THE SKULL AND THE FIRE

“The Bone Chalice” is a metaphor for the “container” with a fire in it.  It is represented in UU meetings by an actual bowl or chalice that has some kind of fire in it: candle, can of Sterno, kerosene wick.  The idea was a celebration of thought as in “what makes us human” as well as “what gives us access to the world.”  For some, it symbolized John Huss, a too-early Protestant burned for heresy, evoking the individual right to think for one’s self.

https://philosophyandpsychology.wordpress.com/2012/07/23/examples-of-the-pervasive-container-metaphor/

The problem is that if one leaves the prescribed (written) litanies of the dominant religion, one also leaves structure behind.  Or the flame is changed, but not the container.  (Several Protestant denominations have kept the Catholic mass for their worship services.)  The consequences can be either that the flame is not consolidated enough to keep burning, or the flame can escape, become damaging or go out.  This, of course, is of concern mostly to the Abrahamic religions, which were built around the experience of the oasis or campfire.  They could as easily be symbolized by a fountain of water in a container, though the implications would be a little different.

Euros didn't realize they were devising the discipline of  anthropology to reflexively study the "anthropocene" forces. Nor did they realize the danger of them escaping their containers, the homeostasis of life.   When first confronting the sacred kindlings of the indigenous peoples of the world, they solved their unfamiliarity by ruling that they were not religion.  Indeed, if religion is a matter of institutions with hierarchies, boundaries, dogmas, and built structures, the practices of Native American Indians or tribal Africans or Australians were not religion.  

But these people obviously had a sense of the Sacred, Holy places, objects that signified, and practices that uplifted the people.  The general public — meaning writers for television series — has still not realized this is a problem.  They can barely distinguish the Protestant plate tectonics from the personality of Pope Francis.  Unless something is written, logical, and historical, most people think it’s not religious.  (But then they drag in the morality of pee.)

If “belief” defines religion, then the contemporary version will reject anything they can’t see.  “Proof” means seeing, whether it is seeing Jesus crucified or seeing hands with sympathetic stigmata or seeing archeological evidence of the buildings in the Bible.  Evidence means something written (the Book) or eyewitness testimony.  Educated contemporaries are a legalistic and optically obsessed people.  For some simpler folks, the image of the Virgin Mary rusted into a screen door is more convincing than two thousand years of scholarly dogma.  If smell is the sense that developed first, sight is the one that defines worship now:  architecture, embellishment, reading, making signs with the hands and arms, precious objects.

The most important sight one sees at church is each other, the congregation, the people who count to you because they know you.  But possibly, in a hierarchical style, one can step back to wanting to see one person, the way a child wants to see the one nurturer.  It’s biological.  So in that situation the people sit in pews facing the pulpit, and their yearning for one beloved is symbolized by the worship leader or by statues, maybe a way of seeing God in terms of human relationship like “love”.

But that’s far from the only option.  A few decades ago, resisting any hint of domination or departure from equality, there was a movement rudely called “unscrewing the pews” which literally meant unfastening them from rows and putting them in a circle.  Or some congregations went to chairs that could be arranged in many patterns, so that one not only is looking at people but also seeing a different angle on the space.  Some went to carpet, like Islam.

When I was in seminary, each student was responsible for creating a vespers ceremony on Friday evening in the little side-chapel of the First Unitarian Church of Chicago.  The space was separated from the great stone sanctuary by a kind of proscenium with a fire-wall that could be lowered, as in a theatre.  But it was cranky, aging, and often stuck, so it was mostly left open.  We normally faced our chairs towards the wood paneled wall opposite the space.  But I got to thinking about the “Void,” the “Abyss,” “Kenosis” and the other doctrines of darkness and emptiness.  I thought about how we fill that space with ourselves.

So I set up a low table in front of the arch to darkness and backed it with the biggest mirror I could find.  We were forced to contemplate symbolic representation of an abstract idea.  Of course, by Friday evening we were usually empty and exhausted — our homeostasis was one of pulsing energy through the seven days of study and worship.  It wouldn’t seem as though staring at a black space and our own bodies would be helpful, but it was a case of “naming the Devil.”  That is, like Rumpelstilskin, once named, the power was gone.  But it was more felt than a matter of proper nomenclature.  It worked.

