REFLECTING AT LEISURE

I’m formally taking the position that spirituality is physical, biological, the most basic of concepts and entirely felt -- no theological content.  No organizations. No moral content  Can happen anyplace, can be culturally defined as evil or blessed, and is not felt by everyone.  (Not missing -- just not activated.)  From one time and place to another it is defined differently and offered different places in the culture.  Often it is displaced or reduced or expanded because of other ideas about what human is.  The concept grows when times are tough.  It diminishes when "rationality" dominates.

Right now both are the case.  We are still in growing “enlightenment” times based on science, which is growing in part because of expanding technology that allows us access to so much more.  Science claims a dimension that offers a supra-cultural mathematical strategy for avoiding some kinds of conflict: the scientific method.  Science is, of course, accompanied by a lot of clutter -- bad claims, counter-claims, corrupt results.  “Spirituality,” defined as an individual pre-conscious biological response to the world, is a way of escaping all that by going to meaning of a different kind, farther back in the head, closer to the spine.  I am defining it as awareness of the meaning offered by participation, wovenness, continuousness with the galaxies. 

The Wiki entry about spirituality is an extensive checklist that’s helpful, but I wish I knew who wrote it and who altered it or edited it, since I’m finding that point of view is crucial.  For instance, they didn’t get Unitarian Universalism quite right.  Still, if a person wanted to really study spirituality, this might be a good place to start.  It would not give you a spiritual experience (a Wiki entry is just anonymous words) nor would it tell you where you fit but you’d have some vocabulary to throw around.

I hope it's not a butterfly.

These overviews always surprise me in two ways:  the first is how many versions there are and the second is how far back the historical discussion can reach -- in this case, mostly to the Greek/Roman foundation of Euro-thought.  Contemporary understandings are always intriguing.  Can we reach into pre-history?

“During the twentieth century the relationship between science and spirituality has been influenced both by Freudian psychology, which has accentuated the boundaries between the two areas by accentuating individualism and secularism, and by developments in particle physics, which reopened the debate about complementarity between scientific and religious discourse and rekindled for many an interest in holistic conceptions of reality. These holistic conceptions were championed by New Age spiritualists in a type of quantum mysticism that they claim justifies their spiritual beliefs, though quantum physicists themselves on the whole reject such attempts as being pseudoscientific.

Reflections and refractions

My view is that core spirituality cannot be discussed, programmed, owned, sold or acquired at workshops and seminars.  It’s possible to trigger some related experiences by exposing parts of the brain to magnets or ingesting what are now called “entheogens”, drugs that offer a blissful experience.  In my view it’s like that exercise called “bicycling” in which one holds one’s feet in the air and imitates pedaling.  It’s supposedly good for the body, but when you stop, you actually had gone nowhere.

Nevertheless, sometimes the spirit can be called and I’ve always been curious about what the effective trigger or “bait” might be.  After reading a bunch of saints’ accounts of their beatific or horrendous experiences, it appeared that binaries of experience that were internally contradictory had something to do with it.  Current research suggests that sensory experience (not the five senses but the constant hurricane of electrochemical information tracking the world both outside and inside the skin in hundreds of ways) is what the brain sorts and acts upon.  If that great clamor of particles falls into a relatively resolved state, then the experience might be what we call “spiritual.”

Most thinking about spirituality/religion is confined to the English-speaking world, esp. in Europe and Asia.  It simply ignores African, American, or indigenous Australian notions.  Australia is particularly intriguing since the culture (like the geology) is extremely old and pretty much self-contained, characteristics that seem to relate to spirituality.  Except for the Americas and Mediterranean Africa, there have not been the bureaucratic, hierophantic, city-like, empire-craving organizations of “religion.”  Religion is always wanting to combine with government and power.  

 Today spirituality as a characteristic of the individual is often considered a marker of superiority, as a kind of intelligence in a world that thinks “smart people” are better than others, but this has to be covert and unspoken because the consensus through the ages has been that spirituality is a force for unity, the reconciliation of differences.  People who try to make spirituality trump science are playing with superstition and magic.

Art is spirituality in drag.  --Jennifer Yane

Another humanities realm that interacts with spirituality is arts that can capture the unspoken, the felt meaning of life.  Probably one of the most powerful of the arts today is photography, since that’s what gives us visual access to both the star nurseries of space and the busy mitochondrias of the cells, plus startling face-to-face confrontations of so many other creatures and their vegetal world.  Even minerals photographed can be stunning.  It is good to be stunned, esp. if it results in humility, a key to spirituality.

It is not good to use spirituality as a scourge to punish organized religion or secular government.  That’s the work of rationality and justice.  

Compassion is often seen as an element of spirituality, but my severe (Scots?) temperament and experience in the world -- possibly out of arrogance -- sees deep spirituality as ignoring that dimension, though it is a key to the meaning and value of human beings.  Suffering cannot touch the depths of spirituality.  For a while there was an understanding of God as that great power and meaning that comes to suffer WITH humans in the most literal way, so that if one is tortured, God is right there also being suffered.  This is one element of the idea of Jesus, to show that a deity cannot really care about us if they are so exalted that they never feel anything.  But it never struck me as very comforting.

