CONSENT TO BE GOVERNED

This series within the strip follows the idea of the Holy Fool 

that was used in the comic strip called "Brother Juniper."  It's also part of the story of the historical Saint Francis.

The world is confronting many issues of confidentiality and disclosure, which emerge from and deeply affect the prioritizing of authority.  We ask who can know, who has the authority to decide what is censored or hidden, and when it is justified to turn out the secrets that may make previously trusted authority ineffective.  “Consent to be governed” is particularly challenging when it has a religious component.  Two interesting cases reward reflection.  At the liberal end of the religious scale is the slow investigation by Starr King School for the Ministry where a student who had been a dedicated activist in the larger world, even taking damage for the cause, evidently turned the same weapons (disclosure) against the seminary.

Most lay people who have a simplistic understanding of law do not understand the nature of authority in the Western legal world.  The first fact about law is that it is useless without enforcement -- note “force” is in the long word.  Law is derived from war.  It is meant to prevent the violence of war, not justify it.  War derives from nations.  Nations derive from consensus.  When the consensus is lost, the people do not consent to be governed.  They march, they fight, they leave, and the nation dissolves.  It’s in the news every day.  In Europe and her empires, authority finally went to Christendom -- we still swear by God.

In Europe -- not so long ago -- there were long periods of time when people fought mercilessly, ceaselessly, just as the Middle East is doing now.  Ever hear of the Thirty Years War?   The disorder was so violent and bloody that even the king’s claim of being authorized by God was contested.  There were competing kings, all claiming to be God’s favorite.  So the Pope stepped in, on grounds that he was closer to God -- in fact, a personal and historical confidante.  When he could make that claim stick, he could mediate between nations and authorize kings by crowning them.  Until the Roman Catholic church became so corrupt that it triggered both the Protestant movement and the Reformation, everyone mostly went along with a religious consensus.  It began to break down when the Pope at the time of WW was so afraid of the claims of the Nazis and the possibility that the authority of the church would be diminished, that he failed to challenge the Holocaust.

Today we have lost our religious consensus.  We don’t even agree that there IS a god.  The Pope has to rely on reason, compassion, good will, fancy buildings and juju to maintain his authority.  He uses big rule books and some formidable old crustaceans who know things that will keep their underlings under control.  (I’m exaggerating to make the point.)  Then pedo-predation is revealed everywhere and introduces a new consensus, that children must be protected.  When it becomes apparent that the church representatives have not obeyed this rule, which is rooted in the teaching of Jesus, the whole justification of the church as a source of virtue is destroyed.

One of the control management mechanisms was undoubtedly knowing about and threatening to reveal corrupt behavior among church leaders.  Now the revelations have emptied that element of control and revealed that corruption was tolerated for convenience and to protect the reputation of the church.  Before the trial of this ancient and disposable old pedophile, Ex-Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski, now confined in the Vatican, the only crime prosecuted was Paolo Gabriele snitching on the previous Pope by “liberating” his confidential papers.  Both of these men are accused, confined and tried by the Vatican as an autonomous nation by its own laws, though it is only a claimed diasporic "nation", scattered around the world as the international corporation it really is without God’s authority.

The REAL reason the Roman Catholics will not allow secular prosecution of their priests is that it is a challenge to their sovereignty.  If the secular nations can enforce their laws on the Roman Catholic church, the next thing after prosecuting pedopredators will be civil prosecution of financial corruption.  If nations begin to investigate and prosecute money matters, the sanctified exemption of the church from taxes, sheltered transactions, and the protection of the inventory of their assets will be removed.  If anything can trump the RC “machine,” it will probably be abuse of children.  Some forces have been waiting for this moment.

Now let’s change focus back to the other end of the spectrum, the liberal seminary of the Unitarian Universalists, Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley.  In this context, the ultimate source of authority is the Protestant claim of individual conscience, a matter of relationship between the person and his or her God -- or at least their better self.  Now that we’ve pushed God out of the room, individual conscience, esp. as enacted in social activism, has claimed precedence over everything else and allies with political forces.  Civil disobedience challenges authorities when there is a consensus among some persons that the laws are unjust.  This is how we resist slavery, starvation, cruelty, abuse of children -- issues of injustice and abuse generally generating consensus.  Though Americans may be arrested for demonstrating, persons are generally protected from violent harm and may sue for damage.  One of the weapons effective against overbearing authorities is disclosing privileged information, like the Pentagon Papers, or the recent Wikileaks breaches of internet secrecy.

