Category Archives: conservatism

Jeb Bush Teaches Me a Lesson

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Yes, I was “schooled” by Jeb Bush last night who was a guest on Stephen Colbert’s inaugural late-night talk show.  The brother of former president George W. Bush and son of former president George H. W. Bush is seeking the Republican Party’s nomination and found this occasion to score some points with those of us who love the irony and sarcasm of Stephen Colbert.  When the subject of politics and President Obama came up, he noted that he does not question the President’s motives, pointing out very astutely, “If you question someone’s motives you can’t ever find common ground.”

Well, immediately he explained why he is not the darling of the Republican Party, polling in the bottom tier of candidates right now far behind the darling of the hyper-conservative base of the party, Donald Trump.  The disdain that the Republican have demonstrated for Obama for the whole of his presidency reflects “questionings” of his motivations, a critical stance which stems for their outright disdain of his person.  This disdain has been so obvious, so blatantly egregious that it often has reached the point of comic.  To illustrate, I recently saw a cartoon which illustrated their penchant to blame him for everything, the cartoon posing the question, “If a tree falls in the forest, and Fox News is not there to report it, is it still Obama’s fault?”

We are all “motivated” creatures and in being critical of the motives of others we run the risk of “assuming” that we are not motivated ourselves.  And Bush’s observation indicated that he grasped the notion that when we are trapped in this “embedded thinking,” based on deep-seated fears and insecurities, we cannot even “seek” common ground.  But this applies to all of us, even…cough, cough…ahem, ahem, ”moi.”  Persons like myself, very much on the liberal wing of politics, often have trouble realizing that conservative values have an important place in our life, politically, socially, and culturally.  It is then so easy to find ourselves guilty of the same obnoxious arrogance that we attribute to “them.”

However, I do admit that the current situation with the GOP is beyond the pale.  But the real root of the problem lies only in the hard-core base of the party…those that their own Senate leader once described as “knuckle-draggers”…with most Republicans being quite intelligent and thoughtful.  The real culprit has been the leadership of the party which has routinely capitulated to this “baser element” in their ranks who depend on “low-information” voters without which they could not win anything.

( http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2015/09/09/jeb-bush-stephen-colbert-donald-trump-orig-dlewis.the-late-show-with-stephen-colbert}

My Life in a Mega-Church

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I spent two years as a member of a mega-church in the early eighties, a Baptist Church in Springdale, Arkansas. I was so proud of myself, so pleased to be a member of a church that was so “up-and-coming” and growing larger and larger and larger. And the pastor was very good. And I mean very, very good; even today I appreciate memories of his skill as an expositor of scripture.

And I was single at the time and didn’t “smoke, drink, or chew…or screw”…though I will admit I faltered on that latter point from time to time. And, yes, God forgave me. I knew he would. He had to. But I hated relying on that “duty” of His and so didn’t “imbibe” as much as I wanted to. But, nevertheless, I did not “smoke, drink, or chew!!!” But, I continued to flirt with darkness in the fall of 1981 when, after hearing the pastor lament the passing of Arkansas’s “Blue Laws” I stopped by after service and reveled in a luxurious Wal-mart for a while and bought a lot of “stuff.”   (The “Blue Laws” disallowed most stores to open on Sunday) I do remember to this day the guilt of that offense, hoping that no other church members saw me!)

But it was so nice to be part of a church that was really special and powerful and becoming more so. The Word of God was being preached and souls were being won to Jesus and even though the world was lost in sin, we were doing our part to win the world to Jesus. And I was a small part of this enterprise. It felt nice to belong.  Now looking back on it, the “pride” is kind of awkward, for it is the pride that Emily Dickinson had in mind when she described, “a mind too near itself to see itself distinctly.”  Or, to put it in the words of a recent Face Book discussion group re Paul Tillich, a mind “embedded in itself.”

