"The real problem isn’t religion. It’s a deeper psychological failure that afflicts humans of all varieties, religious and not. It’s called “fanaticism” — that eerie quality of single-mindedness that can lead even the intelligent and the educated to believe that the views they hold excuse any form of savagery. Yes, many of these people gravitate to absolutist versions of religion — but history shows they’re equally attracted to secular forms of political extremism."
It's like everywhere I look is another example of the damage that comes from black and white thinking. I have found myself trying to communicate this idea with anything and everything that comes up lately as I parent and it feels so healthy. The other day Sophia asked me, "Which is more important: brushing teeth or brushing hair?" I responded that it seems to me they're both important in different ways, and then asked her to brainstorm all the ways each was more important or less important depending on different variables I would bring up.
Does that sound silly? Because it feels awesome.
When she screams, "You love Joan more than me!", I don't say, "Of course I love you as much as Joan, don't be ridiculous." I wait until it's a good time and then I bring up her comment and elicit discussions about how there are lots of different kinds of love and how sometimes we feel loved and sometimes we don't and how some people struggle to love in certain ways while being awesome at loving in other ways. I tell her that I know that there are ways that I fail at love and that I am sorry for the pain it brings to her heart, and that I will never stop trying to learn to love her better and better.
If as children they get used to the feeling that there are no easy answers in life then I'll have offered them the foundation for finding love and peace when they're out their on their own.
At least I think so.
So far the effort is provoking lots of long, in-depth, thought-provoking conversations where we really have to listen to each other. And I'm going to call that good.
"You cannot “get” a girlfriend, because a girlfriend is not an iPad or a burrito or gonorrhea. Women are people. You aren't entitled to “have” people, just because you think it will cure your unhappiness. Your unhappiness is your problem and no one else’s. And thinking about a girlfriend as a thing that you “get” and not an equal partner whose humanity you respect and cherish will never result in a satisfying relationship anyway."
Also, the friend who posted this did so with this thoughtful commentary:
This is excellent. I would push back on only one thing: that she overestimates that men accurately understand what it means to "be a person" or what it means to be human. Part of the basic problem with sexism/patriarchy is that men (and sometimes women) so often assume that men experience and understand the basic standards of humanity and merely deny these to women by perceiving/using them as objects. It's more the case that men themselves are so often confused by and insecure about their own humanity (forcibly interpreted through the lens of having to come to grips with what it is supposed to mean to be a man) and so are floundering and in despair in profound ways about their own humanity.
I am really, really grateful for Mormons who feel called to write things like this and then do it. Honestly, I skimmed most of the philosophical part at the beginning, but this ending that I've posted here I read carefully, and then went back and read it again.
...Only when we allow ourselves to be fully summoned by another’s gaze and therefore another’s injunction do we begin to understand and experience what it is to love. My own unsubstitutable individuality is due to the other’s intentional gaze and summoned injunction. I owe myself to those who created me by addressing me (or failed to address me). Love is the “the act of a gaze that renders itself back to another gaze in a common unsubstitutability.”
This past week we learned that Charles Cooper, the Republican attorney who defended California’s Proposition 8 before the Supreme Court, is now in the process of planning his daughter’s wedding to another woman. Ironically, his daughter Ashley had become engaged to her girlfriend just months before Cooper began arguments against the legalization of same-sex marriage in California. While Cooper has not definitively clarified his own personal views on same-sex marriage, he has been quoted as saying, “What I will say only is that my views evolve on issues of this kind the same way as other people’s do, and how I view this down the road may not be the way I view it now, or how I viewed it 10 years ago,” and, more importantly, “I told Ashley that what matters most is that I love her and she loves me.” If Cooper had held any firm beliefs about the positive prohibition of gay relationships, it was not argumentation and logic that swayed him; after all, he was a paid expert in all the legal, cultural, and religious arguments to be had one way or another about same-sex marriage. And it was not just an abstract universal responsibility to love another human being (which at best becomes mere toleration). The only thing that changed his heart and mind (the only thing that could have changed his heart and mind) was an injunction derived from that particular face and that particular gaze of one whom he loved.
