On the other side of the absurdity matter -- previous post -- is the tendency to diminish one's own suffering. At one end of the continuum (assuming there is a continuum) is victimhood, an identity shaped by truly abhorrent treatment at the hand of someone or an entire culture. Victimhood can endure as a permanent feature of identity, inseparable from the self and the visible, symbolic participation in the meaning of the suffering, surviving in spite of the injuries and insults, but with little surplus of joy.
At the other end of the continuum is something like arrogance. This is a kind of impermeable way of being in the world, preoccupied with survival in a different way, avoiding harm and pain, perhaps describable as hedonic or hedonistic, or capable only of rising to occasions of fun at any expense.
I have described these extremes in the abstract. I don't think I have ever really felt either of those identities to be descriptive of me. I have too much advantage and shielded privilege, good enough parenting, safety in the adequacy of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, to have fallen into victimhood as a permanent state.
I have never given in to utter hedonism, either. My WASP work ethic is firmly in place, although I will admit that I would rather find a way to be paid well and with good health insurance as a dilettante fly fisher, a female Isaak Walton, if you will.
I have managed to steer -- no, wait, that implies control -- I have managed to move through life with enough buffetting of suffering, tasting despair, courting oblivion; cushioned by a general condition of comfort; and distracted by the entertainments of pure uncensored fun so that I would have to say that, like Rachel's favorite clothing says, life, indeed, is good.
And yet ... and yet ... life continues to serve up these absurdities. What can one person do? Act. Pray. Care. Pay attention.
Self-understanding is important to cultivation of a self worth sharing with someone else. So, it is important to confront the oppressors, offenders, and creeps that hinder the flourishing built into a heart. Say no, enough, stop, quit, move, change, leave -- whatever it takes. It does not help to deny what you know to be true. Have courage. Do what you have to do.
Curiosity is also a good thing. Why do you laugh at what you laugh at? What language do you speak? Who taught it to you? How were you put together that makes you you? What makes you different makes you interesting, as long as you are just as willing to ask me the same questions and remain open to my answers.
But, evil is real. That's why we have to watch out for the vulnerable (including ourselves). There really are some very bad people who want to harm you. There really are people who want to take away all of your stuff and your life with it. There are people who do not want you to flourish. That's when it helps to be selfish, if that's what you want to call it. Self-preservation is a worthy impulse. But, love comes first. So, even when love does not win at first, or seems never to win, or doomed to fail, you have to keep loving, as long as you know not to let anything come between you and the door. You don't have to be a hero. You can run, live, lick your wounds, and rest up for the next struggle against evil. Unless you're just plain exhausted, in which case, it's also ok to run and keep running until you find a safe place to stop.
They write books about these things. The futility of hope; the ridiculous tenacity of love; the necessity of surviving; and that this is not the whole story. The end we see is not really the end at all, but a kind of new beginning.
It is still true -- here and now, on this first day of Spring, and the eve of Easter -- that somehow, between the ditches of hedonism and despair, hope and love will win.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
A World of Absurdity
A phenomenon -- psychological, spiritual, sociological, ... (?) -- accounts for a feeling I have sometimes. I don't know the name for this phenomenon. It's partly a kind of survivor's guilt; it's partly a smarmy privileged liberal self-loathing; it's partly an imposter's syndrome; maybe it's all of these things. It says:
No matter what I might have suffered in my life, nothing -- gods, singular and lesser, willing -- will ever compare to atrocities such as the Shoah, the Trail of Tears, 400 years of slavery, and Darfur; therefore, I should remain silent, count my blessings, and keep on the sunny side.
Such a vision of tragedy is as hard to keep in focus as staring at the sun.
Silence, as ACT+UP told us back in the early days of HIV/AIDS, equals death. Yet, I feel so overwhelmed by tragedy that I am struck dumb.