Modern physics is about sharing, but not about feeling.  It is not about God the Creator but about existence as co-creating itself, unfolding and unfolding in complexity that has only one meaning: survival.  Not of the individual, but of the cosmos itself.  All the emotion is on the part of the witnesses, which are us.  It’s our specialty, more important than just talking about spirituality or even admiring it.

When we calm down enough to really pay attention, what we see is that everything is connected, everything is moving, and we can’t stop it, so we might as well join it.

SURVIVAL DEMANDS EVOLUTION

What lurks in us?

The crown of evolution turns out not to be rational thought, but rather empathy: the ability to see what others are feeling in their own heads and to respond to it.  Of course, those who don’t believe in evolution don’t believe in doing that.  But then, they don’t believe in rationality either.

Rationality is one of the excellent reasons for empathy-driven social progress, when the evolution of memes is prompted by understanding how other people feel and using that understanding to benefit us all.  It is rational to make social progress -- meaning developing a world in which everyone has a place and all of the individual worlds are woven together into a planet where survival at every level is possible.  It is irrational to let huge populations of any life form be eliminated out of failure to understand or deliberate destruction that DOES understand but only wants benefit for our selves.  Some of us still think that survival is a matter of taking everything for ourselves.

I’m talking about all the life forms, all the territory, and the air -- the basic fabric of life for creatures.  Survival of the fittest doesn’t mean the biggest, strongest, most potent -- it means what can survive the circumstances.  The planetary circumstances become more and more subtly hostile to humans, in spite of their evolved empathy which has helped them work together to create circumstances that diminish disease and send research vehicles to the moon.  We aren’t saving the frogs, the bees, the coral reefs, the acid/alkalai balance of the ocean.  This is irrational.

My sort-of denomination has been trying to attract new members and improve their reputation for do-goodery based on 19^th century reforms, marching at Selma, and developing principles.  They are doing this the high school way: t-shirts and slogans.  At least the t-shirts aren't pink, but the slogan is “standing on the side of love.”  Every teen can get with that -- there must be a song.

Compassion: does she know how he sees the world?

But it makes me think of a meeting in the eighties at the former Beacon Street headquarters.  In attendance were newbies like me, but also some of the most revered and dignified of our leaders -- all white males over sixty at that point.  We were in a conference room with ground-level windows that opened behind a lot of shrubbery.  Suddenly we were distracted by a shabby whiskery young man who was inadvertently mooning us because he was doing his business in the shrubs, not realizing he was presenting his nethers to a mixed group.  One of the most intellectual and brilliant of the leaders opened a window and berated the man with profane and damning shouts.  The man, unimpressed, took his time rearranging his jeans and leaving.  I forget what his t-shirt said.  Given the times, it probably said "peace."

25 Beacon Street

Why do people want to be do-gooders and why doesn’t it translate into rational provisions for the needs of others?  If a minister can't understand the urgent need to move bowels, what CAN he understand?  Do we ignore such matters because we think angels don't shit?  Politics is one reason.  But it’s not enough to have the American flag flying over the front door and be located by the State House with its gold dome, if there is no support downstairs for rest rooms the public can use.  Oh, well.  The new building has no shrubbery.

Love is an emotion so Hollywoodized and splintered into sex, dependence, and commodified into Valentine candy and diamond rings that it’s pretty much empty now.  The internet is jammed with pastel glittery butterflies and clever infantalized ponies and rainbows, all declaring love.

Compassion is often the watch word.  It’s taken me a while to realize that compassion is not about the receiver but about the provider.  This is why Christopher Hitchens got so upset by Mother Theresa -- it was all about how “compassionate” she was in the many images of her in her plain cotton sari, embracing babies and dying adults.  Our own empathy went out to her as we “became” her, and felt the aching desire to help those suffering.  We didn’t even look at the faces and bodies of the emaciated people on racks of beds -- who would want to empathically share what they were feeling?  Questions about providing meds or preventing starvation didn’t come up until late in her career.  And then we found out that our ability to empathize accurately was faulty.  Her journal describes a terrible darkness, depression that holding infants did not help.  Nor did her fat bank accounts get used rationally to improve conditions.

Can you empathize with this man?

Without scolding him for smoking?

Rational response to suffering is addressed by our nation and our various religious affiliations who send subsidies, food, used clothing, various chemicals produced by our industries.  It’s true, as Rev. Bill Holway used to say, that it feels good to give, but that’s about us, isn’t it?  It’s sometimes a good chance to get rid of stuff we don’t want: the two worst (but funniest) examples I remember are crates of high-heeled strappy shoes sent to Saharan tribes -- evidently because they were labeled “sandals”-- and tons of canned tuna fish but no can openers, also sent to the desert where no one even knew what a fish was.