“Visual Literacy” is defined thus:  “Visual literacy is the ability to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from information presented in the form of an image, extending the meaning of literacy, which commonly signifies interpretation of a written or printed text.”  

One interpreter is David Howes, “professor of anthropology and the director of the Concordia Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. He holds three degrees in anthropology and two degrees in law. His research focuses on how senses are formed by culture and what the world is like to societies that emphasize touch or hearing rather than sight.”   Because he approaches through the paradigm of reading, he is confined to the ideas of language, like grammar and vocabulary.  I find that a bit old-fashioned in an age of video and hyper-realism.  But he is only describing and tabulating, not actually trying to summon the Holy.  He looks at the container and what might be incised or embossed or painted on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av0DIITQQk8

But he tries to see the organic emergence of the objects and rituals.  The difference between a skull and a chalice is that the former is built by itself, formed by processes spontaneously guided by molecular DNA blueprints that developed over millennia of evolution, long before the brain found symbolisms of alphabet.The soft cartilaginous globe of a fetus forms by the twelfth week of gestation and continues to develop and translate into bone at least into the person’s twenties and possibly through a lifetime.  

In infancy, the skull can be shaped by simple pressure and some tribes have done this on purpose.  Otherwise, the baby’s head needs to be turned occasionally so the pressure of the bed doesn’t flatten it.  Of course, it usually has been deformed by birth and needs a bit of time to become round.  We are about to learn much more about Zita and the lack of the brain's pre-frontal cortex so that there is no forehead bulge.  And we already know about the brain swelling to the point of crushing itself against the inside of the skull.  One can run away with metaphors, but it might be useful to think about this in terms of religious systems, where the institution has become a crusher of the Holy or has simply deleted it.  

A skull, of course, once developed into a person and then de-fleshed by death, is a powerful symbol and often used in actuality or depiction for the sake of our feelings when confronted with the eye holes and grinning teeth.

The central idea of this post is two-fold:  first that the sense of the Holy is a felt phenomenon that is a natural part of the living human body, accessible to everyone, even the most rigid “prove it” person.  No need for an evangelist or a miracle.  No need for an institution.  It develops by itself according to internal directions.  It is a time-related development.  It may vary between persons the same as any other physiological feature.

Second, that though this experience is quite apart from conventional historical systems of worship and prescribed liturgy, it is still possible to invite Sacred experience and to shape it in ways that obey the organic laws of homeostasis:  too wild and damaging will snuff the fire, and the same goes for too faint or incoherent, a lack of fuel.  We suffer from both.  Right now, fear is rocket fuel exceeding any crucible.

This is a “humanist” way of thinking that involves no supernatural elements, but it MUST be responsive to the environment, which has much to do with the way the fire burns.  Our ecologies shape our being and inform our poetries of the Sacred, which we enact as part of our identities and survival.

ACTING OUT: A RESULT OF GUILT AND SHAME

A few nights ago I was looking for illustrations for something or other I was writing and — as happens every once in a while — I ran across something that stunned me.  It wasn’t one of those pay-for-tattling websites, but just an ordinary newspaper story about a man from Browning, respected and educated, from a good family, a grandfather, a ceremonialist, elected to a responsible role in the community, who had a son who “made it” on one of those legendary athletic scholarships.  Here were his mug shots from an incident in one of the state’s bigger cities.  Evidently he had flashed some people in a coffee kiosk and the mall security grabbed him.

Long ago I was his teacher.  The last time I saw him I sat next to him at the funeral of a respected elder.  Of course the consequences of the exposure were a domino chain: loss of respect, loss of role.  I don’t know how his wife reacted but she’s not a weak woman.  Shame? Or guilt?  For what?
  

Women around here, whatever color, are often caught embezzling.  Usually they say they want money for their families.  But men occasionally do unaccountable defiant but self-destructive things, stuff a junior high kid would do, and though there’s often alcohol or drugs involved, they are stupid acts — maybe self-hating.  Shame, guilt . . . frustration, overwhelmed by everything.