Looking back on it, I was merely an “actor” in my life and my faith and so I’m tacitly accusing this church of the same. But, I have some guilt over accusing them. For, they were very, very good people and are so today. And, so was I! And they will not be reading this account and if so they must take it as it is, a revelation more about myself much more than an account of them. Yes, those people were “limited” but who is not and there was none of them more limited than was I. Dealing with my “limitations” has taken me a different direction than most of them but I’m sure most of them are not in the same place as they were back then. We are all “actors” in some sense and God takes our “strutting and fretting” during our “hour upon the stage” and weaves them into this beautiful tapestry that we call the human experience.

“You Spot It, You Got It”

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Conservative Christians in my country are currently beset by a rash of “sexual indiscretion” scandals, personally or with their close associates. In some instances their response is to minimize the “sin” with the pious platitude, “God has forgiven me” but what they fail to address is how that often their lives have been characterized by ardent stances on moral issues and quick judgment of others on sexual matters. Yes, I firmly believe God has forgiven them and he will forgive them of a more serious sin that is present if they would deign to acknowledge it.

This “unacknowledged sin” I can address because of personal experience, past and present, demonstrating once again the wisdom of a psychologist, “You spot it, you got it.” I knew one of the notable figures alluded to above and helped educate him in the practice of being what I now call a Christianoid. I was in the position to do so for at that time in my life I was a Christianoid and each day could have said, “Wind me up and watch me be Christian.” My Christian faith was a “thing” that I had acquired from my culture and it provided the core of my persona. Without it I would have been a “no-thing” and would have had to deal with the intense existential anxiety that comes when you begin to realize, cognitively and emotionally, that one is “no” thing.

One could use the term hypocrite to describe me at that time in my life for the word means simply “actor” and I was merely an “actor” in the whole of my life, including my faith. I didn’t know anything else. And I was not a “bad” person nor was I a “hypocrite” in the usual sense of the word. I just was very immature and had not enrolled yet in the “school of hard knocks” which always facilitates an identity crisis. And I lived in a culture and practiced my faith with people plagued with similar immaturity.

One thing that Christians need to learn from this current “mess” that they are in is that the God who they believe in so fiercely…the same one that I do…is trying to tell them something about sexuality. Basically, He is saying, “Hey, I made you sexual beings. I did it deliberately and it is a good thing. But trying to deny, avoid, or repress it will get you or your children into trouble.” And it is very apparent that those who have the gravest concern about the sexual behavior of other people and want to control it have the gravest issues with their own sexual impulses. “You spot it, you got it.”

The sexuality issues of Christians is part of a more fundamental error they are making which is a denial of their very body. And this is very personally relevant for myself as I took this to an extreme and have spent my whole life denying my body, placing too much emphasis on cognition rather than emotion. A misplaced emphasis like this will always turn one into an ideologue in which the “idea” is valued more than the “thing” which the idea refers to. Thus I had to discover that the “Jesus” that I purported to worship was only an idea and that I was actually, in some subtle sense, only worshipping myself.

Let me emphasize that I believe firmly in moral codes and in self-restraint, or, as the Greeks said, “measurement in all things.” But when the external boundaries become too strong, when they are emphasized excessively, the spirit within is squelched, and “acting out” will occur often in the form of “sexual indiscretion.” It is almost as if the gods are saying, “Hey, you think you are in control and a bastion of virtue? Just watch this!” And then they send a vixen our way, we imbibe readily, and are taught that we are not what we were pretending to be. We must not fail to learn the lesson that we are always “actors” in some sense and that “none is good, no, not one,”; or as Shakespeare put it, “Give every man his just desert, and who would escape a whipping?”

Hiding behind “God’s forgiveness” is not enough. Sure, it is there and will always be there. But our indiscretions always reveal issues in the depths of our heart and in those depths is where the work needs to be done. But with Christianity that I used to teach others there was no awareness of those depths and barriers actually in place to avoid discovering them. This is the “bad faith” that John Paul Sartre wrote about.

