Day Two
Day Two of Chaplain School
Tinfoil Hats and the Examined Life
Let’s say I tell you I’m wearing a tinfoil hat today . . . What does that say to you? Crazy? Paranoid? Safe from the mental meddling of governments and/or extraterrestrials?
It’s shorthand, isn’t it? A tinfoil hat says crazy or paranoid or safe, not because of anything inherent in the tinfoil hat, but because we equate wearing a tinfoil hat with a set of behaviors that could be well described as crazy or paranoid or staying safe—“tinfoil hat” is a symbol for a set of beliefs—that, for example, space aliens or perhaps one government or another is sending messages into my brain by electric means.
The first known appearance of a tinfoil hat is in a science fiction story published in 1927 by the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley. In that story, tinfoil hats prevent interference from mental telepathy.
Now, if you look for how tinfoil hats work on Yahoo Answers, you will discover this advice:
Tin foil does not work. I tried aluminum foil for my first thought screen helmet in 1998 and it was a failure. Thought screens made from velostat work. I’ve been making them since 1999 and sending them to abductees all over the world for free for 13 years.
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20121017081732AAn0A1T
Now, in case you’re like me and didn’t know, velostat is a packing material used to block electronic effects. So it goes.
I want to notice two things about this brief look at tinfoil hats. First, “tinfoil hat” has come to mean something way beyond merely a hat made of a particular material. And, second, how quickly we rocket from a discussion of tinfoil hats to a discussion of more efficient hats to evade thought surveillance.
Both of these things have to do with the human imagination. How the human imagination works. We make symbols. Then, often, we fall into the trap of treating a symbol as if it were a reality. We easily mistake symbols, and symbolic statements, for literal truths.
The simplest example is perhaps flags. We create a flag to symbolize a nation or some other grouping of people. Then we create rules and customs around how flags must be treated.
I’ve heard people debate whether a particular piece of cloth is a flag or only bunting—because you can burn bunting, but burning a flag might get you into trouble.
We create a symbol, then we treat the symbol as a reality. The flag becomes the nation. And so on.
Educator Hugh Mearns had something to say about this propensity back in 1899 when he wrote a poem in response to a brouhaha in the town of Antigonish, Nova Scotia concerning a ghost sighting. One of the poem’s verses goes like this:
Last night I saw upon the stair,
A little man who wasn’t there,
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away…
It appears that we can make symbols of things that aren’t there at all. And then the symbol becomes a thing we can imagine.
We enter into pretend realms very early in childhood—you be Batman; I’ll be Joker. I’m an elephant. I’m a unicorn. When we play these games, we agree to certain rules. We agree to be bound by the logic of the game. Just as do the folks who wear tinfoil hats or who set out to make a better tinfoil hat. Or who imagine little men on stairs that aren’t there.
We can go to a murder mystery dinner party set in the 1920s and act as if we have murdered someone. Or act as if we are a Belgian detective. We can go to a Renaissance festival where corporate lawyers become barmaids and carpenters become knights.
We choose a game, we agree to obey the rules of the game, and then we act . . . as if.
This is how fiction works. There are all sorts of fictions, each written according to the rules of the game that the author asks us to play. Perhaps the novel is naturalistic—in that case, everything that happens will happen according to the observable and describable rules of the universe.
We can have “magical realism,” in which the world operates more or less as it does in our own world, but occasionally odd things happen—such as people flying away.
We can also have fantasy—that is, a world in which the rules we know do not apply. But even there, notice, there ARE rules of the game. Devotees of Star Trek or of the World of Warcraft will be quick to point out when an action goes outside the rules of that particular fantasy world.
We agree to the rules of a particular form of government. Or of economics. Of of religion. In these cases, usually, we have very little in the way of choice about playing the game—we are born in places where a set of games with rules are already in place—this is called culture and tradition.
Those who choose to ignore the rules are ostracized or punished. The rules of the games called culture and tradition often insist that you WILL see the little man on the stair—or at least say you do—, even if you cannot see the little man.
However, the difference between knowing you are playing a game with rules and thinking you are seeing reality are very different things, aren’t they?
Some games we choose, and some we don’t. No one is born wearing a tinfoil hat. Or saluting a particular flag. Or worshiping a particular god. Mostly, such games with their particular rules are forced upon us by geography or social status or educational attainment or mental health.
Am I really equating tin foil hats and patriotism, you might be asking. Yes, I am. Because I think the examined life requires that sort of examination. Until we see the games we are enmeshed in with some clarity, we have seen neither truth nor reality. We have not examined life.
So, what’s your game? Do tinfoil hats come in handy?