Such nonsense is good for the survival of politicians who want to please those who provide generous election donations by disposing of excess production of food or by providing living experiments for pharma corporations.  Opportunities for international extortion and blackmail abound when large segments of a nation are dying from malaria or HIV.  Empathy never arrives, but the sudden realization that ebola travels by airliner can speed up our meme evolution to at least protect us -- which can only truly be achieved by protecting those interfacing with the diminishing jungle.  

Not Mother Theresa

Justice is a more stern and durable source of rational intervention for the common good.  Médecins sans Frontieres provides a valiant and life-threatening counterforce to ebola.  For once there is focus on the victims -- the engulfing spacesuits prevent us from even distinguishing the doctors from the local practical nurses, their billowing tyvex other-worldly against the black and bloody bodies of the dying, every figure in front of those ubiquitous turquoise walls. 

Still, less noble and professional institutions are careless enough to let pirates and profiteers skim off profit for their own survival.  What would empathy with the bad guys tell us?  Crippled brains, irrationality, desperation, dead hearts.  But they DO survive.  Up to a point.

Empathy-based compassion is not pretty stuff, often painful, but it offers the real stuff of survival: if not truth, than reality or as close as we can get to it.  When Jack Nicholson sneers, “you can’t handle the truth,” he’s really saying we can’t handle empathy, the knowledge -- no, the FEELING -- of what the others are experiencing.  Of course, that was a movie character he was playing when he said that.  In real life he had no insight into the people who loved him.  He didn’t allow empathy to penetrate his personal life even though the work of an actor is exactly that: empathy.

The model of compassion is often mothers, who undeniably must empathically understand what their infants need and who mostly will privilege the child’s survival over their own.  But this pattern can become controlling, a capture.  A father who is constantly “mothered” instead of partnered, can be crippled.  “Love” can be used as ownership, entitlement, justification for imposing goals “for your own good.”  Then empathy thins and disappears.  The Lover becomes the Joker.  And Batman?  We hope for justice at least.

CULTURE CLASH IN THE SEMINARY

Dissenting faculty at the General Theological Seminary

Starr King School for the Ministry in Berzerkley is a marginal, energetic, socially conscious outfit where uproar breaks out now and then, not unlike a Unitarian Universalist congregation or the denomination itself.  General Theological School in Manhattan is a dependable, mainstream, dignified seminary in a resilient, well-mannered, tolerant mainstream denomination, the Episcopalians.  What does it mean when they, too, go into uproar?  Especially when the management (president and board) react as though they were Hong Kong officials, firing 8 out of the 10 professors.  They hardly look like renegades.  Their photos show neat, short-haired ladies and gents, all white.  

The Reverend Kurt Dunkle

Their President Dunkle’s manners sound so seriously lacking, so obsessed with sexual imagery and politically insensitive statements, that I think he needs a good medical checkup.  Something has gone wrong.  Big shot white administrators at the top of their game can become grandiose and overbearing without any help, but their lifestyle often includes enough steaks and martinis to invite constricted blood flow to the brain.  This man needs one of those monitoring bracelets.

The Rev. Ellen Tillotson, clerical member of the board who sides with Dunkle.

Consent to be governed is the subject of this post.  If eight out of ten professors do NOT consent to be governed without dialogue, then the institution is in trouble.  (They had asked for a conference, threatening a walk-out, and the management simply pretended they resigned.)  The institution is already in trouble due to high debt levels (of the school rather than the students) which have just been addressed -- successfully, it seems, though by selling off property.  88 (some say there are 70) students is not a large student body.  Will aspiring clergy consent to be educated there?  Ultimately that will decide the fate of the institution.  If I were guessing, I’d say they’re more likely to side with their professors than with Dunkle, certainly if the accounts of his corporation CEO sort of behavior are true and have been observed by students.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Theological_Seminary  for some general background.

Dunkle should not be stiff-necked about this.  If feminists can bring down the President of Harvard University, which also acts as a UU respected seminary, then conciliation would be the wise strategy.  The reports are not optimistic.  http://episcopaldigitalnetwork.com/ens/2013/05/15/kurt-dunkle-elected-dean-president-of-general-theological-seminary/  

Tom Wojtowick and Paul Huff in front of St. Leo the Great Catholic Church in Lewistown, MT.

Here in Montana a young priest, 27, was assigned to the Lewistown Catholic Church.  Arriving full of zeal and eager to get things off to a nice neat start, he informed two gentlemen of retirement age -- the kind of reliable folks who are often pillars of a congregation -- that their decades-long relationship, protected by a civil contract from Washington State but not consecrated by the church, was evil.  They would have to give up their partnership, which surely must be based on sins of the flesh (flesh of the same shape organ-wise), and would not be able to receive communion or any other benefits of the Church.  They had been key members of the choir, which has now fallen apart.  The congregation as a whole is split down the middle.  Pope Francis must be pounding his head on the wall.

