my being a physician, and the case involving physician testimony about injuries to the plaintiff in an accident.

So I wasn’t prepared to feel anything when my number was among those called in a group to go to a courtroom upstairs for jury selection. The defendant looked relaxed—-too relaxed, as though this was just one more spin round the dance floor for him—-sitting next to his attorney at the table. The defense counsel and the state’s attorney were both decades younger than me, as I expected. The judge made mention of the fact that he had been called out of retirement to help clear up the court’s docket, and he looked the part: gaunt, white-haired, his voice a little tremulous. The defendant was charged with theft of a car, unauthorized use of a car, and resisting arrest.

I had just enough prior experience to expect the first question posed by the judge: Had any of the prospective jurors been convicted of a crime, been the victim of a crime, or had family members that were convicted of a crime or were victims of a crime? More than half the jury pool stood. As it turned out, my summons number was at the low end of the group that had been called, and I was first to approach the bench. The attorneys and the defendant all leaned in close to listen to my exchange with the judge.
“State your juror number, your name, and your reason for standing,” the judge instructed us.
“Juror 481," I said, and I gave my name. "I stood because I have been the victim of a crime.”
“Can you tell us, Dr. Hoffman, what that was, and approximately when?”
How does he know I am a doctor? Oh, right, they asked for my profession on the jury questionnaire.
“I was forced off the road and robbed at gunpoint when I was 18. And my car has been stolen three times in Baltimore City since I moved here in 1987.”
“From your residence?”
“Two times from outside my residence. Once from the doctor’s parking lot at the hospital.”
“Anything else?”

I hesitated. Only the group at the bench could hear what I was telling the judge. I had raised my right hand and sworn that I would tell the truth. Did that mean that it had to be the whole truth? Or would merely some of the truth do? I thought of other crimes I’d been the victim of: burglary, twice. Chased through Baltimore's Mt. Vernon Square by a gang of rock-throwing homophobic teenagers, who my companion and I managed to outrun, in my early 30s. Minor assault, a few times, but mostly by mentally ill patients, in care settings. The crimes against me as a child? Not for polite company. Did I continue to elaborate?

No, I did not.

“Those are probably the salient instances, your honor.”
“And do you believe that those experiences will affect your ability to be fair and impartial in hearing this case.”
“No, I do not, your honor.”
“Good,” he said. “You may return to your seat.”

I turned from the bench, and as I sat down among the prospective jurors again, I realized I was welling up with tears. The attention of the courtroom had shifted to juror number 483, at the bench. I put my face in my hands, and wondered at my response to the interaction that had just transpired. I stifled anything like a gasp.

I have often advised trainees in my profession to be prepared for never-ending surprise. Just when you think you’ve seen it all, you’ll see something for which you feel utterly unprepared. You think you’ve seen death in all its forms in front of your eyes, and then you’re bowled over by the miscarriage of a second-trimester fetus in the moments between your helping the patient onto the ER exam table and your return with a bag of saline to start an i.v. You think you’re hardened to the grim possibilities in life and then a seventy-year-old great-grandmother who’s caring for her small great-grandchildren because their mother is a prostitute and their grandmother died of AIDS confesses to you that she herself is shooting heroin into her veins every day.

Even so, I was not prepared for the utterly new dimension for me in today’s voir dire. To stand in front of a judge, to whom I have sworn to speak the truth, and to say “I have been a victim.” And, equally the truth, “I do not think this marks me with a defect in judgment, or fairness, or impartiality.” And then to hear his response: “Good.” No attempt on his part to argue the opposite—-because he did not believe the opposite. True, he was probably gratified that I didn’t try to use the events to wiggle out of jury service, but I do not think, nevertheless, that he believed the opposite.

“Good.” That single word of acknowledgment and affirmation from some old gentleman with the mantle of legal authority resting on his shoulders packed more punch than I could have anticipated.

The contrast to what I have experienced for a lifetime, not only that someone’s criminal act was actually leading to a criminal prosecution, but also the contrast to the usual supposition that I could not be trusted to know if in fact I was a victim, the supposition that if I have been a victim I am too biased to take part in any discussion of the appropriate response to such events, the supposition that someone besides me is whole enough to make sober judgments where I am clouded and irrational, took my breath away.

After the rest of the questions were asked and answered, after three quarters of the prospective jurors left for reasons of conflict or stated bias or wives about to deliver babies at home, I approached the bench first, as my summons number would dictate. The state had no objection to my being seated on the jury. The defense attorney, earning his keep, used a peremptory challenge to thank me for my service and send me home. But I, lowly prospective juror, almost negligible in my importance to this process, left with something I had never experienced before in my life: a whiff of actual justice, rendered to me by a judge in a court of law in the jurisdiction in which I have resided for most of the past 20 years. No one knew it but me, but it was to me that it mattered most. Even a whiff of justice, it turns out, could make me grateful for my day in court.

You have met the gaywad, and the gaywad is me

2010-08-08T07:18:00.000-07:00

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Occasionally, I think for a moment that I ought to be less of a curmudgeon. Just momentarily. And then I revert to type.