Part of the problem in living within the Mormon cultural mass (which, though becoming increasingly diverse is nevertheless still fairly homogeneous) is that gays and lesbians very often have no face, no particularity. They are invisible, both as individuals and as an accepted and legitimate category within the culture, and thus recede into the mass of otherness toward which we are supposed to feel some sort of general “ethical obligation,” tied to our notions of shared humanity. But such general ethical obligation—even where it genuinely exists—cannot produce genuine love and charity. We cannot genuinely love a universal ethic; we can only love a face with a gaze with a particular history, etc. When Mormons learn that someone they know and love is gay, this might produce an actual struggle for acceptance, which may at times change their views about the gay community because and only because of this particular gay person who has a face, who is that particular other that they love, whose own unsubsitutable gaze has helped to make them what they are as individuals. Of course, it also happens that at other times nothing substantively changes and they continue to hold previous beliefs and/or prejudices. There was nothing inevitable about the conclusions Charles Cooper arrived at through his love for his daughter; he might not have chosen to be open to her summons at all. But, no longer are these beliefs and prejudices beliefs and prejudices about a faceless other that one can believe just anything about. Now, they are must deal with these beliefs overlayed onto an actual person they are forced to reckon with. As Marion says, before the gaze of the face we are unsettled. Things change when the other has a face, and genuine love is only possible when this occurs, even when the other does not love us back. (This is important: we can love those whom we might not have chosen or preferred to love in different circumstances. What counts is that we are confronted with the face, gaze, and injunction of a particular other, not that they must love us in return).
Our beliefs regarding our LGBT brothers and sisters (and I daresay some of our doctrinal orientations and certainly our cultural attitudes) will change in proportion to gays and lesbians emerging from the faceless mass (toward which we have a mere ethical responsibility to treat fairly as human beings, and therefore are free to fear and not to love) and taking on the faces of those we love. Not all of us will love them simply because this occurs, but some will, and no doubt all of us would be unsettled.
That the gay community is mostly faceless to the average Mormon has, I am arguing, the effect of there being no particularized call, no one to address, no gazes to meet, no injunction to enact. And thus we remain settled and sure in our knowledge, enclosed in ourselves and comfortable in our separate worlds. To the extent that more gays and lesbians become that particular person–sons, daughters, friends, neighbors, with names, faces, and gazes, unsettling and breaking our hearts, and destabilizing our preconceptions–is the extent to which unpredictable events will begin to happen, and love and charity will do the work that loose, abstract ethical obligation cannot."
Before I start writing a post about suicide at midnight I will first tell you that I have never felt suicidal. And with that disclaimer hopefully putting everyone at ease (at least as much at ease as you can be while thinking about suicide) here are some of the things I've read and thought about lately on the topic.
A couple months ago the CDC released a report about how the suicide rate in the US rose 2.4% and is now the highest it's been in more than 25 years. I read that this means that about every 12 minutes someone in the US ends their own life.
Something I read recently:
from historian and poet Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It, recently published by Yale University Press:
‘When I was getting my PHD in history at Columbia I knew two other poets in the English department. One of them took her life in 2007, and the other one wrote the posthumous afterword to her book, saying how shocked and upset she was by this. Then, about a year and a half later, she did it too,’ Hecht says.
‘This was profoundly upsetting for me ... in the book, I mention that I was going through some dark times too. When I feel dark, my brain offers suicide as a solution, and even when I’m not feeling terrible that thought comes to mind. I’ve now talked to so many people that I think that more than half of people have that suggestion come to their mind.’
Amid the rhetoric about personal choice, Hecht says it’s important to remember the impact suicide has on not just close family and friends, but even more casual acquaintances. She says that by staying alive despite suicidal feelings, many people are performing a community service.
‘Crying and useless, sitting at the end of your bed is way better than death. It’s a million times better than death. If you feel like a burden, you need to know that your suicide would be a much bigger burden.’
In families where there’s been a suicide, it takes two generations for the rate of suicide to go down.
‘That means that if you want your unborn niece to make it through her dark night of the soul, you have to make it through yours,’ says Hecht.
‘There has to be at least some voice of gratitude in the culture, and I don’t mind starting—thank you, if you’re staying alive for other people, you’re my hero. I know how hard it is, and I am grateful.’
While Hecht says efforts to remove stigmatisation from suicide are laudable, she argues that they can also minimise the reality that suicide is an act.
Reading that woman's thoughts reminded me of a song I heard recently and of something I read in M. Scott Peck's, The Road Less Traveled:
“Life is complex. Each one of us must make his own path through life. There are no self-help manuals, no formulas, no easy answers. The right road for one is the wrong road for another…The journey of life is not brightly lit, and it has no road signs. It is a rocky path through the wilderness.”
"On Your Porch"
I was on your porch, the smoke sank into my skin.
So I came inside to be with you.
And we talked all night,
about everything we could imagine.
'Cause come the morning I'll be gone
and as our eyes start to close
I turn to you and I let you know that I Love You
Well my dad was sick,
and my mom she cared for him.
Her love it nursed him back to life.
And me, I ran. I couldn't even look at him
for fear I'd have to say goodbye.
And as I start to leave
he grabs me by the shoulder and he tells me:
"Whats left to lose? You've done enough.
And if you fail well then you fail but not to us.
'Cause these last three years, I know they've been hard.
But now its time to get out of the desert and into the sun;
even if its alone."
So now here I sit, in a hotel off of Sunset;
my thoughts bounce off of Sam's guitar.