Now a secular example.  (I’m resisting jokes about spelling God backwards.)  When I was an animal control officer, I had many opportunities to consider the trade-offs between the letter of the law and what I considered to be just.  The first was early in my so-called career:  a little wire-haired terrier who had been hit by a car.  I took him to a veterinarian.  The official position was that an animal hurt that badly should be euthanized.  The veterinarian said he would not treat the dog for recovery unless someone guaranteed the bill.  

This dog had tags, a red harness, and a recent clip.  I called the office, found out the address of the owner (a very nice, well-kept house), and went there, but no one was home.  I went back to the vet who was administering first aid but refused to go farther, since the bill could rise into hundreds of dollars.  I appealed to my boss.  He said a rule was a rule, deal with it.  So I personally guaranteed the bill.  I had almost no money to spare but it was the right thing to do.  The veterinarian got to work.  Late in the evening the owners came home, found my note, and were grateful.  They were happy to pay the bill for their beloved dog, who was saved.  It was a compassion-based strategy that broke authority, but also saved it.

A few years later, we did a neighborhood sweep where people had become very lax about managing their pets.  The rule of the day was to cite every dog not obeying the letter of the law, which was to be on a leash or behind a fence.  A man I approached was letting his dog run around loose while he worked on his yard.  The dog could easily and quickly have darted into the street or confronted someone on the sidewalk.  I pointed this out and the man gave me lip.  I cited him.  It went to court.  He was VERY indignant!  

The judge was amused, but dismissed the ticket.  I didn’t care.  It cost him time and emotion.  But it was also clear that I had pushed it far enough.  If I had grabbed the dog, put it in the truck, and cost him a hundred bucks to reclaim it (he had not licensed the dog nor gotten it rabies shots), that would have been too far.  I would not have argued with him as much as I did if there had not been five other officers on the block, all paying close attention.  It was an authority-based action, tempered by strategy.

A quote from a paper in Cerebrum (a group that studies the brain) by Peggy Mason, Ph.D.  “Membership in a social group brings benefits that scale with the ability of the group to work together.  Thus social cohesion, more than simple sociality, most powerfully promotes survival.”   Being a seminarian is not a matter of accepting dogma or authorities, but rather social cohesion that derives from knowing each other, trusting exchanges, and feeling secure in one’s position.  GTS, according to Wikipedia, is a liturgically driven institution with theologically prominent professors.  If Dunkle, who comes late to the ministry, is pressing hard to make them “grow the seminary,” then his motto of “Both/And” becomes a compulsion to work double-time.  One solution for strapped seminaries is to go to "low residence" -- one-step above correspondence schools.  No social cohesion.  The seminary is in a gentrifying nabe, Chelsea, maybe a little more "artistic", gay and free-thinking than some Episcopalians might prefer.

Former seminary building sold and converted to fancy condos there in Chelsea.

The personal dimension of leadership, which is the point of ministerial “formation” or the training of a cop (both authority-based), is always the end point of a system.  It’s sensitivity and resilience is key.  Law enforcement people across the country have so fallen in love with the military model that are having to relearn this.  Evidently seminary presidents must also learn not to fire without justification.  Dunkle must know he is looking at lawsuits since most of his life he was a prominent lawyer.  Already he has made his seminary look unattractive to youngsters who want to be peacemakers.  To say nothing of replacement professors.

Bibfeldt

I note two things.  The big new initiative that Dunkle was proposing was called the “both/and” which at the U of Chicago Div School was the key credo of a theologian called “Bibfeldt” like those other “Big B” fellows coming out of German.  He was arguing in contrast to Kierkegaard, whose catch phrase was “either/or.”  Without getting into the contrasting dogmas, the main difference between these two prominent scholars was that Bibfeldt was imaginary, invented as a prank by students.  Over time he somehow managed to write papers, enjoy feschtshrifts, be the subject of seminars, and even publish books.  Some of us began to really appreciate his ideas!  Dunkle should have been there.  

The Reverend Wray Mackay

I see that a former professor, the kind of wise old man that seminarians look for and love, died in a climbing accident last April.  I suspect that there is still unaddressed grief at that seminary.  Losing iconic buildings can also trigger grief.  Compassion would be far more effective than compulsion.  Obedience to authority is Old Testament.  The Gospels are about something else.

RACISM, STIGMA, AND RAW FEAR OF NOT SURVIVING

Racism has become far too chiaroscuro:  black and white. 

In the first place, few people are unmixed nowadays. 

In the second place, this whole race thing is polarized between only TWO races when -- assuming you accept the concept of races -- there are dozens, hundreds, of groups of people interacting, few of them purely anything biological or even cultural.

In the third place, much of what purports to be about race is really about an urban/rural split or maybe only an urban/urban split.  The issues of country people, the racisms of small towns, are not addressed, though they have much to do with economics.  So long as survival is about money, it will be about potential for getting it.  The one thing that makes it easy to get money is to already have money.  The stigma of have/have-not is gaining -- could potentially change the terms of what we’re now calling “race.”  Or even nation.