“Bad Faith” gets Exposed Again!!!

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Mike Huckabee is demonstrating again what John Paul Sartre described so eloquently as “bad faith.” One of Huckabee’s tribe (conservative, evangelical Christians) has again gotten “caught with his pants down.” Huckabee and many others of that tribe are seeking to comfort the offender, Josh Duggar, and minimize the pain that comes from having your baser nature exposed to the public. Now Huckabee’s benevolent response is not without some merit as we should offer comfort to those of our tribe…and others…who have encountered duress even if it is self-imposed. But that comfort does not include overt or subtle excusing of the behavior, attempting to mitigate the offense with lame explanations such as “he made a mistake” or “God has forgiven him.” Yes, he did make a mistake and yes God has forgiven him but what he and many other evangelical Christians fail to see is the real offense—using one’s faith to hide behind and cover up one’s intrinsic human-ness, including “baser instincts.”

Huckabee’s “bad faith” demonstrates the biblical “form of godliness” that “denies the power thereof.” Though I don’t doubt his sincerity, his faith is a suit of clothes that he dons each day and makes him very appealing to his friends, confidantes, and political base. Of course, he sincerely does not know this. He thinks he is a humble Christian servant. But he needs to keep in mind that the Islamist extremists who are beheading people are equally sincere in what they are doing! It is often that which we are most sincere about that hides our darkest secrets.

And that brings me to a core issue in this most recent sexual scandal that is rocking our culture right now. In spite of their “innocence”, evangelical Christians need to wake up and embrace that fact that they are instinctual creatures like God created them to be and if they use their faith in an attempt to obliterate their instinctual nature, it will rise up occasionally and bite the in the butt. I do not think that Jesus intended his teachings to be used as a way of hiding from our instinctual nature but as a way to embrace the whole of our “human-ness” and express it in a mature, responsible manner. But attempting to repudiate these baser impulses always leads to projection and at times to “acting out”—“They call it Reason, using light celestial, just to out do the beasts in being bestial.” (Goethe)

I do not excuse Josh Duggar for his “mistakes.” But I understand! I remember being a horny teen-age boy and having learned that these sexual impulses were “nasty” and “of the devil.” I guess I was blessed/cursed with more guilt than was Josh and managed to not let my youthful lustfulness go quite that far. And I can identify with the response of Josh’s parents who sought to cover up this “indiscretion” for they too were, and are, but human and had this Christian “face” to maintain. But what Mr. Huckabee and the Duggar family need to learn is that their Christian faith needs to seize this opportunity to deepen and to learn that the “Grace of God” that they purport to believe in is providing them an opportunity to lose this Christian “face” and learn that they can then join the human race and still be a Christian. Then there is “forgiveness” that is not just a self-serving, postured contrition which allows one to continue in his/her blindness, to wake up again the next morning and say, “Someone wind me up again and watch me be a Christian.” I know. I’ve been there most of my life and am even now far short of “perfection.”   I have not learned even yet to live with these occasional gut-wrenching bouts of “imperfection.”

Once again the “tee-hee” part of my brain wants to smirk and ridicule when another one of the self-righteous crowd gets his hypocrisy exposed. But my “tee-hee-er” does not work as well as it used to as I feel sorry for the Duggar family in some way. It is so painful to face disillusionment and my tendency has always been to “cover my ass” and not learn what is staring me right in the face…and has always been apparent to those that know me the best.  I’m reminded of the wisdom of Shakespeare who noted, “Give every man his just deserts and who would escape a whipping.”

More Confirmation of my Biases!

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I just love it when I find something that confirms that my thoughts are valid. No, in my case this is not “confirmation bias” (epistemic closure) this is God telling me once again, “You are right!” And, btw, if I read something or hear something that does not offer me this reassurance, my immediate response is, “Of the Devil!”