I suppose I will always see too much wrong with the world to ever truly lighten up about it. I suspect that there’s a self-reinforcing cycle at work here: Because I can tolerate acknowledging and listening to what is painful and unjust in life with compassion and with clear, sober vision, I work successfully in the eye of a human storm of illness, misery, trauma, neglect, and loss. And working in the eye of such a storm, I am never far enough from the painful and damaging aspects of life that I can be carefree about the dangers concealed around life’s every bend.

I had fresh occasion to think about this the other day as I got back on the freeway after dropping my son at camp for the day, and tuned in for a couple of minutes to the morning show banter on a popular local FM station. It happened to be the day after Judge Vaughn Walker issued his heartening ruling in the Proposition 8 case, and I had stayed up late to read it in its entirety. The juxtaposition of Walker’s thoughts with the ribbing going on among the twenty-something jocks on the staff at my son’s camp and the repartee of radio personalities was like driving down the highway on a pleasant day and catching a sudden whiff of road-killed skunk: visceral, impressive, timeless.

So here’s my curmudgeonly gripe for the day: I do not wish to lighten up about the generations that follow mine--the one that coaches at my son’s sports camp, for instance--who use the terms “gay,” or “gaywad” and the like, as terms of derision for what is weak, lame, dorky, or otherwise undesirable. And I don’t want to give media personalities a pass when they use the term “retard” to characterize what’s foolish or gauche--even if it’s a term I used myself as a child--and when they engage in sexist rants about women, or men, or vent their spleen about the idiosyncratic ways of recent immigrants. Oh, I know the defense…it’s just joking, not serious; “gaywad” really isn’t about gay people.

I learned from Erik Erikson years ago that a normal part of identity consolidation during development is the forceful rejection of alternate identities; that 8-year-old girls and 8-year-old boys think all things about the opposite sex are disgusting for reasons that are developmentally necessary for gender consolidation, and are ultimately benign, in their place. But I have gradually come to a firmer and firmer conclusion that spiritually we all need to grow--and those who conceive of themselves as spiritual leaders ought to lead us--beyond the collective expression of our 8-year-old selves. There are many objects of scorn that we deride (joking or not) as hated and inferior “others” which qualitatively are in fact merely “other”—not deserving of hate and not in any demonstrable way inferior to or less deserving than anyone else. The luxury of deriding them is a regressive pleasure, and I realize it is possible to be too uptight about this, just as it’s possible to be too uptight about poop and dirt. But I’d like to make the case that not being censorious enough about it, not aspiring sufficiently to an ideal of transcending it, carries the potential for needless harm and sometimes tragic harm. Which is why I think it’s more incumbent on spiritual leaders than say, handball partners in the locker room, to call forth from us our better angels rather than to demagogue our pre-adolescent hobgoblins.

I know I have spent my life especially attuned to the phenomena of scapegoating and stereotyping. I have never readily identified with the pleasure in generalizing about women and men, husbands and wives, breeders and homos, Latinos and Jews and WASPs, lawyers and doctors and construction workers. I realize that the attraction is there. I just found it much more likely, for example when visiting the U.S. Holocaust Museum for the first time, that I’d identify with the position of Jews as targets of Nazi propaganda: There but for the grace of God, I thought, go I. The Nazis had their following, and Pat Robertson has his.

I think that especially those who purport to guide us to our higher selves should chastise us for the derision we heap on someone, anyone, whose principal transgression is being unlike us. It’s sometimes the opposite sex, sometimes another ethnicity, sometimes a different cultural group. (If you lack the imagination to think of the particulars, you can always rent Oliver Stone’s film version of Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio for a compelling litany.) But too often the purported spokespersons for spiritual enlightenment, the ones who demand and get attention from the media for their supposed representation of righteousness, are those most entrenched in demonizing those outside their own little group.

When these demagogues engage in labeling my set of sensitivities as “political correctness,” my limbic system is kicked into overdrive. It’s in that moment I’m most able to comprehend outbreaks of civil war. I frequently think, but never actually say, that when armed conflict breaks out between threatened white people in America and the brown and black people they see as the enemy, or between those who want a Christian theocracy and the infidels and nonbelievers who resist, I have no doubt that I will take up arms, and whose side it will be for. But in the interest of avoiding a recurrence of civil war, and promoting civil accord, I truly wish that those who self-identify as spiritual leaders of every stripe would embrace the wisdom in guiding us toward the light--which is to say, away from the regressive pleasure we take in deriding the people unlike us as inferior, wrong, ridiculous, and--more than anything else--as a danger and a threat to us and our security.

This was the most welcome aspect for me of Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision in Prop 8: He spoke directly about the lack of evidence for the often-repeated assertion that marriage for gay men and lesbians will undermine marriage for heterosexual couples. He puts this fantasy squarely where it belongs—in the realm of imaginary goblins. It is an assertion that belongs alongside the idea that fighting next to black men will demoralize white troops, that admitting women to the study of medicine will destroy confidence in the healing power of the profession, that the afflicted and the damaged should be hidden away from public view in asylums in remote small towns. He clearly articulates that this particular religious dictum is not the basis for distinctions in law. I would go one step further, and say what was beyond Judge Walker’s task in deciding this case, which is that this kind of religious thinking is lacking a mature psychology, and therefore a mature spirituality. It is religion far too ill-acquainted with the better angels of the human spirit. All of us would be better off if CNN, when they went to find spokespersons for people of religious faith, made it their practice to quote less regressive religious thinkers. This would be contrary to their own instinct to find conflict and drama in current events, but sometimes there’s virtue in less conflict, and more conciliation.