Tribes.

So in the fourth place, I’m beginning to wonder how much racism is a red-herring.  The real issues -- as always -- are things like education, jobs, marriage, social conformity, health, and even religion.  The real issue is survival in spite of competition for limited resources.

But the most dominant factor, the most dynamic factor, is stigma.  Stigma is deeply biological and erupts through culture volcanically, both the creeping lava kind and the explosive dust kind.  Stigma is a reflex that has in the past served survival, or it would not have survived itself.  Stigma is a domination reflex.  Grabbing the lesser beings by the back of the neck.

One counterweight is pity.  If we feel pity for the stigmatized -- whether lepers or babies born out of wedlock or minorities or the disabled -- then we will tolerate them, even make allowances for them, but if they show any signs of anger, resentment or -- worst -- POWER, all pity is gone and we try to eliminate them.  Uppity women and n. . .   (Don't even think it.)  This is a reflex, below conscious control.  But it teaches people already hampered that they are powerless and dependent.  This is called "demanding respect" even when your drunken father shouts it at you.

Separation of territory is a biological factor.  Groups form when they are separated by a river, a mountain range, or the languages they speak.  One form of separation is exclusion.  Push people onto reservations, into special schools, into ghettos, into menial nighttime jobs like cleaning, into junk housing on marginal land.  Worst: incarcerate them.  Even worse than worst: incarcerate them in a foreign country.  (Solitary confinement is the same thing.)  Know as little as possible about them.  If they come on your territory, drive them off.  Deport them.  Wall them out.  See them as animals, as machines, as zombies.  Contagious filth.

If you can’t exclude them, fort up.  Walled housing projects, red-lining, patrolled universities, controlled-access shopping malls.  Invitation only.  Lock the church doors.  If this makes people angry, say they are vandals, rioters, terrorists.  By then they probably are.  Or in small towns the strategy is to set up athletic competition so intense that rivalry becomes resentment, maybe active hatred.  If you lose the game, overturn the bus with them in it. (Romeo and Juliet relationships are against separation.  War dissolves internal separation in a common cause.)  

Disconcertingly, the world with connections to the former British Empire where same-sex relationships were stigmatized and even criminalized in order to keep lower classes from entering upper classes through the bedroom, has now discovered that gays were NOT separate.  Everywhere they are individuals among us in families, jobs and classes.  When we realize how many and how “normal” they are, the stigma weakens and the laws relax.  Now the gays themselves want gays to be normal -- at least conventional.  

Many people cannot tell “pity” from love, esp. men.  Most women cannot tell “awwww” cuteness from ownership.  These little problems of distinction combine in “compassion,” which makes demands on those able to provide protection, patronage, and other survival-based contributions that maintain separation.  That is, until the receiver of “compassion” begins to feel entitled and confronts, which is a form of connection, so that separation in terms of intimacy resorts to violence.  Separation in terms of welfare safety nets flips to withdrawal and punishment.  Blame.  You'd have a job if you'd accept oppression. 

These dynamics are part of producing and raising children, who ideally DO become separately empowered in spite of parental attempts at control and merging.  This is also biological.  If the crucial biological forces of stigma and compassion are allowed to overwhelm any cultural counterweights -- which sometimes become aligned with those raw biological drives and enflame them -- the result is war: gang war, territory invasion, terrorism, economic “pencil” death, and the general destruction of culture that the dystopic books, films, and theories vividly illustrate for us.

My experience with stigma and compassion has shaped my opinions.  When I came back to occupy this marginal old house so I could write on a very low income, I was interpreted as needy, weak, and pitiful and so people gave me food.  I only accepted it from people who were established long-term friends BECAUSE it marked me as weak and stigmatized.  On the other hand, people who believed I was a writer said they were in awe and meant it.  A few took me out to supper at the nicest place around.

I was respected by people who remembered Bob Scriver because he was famous.  (Though one old farm wife said, "He wasn't THAT famous.  He wasn't Charlie Russell."  In her eyes, that was failure.)  When I showed power by telling what I knew in books -- "an exposé of the Western art world", said the only honest reviewer -- I was re-stigmatized as a bitter old ex-wife.  

As an English teacher I was respected as a representative of propriety.  As an animal control officer I was stigmatized as a persecutor of animals.  As a friend of Blackfeet I was both stigmatized by locals and given status by romantic liberals.  As a former co-writer with Tim Barrus, I was stigmatized except by the other people who love his writing and vids.  I don’t align with the compassion people either, because Tim's work proves daily that even boys pushed out of the system are not powerless.  It is their brave work as observers and interpreters that aligns us.