It took me a long time to understand that Native Americans feel so very ashamed that they could not defend themselves from the Euro-invaders.  They weren’t equipped, they didn’t understand what was happening, and Euro-disease wiped out many.  There is no justification for holding them accountable and yet they feel that way.  For generations now.

It’s not so different from young Jews who feel that a Chosen People ought to have been able to find a way to prevail over Hitler, a way to explain or escape or even offer some kind of accommodation, the way England did at first.  Maybe you remember how Americans tried to shame the French not so long ago, because that nation criticized the invasion of Iraq.  They renamed “French” fries to be “American” fries and they tied the whole thing to the German capture of France in WWII, claiming that the French didn’t fight.

It’s like family crackups that the children feel they caused, that they ought to be able to fix, so when they can't, they leave home, hoping that will make it all settle down.  This is never real and most people never get it resolved because they can’t see past blaming.  Often the blaming is so clever, so accurately aimed at a soft spot, that the one who takes the blame punishes themselves, clear to the point of death, taking desperate chances to prove that they are brave or else maybe giving up.  

Especially women can sink into depression, a terrible burden on their right to live, always trying to propitiate the mysterious gods who made them inevitably come up short.  Stockton links this to the suicide of Virginia Wolff, probably accurately.  She never could satisfy her father, whose standards were impossible anyway.  He caused her to be ashamed of her beauty, her talent, her intelligence.

Those young Indians who finally refused to take the blame were in the cities, talking to defiant Blacks, but defiance and blame only perpetuate stigma.  It becomes a rebound weapon against themselves.  A tool for their enemies.  When Bob Scriver’s museum burned, the FBI was quick to say it was AIM that did it, which only pushed the fear and rage up higher.  No one looked at the structure of society and how it traps stigmatized young men; the same thing happened in Ireland.  Plenty of evidence, many strong theories, individuals who saw clearly.  But the little worm of debasement ate into them like toxoplasmosis making rats love the smell of cat pee.

Blacks have a different context.  They were not victims of invaders that they failed to repel — rather they were captured, chained, taken across the sea to a different country, and kept enslaved by a strong cultural consensus and brute force.  Ever read “Mandingo”?  Slaves were penetrated and boiled into soup.

Down deep in many Native Americans is the idea that they might be able to restore their tribe to its former power.  Whites make noble angels of them, and they kind of believe it.  Casinos with all their glamour and clatter of money sort of appeal to that.  I suspect that Englishmen — and certainly Scots — have that same wish to reconstruct past glory.  It’s unreal and finally makes them angry.

My first impulse is to go have coffee with this man and try to understand what happened, why he was so out of character.  But I suspect that he was IN character, that something festering had broken loose and burst constraints.  When I try to imagine how he would react if I tried to talk to him, I see that there is no way he could believe that my intentions were good and he probably doesn’t have that much insight into himself anyway.  It might take a sweat lodge with wise older men.  But where are they?  HE was supposed to be them.  

I don’t think a Western style therapist would be any help because they all work from theory and NOT experience.  Not many have experienced being mocked, excluded, and shunned.  Maybe that’s why the most effective analysts are often Jewish.  “Jimmy P” has nothing on the reality of being “Indian” and I’m not going by the movie — I’ve read the book carefully several times.  “Winter in the Blood” is closer.

My mother’s family were major blamers and ridiculers.  My father’s family is deniers, people who are nice no matter what.  I’ve got both in me.  My strategy has been to think things out, to learn how things work, to explain and justify.  But none of that ever changes the accumulated shame-and-blame feelings.  The feelings just sit there like toads and stare.  Someone said to me, “Why can’t you believe that I love you?”  Well, there’s the answer: a panel of toads, all with their webby little thumbs turned down.

The toads say,  “Why couldn’t you save your marriage?  Why didn’t you finish your doctoral thesis?  Why couldn’t you save your brother from death on the street?  Why haven’t you written a best-seller?  Why didn’t you cure your step-daughter’s cancer?  Why couldn’t you save her daughter from suicide?”  