There is the famous Martin Niemoller quote that starts, “First they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a communist. And then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew….” I happen to be of the opinion that Niemoller’s warning is one we need to hear in every time, and every place, as long as there is a human condition. The grownups need to chide the children for their uncivil impulses. In the words of Paul in 1 Corinthians: "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways." It is no coincidence that this line comes in the middle of a discourse on the nature of love. While it is cited most often at weddings, and therefore has become associated with romantic love, I think it would be a breath of fresh air to hear it cited as a guide for civic life. The planet urgently needs us all to love our neighbor. The idea that “he who is not like me must be derided in the interest of my security” is childish. Understandable, and childish.

I sometimes wonder--has Pat Robertson (or James Dobson or Cardinal George) actually read his own New Testament? If he did, he didn't hear it saying what I heard it say.

The Real Men Who Eat Quiche

2010-06-10T08:02:00.000-07:00

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I have no desire to have the pope rise (or is it fall?) to the status of personal pet peeve. I am not his constituency, and he is not my leader. I could agree to live and let live. To the extent that he chooses to make the cultural forces of "the secular West" his enemy, and by decree, the enemy of his church, he is free to do so, and I will be one who agrees to wear the label of "secular Westerner."

My attention, however, is drawn to him and his pronouncements at those moments when he is making of secular Westerners a straw man, which it turns out he does quite inveterately.

In just his latest international outing, in Portugal, he said that "politicians, intellectuals, and communications professionals" profess and promote "a monocultural ideal, with disdain for the religious and contemplative dimension of life." So one has to be an atheist and unreflective to value the separation of church and state, or religious tolerance in the public sphere? while interreligious violence continues frequently to be the story they are reporting?

After writing recently about the Catholic Church and its ongoing sexual abuse scandal, I found myself fortunate to have a larger readership and to elicit more comment than my writing has ever previously enjoyed. To my surprise, my post was liberally copied and posted to other blogs, regional newspapers, and special interest websites. Among the comments were any number based in assertions that the Catholic Church continually puts out to the world--Rome's talking points, you might say--which unfortunately convey the distortions about secular people and those outside the Catholic Church that this pope has enunciated for the past several decades.

It seems important for a number of reasons to push back against what is not in fact a matter of divergent belief or values but rather simply untrue in these assertions. Untruth repeated over many years and never challenged becomes accepted as common knowledge or as consensus, when other points of view have the virtue of greater basis in the facts.

One of the pervasive refrains coming out of this pope and his apologists is that those who deviate from the church's "truth" are advocates or representatives of relativism, when this is not the case. There are among us the most serious of ethical thinkers. We are in fact mostly more Aristotelian ethicists while the pope is a more Platonic ethicist. We think that virtue lies in avoiding two dangers, relativism at one end and absolutism on the other. In Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, virtue lies in the Golden Mean, between two less desirable extremes, deficiency and excess. For Plato, virtue lies in the pursuit of ideal form, which lies in another world, and which the world we know can only approximate in a very imprecise way (Plato's exact simile was that this world only roughly approximates ideal forms in the way shadows cast on the wall of a cave by figures in front of a fire only roughly resemble the figures that cast them.) The pope is more of an ethical Platonist in that he thinks what God demands morally, instead of any pragmatic balancing, is adherence to what might be envisioned as the ideal.

To an absolutist, anyone who doesn't agree with him is a dangerous relativist, and the hierarchy indulges frequently in drawing a caricature of those who don't share their view as proponents of "anything goes." The accusation that those who disagree with the pope think that morally "anything goes" is not at all intellectually honest; we are mostly not libertines or anarchists, we are just some variety of ethical Aristotelian where he is an ethical Platonist. We think there are dangers in the elevation of the absolute to a sacred position and the disregard, or at least the de-emphasis, of the pragmatic good. We think condoms used in the service of saving life in the midst of an AIDS epidemic easily trump an ideal of all sexual acts being open to procreation, and we think the elevation of that ideal over the actual sum of its effects in the world here and now is an example of cruelty born of absolutism.

Natural law theory of the Scholastic period claimed to carry the mantle of Aristotle while in fact building mostly on Platonism, with the assertion that God's intended purpose for man--the other-worldly ideal that Plato said was projected dimly onto our current worldly existence--could be ascertained rationally from the evidence available to us--a sort of approachable limit, to use an analogy from calculus that helps unify Plato's conception of the world as dimly lit with a religious quest for moral certainty. Plato exerts a great deal of pull on Christians, who are attuned to the scriptural words of Jesus about his Father's otherworldly house where he was going to prepare a room for them. Yet even ethicists more sympathetic to Plato than to Aristotle would question whether new evidence is allowed to change, over time, our conclusions about the laws nature reveals. Is modern psychology allowed to have a say about man's transit on this Earth, or are we locked into what Thomas Aquinas knew in 1274? The Catholic Church, unlike fundamentalist Protestantism, at least allows that God's revelation to man is ongoing, rather than privileged to the words of holy scripture. But the two are similar in raising a cry of heresy or relativism when anyone attempts to stretch the outlines of tradition to accommodate new conclusions about the rightful purpose of man. The differences between an Aristotelian approach to ethics and a Platonic or Scholastically-adapted Platonic one should not be minimized. The conception of the good lying in the middle between extremes is in fact opposite to a concept of the good lying in an ideal that exists at a far limit. What it is not is an assertion that "anything goes."