A sharp issue (indeed, "cutting") arose when the clergyman next door to me refused to see me as his equal -- we both attended the U of Chicago Div School -- and insisted that I was a needy old woman who should be grateful for a gift jar of jam and could be freely dominated if my tree interfered with his desire for a suburban lawn (status).  We ended up in a stigma standoff.  All compassion blasted.  (Much laughter around town -- deserved, I admit.)  We are the same race.  He has more money since for much of his career he was a veteran’s hospital chaplain on salary.  He feels it is an achievement to have children, though his wife did all the work -- as usual.  Religious affiliation can be racial even when color is not involved.

In the interest of self-preservation, there are people in this village whom I actively avoid.  I move on quickly, try not to “see” them.  They are too curious, too eager to find a weakness to exploit, if only by gossip.  There are other situations -- church, school -- that I avoid because I am socialized to a world so different from here that we can’t read each other’s signals.  I was asked to judge a speech contest when I first returned, and discovered that I’d given the highest ratings to those the other judges gave the lowest ratings.  I valued personality, creativity, uniqueness.  They wanted conformity.

Of course, identifying with the rez towns -- Browning and Heart Butte -- does me no good in Valier and it IS color-racial.  In the larger world, I have a hard time not stigmatizing many people in my former denomination and profession.  They seem like a different privileged race, perpetual children so confident of their entitlement that they are inadvertently cruel, greedy, and stigmatizing of any difference.  

It surprises me that they complain they are powerless, since they are not, though their power is a little atrophied and they turn it on each other, like the recent attack on her own seminary by a social activist used to attacking "bad" people.  They won't award her a diploma though she has completed her course work.  She is SHOCKED.  Of course, it means she won't have to candidate for a pulpit and do that daily drudgery or that weekly sermon.  

But she's not used to being gripped by the back of the neck, nor did she realize she would be stigmatized. The world cares about her predicament about as much as they care about the rez kid thrown out of the local high school for being a pain in the butt.  Not only do the two kinds of ostracized students not care about each other, each thinks he or she is unique, just trying to survive.  Neither knows the other exists.  Would it help if they did?

SEND FIVE DOLLARS OR I'LL KILL THIS PUPPY!

Many scandals emerge from the rez.  Today’s version is a huge government grant for educating the children which evidently was skimmed for personal gain.  I know few of the people involved and have no opinion on the particulars, but I know the phenomenon well and it is not limited to reservations.  I called it “compassion trafficking.”  In its most primitive form it amounts to “send me five dollars or this puppy will die.”  Find a sorry situation that wrings the heart, propose some kind of solution because you are so tender- hearted, informed and skillful, and then watch the money roll in.  It works great: refugees, war victims, the starving, the abused, the debased innocent, the contaminated land, the stray pups.  How can one NOT send money?  Our love becomes intense, almost sexual, maybe a lifelong obsession.

Those particularly vulnerable to these appeals are likely to be folks who feel guilty over good fortune (movie stars, those in need of approval, zillionaires).   Is there something wrong with that?  I don’t think so.  Surely atonement is good, esp. when it benefits many (Carnegie’s libraries, Ford Foundation’s educational support, Jobs’ malaria project) and when it points out to the rest of us how simple measures (books and mosquito nets) can have huge consequences.  If much of the money that is sent comes from people who can scarcely spare it in their own lives, is that bad?  I don’t think so.  Do we or do we not believe in free will and self-determination?  Should we deprive anyone of the pride that comes from giving?

Human sexual trafficking is locating the relatively powerless (children, women), capturing them physically, making a profit from them until they are too old or damaged to be valuable (soon enough), and then either snuffing or abandoning them.  This is the basis of drug trafficking as well, using addiction as the means of capture and knowing that as the older users die, new users will arrive. 

 “Vote trafficking” in a democracy is not different.  Promises are the mechanism of capture, the issue is promoted until it dies of failure to deliver (or more rarely due to success), and is then abandoned for the next issue.  Advertising is also based on this premise, trafficking toothpaste and soft drinks through the mechanisms of popularity and exaggerated claims, then changing the brand to something “new” to keep the trafficking going.  This could be criticized as trivializing the far more serious trafficking of sexual victims — or war — or empty monetary instruments of conveyance.  But since it is a basic vulnerability of all human beings, the mechanism itself deserves to be addressed in all its forms, its seeming innocence as much as its obvious criminality.

Those who exploit this mechanism of compassion, of needing to help and improve the world, are normally defined by law as criminal or curbed by regulation.  Their secret — and it is easy to learn — is always to stay one step ahead, legalizing and deregulating, whether marijuana or junk bonds.  But it is also useful to forbid, criminalize, impose prohibition, because that creates an underground that drives up the profit far beyond the limits of what can be controlled by inspectors, permits, cops and judges.  Also, the seeming virtue of the criminalizers is burnished.  Complexity and overpopulation are also enablers of the criminal compassion traffickers.  

The current overwhelmed governments of nations, to say nothing of their corruption from within, allows a whole new category of trafficking in “white horse riders” who wish to be funded for seemingly virtuous reasons.  This means a constant three-level opportunity to say:  “Send five dollars or I will kill this puppy,” “Killing puppies is evil and you must send me five dollars so I can punish those killers,” or “Send five dollars and I will write a perfect law and design a perfect system for managing puppies.”   Meanwhile, the endless supply of puppies continues.  (Substitute “boys” for puppies.)  It is the social and biological forces that need to be addressed, but they are not popular.