At Starr King seminary, which is well-known for supporting individuals who are social activists, a new president of the institution was chosen that some students did not accept.  They didn’t resort to violence, but they did break confidentiality by distributing records of the process, which they evidently assumed would bring the consensus to their side.  It’s unclear whether any opinions were changed.  But consensus did not achieve authority.  The social activism in this case was seen as fouling the nest of the mother institution, which continued with its planned course of action but used its authority to withhold degrees of the suspected tattlers and start an internal investigation.  This is not secular, not accessible to civil secular authorities.  It’s a “Vatican” crime.  Sovereignty within an institution.  In fact, the institution of the seminary inside the institution of the denomination which has standards of confidentiality and ministerial performance of its own.

It would be wonderful if everyone could know everything, reflect on it rationally and come to opinions that were clear, actionable, and valid.  It can’t happen.  Partly it’s a matter of the unforeseen consequences of knowing, partly it’s the ease with which most people can be scandalized and overwhelmed by their own personal opinions, and partly it’s the old Jack-says-you-can’t-handle-the-truth. 

Much of life is negotiated by being a tight-wire walker -- not looking down.  They say 1% of men [sic] are psychopaths.  That means there are maybe four in this little town of 400 or so.  They say one-fourth of boys and one-third of girls are sexually hassled or outright assaulted in their lifetimes.  As a minister I knew of maybe ten men in ministry and a few women who acted sexually outside the guidelines, but they were rarely identified or defrocked.  One of the worst was, but a wrong-headed congregation hired him anyway.  I never heard how that turned out.  We’ve been confused by the sexual revolution as well as the impulse to “level” authority figures, not holding them to a higher standard, so that they feel entitled to indulge themselves.

Human beings are a roaring mess and it’s a wonder any of us survive unscathed -- maybe none do.  The least we can do is arrive at a consensus we can all live with and stay aware to the extent that we can bear it.  Not easy to do in a nation of immigrants obedient to inner voices from far different places.  That means if we know that children are being abused, whether sexually or in some other way, then we’re all obligated to do something about it.  But if we are just objecting to the choice of leaders of some movement, we should probably be the ones to move on.

I've used comic strips as illustrations.  This article describes how a sense of humor can be effective, an idea missing from the above cases EXCEPT by the inspired cartoonist.
http://www.ozy.com/c-notes/protests-go-absurd/34130.article?utm_source=dd&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=10012014

PASTORAL COUNSELING (CPE)

Teruo Kobayashi was a fellow student at seminary.  He was a Konkoyo priest, which meant he was a genetic descendent of Konko himself who had founded the religion, which was a conflation of Christianity and Shinto.  Teruo could never understand pastoral counseling.  He said that in his tradition, he went to a certain location in the temple and sat down on a cushion.  Then troubled people came to him, brought him a gift and sat across from him to explain their problem.  He would think about it a bit, tell the person what they ought to do, and then the person would go away to be obedient.  This approach would only make sense to a conservative Fundamentalist Christian.  A liberal, particularly from the UU or Ethical Culture traditions, would laugh.  Defiantly.

Clinical Pastoral Care is a formal course, usually ten or twelve weeks long, in which prospective ministers are put in relationship with people in serious situations, as in prison or a hospital.  They are asked to be useful to these people for part of the day and then the rest of the time they are asked to sit in a group and address what feelings arose in them.  FEELINGS, not rules.  And the point was to listen, which meant to open up enough for those feelings to be triggered.  Then the group would address how to handle those feelings, which were often profound, often disconcerting, and always a challenge to any faith position that would cause a person to become a minister, even a free-thinking atheist hedonist anarchist.  It was really about one’s identity while being in relationship to other people.  

The point of doing this in a hospital or prison was that one couldn’t choose which people to help.  It meant intimacy without sex.  The chaplain does not crawl into the bed, no matter how much the counselee wants it.  Luckily, very sick people don’t want it very much.  It’s much more of a problem in a regular congregation.