It is ironic that the charge of relativism should come up in the midst of a discussion about the church and the scandal of sexual abuse. It takes a fairly tin ear not to hear that the more absolute moral censure of pedophile priests is coming from the church's critics, who are less willing than the hierarchy or the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to balance an old priest's desire to "die with the dignity of his priesthood" against the cry of his victims for justice or even for significant consequences. Perhaps the hierarchy is truly surprised to find itself in a struggle for the upper hand against critics who take it to task for it's moral failures while maintaining a tolerant attitude themselves toward some things Rome ever since Aquinas has seen as outside of natural law. But the argument put forth that the critics of the church's response to the sexual abuse crisis are ultimately looking to score points for their permissive and indulgent world view because this pope has castigated them for the last three decades is an astonishing bit of sophistry that is fairly insulting to the victims of clerical abuse. Just maybe, they're actually ticked off about the way the effects of the abuse have been persistently and pervasively minimized. Blaming their critics for being relativists is so habitual for this church leadership, it doesn't matter how poorly their canard fits the situation at hand.

While the pope makes of secular Westerners a straw man, he mostly makes of homosexuals a bogey man. His assertion that children raised by a gay couple would be subject to a "great violence" because "their condition of dependency would be used to place them in an environment that is not conducive to their full human development" is supported only by tautological arguments (gay parents cannot promote full development because only heterosexual couples can promote full development). After meeting privately with newly elected Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, at that time President of the Pontifical Council for the Family, said of gay couples, "In these unions there are no promises for the partners or for the children, no stability, nothing before society or God, but they demand all the benefits of authentic marriage." This fervent derision is unfortunately impervious to actual evidence. Turn on the light, open the closet doors, look under the bed--homosexuals are still the bogey man because Benedict and his friends say we are.

Meanwhile, the general public for the most part decides, once they actually know gay people, that gay people are frighteningly...well, a lot like them. Justice Lewis Powell joined the majority of the United States Supreme Court and provided the swing vote in the 1986 Bowers vs. Hardwick decision, in which Justice Byron White, writing for the majority, stated that any claim that a right for homosexuals to engage in consensual adult sex in the privacy of their own homes is implicit in the concept of ordered liberty is, "at best, facetious." Four years later, retired from the court, Powell described his vote in that case as "probably a mistake." What religion did he get in the short intervening span? It may or may not have been the experience that converts so many to the view that homosexuals are deserving of equality, which is first-hand experience with particular individuals who are gay.

I harbor some degree of utopian fantasy (I am not deluded into thinking it's anything else) that the pope could not maintain his perspective and say the things he does if he actually came to know me, the life I live, and the work that I do. At a formative age, I really took to heart Thomas Merton's writings about contemplation as the way to give action depth, and action as a means of giving expression to contemplation. My ideas about God and church changed, but I hardly became materialistic or pursued a life lacking in meaning or in hope, as the pope would have us believe about secular people. And in my chosen line of work I have learned, sadly, a great deal about environments not conducive to children's full development--they exist in such abundance that one does not need to go looking for them where they don't exist. There is enough true evil and horror in the world, one does not need to populate it with fictional bogey men. But alas, to Benedict, a straw man and a bogey man are what I remain.

Listening to Prozac, Listening to Pedophilia

2010-04-26T20:40:00.000-07:00

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I am a psychiatrist, a psychotherapist, and a psychoanalyst. It’s a peculiar life that I lead, listening to, thinking about, and trying to heal the maladies of mood, thought, character and self-regard (or lack thereof) that are brought to my office and to my couch. It was strange the first six months that I did it, and strange ten years later, and still strange twenty-plus years into it, as I am now. Not strange to me, just strange to most other people. I am enough of an introvert that most of the time I am content to sit with the muddle and the misery and keep them largely to myself, save for the conversations I have, usually at a somewhat abstract level, with other therapists and analysts who do what I do in their own offices. The epiphanies I share with individual patients have a way of sustaining a person like me, whose penchant for privacy and wealth of reserve is a good fit, and maybe even a necessary one, for the work that I do.

There’s something about the ongoing debacle of the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, however, that leaves me feeling like the kid in the back of class raising his hand with something to say, and never called on. Years of listening to and thinking about the voices of the sexually abused, from every perspective, on and behind the couch, have led me to feel particularly endowed and particularly burdened with insight into these matters. The experience of growing up Catholic and spending time in “formation” at a Catholic seminary prior to medical school gives me a particular vantage from which to view the church. Yet my status as a gay man who is frequently singled out for particular censure by the Catholic hierarchy gives me pause when I think of commenting on their failings. Would anyone hear my voice and not think I am just peeved at my own excommunication from the fold? But it turns out I have a lot to say on the subject of pedophilia in the church. The dilemma seems only to be: Where do I start?