No one thinks of compassion for traffickers and exploiters.  No one pities people so desperate that they will deprive the vulnerable they pretend to be helping.  In fact, another dimension of sexual trafficking in children is discrediting those who know and  help victims.  In the literary world this means that for every book sold because it reveals something like the suffering of children is followed by another book stigmatizing the first author, often on puritanical grounds exploiting liberal tendencies to stigmatize bad guys instead of figuring them out.

What are useful criteria for distinguishing between a scam and a true service?  When I was in seminary, I worked for a counseling center managed by a certified and constantly scrutinized Clinical Pastoral Education minister and counselor.  The lifeblood of the center was government money that came in for public support of broken families and desperate children.  Also, there was money for the development of future ministers, some money from private counselees, and money from the church that sponsored the center.  Once a month this man of good will cooked the books: that is, he shifted money around — not to benefit himself but to pick up the bill for the neediest.  His life was ten hours of work every day.  He did not live high.  He had gotten through college by living in his car and qualifying for scholarships, which are a kind of trafficking in education that benefits institutions of higher learning since scholarship money often comes from donors.  (“Send five dollars or I will deprive this student!”)  He knew that if he were found out, he was vulnerable to punishment.

These criteria are helpful:

1.  Tenacity:  Is the issue addressed over a long period of time regardless of changing fashions that offer more money for other issues?

2.  Participation:  Do those working for this cause have actual contact with the beneficiaries?  Have they actually been there, done that?  Is their lifestyle roughly the same, even if they have the independent capacity to live in a much grander style? 

3.  Identification:  Are they resisting the temptation to be “better,” the “big person” who is stooping to help the pitiful?  Or are they one of them, equal.

4.  Acceptance by the category:  If, for instance, the “puppies” are sexworkers, do they accept this charitable helper as one of them, able to see their world as they see it and therefore possibly help find a way out of it that doesn’t make victim-puppies out of them?

5.  Is the help empowering?  Will the empowerment be removed when the puppies become dogs?  Or will they suddenly be criminalized, impounded, accused?

6.  Is it first level, on the ground, in the trenches, or is it Ivory Tower critiques and theorizing working from data-surfing and bibliography?

7.  Transparency is a difficult issue.  Protecting those stigmatized can mean sheltering their particulars as much as sheltering their bodies.  Those who traffick in stigmatizing are constantly mining for info about infection, gender-identification, “failure”, insanity, arrests.  Extortion is a kind of trafficking:  “Send five dollars or I will reveal your past.”  Therefore, part of the work of opposing trafficking is opposing stigma of all kinds and possibly also the reverse of stigma, which is superiority: elitism, privilege.

8.  Systems and games are surely at the base of much woe.  Overpopulation, outmoded systems of governance, rampant capitalism (commodification), dwindling resources, lack of consensus, overspecialization, distancing from reality, self-protection, and a constantly shifting state of the planet and the knowledge of it, mean that what worked yesterday won’t work today.  (“Send five dollars and I’ll tell you the secret of the universe!”)

9.  Fear.  (“Send five dollars and I’ll tell you how to survive when the world is destroyed.”)  Best voting and war-mongering scam yet.

10.  Funding by accomplishment:  Pups should avoid dependence on both charity and institutions.  Take your life into your own hands, Pup.

11.  Charity does not entitle control or ownership of the issue, not even by the government.  How can a government “own” HIV-AIDS and suppress all differences of opinion or competition?

12.  If the category doesn’t include those who are ugly, infected, vicious, stubborn, unhousebroken, or handicapped some way, it’s not compassion.  In fact, specimens like this who turn up in “shelters” are euthanized. Mother Nature does the same thing, but doesn’t pretend it’s compassion. 

RESPONSE TO SUFFERING

After working out my theory of liturgy, all based on “feeling” rather than dogma, individual human response rather than institutional imperatives, I find a crack.  It is the issue of compassion, defined as empathy with a suffering “other” to whom one responds  with attempts to help.   The problem arises when the help is offered on the terms of the helper rather than the helpee.  Usually on the assumption that the helpee doesn’t know what’s good for them anyway, so why ask?  

For years I saved a New Yorker cartoon about some men struggling with a piano stuck in a doorway.  A passerby comes along and generously helps them stuff it inside.  The only trouble is that they were trying to get it OUT.  It’s the whole phenomenon of helping old ladies cross streets through traffic when they didn’t WANT to cross the street.  When this happens to me I kick and scream, so I know firsthand how resentful and destructive the doer of the good deed can become if you resist “good.”