Seriously, “Brain Pickings” is a wonderful Face Book page and on this occasion it has offered something that is relevant, and reassuring, of a line of meta-cognitive exploration I’ve pursued for decades. (http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/10/30/daniel-kahneman-intuition/) The author describes research that has explored perception and intuition and concluded that we do have the tendency to believe and think exactly as we wish to. Or as someone said once, “Our thinking is the belated rationalization of conclusions to which we’ve already been led by our desires.”

So, my friend, you are reading the “coinage of the brain” of one man who is comfortably ensconced in his “delusional state!” No, I don’t really mean that but I do realize that the mind trotting this “stuff” outs springs from a heart that seeks homeostasis. Yes, this narrow little prism through which I view the world is the latest version of one which I’ve had for 63 years and I do not want its subtle premises questioned. I will say, however, in fairness to myself that being blessed…or cursed…with meta-cognition running out of my backside, I find some willingness for this homeostasis to be shaken occasionally by Reality so that I’m increasingly able to make room for other people. May it always be so!

Anti-intellectualism and “Mindfulness”

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I find the current anti-intellectualism craze in my country fascinating though my fascination is mitigated by fascinated by the worry about its consequences.  As indicated earlier this stems largely from my past life in an hyper-conservative Arkansas community when conspiracy theory was one of my favorite “comfort foods.”

But epistemology is relevant.  These anti-intellectuals are not without intelligence; in fact, some of them are very well educated and have powerful posts in our government.  But intelligence is not a static phenomena, or shouldn’t be.  For intelligence to be meaningful it must be accompanied with the capacity to view things critically, even belief systems that are near and dear to their own heart.  Without that critical capacity, one will find himself in a closed mind which does include the “comfort” of not knowing one has a closed mind.  And one who lives in this prison…self-imposed in some manner…will automatically dismiss anything that threatens his view of the world.  This is the “epistemic closure” or “confirmation bias” that I address here so often.

 Intelligence is not objective.  With the anti-intellectual crowd, they have intelligence but they have used that intelligence to formulate a comfortable world view and then said to themselves unconsciously, “Ok, that’s enough.  I don’t need to know any more” and will spend the rest of their life viewing the world and themselves through that narrow little prism.  Instead of “thinking” they will be spend their life “thought” by a body of ideology comprised of preconceptions which have never been questioned.  Their thought life will be a daily regurgitation of these preconceptions.  And having that narrow view of the world pierced would be extremely painful so most who are within its “safe” confines just will not allow it to be pierced.  For this “penetration” by reality would evoke a deep sense of being existentially “wrong” which is related to why so many of them often avow a deep conviction of being “right.”  And this “wrong” that they fear is not a conscious “wrong” of having done something amiss but of “being” wrong which would evoke what I have posited earlier is the experience of “the judgment of God.”  The experience of “being” wrong is at an extreme unmitigated terror and that is why we have been given a persona without which we could not function.

But if we live our whole life knowing ourselves only as the ideology-based persona that we trot out every day, we will not have understood the question posed by Jesus, “What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?”  Our persona can survive, and even thrive on self-scrutiny but our ego will always tell us that it can’t.  And therefore, when threatened, we cling even tighter to our persona rather than experience some version of the aforementioned terror.  And for most of us the “terror” will only be some degree of discomfort,  i.e. “cognitive dissonance.”  But usually we “cling in panic to our tall beliefs” when “Truth holds our her hands” and proceed to “shrink away like an ill-treated child.”  (Auden) We prefer the comfort of our ideas rather than addressing the “Reality” that lies beneath and beyond these ideas.  We cannot bring ourselves to declare like W. H. Auden, “Oh blessed be bleak exposure on his sword we are pricked into coming alive.”