All this assails me until I have to laugh at such grandiose narcissism.  But that’s not the same as taking on the burden of the loss of an entire culture, the destruction of a continent.  The actual offense of the man in the mug shot — he just pleaded no contest, paid a fine or something — would never have become public if he hadn’t been Native American, but it was a satisfaction to some to once again punish people they stigmatize.

The shrinks call such incidents of disruption in the middle of a lifetime of constructive work “acting out.”  It’s considered a defense mechanism, a way of relieving pressure.  I like the image of a container (hot philosophical concept at the moment) that holds a roiling hot mixture, reacting, getting deeper, until it causes the container to leak — tell things, do things, provoke, make something happen even if it’s bad.

I like that container idea because it offers a way to address the guilt/shame issue that triggers so much frustration.  Two ways, actually:  one is to make the container bigger or stronger, and the other is to stop adding to the heat inside.  Ways to do those include reframing the situation, finding a community that understands, increasing one’s skill level in any way, and others, including the Native American favorite:  laughter at the absurdity of little fool Napi — yourself — trying to save the world.  Well, we DO manage to save little patches here and there.  But some atrocities can never be reconciled.

ATTACHMENT IN THE FACE OF TRAUMA

My accumulations of paper — which persist in spite of computers or maybe because of computers because it’s so easy to print — include much on the theme of development in humans.  The theories come and go, the names of the same phenomena change, and the pendulum swings from focusing on individuals to groups and back again.

I’m looking at this tempting bit of a larger document.  I can’t make it copy and paste so I’ll summarize a bit.

  

traumacenter.org

http://www.traumacenter.org/clients/Intertwining_Nature_of_Attachment_and_Trauma.pdf

“The attachment system provides the safe container.”

Since today is Saturday and I’m composing my post for Sunday, it occurred to me that it was worth looking at these concepts in terms of congregations.  Some words are so worn and abused (traumatized, you might say) that they have lost their meaning or have been seized by people who use them as weapons:  I’m thinking of the words “church,” religion,” “community,” “family,” and so on.  They become triggers.  The fists come up ready to fight.  So we say “congregation”, “spirituality”, or whatever but don’t really examine the phenomena.

Here’s the assertion:  “Within the safety of that attachment system, children are able to explore their worlds, and develop a range of skills, including the ability to regulate their body and emotions, build an early understanding of self and others, and over time, develop an array of increasingly sophisticated developmental competencies.”  We are all lifelong children.

What makes a congregation “attachable”?  Safety is the consequence of being attached, but what safety is there during the process of approaching, testing, awareness of exits, identifying what dangers there might be?

This little bit of an essay asserts that there are two kinds of trauma with quite different developmental consequences.  One is the catastrophic overwhelming kind of trauma and the other is the constant erosion of smaller insults, losses, deficits, and uncontrollable change.  To be frank, life in general is a sequence of traumas.

The newer material about surviving life itself, both as an individual human and as a human group, is quite different in tone.  Conformity has been removed.  There is little talk about morality.  Not only is the discussion quite secular, but it begins to sound like learning to play the piano:

Making order from chaos.  OR in the name of re-organizing, creating chaos.  (Tolerating temporary chaos is a competency, but persistent chaos is a malfunction.  Temporary chaos as a self-protecting strategy can work either way.)

The ability to self-regulate emotions and experience.   (I suppose you might have not considered how important emotion is as a music principle.)

Openness to new strategies if the old ones don’t work or are outgrown or maybe even were imposed by clumsy helpers.

Willingness to address and resist destruction from outside the sphere of attachment.

Small attachments among individuals within the larger community and competency in managing them.  (Truly sophisticated musicians consider and internalize the micro-relationships between notes.)

The point of this discussion is to support caregivers, not to directly address the traumatized.  So I suppose one could say this is for professional and natural caregivers in the group.  The authors sketch what they call a “theoretical framework” rather than a “manualized protocol.”  