Day One
Day One of Chaplain School
What to Wear
OK, time for the teensiest bit of a rant, here. It starts with the fact that a girl named Jessica had her photo kept out of her high school yearbook because she was wearing a tuxedo. (Class pictures are required to be in either a tuxedo or a drape.) Or maybe it starts with the fact that a friend’s granddaughter was sanctioned at school because she was wearing a crop top and skirt that came half-way up her thighs.
And you know what I think? What the hell business of yours it is what someone else wears? Yeah, I get it that you’re going to browbeat your kid into wearing something proper for a wedding or a funeral, and I know in some places it’s a sin to wear white shoes past Labor Day, but really, and in general, what business is it of anyone’s what someone else chooses to put on their body?
I don’t know if Jessica, by her choice of clothing for the class photo, was trying to communicate that she identifies as trans, or that she’s lesbian, or bi, or countercultural, or just that she thought she would look cute in a tuxedo. (She does.) And you know what? Not only is it not any of my business, it isn’t her school’s business either. She is entitled to share or not share any of those identities, and no one is entitled to decide, based on what she’s wearing for a photo, which, if any, she might embrace.
I’m pretty sure that my friend’s daughter was just wearing what she thought was a cute, fun outfit on a warm day. (I saw the picture–it was.) And maybe some boys paid more attention to her than they would have if she were more covered up. And if so, maybe she enjoyed that attention, and maybe she didn’t. But if she liked the attention then she should be entirely free to flirt back, without having to worry that flirting would turn into assault. And if she didn’t like the attention she should be able to rebuff any advances without hard feelings or fear of repercussions.
Because she, like Jessica and like anyone else, should be able to wear what she wants because she’s the one wearing clothes on her very own body and she deserves to have say over what happens with that body.
Yes, I do think there are some limits on what teenagers should be allowed to wear to school. No clothes bearing racist, sexist, homophobic or other remarks that are designed to attack people as they walk by. Because no one deserves to be attacked.
And you know what? That rotund lady in the tight shirt and shorts doesn’t deserve to be attacked by disapproving glances or muttered comments either. Because it’s her body and her clothes, and who are you to say what she gets to wear? Maybe she feels cute and sexy and maybe it’s what she had clean at the moment, and what business is it of yours?
Look, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t set limits on teens, or that there is never a time when it might be reasonable to intervene in the behavior of a stranger on the street. If you see someone driving badly in a parking lot or kicking a dog, by all means, step in and I’ll applaud. But you know what? No one was ever run over by another person’s clothing. If you don’t like what someone else’s clothing says about you (like “I’m with stupid–>”) speak up. But if you don’t like what you imagine their clothing says about them, that is your problem and you should just get over it.
End of rant.
Bomb Throwers, Navel Gazers, and Goin’ All Thoreau: Doing Justice
Let’s consider an extreme example, a stark instance of the decision between doing something and talking about it. The abolitionist John Brown, fed up with the endless wrangling and political maneuvering over slavery in the early Nineteenth Century, decided to take matters in his own hands. He led a group that attacked a US military arsenal with the intention of seizing the weapons—Sharps rifles, which were a state-of-the-art weapon of the time, and arming slaves. Brown was captured, and, in the case of the State of Virginia Versus John Brown, Brown was charged with murder, incitement to riot, and treason. Brown was hanged for his actions.
But that’s not the action I want to consider.
One of the financial contributors to John Brown’s violent plan was Henry David Thoreau. Nowadays Thoreau’s reputation is mostly as an individualist and a naturalist. But in his own time, he was seen by many as a fiery abolitionist and as an anarchist.
There was never any doubt that John Brown would be convicted and hanged. The debated question—and it is still alive in American popular culture—is whether or not John Brown was crazy. (Look at the pictures and portraits of Brown sometime to see what I mean.)
Slavery sympathizers insisted that Brown had to be crazy: No white man in his right mind would arm slaves.
Abolitionists, on the other hand, insisted that the horror of slavery had driven Brown to this extremity, and that, the longer slavery existed, the more Browns there would be. Thoreau went on a lecture tour in support of this view, presenting everywhere he could a lecture that became an essay called “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” There Thoreau says,
I do not think it is quite sane for one to spend his whole life in talking or writing about this matter, unless he is continuously inspired, and I have not done so. A man may have other affairs to attend to. I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable. We preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty violence every day. Look at the policeman’s billy and handcuffs! Look at the jail! Look at the gallows! Look at the chaplain of the regiment! We are hoping only to live safely on the outskirts of this provisional army. So we defend ourselves and our hen-roosts, and maintain slavery. I know that the mass of my countrymen think that the only righteous use that can be made of Sharps rifles and revolvers is to fight duels with them, when we are insulted by other nations, or to hunt Indians, or shoot fugitive slaves with them, or the like. I think that for once the Sharps rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause. The tools were in the hands of one who could use them.