One of the observations made recently in the media that I found particularly trenchant came from Maureen Dowd, commenting on Father Gabriele Amorth, the chief exorcist for the Holy See, who said that the abuse scandal showed that Satan uses priests to try to destroy the church, “and so we should not be surprised if priests too ... fall into temptation. They also live in the world and can fall like men of the world.”

Dowd’s comment was “Actually, falling into temptation is eating cupcakes after you’ve given them up for Lent. Rape and molestation of children is far beyond what most of us think of as succumbing to worldly temptation.”

The failure of the Roman Catholic hierarchy to contemplate that maybe there is something about the church and the priesthood itself that breeds the sickness of pedophilia is exasperating in the extreme. The easy answer they prefer, that it is cultural permissiveness about sexuality that fosters the sexual abuse of children, is so lacking in insight and rich in smug self-regard that it makes me nearly apopleptic. The idea that mastery of a sexual life might be what guards against the trends that end in sexual abuse of children is so far from their comprehension that I hold little hope of their arriving at a position of moral wisdom on this subject, at least in my lifetime. They are as bought-in as a group of people can be to their doctrine that sexuality is sinful unless it is subordinate to procreation, and it is precisely this equation of all other aspects of sexuality, however they might be viewed by the rest of “the secular world” as opposites, as optimal and healthy on one end of the scale and deranged and perverse at the other, that disables their moral reasoning on the subject of sex. I think it also attracts the pedophilic character structure to the priesthood. If you know, deep in your heart, that your sexual and interpersonal reality is one that successful, actualized adults view as twisted and insufferable, then the twin enticements of the priesthood are these: The elusive ideal of chastity is seen as superior to a sexually expressive relationship between adults, and the intention to fulfill or attain it, even if doomed to occasional or frequent or, as we have seen, compulsive lapses, provides a balm of superiority to the battered self-esteem of the emotionally-hobbled pedophile. And the doctrine that all non-procreative acts are equally or at least similarly in violation of natural law, the view that enables Father Gabriele Amorth to think of child seduction or rape as “giving into temptation” instead of acts of an entirely other order, likewise appeals to the fractured vanity of the pedophile, who can feel he’s no worse than all the fornicating, contraception-using, masturbating masses, and maybe even a step above them, as he has worn the cloak of priestly virtues in at least some traditional respects, comforting the bereaved, preaching charity, forgoing personal wealth, stifling the impulse to petty gossip, and the like.

Certainly the Catholic priesthood over the centuries has attracted exemplary men, men of exceptional ego strength, uncompromised virtue, and true sacrifice. But it has also attracted quite the opposite, and the church cannot pretend that its attraction of large numbers of pedophiles has nothing to do with the contours of the institution it has created. The longstanding and current assertion that it is permissiveness about homosexuality in the secular world with which the church must coexist, or perhaps on the formation staffs of its own seminaries, that accounts for the ghastly pervasiveness of sexual abuse by ordained priests, is not merely misguided and inaccurate. It is that (misguided and inaccurate), and it's a logical outgrowth of their superiority complex about the renunciation of sex for gratification’s sake, but it is also pathetic, dishonest, and selfish—-the scapegoating of yet another vulnerable population-—and it’s unworthy of anyone who would make claims to honesty, charity or moral authority.

The Roman Catholic hierarchy exists in a world of their own deliberate perpetuation that is pre-modern and basically ahistorical with respect to sexuality. The actual world in which we live, in which health and maturity are achieved, or in which they prove to be beyond the capacity of certain unfortunate or, yes, morally defective individuals, is not one in which moral wisdom exists only in the valuing of virginity and the observance of due gravity about procreative capacity. Almost any normal, moral, mature adult could tell you this. The hierarchy of the church, however, cannot or will not. While we know the large chasm, and many differences, between the activities of a pedophile with a child and the consensual, respectful, tender activities of two adults who are motivated by many things but not by any wish to conceive a child, the church hierarchy conflates them in an instant, and points to our tolerance for the supposed evils of the latter as breeding ground for the former. Psychologically, this happens to be the exact opposite of the truth, and in the twenty-first century we are not such victims of misinformation that we can’t come right out and say so. Pedophiles cannot manage the rigors that adults in functional, intimate, ongoing sexual relationships with other adults must rise to: We must let another whole, more-or-less equal person, whose interests we must consider mutually with our own, into the vulnerable and messy recesses of our lives, and not only survive it but come back to it another day and in fact come back to it on a string of other days stretching forward into an indefinite future. Pedophiles, on the other hand, are terrified of vulnerability. They either avoid it entirely, or keep an internal running score of acts of domination that compensate for what they feel are the accumulated humiliations of interpersonal relations, and so lead split lives of seeming normalcy alongside hidden perversity that, in their view of things, equalizes the psychic imbalance. It is the capacity to accept ourselves as imperfect and messy and perhaps at times ridiculous in our own eyes, and in the eyes of at least our chosen intimate partner, and the ability not to judge our imperfections too harshly, that makes us capable of sexual intimacy in its most moral form. It is the inability to tolerate any such thing that prompts the pedophile to do what he does. The teaching that sexual relations for purposes that are not procreative, or even masturbation, are evil in the eyes of God does not help any individual prepare for sexual or interpersonal maturity, or to direct their sexual energies into channels that are consistent with health instead of the tortured path of sickness and depravity.

