Category Archives: gay and lesbian issues

Does Professional Baseball Now Have More Moral Courage Than Hordes of Religious People?

Leave a reply

Is professional baseball more of a moral arbiter of our country than religion, at least with many of our religious people?  Yesterday, the Major League’s Baseball Writers Association of America voted to not allow Curt Schilling into the Hall of Fame and later explained that one of its criteria for admission moral turpitude  Schilling has demonstrated the absence of this “moral turpitude” in more than one occasion, just recently when he defended the 1/6/21 insurrection at the White House and in a 2016 tweet when he called for the lynching of journalists.  His past also includes a strident display of racism, sexism, an “general human ugliness.” He was fired from ESPN telecasting for similar offenses.

The Baseball Writers Association of America apparently does believe words…and actions…matter.  Oh yes, they have some ‘splaining to do about past blatant racism and other offenses…and they will now face pressure on the matter; but in our nation’s moment of grievous peril, “moral arbiters” need to step up.  And many religious leaders (i.e. Robert Jefferess, Franklin Graham, Paula White, et cetera ) will not offer a voice of disapproval to the dark “savior” they have adopted.  Nor will most of the Republican Congress who demonstrated yesterday when they voted on a matter which reveals how they will likely vote soon on conviction of Trump in the upcoming impeachment trial.

Yes, my “panties are in a wad” again.  And hopefully they will continue to be as I have much to say about how intelligent, college educated, “born again believers” can harbor gross attitudes, speak great evil, and behave badly all “in the name of Jesus.”  I “been there, done that.” The situation devouring my country now is not one of reason, or intelligence, or even politics.  It is “out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks” and our collective heart is now speaking, in words and deeds great evil, and nothing but a spiritual reckoning beyond the pale of anything that Jeffress, Graham, White, et al have ever faced will suffice.

The Challenge of “Naming Our Demons”

Leave a reply

Early in my clinical career a client of mine was a young truck driver who was dealing with substance abuse.  Shortly after the therapy began, I asked him to share about his family life as a child.  As he complied and described life in a working-class Arkansas family, he recalled his mother one time flashing her boobs at him when he was about four years of age; this event shamed him greatly and he had carried it with him into adulthood.  Not long after, as the work of therapy progressed, he suddenly told me he had recently had a homosexual encounter.  When he shared this, he immediately burst into laughter, uproarious laughter as if a burden had been lifted by the simple disclosure of these two events by which he had been shamed.  He must have intuitively sensed an, “unconditional positive regard” that was available in the clinical framework that I offered;  he felt free to share these two events, and others, without the fear of being judged.

It is shame that binds us into a self-defeating life, often with tragic outcomes.  Suddenly this young man found freedom from this shame bind and could only laugh that he had been tyrannized for most of his twenty-something years.  There is power in saying the unsayable, in admitting that which is too painful to admit.  There is power in putting subjective anguish into speech, “speaking words that give shape to our anguish” as George Eliot described it.  But speaking openly and honestly about what is going on in our heart, especially if we have been raised in a culture where this is verboten.  Many children learn to “shut down” even before they can verbalize, for they have certainly been very aware of the “tyranny of the shoulds” abounding in the household.  The reach of this tyranny is most lethal in early childhood as it shapes attitudes, the ability to trust others and one’s own subjective experience.

Here is relevant wisdom from Lauren van der Post: “There is nothing in your life too terrible or too sad that will not be your friend when you find the right name to call it, and calling it by its own name hastening it will come upright to your side.” As Carl Jung would say, “The shadow is to be embraced, not denied”; or in the words of poet Ranier Rilke, “The heart has its beastly little treasures.”

 

Elizabeth Bishop and a Poet’s Loneliness

Leave a reply

I have a close personal friend in Oregon that I’ve known for decades and kept in touch with him as he pursued a career in teaching English literature at a small college on the coast.  He sent me a link to a New Yorker book review of a new biography about poet Elizabeth Bishop which explored her tumultuous family, romantic, and literary life.  This life story might be summed up with a note she sent once to poet and lover, Robert Lowell, “When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.”

Bishop’s loneliness was a common theme in her poetry.  My friend, who also writes poetry admits he shares the same label that I do, a “word fetishist,” though both of us at this point in our life very much in recovery.  He shared with me his impression from reading the review, noting his own profound loneliness over the course of his life time even though he is quite gregarious, socially adroit, and well-regarded.

He described his own love of literature, poetry, and writing as, like Bishop’s, some effort to assuage this loneliness which could best be described as existential.  Being familiar with psychological “shop-talk” which is my forte, we recently explored how words are one powerful way of bridging the gap between humans, extending a hand across the abyss which separates us and hoping to find a receiving hand.  He has been fortunate to often finding that receiving hand as his literary skill is of note.

Something was lost in this man’s childhood which the contrivance of culture has helped, but has not sufficed.  Words have helped him address this lack, just as it did apparently with Bishop and I think with many other writers.  I think Tennessee Williams knew about this loss and had reference to it in a closing line, describing Laura’s brother Tom, who was leaving the dysfunctional-family black-hole and setting out on the life of a vagabond, just as his father had done decades earlier. The narrator in the movie, as we watched Tom exit the drab flat and descend the stairwell, he intoned, “Trying to find in motion what has been lost in space.”  “Space” in this context refers to a spiritual space which most people cover adequately with the aforementioned cultural contrivances.  Tom could only seek this in the frenetic motion of a vagabond life while my friend, and Tennessee Williams, found it with words.

(You might enjoy reading this very interesting, well-written, and insightful book review:  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/elizabeth-bishops-art-of-losing)

***********************************************************************

ADDENDUM—This is one of three blogs that I now have up and running.  Please check the other two out sometime.  The three are: 

https://wordpress.com/posts/anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com

https://wordpress.com/posts/theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com

https://wordpress.com/posts/literarylew.wordpress.com