This happened to me at the Society for Pastoral Theology annual study conference in Atlanta a few years ago. Touring the MLK center, sitting in a circle of conversation and consciousness-raising among a mostly-white gathering of scholars and clinicians, so many images and so many words were overwhelming to me. All of my history, social location, my active and passive participation in systematic endemic racism, all crashed over me like a wave, filling my lungs with sand so that I could not breathe or expend the words that were piling up in my brain and spilling out of my heart, crashing on the beach with the waste and precious awareness, like these words now trying to fall upon these keys as I think and write today. My guilt, my implication, my shame render me silent.
How can I remain silent? This is not the answer. In my social location, history, awareness, I can help to construct a new world.
Thank you, Barak Obama, for your speech after the Jeremiah Wright debacle in your campaign. I feel hopeful that the world can change. You are a politician, a gifted and smart man, and you can lead with inspiration. The world can change.
The world can change. That's the next step for me after this languishing in shame and silence.
What can be more important to talk about this week than racism? Nothing.
Nothing - except for this murder, eclipsed, I fear, by campaign drama.
Lawrence King, image above, 15, shot in the head in his Oxnard, CA, school classroom. He told his classmates he was gay; he was proud of his sense of fashion. He was creative. He was a beautiful boy. Another beautiful boy, destroyed by the bigotry of our absurd world, pulled the trigger. Larry asked Brandon to be his Valentine. Then, Larry's family faced the miserable decision to withdraw life support because of brain death -- after harvesting strong young organs.
Thank goodness, Ellen is not struck dumb as I am. She spoke out when this happened back in February on her show.
Is Larry's death a Shoah, a Trail of Tears, a Darfur, an evil history of enslaving human beings, a genocide? On some absurd level: yes.
OK, now -- will Ohio put sexual orientation in its school bullying code and help raise awareness of the dangers of bigotry for vulnerable gay teens? Or will politicians and religious leaders continue to avoid this poll-killing "issue"?
Will churches and pastors continue to placate themselves with the cool liberal vision of equality for all people, while allowing the absurd tragedy of these isolated cases (Larry), these outliers of social dysfunction (Larry's killer), to keep them in denial? Our church chooses to not become a Reconciling Congregation. We can count on the strength of our love and relationships, our generous hospitality, our wide net of tolerance -- no, not just tolerance: celebration! -- to bridge the singular tragic gaps. How nice.
When will the Democratic Party stand up for rights of gay people and our families? Why cannot a school be empowered to protect Larry and millions of other vulnerable teenagers? It's a political killer, alright.
Why does this absurdity endure? Why continue to hope that the world will change?
According to Michael Berenbaum, in Elie Wiesel: God, the Holocaust, and the Children of Israel (p. 148, 1994), also published under the title The Vision of the Void: Theological Reflections on the Works of Elie Wiesel (1979)], Elie Wiesel said in a symposium:
In a world of absurdity, we must invent reason, we must create beauty out of nothingness. And because there is murder in the world -- and we are the first ones to know it -- and we know how hopeless our battle may appear, we have to fight murder and absurdity and give meaning to the battle, if not to our hope. (Berenbaum, p. 148, source cited above).
Wiesel also wrote in Souls on Fire (Berenbaum, p. 148, source cited above):
... whoever creates affirms that the creative act has meaning, a meaning which transcends the act itself.
When my friends in Seattle lost the case for declaring unconstitutional the Washington State gay marriage ban amendment to the constitution, I wrote an essay with the most hopeful -- hoping against hope -- message for continuing to hope. It's a ridiculous essay. It's the kind of exercise in self-soothing that borders on the insane. Insane: keep repeating the same behavior, expecting a different result. I actually said, "Love will win." So what?
Keep hoping. Keep creating hope. Just like that. Just like Heather and Leslie. Just like Elie Wiesel. Just like Larry.
Hope is absurd. It's ridiculous. It's insane. It's beautiful.
No matter what I might have suffered in my life, nothing -- gods, singular and lesser, willing -- will ever compare to atrocities such as the Shoah, the Trail of Tears, 400 years of slavery, and Darfur; therefore, I should remain silent, count my blessings, and keep on the sunny side.
Such a vision of tragedy is as hard to keep in focus as staring at the sun.