Right there — in the beginning — is what I’m seeing as a major and possibly hindering prerequisite: the failure of our modern systems to produce leaders who can think at the level of theory and abstract principles.  Particularly in conventional churches, the idea is to prevent change, and we can get frustrated about that, but what I’m finding in this small prairie town is that brains have not been encouraged to take the last step of development which happens after high school, in the early twenties.  High school is considered completion, the rules learned then persist through life.  Sometimes that’s not helpful.  They think only in terms of learned "boxes."

http://www.projectlearnet.org/tutorials/concrete_vs_abstract_thinking.html

Maybe there's an adult in every child.
https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/scaffolding-critical-thinking

Backing up, “within the Attachment domain, 4 key building blocks for the caregivers”:

1.  Getting the caregiver to maturity in self-management.

2.  Attunement: “the capacity to accurately read each other’s cues and respond effectively.”

3.  A collection of strategies for meeting melt-downs or roll-ups or outright flight.

4.  Consistency and predictability.

The Competency Domain isn’t about pathology, but what about what every person needs to know in a tough world.  Three basics are:

1.  Problem solving:  personal agency, ability to generate options, reaching out.

2.  Knowing one’s own identity, finding coherence, feeling valuable.

3.  Ability to accept what developmental tasks are limiting and confidence that there are ways to learn them.

There’s a lot more than this.  For instance, the interference of the criminalizing forces (both criminals and law enforcers), the constant manipulative barrages from media, and awareness of suffering around the planet —coming your way in vivid technicolor.  A UU minister observed that our congregations seem not to be as intensely centered as they once were.  This particular movement seems to have moved to social action or personal development, depending on the extrovert/introvert aptitudes of the group.  The social action part has different allegiances depending on their outside affiliations.  The personal development interests vary all over the place — art to yoga.  Conventional churches are still arguing about the various theisms, which we've left behind.

I think there are not enough well-defined challenges.  In a middle-class group things can get worrisome and lately we realize that any of us can be thrown out on the street overnight because of some policy change or renovation project.  This class arose as shop-keepers and salarymen, but now the world is dominated by franchises and corporations — coupon-clippers in a capital-dependent world.  

Under all those economic arrangements (everything is economic when you’re talking survival and I’m talking biology here —you MUST have enough food, water, shelter to survive and that’s economic) is the planet itself.  Tsunamis, droughts, earthquakes, firestorms, hurricanes — you wanna talk trauma?  Lately I’ve been thinking about the catastrophic/economic/corporate consequences of grain crop failure, since I’m living right in the fields.  

The ebbing of the middle-class on the prairie (the closing of shops, the disappearance of wage labor) means that the middle-class religious groups who depend on dressing up and using good manners on Sunday morning have also shrunk.  They still love to sponsor community feeds in a place where diabetes and gluten-allergies are real.  Their ministers are all part-time.  Alcohol is still the favorite medication, as it has been for most of their ancestors since Medieval European times, and they still watch network TV.  Their dependence on cell phones is only limited by the lack of infrastructure.   “Rough sleepers” are few around here: they would die.  We’re not so modern.

Most seriously, they know nothing about the larger world, not even the layer of culture where their kids live, nor the layer of highly intellectualized thought where I live.  So much of the world is confusing and distressing that they cocoon.

Ben is the near-ninety-year-old man who with his wife operates the Cut Bank laundromat where I spent most of the morning yesterday.  He was in the military in Nuremburg during the post WWII trials.  http://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/nuremberg-trials   He is sharply aware of the importance of such events, not in terms of who got which penalty, but in terms of order-keeping.  Larry Reevis, whom some will know from his “letters to the editor” in the Glacier Reporter, lives nearby.  He’s working on the politics of the Blackfeet Rez.   The “History.com” website referred to above is the source of the “Vikings” series that Harry Barnes likes to watch.

Maybe the three of us very different people represent caregivers in a broad sense.  We are all rather intensely attached to our lives and people, maybe more consciously than most.  With that comes awareness of the pain of many humans and a need for safe containers while we figure out ourselves and others.  I keep thinking, “What on EARTH sort of childhood traumas could have created the US politicians?  Where are the ones who grew up happy and learned to be competent?”  I think this is an essential religious question.  Because “religion” is about survival.