TIME IS THE CHALICE

Like whole cultures, individual human beings have crises that can’t be resolved without a major transformation, a move to a new frame of reference. In the best of all possible worlds, this is an evolution rather than a personal revolution, and one moves to a new understanding that accommodates the new facts of life without too much grief. On a planet where the populations have been stirred with a stick and have viewed the planet from outer space where they can’t even be detected except for the damage they’ve caused, many of us have a LOT of mazeway resynthesizing to do.

A mazeway formed in a child’s mind, especially one trapped in an impossible situation, is probably the hardest to reframe later on. A neglected, abused child is ALWAYS going to see the world as hostile. It’s deep as the marrow in their bones. Even tougher to reassure are children who have had a loved and protected life for a while, but then were betrayed and abandoned by parents. Even if it was because the adults were killed in a car accident, how can the child ever believe it won’t happen again? (And it might.)

If a beloved parent or role model suddenly demands something painful and against all the previous rules, what can a child do? Run away? Then what? Where do they go? Some abused children aren’t even old enough to walk. The only escape is death. They are spared the suffering of the child raised with love to the point of awareness, then thrown into hell. A kid with enough inner resources can harden up beyond the possibility of anyone being able to reach him -- or her -- ever. If that protecting shell is broken, madness and suicide can follow.

More likely, and more luckily, they’ll look around for Someone who will let them attach. They’ll call that love. “Do this for me,” says the Someone and they do. “If you love me,” and they do love the Someone. They feel they really do. “Don’t trust anyone else,” and they don’t. Never tell. Never tell. NEVER. NEVER. If the evidence of another betrayal mounts up, if that attachment becomes a punishment, the result is a crackup or a zombie.

But usually the shift is not so dramatic. The not-so-traumatized person goes along, does the stuff, finds it’s empty, then one day stumbles across an idea or situation so electric and vital that -- well, their mental mazeway is resynthesized. Sometimes it’s a bushwhack, sometimes it’s a search. If they’ve got the guts for it, if they can stand the shaman’s ordeal. . . real life begins. More often the person finds some kind of way to pretend nothing has changed, that they cannot escape, that this IS the world. Other people aren’t likely to believe their change anyway.

Or maybe they set expectations for themselves at such a high level (be a charismatic leader who changes the world, a prophet, a towering black angel, the Great American Novel, the Nobel, the Pulitzer, the MacArthur) that no one could achieve those things and so they are excused by themselves, because of the impossibility of it all. (Even if they did make it up themselves.) Another strategy is to hang out with lesser folks: make sure you’re the only one with an education, the only one with the real skills, the adult among the children, the professor with the students, the preacher with a congregation. Or maybe resort to uproar, staging some kind of crisis by picking a fight or doing something forbidden, thereby confusing and emotionalizing everything. For neglected girls (and very occasionally boys) a strategy is to have a baby in order to give it what they feel they have missed. The trouble is that they have missed more than they know: like practical skills. Once the infant begins to be a separate person, they resort to the treatment they knew in their own childhood.

There’s no shape to a damaged child’s efforts. They sprawl and wander unless there’s a safe place. Then they can stop and think, whether it’s a therapist’s office, an AA meeting, a church group, or a proper sweat lodge. If things get really bad -- maybe a drug withdrawal on top of the rest or a systemic infection -- they will need one or more persons to be with them, not just for moral support or to fetch and clean, but to form a human container, an embrace, which is the most molten chalice of all so long as it belongs to the contained one.

The idea of the molten chalice is to provide a container which is also a safe defense that can be re-cast and re-shaped to fit the re-newal of the person inside. A person is a process. The only failure is to stop trying, but even that can be a good thing: to stop. Drop the defenses and let the world come in. Give up the control. Give up the pre-conceptions. Expose yourself -- oh, yes, EXPOSE yourself -- and let the shadows speak to the moon. Stop being the puppet master and let the puppet sleep. It’s a shaman’s way. Some need drugs. Others only need -- well, maybe nothing. That nacreous half-moon in an afternoon sky, suddenly cleared of rain.

I was thinking about all this last night, the need for deconstruction to make way for rebirth and the necessary courage. The last dream I had before waking was about walking into an aspen grove in fall -- yellow leaves, a little chilly -- on a path. (This is near the beginning of a novel I work on.)

Then I see in the brush a boy’s detached leg, the tennis shoe and denim pants leg torn off with the bloody white knob head of the femur sticking out. I walk towards it and see a pile of people -- not a lot, maybe a dozen, bloodied and torn. A family. A young woman is looking at me.

I hear the grizz. I turn slowly and walk back on the path, trying to be calm. I smell the grizz, hear her in the brush. She’s not coming towards me. Maybe. My hair is on end. The world is brilliant in its colors, intricate in its design, deeply meaningful without words. Adrenaline is the most jolting drug of all. It reveals why we are here, even as death grips us by the back of the neck. We are here to participate. That’s all. No guarantees. No expectations. No fabulous goals of heroism. Be here now. Time embraces you, embraces us all. Death is just part of the process. It is Time that holds the chalice to our lips.

THINGS FALL APART

http://marycobham.bandcamp.com/album/mazeway-resynthesis

Above is a lovely set of songs to listen to if you’re attracted to the phrase “mazeway-resynthesis.”