A second subject, tangled up with the splitting of life into normalcy and perversity that so often attends to the existence of pedophilia, is the meaning of secret-keeping. Part of the domination of a child by a pedophile is coercion to accept that the reality of these events is authored only by the abuser; they have only the meaning he gives them or are in fact made magically unreal by his wish that they be so. Most any survivor of sexual abuse can tell you that secrecy about the events of their abuse protects the abuser and perpetuates the destruction of the victim. How is it that members of the hierarchy can unselfconsciously utter the assertion that they thought secrecy was in the best interests of the Universal Church? They are more than a bit like Michael Jackson telling Martin Brashear on network television that there was nothing wrong about an adult sharing his bed with children, in fact nothing more beautiful in the world, and not realizing that he had, by his own obliviousness, convicted himself in the court of public opinion. No one in their right moral mind could have said what he said, and most everyone but him knew it instantly. Exactly what is the moral derangement that allows some, many, in fact, in the Roman Catholic hierarchy to perceive a greater moral good in secret-keeping about priestly pedophilia than in bringing pedophilia into the light, and marshalling every force, religious and civil, that could bring it to an end? That greater moral good is not apparent to we mere lay people, and we do not suspect, as a matter of fact, than any exists. I for one suspect that the hierarchy’s different ordering of values has something to do with the very notion of hierarchy-—that the mutuality and equality that orders life for those of us who maintain intimate adult relationships is at odds with the hierarchical order of Roman Catholic clerical life, and the idea that one’s subordinates should accept bearing a cross for the good or the aggrandizement of someone or something greater seems more in keeping with moral order when everyone is one up or one down, and never straight across the breakfast table from you.

Few in the Roman Catholic hierarchy could care less what I think, except perhaps if there’s an advantage to be gained in tying an unwelcome message to a messenger as discredited as me. But I believe, nevertheless, that the reformation necessary to address what’s ailing their church is one in which the inequalities between clergy and laity, male and female, celibate and sexual, adult and child, gay and straight, all begin to bend to the sensibilities of the-—heaven forfend!—-modern world in which we find ourselves. Only then will the exploitation of the weak, and the cover-ups that perpetuate it, strike them in something like the way it strikes us—as an unmitigated injustice, with no veneer of godliness.

Thoughts about Gods and idols, on a day between Pesach and Easter, 2010

2010-04-03T04:36:00.000-07:00

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I may doubt the existence of God, but there’s little doubt in my mind about the perils of idolatry.

In my understanding, it falls under the definition of idolatry to worship a God we have imagined to be like us, and not consider that an infinite divinity is likely to be beyond our self-centeredness, beyond our insecurity, our shame, our doubt, our vengefulness, our sadism, our single-mindedness, our intolerance, our venality. If there is a God, natural or supernatural, it would seem to be in the definition of God to be larger than our frail imaginations, and larger than our anthropomorphic declarations about “His” mind and motives.

I believe quite passionately (fervently, to use a word to use a word that is usually reserved for the traditionally religious) that those who believe in a supernatural being are most spiritual when they avoid dividing the sacred and the profane along the same line that separates believers in their own version of God from believers in God by another name, or believers in a supernatural God from the believers in none. When they make these divisions, I think what is displayed is reckless hubris and ultimately, idolatry. Though I may doubt the existence of God, of this I am convinced: the idolatry of thinking God has taken our side is a most grievous sin against the very nature of what is sacred. The experience of the sacred is far too important to humanity to be sequestered by only those--and for only those--who believe in one particular, or in fact any, supernatural being.

A fair number of us, supernaturalists and non-supernaturalists alike, would sanctify the moral tenet that to obliterate others in the name of the divine, to persecute them, certainly, or enslave them, but even to demean them or treat them in any way other than according to the golden rule, belongs to the category of evil, not to the category of good. I consider these my spiritual brethren. I sadly fear that we are not a majority on the planet, and never have been, but that in itself does not defeat us, annihilate us, convert us, or cause us to despair.

The faithful can call me an atheist, or not. It is not important to me. I hope I can be credited with this: that I strive to possess the virtue of humility and avoid the sin of idolatry. Can they say the same, themselves? Are those two things a virtue and a sin, respectively, in their vocabulary? How disciplined, logical, mature, consistent, generous, fair and loving is their own act of faith? Or do they not take ownership of their faith as their own act? Do their holy scriptures relieve them of any such responsibility? Jean-Paul Sartre receives a lot of contempt from people who’ve never read a word he wrote, but one of his assertions that I came to appreciate in a profound way in my college years is this: We cannot blame our beliefs or our actions on those who have advised us, because ultimately the fact of our human existence once we reach maturity is that we choose our advisers. That includes choosing holy scripture.

Freedom of religion served as a major organizer of the Constitution of the United States. It was a dearly-held principle at the time of its drafting-—made dear by much recent and cumulative religious persecution. I am happy to stand with its defenders, because I know it is a right on which much human happiness depends, and without which much human suffering proliferates. It gets far more lip service than it gets true respect and appreciation. It is attacked incessantly by many who claim to hold it in high esteem. At its core is a value that I consider to be deeply spiritual-—that my fellow man and I have mutual and equal rights to declare what is sacred and divine in our experience, and that recognition of this equality is itself a declaration of something held sacred, the absence of which is best regarded as a manifestation of evil.