It is no accident that the fundamentalist Christians who are the driving force of this anti-intellectualism vehemently oppose meditation and yoga, often denigrating it as “Of the Devil” or “Straight from the pits of hell.”  And, they are right…in their way of looking at the world!  For the “mindfulness” that is in the vogue in our culture with many of us “damn liberals” emphasizes awareness of one’s subjective experience that precedes our “fall” into the realm of cognition.  The “awareness” that mindfulness disciplines offers is frightening to one who is an ideologue and trapped in his ideological “comfort food.”  This “awareness” frees us from the bondage to our thinking.

 —-AFTERTHOUGHTS—-

“Words,” wrote John Maynard Keynes, “ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.”

 

A very thoughtful assessment of this current anti-intellectual craze is found in the magazine Psychology Today:  https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201407/anti-intellectualism-and-the-dumbing-down-america

 

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President Obama Invading Texas!!!

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American politics is so much fun these days with the lunacy running amok in the extremist wing of the Republican Party.  Their latest insanity is a paranoid fear that President Obama is plotting an invasion of Texas.  That is right!  The routine deployment of federal troops in six southwestern states, including Texas, has stoked fears that it is a ruse to get the populace accustomed to seeing Federal troops on the roads and highways so that when the sure-to-come invasion does occur the people will not know what is going on until it is too late

But, the significant feature of this story is the even the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, stoked these fears when instead of dismissing the paranoid concern, he wasted tax-payer resources and ordered the state guard to monitor these activities so that the rights and freedoms of Texas citizens would not be in jeopardy.  Even a Republican candidate for President, Rand Paul, responded to a question on the issue with the promise that “I’ll look into it” rather than dismissing the issue.

Abbott’s and Paul’s response reflected their dependency on the lunatic fringe of their party without which they would have no hope for election.  Mollification of these “low information voters” is necessary for these politicians who bow to their God of “Maintaining Electibility.” 

A mature response on this type of lunacy was demonstrated by Republican Senator John McCain in 2012 when he was campaigning against President Obama.  When “working a crowd” with a live microphone, one “low information voter” female asked McCain to address her concern that Obama was a Muslim.  McCain politely and calmly took the microphone from her and told her, “No, President Obama is not a Muslim.”  He then adroitly shifted the focus to legitimate territory, “President Obama represents a different approach to governing this country” and then proceeded to address the GOP agenda.  Here McCain politely set a limit with this woman and with all who were watching.  In recent years many Republican politicians have gone to embarrassing extremes to avoid honestly answer questions re Obama’s citizenship and religion, knowing that to answer candidly would possibly alienate them from the base of their party.

Now, this kind of “stuff” always gets my panties in a wad because I grew up in that kind of madness and it is still buried somewhere deep in my heart…I guess.  And looking back on it I realize and remember how it appealed to a mother lode of fear in my young heart remnants of which are still present, unfortunately.  And fundamentalist religions of all stripes are always fear-based and thus thrive on perceived threats to their integrity and freedom.  But they are failing to remember that Jesus said that, “Perfect love casteth out fear.”  (My panties, btw, are pink chiffon with black polka dots!)

I do not blame these “low information voters” for this phenomena.  They cannot help it in some way for they have not been blessed with the opportunity for an education.  But I do blame politicians who have exploited the fears of these people merely for the sake of electability.  One other illustration of their pandering is that many of the leading GOP politicians have a stock-answer to questions about whether or not they believe in global warming:  “Well, I’m not a scientist.”  They know that the ill-informed, uneducated basis of their party thrives on an anti-science and anti-intellectual currency and so these very intelligent and well-educated leaders of our country embarrass themselves by refusing to answer the questions of that sort directly.

Here are two links relevant to this insanity:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/07/us/conspiracy-theories-over-jade-helm-get-some-traction-in-texas.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&bicmp=AD&bicmlukp=WT.mc_id&bicmst=1409232722000&bicmet=1419773522000&_r=0

 http://bigamericannews.com/2015/05/05/obama-plans-to-invade-texas-kidnap-george-w-bush-and-create-a-new-kingdom-of-liberal-darkness/

 

 

 

 

 

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A Perspective on “Enlightenment”

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WordPress and Facebook introduce me to so many interesting people from different walks of life who I would have never met otherwise. I would like to introduce you today to a young Korean woman, Wanyoung Kim, who can be found on Facebook and is stunningly intelligent and erudite.