Originally the term was invented and developed by Anthony F. C. Wallace in his book “Culture and Personality” and other places. It refers to the kind of situation where one’s mental life is so scrambled, challenged or stressed that it has to be drastically rethought even to the level of a religious conversion. But it is NOT a religious conversion in the way we think of such a thing, in the terms of our familiar religious institutions, their dogmas and images. It could be entirely secular, even scientific. It is not about madness in the sense of the actual physical organs of thinking and feeling becoming deranged, but it could look like that. Some relate it to shaman death and reintegration.

Like a person, a whole culture could have such a crisis and probably that’s the best way to look at the revolutionary Sixties/Seventies demand to just cancel all the rules and see what happens. My favorite example (I used to use it in sermons) was Carl Rogers’ study of marriage. (“Becoming Partners: Marriage and Its Alternatives.”) People asked, “Why must marriage be only two people of two genders?” and acted on the question (which was actually very old if you consider communal utopian communities centuries ago) by forming households of threes and more, mixed genders, various practices and rules.

The idea was NOT sexual access to each other, which they already had. Rogers, with a straight face, calmly investigated them and discovered that to succeed, relationships must take time to keep communication clear. That meant sitting down to talk. There was only enough time in their lives for a maximum number of five people to maintain a “marriage.” (He didn’t talk about the need for an economic platform of some kind.) Some people can’t manage enough time for two.

We all hope for some kind of understanding, even participation in a congruence, confluence, conflation, fusion -- whatever works to describe your version of intimacy. The more different we are, the more time it takes to figure it all out.

Humans seem to have a great need to share their mazeway, maybe by living similar lives or maybe just by feeling that their explanations are truly grasped by others, maybe only one person. We appreciate having a “tribe” of people who don’t need to have everything explained all the time, who share goals, who have similar affinities. This is the true basis of religious congregations beyond the formal denominations that are many times artifacts of old shifts in thinking (from trinity to unity, from immersion to sprinkling, from predetermination to free will) or former ethnic persistences into a new context.

Today’s denomination may be a left-over institution from a “successful innovation of whole cultural systems.” (I’m quoting at length here but confess that I’ve lost the reference specifics.) Wallace classifies this kind of change under the general rubric of a “revitalization movement” and defines it as “a deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture.” This concept implies that at some previous time, people found their culture to be meaningful, believable, and satiable. But over a period of time the growing gap between old social expectations and new social behavior, between old cultural values and new ones, and between local autonomy and foreign domination frequently increase cultural distortions. Unresolved, this type of confusion and disorganization may contribute to ethnic extinction.

We’re about due for another turn on this wheel. Or maybe it’s already happening in the Middle East. The “Occupy” movement qualifies. “Tea Party” does not -- it’s not revitalization, it’s retro.

I. Steady State

Wallace identifies five common stages through which all revitalization movements must pass to reverse this trend. One, the revitalization process begins with a “steady state” characterized by social conformity, acceptance of a common set of values, the fulfillment of individual needs, and the resolution of social conflicts.

II. The Period of Increased Individual Stress

Eventually, internal changes brought about by social, economic, or technological innovations, and external forces, frequently result in increased social competition and ethnic conflicts giving rise to increased social disruptions and decreased levels of individual satisfaction with their present system contributing to a second stage–referred to as a “period of increased individual stress.

III. The Period of Cultural Distortion

If the internal social mechanisms fail to reduce this increasing level of anxiety, then members will experience rising levels of stress, causing the revitalization movement to evolve into a third stage, called “the period of cultural distortion.” This third stage is characterized by disillusionment, apathy, cultural deterioration, decreased birth rates, increased death rates, and internal factionalism.

IV. The Period of Revitalization

Fortunately, during such distressful periods of social unrest some individual frequently emerges with a creative cultural plan for resolving the social malaise, introducing a fourth stage of dynamic change designated as “the period of revitalization”. Successful social adaptation and institutionalization of the revitalization plan produces a new steady state that culminates in an ongoing spiral of continuity and change as societies adapt to innovations.

V. Returning to a new steady state.

Or you could look at Religious Revitalization (think NA Ghost Dance) for five more steps:

A. Mazeway Reformulation

In the first phase of religious revitalization, the “mazeway reformation” phase, a visionary experiences a radical change in personality, assumes a new role in society, devises a new plan for reorganizing society and proposes a new order that promises new meaning and purpose for living.

B. Communication

In the second, “communication,” phase, the visionary successfully transmits the mental blueprint for social and cultural change to other members in the society.

C. Organization

Third, in the “organization” phase, the visionary appoints leaders and organizes the followers into an effective social movement to implement the proposed changes.

D. Adaptation

This is followed by a fourth or “adaptation” phase, in which the new organization devises strategies to counter internal resistance from those who feel threatened by the sweeping changes or external confrontations from powerful groups who are hostile to the changes.

E. Cultural Transformation

In the fifth phase, referred to as “cultural transformation,” the vision of the reformer becomes “owned” by the membership and transformed into the daily behavior of the people.

F. Routinization

Since many of these changes do not come easily, the leadership needs to monitor and encourage the followers to complete the process by integrating the new values, beliefs, and behavior into the cultural norms of the people in the sixth or “routinization” phase.

This is all very logical and self-evident, but in 1956, which was just before Thomas Kuhn (1962), it was the leading edge of a whole deconstruction movement. It was reassuring! There was someplace to go -- a future. All you needed was the courage to let go, fall apart, hit bottom. Counter-intuitive.