There is in our culture an oft-stated aphorism that everything happens for a reason. This is a thesis usually associated with numerous corollaries, any of which may be doubted: if we believe not everything happens for a reason, then we think we have been abandoned by God, or worse, we have abandoned “Him;” either way, nothing could possibly be sacred any longer, nothing moral or immoral, nothing endowed with meaning. But perhaps these assertions are false. The conception of a God with a plan that stretches infinitely in every direction stretches, itself, in every direction but one, which is toward contemplation that perhaps our human lot is to grapple with our existence and our need for morality and our need for categories of sacred and profane without the simplicity of a divinely-conceived reason for it all. Contemplation that our lot may be to cope with events as having a natural or human cause and not bring the supernatural in to share blame or authorship.

One of the spiritual highlights of my last several decades has been to sit in a planetarium and look at the Hubble Deep Field. It is an image of a small region in the constellation Ursa Major, constructed from a series of photographs taken over ten consecutive days in December, 1995 by the Hubble Space Telescope. It covers an area just 2.5 arcminutes across, therefore just two millionths of the sky. The field is so small that only a few foreground stars in the Milky Way lie within it, yet there are 3,000 objects in the image, all the rest of which are other galaxies. Galaxies; not solar systems, not planets. Three years later, the image called the Hubble Deep Field South was compiled, of a similar tiny slice of the south celestial hemisphere. The similarities between this bit of sky and the one in the Hubble Deep Field advanced our understanding that the universe is uniform all around us, and that the region of the universe the Earth occupies is typical. That means that in ten days, measurable light from 1.5 billion galaxies could be photographed if we undertook to photograph the entire sky. How many would we see-—because enough of their light finally reached us in measurable amounts—-in a month? In a year?

My rational mind—-the mind that has travelled the worlds of chemistry and biology and medicine--understands that the chances that the elements that combined to give rise to carbon-based life here on Earth have done so only here, and nowhere else in the universe, are infinitesimally small. And my spiritual self-—yes, I insist that I have one, just as much as any other human-—believes that if any of us on Earth undertakes to conceive of God as universal, then our need for humility, in the face of the enormity of the universe, cannot be overstated. Could we ever be too circumspect, too tolerant, too patient, too humble in our assertions? Seems unlikely to me.

If life on Earth is not unique, but in fact typical of life elsewhere in the universe, what could we expect to deduce from it? It seems to me that the challenge for us is how to live with our fellow beings in a way that gives us meaning and hope and moral direction, while at the same time recognizing that the universe—-by the hand of a supernatural God or not-—gave rise to sentient others just as it gave rise to us. Annihilation of the other could be our godly imperative, just as submission to annihilation could be the path to eternal, non-corporeal life. But what about the other possibilities? Are they less likely? What if divinity lies along the path of co-existence, however difficult that turns out to be? What if the concept of the devil, of the evil other, was just an anthropomorphic projection on the universe, a supernatural goblin we conceived, to help us make sense of the terrors of existence? What if our true godly orientation to the other is always to figure out best how to hold onto ourselves, not lose ourselves as we meet him or her, and yet not annihilate what is them, on the assumption that they are our equal? When I think about things that I hold to be undeniably immoral-—bullying, battering, murder, child sexual abuse, genocide-—what is apparent to me is the psychic annihilation intended in all of them. These are the acts that would rouse me to defensive action. I would live with ambivalence about the harm, destruction or death entailed in my cause, but it’s where I would confidently plant my spiritual colors and defend my ground.

I spent years feeling deeply conflicted about the casual statements by others that they would ‘pray for me,’ or requests they made that I ‘pray for them’ or those they loved. For years, I couldn’t say ‘yes, I would,’ because I couldn’t pray in the way I did as a child, to the God I had been taught existed. Only in my forties have I concluded that I am entitled to my own understanding of divinity, and that my will, lifted and directed in hopeful expectation of redemption, whatever that may be, is just as sacred and worthy of solicitation as anyone else’s. I will not pray that your team wins the Superbowl, or that your daughter’s team wins her swim meet—-it insults my concept of everything properly spiritual. But I will pray for anyone’s comfort, and peace, and solace-—because I do not believe that the meaning of the sacred is in the path of suffering, but instead that it endures despite suffering. I understand that frequently the sacred might lie down a path that requires a person to turn away from selfishness, destruction, and falsehood, and that the mantle of responsibility for one’s self and one’s actions can be a painful one to pick up and bear. But I cannot sanctify as “prayer” my wishes that anyone encounter ill for the sake of ill, or suffering for the sake of vengeance. I know better. I have changed my mind over time about how to respond, though, when people ask me to pray for them. Now I say that I will, and I mean it. I am a spiritual person who does not believe in a supernatural God. I pray, maybe not every day, and certainly not in my most venal, selfish moments, but I do pray; I pause to lift my will in the direction of what I understand to be sacred and divine, for my family, for my friends, sometimes even for my enemies, and always for the safe forward transit of our tiny Earth in our incomprehensibly enormous universe. I just do not require the certainty of a respondent in order to know I am praying.