Recently she declared on Facebook, “You can be mentally Enlightened, but it is really the power of Christ that heals a person.” I was puzzled as this declaration reflected a dimension of Christian faith that I had not noted before with her postings. So I responded, “I agree. But, I’m curious how you would define ‘Christ’? This is not a cynical question. I just know that you are a very thoughtful person.”

Ms. Kim responded with:

A friend of mine (name omitted here)once described Him as the Internet of all hearts and minds- I cannot say it more succinctly than this. To believe is to know that his suffering accounted for all grievances of every heart and mind that walked upon this Earth in world history. ‪Christ is a man of sorrows himself like me, one can say. The heart of Christ is to see Him in every human being including myself- to empathize with the pain I see of a stranger in the street and this empathy is a healing act where a collective feeling of sharedness which in itself is a unity to the Other reassuring them we all are part of this suffering of Christ. I become Christ my self.

Ms. Kim does not see Christ through the narrow prism that I was taught as a child in conservative Arkansas as a Baptist in the fifties and sixties. And as I read her insightful observations some ancient part of my soul…which I often refer to as “literallew”…wants to denigrate her thoughts immediately. But “literallew” is increasingly buried under the Light of what I now see as Spirit of God which wants us to interpret the scripture and not merely regurgitate it as we have been taught. And this is not merely an intellectual enterprise but a gut-level enterprise that cannot be taught with “book learnin’”. It requires a willingness to have a heart that is “petal open” as Toni Morrison once put it; or, in the words of Shakespeare, a heart that is full of “penetrable stuff.” And this is scary for it subjects one to the flow of life and deprives him/her from the cold, sterile “certainty” that I was told was available and strived for so desperately and never was able to obtain.

Christ is not a “thing” that can be reduced to our “ideas” and thus captured by our ideology, as noble as that ideology might appear to be. He was, and is, an expression of the “Wholly Other” and can be known only when we are willing to experience our own finitude which can only occur when we come face to face with the Otherness that faces us daily with each one we meet and even with this beautiful world itself.  Eckhart Tolle reports He is the “Presence” which is the only thing that “is” if we can separate ourselves from our compulsive thinking.

But seeing Christ in non-linear terms requires an ability to see ourselves in non-linear terms which for most of us requires a radical transformation in self-definition and view of the world. It requires a transformative shift of perspective which brings to my mind the notion from the Apostle Paul, “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” It is much easier to just tenaciously hang onto the  way that we have always seen and experienced our world. As W. H. Auden put it, “And Truth met him, and held out her hand. And he clung in panic to his tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”

But I’m aware that what I’m writing now is “nuts” to nearly anyone from my youth that might happen to read this. This does not make any “sense” to a linear mind that is confined to the time-space continuum. But I have learned that it is very possible to escape confinement in that prison and still respect it and those that live in therein. And I, too, can still live within its confines which is known as “reality” even as I revel in the freedom which Christ represented and offers today.

 

Bruce Jenner, Trans-Gender Identity, & Culture-Wars

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Bruce Jenner, the former Olympic gold medalist and former husband of Kris Kardashian formally announced last week that he is a woman, explaining, “It is who I am.”  Our culture provides great liberty with declaring and acting on the choice to “be who I am,” a choice that is not available in most places and never has been.  And this is certainly the case when it comes to gender identity. (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/arts/television/bruce-jenner-transgender-diane-sawyer.html?emc=edit_th_20150426&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=71726985&_r=0)

Culture has one primary intent—to perpetuate itself and the “certainties” that constitute its bedrock.  These certainties provide a culture’s children a template through which to view the world and this template tends to always legitimate the values of the particular culture into which one is born.  And one of the simple little “certainties” that one quickly learns is gender identity and this originates when the child learns that his/her “plumbing” distinguishes himself/herself from roughly half of the population.  Once that distinction is ascertained, the child then begins to learn what it means to be a “boy” or a “girl” in that culture and then has the task of following the mandate to “get with the program.”  Yes, early on there are some children who have “contrary” impulses with respect to gender identification but the cultural mandate historically is overwhelming so that they dutifully obey the “law of the father” and subscribe to “proper” gender identity, repressing any impulses that might be “contrary.”