There are two aspects that define this intimacy as professional.  One is the time and situation limit.  The chaplain doesn’t go home with the patient or prisoner.  And the job IS a job that ends.  The other is the requirement of confidentiality.  In a CPE group confidentiality applies to the student chaplains, just as though they were attending AA meetings. 

Not too long ago I got interested in what happened to my CPE group.  It’s been thirty years now so I didn’t expect to upset many applecarts.  There were six of us.  I had my notes but discovered only one name.  Thanks to google I now know that he did indeed achieve the primacy in his tradition that he wanted and he did pursue the issues that he wrestled with at the time, but as a professor, not as a minister.  I don’t know what happened to the handsome boy with cancer of the testicles or the other handsome boy who was seduced by a priest on the first night of his student priesthood nor the sturdy and stoic young woman who found herself crying uncontrollably in the arms of a family that had just lost a member.  You know what happened to me.  The sixth student was pretty laid back -- he played in a bluegrass band.  Our advisor left CPE.

Confidentiality has been a major issue for me.  I know too much and too little at the same time.  I have to guard others, but as many books and movies have illustrated, that might mean not making public something that would save them, respecting their right to decide what is known about their lives.  It’s a kind of torture to see injustice based on ignorance, whether that is a stupidity of thinking or simple ignorance of facts.  All a person can do is to stand by the accused and wait for the situation to change.  But if that person begins to worry about intimate things told at unguarded moments, then the relationship may disintegrate.

The hardest persuasion is to assure the armored person who is guaranteeing rejection by not disclosing the truth that they can safely give it up.  People can get invested in the stigma against them and accept that definition because it is a familiar and dependable source of identity.  In truth, there is no guarantee that the “truth” can set anything free -- not people and not ideas. 

Another curve ball that comes my way is that I have guarded some secrets for decades, only to discover that everyone already knew that and didn’t care very much.  In small towns and church congregations, people know everything.  Just about the time I left one congregation, someone finally let it slip that one of the members was suicidal -- had made repeated attempts while I was there.  I had been friendly with this woman, stayed at her home overnight, found her cheerful and well-balanced.  No one told me.  She succeeded in killing herself after I left.  She didn’t tell me because I was an authority figure and that meant she projected all sorts of fantasies about what I might do if I knew.  I have no idea at all what I would have done.

Counseling is seen by many in the same terms as Teruo’s tradition:  a big authority tells a little needy person what they need to know.  Maybe even intervenes on their behalf.  If there is NO big authority (God, minister, doctor or parent), then the little needy person will just have to figure it out on their own terms.  A whole flowering of “Third Force” psych in the Seventies comes from acting on this assumption.  The task of the counselor is NOT to tell the counselee anything -- just to listen and try to “become” the counselee in some sense.  It helps if both are from something like the same background.  Eugene Gendlin asserts that the second person doesn’t even need to be a counselor but merely a witness.  They don’t even have to say mmm-hmmm at intervals.  They can even be on the telephone.  To some extent they can even be there as a known figure who is only imagined at the moment.  (To find out more, what you want to google for is “Focusing.”  There are YouTube vids.)  Kids can do it for each other.  A dog, maybe.  (Forget cats.)

Outside of a professional relationship, it’s confusing to know what rules apply.  It might reassure people to know that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and reading about this issue of intimate confidentiality.  Every time I’ve stepped a little out of the conventional line, there’s been trouble, whether I told too much or told too little.  The whole society seems to be wrestling with this.  I have a friend who does not want to KNOW who is gay and who is not gay.  (She can’t hear me say that this is a binary distinction that’s not useful anyway.  She thinks it’s like male and female, which she thinks are mutually exclusive.  She bristles at the idea of me knowing better.)

But I’m a writer.  That’s quite a different profession.  When I wrote the bio of Bob Scriver, I didn’t tell everything I knew.  Afterwards people came to tell me things I hadn’t known.  Some of them made me cry.  Bob himself never suspected anyone knew.  Inevitably, someone who reads this will ask me what information made me cry.  Forget it.