Somehow this is mixed into romantic love and parental care in many subtle and troublesome ways.  I’ll make an incomplete and probably confused list:

1.  Wishing to go back to childhood and therefore seeking someone to “help” one.

2.  Looking for the warm and merging feeling one got in childhood from comforting puppies and rocking one’s dollies.

3.  The amount of control that a suffering person has over helpers -- the Munchausen Syndrome reward.  Could be one’s own suffering or could be the second-hand suffering of one’s small dependent, like a child or pet.

4.  The panicky feeling as the receiver of help, esp. when docs, nurses, social workers, and clergy are out of sync with the need.  The old Vietnam trope of “ we had to burn the village in order to save it.”  Or the punishing parent who says “I’m doing this for your own good.”

5.  Enlisting the sympathy of others, esp. when the suffering is emotional.  Most people will be moved by obvious disease and trauma.  (Broken hearts not so much. People may disapprove of the emotional response and therefore welcome one’s suffering.)

6.  Knowing there is a need for intervention but being powerless to supply it.  A loved one is dying of cancer -- why can’t you cure it?

So the idea of “God” as the ultimate lover or parent or at least witness becomes very powerful indeed.

In practical terms, sometimes one is the helper and sometimes the helpee.  What are the principles? -- oh, before that, the awareness -- that must be in place in order to give and accept appropriate help triggered by compassion.  Many will be cultural.  Many will be circumstantial.  Some will be internal to both parties, only accessible by reflecting, which there may not be time for, or maybe overruled by the needs of the group/institution which no doubt wants trouble dealt with.  In jobs over the years I’ve done a LOT of emergency and nuisance complaint response.  The almost inevitable, though lamentable, practice becomes to “eliminate the complaint, not the situation.”  Worse than that, an effort to isolate and address the underlying causes of the recurring dilemma is difficult and maybe impossible.  How can anyone change the geological configuration of the planet that leads to economic inequities, that constant gradient between the haves and have nots?  So much depends upon whose crops are good that year.   Our willingness to use food for blackmail is even more evil than our withholding of drugs.

Then there’s the problem of what seems to be help that is actually a disguised means of making a profit, like the subsidies for high-priced drugs that keep people from banding together to demand more responsible pricing.  I found that hospitals hire chaplains in theory to help patients, but actually to keep order, suppress anger, convert action to obedient prayer.

Too big.  Too much to get one’s head around and still make it work.  

Here’s a weird idea.  Maybe the way to address compassion is not just amelioration, but the creation of pleasure, something liminal liturgy can do.  Not just a back rub but real and abandoned joy -- abandoned in the sense of letting one’s guard down and letting new things in.  We think of drugs in terms of constricting, limiting, but what if something like LSD or marijuana really DOES put the brain into a configuration that is accepting?  That’s often the reports of users, including those who use “theogens,” drugs that are supposed to “call God” as an awareness of joy, not judgment, punishment or even salvation.  Is that justification?

As long as I’m being Christian I’ll suggest the next weird idea as the “pick up your bed and walk” factor.  You remember that story about the paralyzed guy whose friends took him to Jesus, the specialist, to be healed.  When the crowd was so thick around the house (waiting list), the friends broke through the roof and lowered their friend, complete with bed, practically into Jesus’ lap.  His response:  “Pick up your bed and walk.”  No enabling here -- though the determined friends were certainly doing it.  The afflicted person picked up the bed and walked out with it.  It was a miracle.  Or something.  The point I get from it is that we should be our own doctors.  Why wait to be empowered?

We should be our own priests, our own liturgists.  Resist the idea of a specialized class with “magic.”  I don’t see any other way of guarding against the helper who assumes superiority and therefore justifies force, oppression, and hypocrisy -- or equally destructive -- from the helpee -- the wish to remain a child and let one’s powerlessness and dependency become an entitlement and then a demand.  But we should participate in our treatment.

With a friend who often discusses my posts “backstage,” this dynamic has been framed up in a triangle:  Mother Theresa, Christopher Hitchens, and the dying masses.  My friend says he appreciates both MT and CH and backs off from the masses but is glad if they are helped.  Regarding CH, my friend says, “He could be a hard nosed bastard. I think the main reason he didn't care for her was her propensity to toe the Vatican lines. If I were to create a tally sheet on both individuals as far as to what they left behind, Mother Theresa would be far ahead.”  This friend acts on his compassion and helps many.  

But I side with CH, fearing that MT is a step along the path to a bully Pope and a lot of bully priests who take out their frustrations by victimizing children, insisting it’s all an honor.  Until retirement I have not been one to avoid suffering masses, even those of other species.  Maybe I’ve shirked helpful interventions in specific cases.  I’ve walked off.  A hard-nosed bitch.  So I have to justify this at the level of looking for the causes of suffering, using this great retirement privilege of time to reflect.  It’s just that it seems to me that all of us should have the right to decide when or whether to cross the street and it would be a lot easier to ASK whether the piano is going in or out the door.

So what does my manuscript about liturgy need in order to discriminate between true “feeling of holiness” in the sense of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans and simply cultural warm-glow do-goodery?