But Mr./Ms Jenner illustrates a huge cultural shift in my country and in the West.  Certainties of the past are now often less certain, even those of gender identity.  We are learning that the distinction between “male” and “female” is more nebulous than we were taught as children.  And this is a frightening experience to those who cannot handle ambiguity and nuance and are accustomed to seeing things in black-and-white terms.  And for many of those in my culture they have an immediate contrivance to rely upon—“It’s of the Devil!”  It reminds me of the label ancient cartographers applied to regions of the map which had not been explored—“There be the dragons.”

 The unknown is frightening.  When faced with the unknown it is human tendency to retreat to what is already “known” and to “hunker down” with that little view of the world which one of my readers recently described as a “querencia.”  With this “hunkering down” mentality, one clings even more desperately to what one has always believed and often will merely affirm it with more vehemence.  This vehement affirmation often even leads to action, even violent action.  Change cannot be tolerated to a hyper conservative mind.

 Ultimately we must deal with human finitude and this gender aspect of our current “culture wars” provides us another opportunity.  We are finite, fragile little critters running around on this little ball of granite, our frantic activities amounting to nothing more than the Shakespearean “tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.”  But if we have the courage, and a healthy dollop of meta-cognition as Shakespeare was blessed with, we will be able to counter the nihilistic despair with the affirmation that, “There is a Divinity that doeth shape our ends, rough hew them how we may.”  In other words, there is always Hope.  But hope is not mindless clinging to the dogma we were brainwashed with as children but to truth that has withstood our heart-felt, Spirit-led, mindfulness-inspired self-scrutiny.

Belonging and Human Connection

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It was morning recess in the 2nd grade in Magnet Cove, Arkansas and the “BMOC” of our class of 32 announced to the boys, “Alright, everyone with high top boots come with me and let’s chase girls!” Oh I was so proud as I was sporting a brand new pair of high top boots and could join the chase in this customary recess activity in the fall of 1960. It was delightful to realize that I “met criteria” and belonged and I’ll never forget that moment, certainly revealing that “belonging” issues have always been present with me.

Making connection with fellow humankind and “belonging” is a basic human need and we are hardwired to do so, allowing us to form tribes that are the basic unit of human culture. And to establish “belongingness” various “criteria” are always announced, sometimes overtly by decree but more importantly in subtle manners as it is the “subtleties” that really constitute the bedrock of tribal unity. These “subtleties” are the premises which are not questioned, and for the sake of tribal coherence should not be. But the converse of this group dynamic is also present—someone must be excluded as otherwise the group identity would not have any meaning, its “identity” would be tenuous at best. This group dynamic is not “bad” it is just how we function, it is just being “human.” And the same process of identity formation takes place on the individual level, with certain things being accepted as part of our identity and others excluded and often projected “out there.”

But focusing now on group dynamics, the goal for a group is that it will be composed of individuals mature enough to recognize that in the passing of time some of its defining parameters can be relaxed and some persons who have been excluded can then be included. At least the focus of the group’s psychic energy will not be merely on boundaries that constitute its self-definition but on some purpose beyond itself which reflects respect of and value for the world at large. If the focus is merely on what sets a group apart, the group will eventually become a self-enclosed fortress whose only purpose is to perpetuate its mythology. When this happens, the group will find itself at odds with the world “out there” and will often be quite proud of this. This is often found in sectarian religion.