Dangerous words in 1859. Thoreau the anarchist appears in these lines:
The only government that I recognize—and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army—is that power that establishes justice in the land, never that which establishes injustice. What shall we think of a government to which all the truly brave and just men in the land are enemies, standing between it and those whom it oppresses? A government that pretends to be Christian and crucifies a million Christs every day!
Clearly, Thoreau believed that working for justice includes direct action and taking to the street.
While the John Brown affair clearly energized Thoreau, it put his friend and supporter Ralph Waldo Emerson in a bind. Though Emerson was a leading progressive intellectual at the time, and friends or acquaintances with most of the leading abolitionists, Emerson had been very careful in his words about the abolition of slavery. Emerson did not put much faith in political solutions. Or politics, for that matter.
When news of the capture of John Brown reached him, Emerson wrote to his son, ”We are all very well, in spite of the sad Harper’s Ferry business, which interests us all who had Brown for our guest twice . . . He is a true hero, but lost his head there.”
No, neither Emerson nor Thoreau thought much of governments in general or of democracy. They were individualists and elitists. Emerson once said, “Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.” He might nowadays rephrase that as, “Democracy becomes a government of bullies manipulated by media.”
The question was what to do about it. Thoreau said take direct action; Emerson said sit back and think about it, what we might call the “the pen is mightier than the sword” approach. These two had a clear choice: contemplative or activist? Scholar or reformer? Bomb thrower or navel gazer?
This tension has long plagued religions and the religious. Here’s what Thoreau thought about that, speaking of John Brown:
Emerson and Thoreau are good examples of the antipodes, the opposites, of those who think and those who do. Consider: Emerson and Thoreau lived before psychoanalysis. The word “narcissism” wasn’t coined until 1899. Emerson and Thoreau never heard the term “mental health.” Or “introvert” or “extrovert.” But Thoreau knew he had to get outside his own stuff—that he had to stop navel gazing—and get to work saving the lives of those Americans who were suffering injustice.
It’s easy to think Thoreau was right all along, now that we know how it all worked out. Thoreau didn’t live to see how it all worked out. He died in 1862. He never had a chance to put his values to the test in the war. He never saw slavery abolished.
In that way, Thoreau was like the rest of us: we may never see the outcome of our struggles for justice. Thoreau is here to remind us that that is not an excuse.
We’ve Come This Far…
For her 75th birthday, my Granny talked my dad, her 4th born son, into driving her and my Great Aunt Dot out the see the Grand Canyon “before I die.”
Once they had made the long journey from North Georgia to the Grand Canyon, Granny turned to my dad and said “you know what else I want to see before I die? The giant redwood trees! We’ve come this far. We might as well go.” What else could my dad do but get everyone back into the car and go see those amazing trees. What’s another 2000 miles roundtrip with the trickster Granny in your car and in your heart?
Granny was a born again Christian who would speak of her salvation from cigarettes as a miracle worked in her life by Jesus Christ. When she died in 2007, two ministers preached her funeral and they began the service by saying “Granny wanted us to preach a full service today, complete with alter call, because she knew this was the last time she could make y’all all come to church.” I sat in that pew laughing through my tears of grief…and prayed that one day, I would have her courage, her ability to live faithfully into the mystery, even unto death.
My granny taught me to trust the mystery of the world, to delight in the many colorful stories that sustain our days, to ask for what I need to survive, to figure out how to thrive. She taught me to believe that I am loved and can love, no matter what. To believe that you are loved and can love, no matter what.
No matter what.
How Granny learned to live so bravely and unapologetically may always be a mystery to me. But I am ever so grateful for the lessons of her life, of her faithfulness, of her creativity.
Whenever we start to flag, to judge, to doubt, to tire, may we remember and be encouraged by the trickster energy of Granny.
We’ve come this far. We might as well go see the giant redwoods – host General Assembly in New Orleans in 2017, grow our faith in the Deep South, bend the arc of the universe toward justice – whatever faithful longing we carry in our hearts.
Let’s be brave, beloveds, and live into the mystery together.
Those Who Came Before Us
Life is busy as ever, one thing hurtling on into the next, and we are juggling so many different to-do lists at once. In the midst of that whirlwind, I experienced Mother’s Day this year as an opportunity to reflect, ever-so-momentarily, on lineage and the mystery of the past. I enjoyed seeing all the mother-daughter, aunt-niece, mentor-mentee, multi-generation photos that people posted on Facebook. And so I took just a few moments to scan this photo I had recently come across in an old-school photo album. Three generations of my family walking along the Oregon Coast during the summer, five years before I was born (and I am the oldest kid in my generation in this family). Forty-four years ago. All kinds of things they didn’t yet imagine lay ahead–divorces, deaths, births, illnesses, upheaval, celebration, marriages, joys…and many more walks on the beach.