Concerning Hell, Private or Otherwise

2010-03-14T15:14:00.000-07:00

While kicking around on my ancestry website the other day, I noticed that my Aunt Liz, my mother’s oldest sibling, will be turning 94 in two weeks. The most recent photo I saw of her was on her Christmas card last year, which showed her riding a camel near the pyramids on the trip she took, by herself, to Egypt.

There was a time, in fact most of my last several decades, when I could easily say I expected to follow in her footsteps; that her spirit, as well as her good genes, had been passed on to me, and I could take for granted the prospect of generativity into old age. Something has happened lately, in my 49th year of living, that I did not see coming. I think it’s what they call a midlife crisis.

I never thought I would be the person to have one. At every earlier age, I’ve resolved not to fight the changes the years bring: I cropped my hair close to my head when baldness made it clear that denial was unseemly; I changed the colors in my wardrobe when I was no longer a blonde who could wear olive and gold, and the grey in my beard was flattered only by blue and white; I started watching carbs when the scale started reading 10 pounds higher than I was accustomed to. I did not think I was allowing any confrontations with age to sneak up and catch me unaware.

Then it seems one did.

I have spent months now trying to put a finger on it. It’s not as though I have many regrets about the direction I have taken my life. I can point to all the major decisions of my last decade and say I’d happily make the same ones over again. I am not ready to renege on any of the commitments I have made, to parenthood, to marriage, to career. If anything, my funk seems to stem from an unwelcome realization that I have reached my limits in a way that I never have before. In the course of a week I struggle to find the energy it takes to follow through with current plans, to wake the child and supervise the science projects, to keep the dog in kibbles and keep clean socks in the drawer (or at least in the dryer) on a weekday morning, to return the phone calls that can’t be postponed and to move the work projects forward that are coming due, to think at least occasionally about the need to creatively advance what is done at the agency that employs me (where my ordinary responsibilities are piled high and the exigent needs of patients are always pressing down) and I hit an existential moment where I think, “Is this all there's going to be, then?” I entertain the thought that I might burn out my last ounces of energy following through on my current commitments, only to discover that something really important got overlooked, postponed too long, left on the shelf past its expiration date-—or past mine—-because time and energy and devotion were never spared to undertake it. I worry that the friends I have will drift off and eventually die off, and suddenly I dread finding myself stranded, alone, without the capacity to make any new ones.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my life. I love my husband and my child and my work. But heading toward the benchmark of 50-—less than 20 months off, now-—there is something afoot that I quite possibly think-—or feel-—that I hate. Something that can cast a dark pall over the whole, quite against my will.

I am put in mind of the ending of the movie “Amadeus,” when Antonio Salieri in his wheelchair describes himself as the patron saint of the mediocre. He turns and addresses the audience directly. “Mediocrities everywhere...I absolve you...I absolve you...I absolve you..I absolve you all,” he says. I think my dark pall these days may be the internal judge who does hate, in fact, the mediocrity of my life. Who disdains my failures and my limits and my isolation, disdains the tree-falling-in-a-forest anonymity of my cumulative efforts in the course of a day, the course of a year, the course of a lifetime.

I wonder what motivates me to spend the time I do researching lost ancestors over the internet, and gives me such pleasure to find their gravestones in Willow Island, Nebraska, or Adrian, Michigan when their names but not their ultimate fates have been known to me throughout my life. Is it just a vain effort to fight my own encroaching sense that my life is one of anonymous toil, misspent devotion, and ultimate unimportance?

I left my saints in childhood, in the way that Elizabeth Barrett Browning referenced when she professed “I love thee with a love I seemed to lose with my lost saints.” I do not believe they are in the sky, able to intercede for me with the Almighty. But there was another idea of saints that I had when I was little, one of saints being spiritual role models, and that is one I may still need now and then. I may need it now, especially, at midlife.

Antonio Salieri was not a saintly man, at least not in his movie version, but I think of him, all these years after F. Murray Abraham and the crew put away their props and ceased their efforts on “Amadeus.” I think of his offer of absolution for mediocrity, and how dear that suddenly seems. I need absolution for what is being left undone, for the traits I have not evidenced, my omissions as a parent, the friends I have not cultivated, the affection I have squandered because I have chosen something else, chosen my job, chosen my patients, chosen perhaps the vain significance of work over the more important significance of something else, all the while not knowing, blind, foolhardy-—and yet moving inexorably into tomorrow still not knowing, just living with the choices I have made and hoping I am not judged too harshly for how sadly I stack up to the next person, whose more admirable human qualities will make his or her time here on Earth a better, more praiseworthy journey.

Is this what it means to look at life and realize you’re well beyond halfway, and your energies are only declining from here on out? Your focus becomes drawn away from what is, to what is not, with regret? With judgment? With encroaching sadness? If it’s too late for me to get a new superego, then maybe I can have back one of my saints-—the one who promised to be my patron. Saint Antonio Salieri, I beseech thee, absolve me of my mediocrity. Soon, if that can be arranged. By my 50s, I want to get back to just living life, without any dark cloud overhead. I want to wake up and start the day with lightness in my step.

(P.S. I hope, Antonio, that you are not actually in hell.)