And that's the way its been,
ever since we were kids but now,
now we've got Something to prove.
And I, I can see their eyes,
but tell me something, can they see mine?
'Cause whats left to lose?
I've done enough.
And if I fail well then I fail but i gave it a shot.
And these last three years, I know they've been hard.
But now its time to get out of the desert and into the sun;
even if its alone.
Even if it's alone
I was on your porch last night, the smoke it sank into my skin.
****
Those words from the father to his child, "Well if you fail well then you fail but not to us", that is just exactly what I am hoping to instill in my children's hearts, and in my own in the process. This truth that life is complex and that it is not possible to ever fail completely just as it is not possible to ever love completely. The truth that thinking in black and white about love and failure is dangerous because both are only colored in shades of gray for everyone, always.
Which sounds kind of non-offensive when spoken of in generalities, but turns out to often be super sucky when faced day in and day out in a thousand different ways. When my kids figure this out I will tell them that I think Friedrich Nietzsche was on to something when he said, "We have art in order not to die of the truth." But in the meantime I will just keep doing things like telling them how much their homemade gifts and crayon drawings mean to me, taking them out in nature whenever I can, and keep saying yes when they ask me to turn up the music and dance with them. Turns out 'Cause what's left to lose?' is actually a pretty inspiring sentiment.
Ver woke up a hundred times last night with a croupy cough and I just couldn't do it, I couldn't get us all to church, so I've spent the day slowly unpacking the van from Christmas and trying to do it without chaos reigning. It really is unbelievable to me how much work it is to pack for traveling with three children and then unpacking might just be worse. Add Christmas gear/gifts to the equation and yes, it's4:42 PM and I'm still working on it. A dear friend gave this completely awesome "After Christmas" six hours of stories audio book to Sophia as a gift and she and I listened to this story from it while I sorted laundry and toys and she laid on her bed and watched it make me cry. "On the eleventh day of Christmas, the children learn that Andy has to return to Connecticut. This means King’s Night Barn Dance – planned for Twelftnight - is no longer going to include music and dancing. Brother and sister are deeply disappointed – disappointed that the King’s night event won’t be what they expected and disappointed that Andy won’t be there. They don’t like feeling disappointed and sad, but Momma encourages them to honor their feelings.
From “Twelve Tales of a Tullyport Christmas”: “The Feast of the Eleven Sails” Long ago, an incredible thing happened on the eleventh day of Christmas in Tullyport. Eleven enormous ships appeared off the coast, set off-course by a large winter storm. The families of Tullyport gathered torches and lanterns, and lined the coast, guiding the lost ships to safety. But when the ships set sail from England, there were twelve. Where is the twelfth? Could its captain have guided it to Boston despite the storm? This experience inspired a yearly Christmas feast, to celebrate both the great joys of the year, as well as the hardships."
On the drive to my parent's house yesterday we stopped at a gas station for a potty break and the girls talked me into buying a bag of Twizzlers. When the lady in front of us finished paying the cashier gave a a cheerful, "Merry Christmas!" instead of the usual we're-done-with-our-transaction "Have a good day". The lady gave an enthusiastic Merry Christmas back and then followed it with, "And Jesus is the reason for the season! RIGHT???" The cashier looked away and got busy with something but the lady said it over again with even more emphasis and need for validation while we all averted our eyes and fidgeted. It made me think of something that resonated with me a few days ago:
"As a Christian I am uncomfortable with trite phrases like Jesus is the Reason for The Season, and its derivatives, popular within Evangelical Christian culture (the branch of the family tree I identify most strongly with).
Family is my reason for the Christmas season. It's why I cook and gift and want it to snow. And it's why we give to others in our community or around the world, so they can be supported in loving relationship with their families.
Having said that, the Christian call and tradition to remember the birth of Christ at this particular time of year (I don't actually care how accurate the date is) provides a reflective season, a sacred space in our 21st century lives, to tell the ancient story of our faith, again, to our children."
- http://fimby.tougas.net/shes-makin-list-checkin-it-twice-and-talkin-religion#comments
It makes sense to me that Jesus would probably actually be pretty uncomfortable with people insisting that he was the reason for the season. Like he'd be like, "No, no, it's not about me, it's about US."
Is it wrong to want to stop reading the news? Not that I even read the news, but this is what the "trending" sidebar of my FB reads right now:
TRENDING Robert P. McCulloch: St. Louis prosecutor says he believes some witnesses lied to Ferguson grand jury Cairns: Mother arrested after 8 children found stabbed to death in Australian home, police say Upstate New York: Missing 5-year-old boy found dead; teen cousin charged with murder, police say See More
I just want to bury my head for awhile. But I feel a tremendous amount of guilt when I say that. I mean, those people are LIVING that pain and I'm like, "Ummmm...sorry, I don't even want to HEAR it."
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