So many different combinations of people had yet to come into their lives. I love just looking at this photograph and their expressions, wondering about the personality of the great-grandmother that I never really knew, and what she had to say to her grandson, my father, as they walked on the beach that day. I love looking at my grandmother, in the blue jacket, wearing a skirt or dress that came to above her knees, her neat blue coat, her sandals with a heel (on the beach!) that she holds in her hand. They are each and all so themselves, in this picture, at least as far as I can tell. They are facing the photographer and smiling with seemingly-genuine smiles — and who was that, taking the picture, anyway? My grandmother, my father’s mom? My grandfather, my mother’s father? A stranger passing-by? Who else was there with them that day? They look relaxed, and genuinely glad to be together, that day. And that’s maybe what I cherish most about this photo, and about life in my family now, and life in general even: that we can cherish the moment that we are in. Who knows what lays ahead. There are always things that are challenging, painful, and in flux. But oh, there is so much beauty to be noticed and celebrated right now, in this moment. May we all find something to celebrate about this moment we are in, wherever we are in our walk along the tide.
Salvation Hits the Couch
Buddhism had been known in the United States since the mid-Nineteenth Century, but really came into its own with the return of Pacific War vets who had spent some time in Japan. (The creation of Red China insured that Chinese Buddhism would not be generally available to the Western World for some time.) One of the aspects of Buddhism that attracted post-War interest is that it is based more in psychology than in theology. Buddhism—at least in the Zen form that came back with those vets—is about practice, not theory. The practice is learning to watch one’s own thoughts and the realization that these thoughts can be changed.
Zen Buddhism might have remained just another exotic thing that came back from the war, something like samurai swords, if not for what was already beginning to happen in Western thought—the suspicion that religion and psychology are more or less the same thing, working the same ground. Monotheist religions can give you salvation; psychology can give you . . . self-actualization. And this idea was coming from different directions at the same time—not only humanists were making the argument. Reformed Rabbis agreed. As did many mainline priests and preachers. And then there was the capitalist angle taken by Norman Vincent Peale with his bestselling ideas about positive thinking.
Take for example the work of the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, a survivor of not one but four of the Nazi death camps. Frankl said, “We give suffering a meaning by our response to it.” Yep: that’s Buddhism. Frankl condemned what in the death camps had been called “give-up-itis.” In the death camps, Frankl realized that those who had the best chance of survival were those who found meaning in the suffering and kept on going. Furthermore, Frankl didn’t push a particular path to meaning. The meaning is personal. Again, a bit like the difference between duty and responsibility—a personal choice made without being pointed in a particular direction by outside authority.
Buddhism had long drawn a distinction between suffering and pain. Pain is what happens to you—it can’t be avoided. Wounds happen. But suffering is what you think about the pain. “This is happening to me because . . .” “This always happens to me because . . .” “You are doing this to me because . . .” All of that is negative meaning making. Those are ways of catching a bad case of give-up-itis.
“Salvation” is a hackneyed word. Better to ask, “What will save me?” “What is the source of my suffering and what can give it meaning?”
It’s a truism in looking at prospective seminary students to wonder if they are recent converts to Twelve Step programs. Or newly divorced. Or have recently encountered some other trauma. Are these people signing on to be Karl Jung’s “Wounded Healers.” I’m certainly not saying that’s a bad thing. It’s a natural human thing: Here is my wound; here is my suffering; where is the meaning? Then: How can I help others who have been through what I’ve been through and worse?
And here’s the biggest paradox of it all: just as meaning and responsibility are choices arrived at from individual lives, they are about sharing. Sharing with other human beings.
Isn’t it amazing that—no matter what may happen to us—we can be confident that there are people who will take care of us? This is confidence in the human spirit. It is a religion (if you will) not of victimhood and suffering but of creativity and compassion.
![By Vicki Nunn (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/uucollective/files/2014/05/Lounge_70s.jpg)
Give me the heart
I have spent the past few days saturated in extraordinary music, delicious food, dear friends – and almost completely off of the grid, just checking in from time to time with the office and the work phone to keep disasters to a minimum.
Today I return to the world of administration and e-mail, deadlines and accountability, pastoral care and organizing.
Today I pray to the universe “give me the heart.” Give me the heart to love, the heart of compassion and commitment. Give me the heart of return, the heart of restoration.
And I will give. I will give thanks for the gift of life, for the gift of love and compassion bestowed with grace. In my gratitude, I will serve with heart.
I will live from a place of gratitude.
I will say thank you.
Thank you, universe.
Wonder
Tonight I am thinking of how preciously fragile
and how fragilely precious life is
and how we
(even those of us who know this from experience)
walk down the street on a spring day
with buds and birds and bright green leaves
against a blue sky
like it is not a miracle
that our feet stick to the earth
and our lungs draw air in
and we are all spinning in space
and that we get to be here, in this moment,
laughing,
or walking the dog,
or holding a child’s hand,
or eating an ice cream cone.