Silence, as ACT+UP told us back in the early days of HIV/AIDS, equals death. Yet, I feel so overwhelmed by tragedy that I am struck dumb.
This happened to me at the Society for Pastoral Theology annual study conference in Atlanta a few years ago. Touring the MLK center, sitting in a circle of conversation and consciousness-raising among a mostly-white gathering of scholars and clinicians, so many images and so many words were overwhelming to me. All of my history, social location, my active and passive participation in systematic endemic racism, all crashed over me like a wave, filling my lungs with sand so that I could not breathe or expend the words that were piling up in my brain and spilling out of my heart, crashing on the beach with the waste and precious awareness, like these words now trying to fall upon these keys as I think and write today. My guilt, my implication, my shame render me silent.
How can I remain silent? This is not the answer. In my social location, history, awareness, I can help to construct a new world.
Thank you, Barak Obama, for your speech after the Jeremiah Wright debacle in your campaign. I feel hopeful that the world can change. You are a politician, a gifted and smart man, and you can lead with inspiration. The world can change.
The world can change. That's the next step for me after this languishing in shame and silence.
What can be more important to talk about this week than racism? Nothing.
Nothing - except for this murder, eclipsed, I fear, by campaign drama.
Lawrence King, image above, 15, shot in the head in his Oxnard, CA, school classroom. He told his classmates he was gay; he was proud of his sense of fashion. He was creative. He was a beautiful boy. Another beautiful boy, destroyed by the bigotry of our absurd world, pulled the trigger. Larry asked Brandon to be his Valentine. Then, Larry's family faced the miserable decision to withdraw life support because of brain death -- after harvesting strong young organs.
Thank goodness, Ellen is not struck dumb as I am. She spoke out when this happened back in February on her show.
Is Larry's death a Shoah, a Trail of Tears, a Darfur, an evil history of enslaving human beings, a genocide? On some absurd level: yes.
OK, now -- will Ohio put sexual orientation in its school bullying code and help raise awareness of the dangers of bigotry for vulnerable gay teens? Or will politicians and religious leaders continue to avoid this poll-killing "issue"?
Will churches and pastors continue to placate themselves with the cool liberal vision of equality for all people, while allowing the absurd tragedy of these isolated cases (Larry), these outliers of social dysfunction (Larry's killer), to keep them in denial? Our church chooses to not become a Reconciling Congregation. We can count on the strength of our love and relationships, our generous hospitality, our wide net of tolerance -- no, not just tolerance: celebration! -- to bridge the singular tragic gaps. How nice.
When will the Democratic Party stand up for rights of gay people and our families? Why cannot a school be empowered to protect Larry and millions of other vulnerable teenagers? It's a political killer, alright.
Why does this absurdity endure? Why continue to hope that the world will change?
According to Michael Berenbaum, in Elie Wiesel: God, the Holocaust, and the Children of Israel (p. 148, 1994), also published under the title The Vision of the Void: Theological Reflections on the Works of Elie Wiesel (1979)], Elie Wiesel said in a symposium:
In a world of absurdity, we must invent reason, we must create beauty out of nothingness. And because there is murder in the world -- and we are the first ones to know it -- and we know how hopeless our battle may appear, we have to fight murder and absurdity and give meaning to the battle, if not to our hope. (Berenbaum, p. 148, source cited above).
Wiesel also wrote in Souls on Fire (Berenbaum, p. 148, source cited above):
... whoever creates affirms that the creative act has meaning, a meaning which transcends the act itself.
When my friends in Seattle lost the case for declaring unconstitutional the Washington State gay marriage ban amendment to the constitution, I wrote an essay with the most hopeful -- hoping against hope -- message for continuing to hope. It's a ridiculous essay. It's the kind of exercise in self-soothing that borders on the insane. Insane: keep repeating the same behavior, expecting a different result. I actually said, "Love will win." So what?
Keep hoping. Keep creating hope. Just like that. Just like Heather and Leslie. Just like Elie Wiesel. Just like Larry.
Hope is absurd. It's ridiculous. It's insane. It's beautiful.
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