'Me' against 'Them'

In many ways, I have spent my entire life on a journey away from blame...

Having lived much of my early life in a realm of ritualistic abuse, both inside my home, and in the outer religious world that encircled me, it was natural and easy to develop a 'me' against 'them' framework of life. Fight back or be killed. Life became an adversarial contest of will and strength, and of course, blame. Problem with blame is that 'everyone' is not responsible, community is harmed, and ultimately destroyed.

As I live longer, I increasingly think in terms of 'we' and 'us' rather than terms of 'me' or 'them.' It occurs to me that when I think in, or use, the term 'them' I am descending into the narcissistic tense of all things 'me,' when in reality, there is not 'them' or 'me' but only 'us,' the collective community for which and to which we are responsible. 'We' eliminates the possibility of 'blame,' changes the monologue into one of dialog and conversation, where 'we' are all, collectively, responsible for outcomes. If 'we' are indeed 'we' then I/we must feel the full range of emotions at the same time: Love, anger, sorrow, empathy, and hope. For it is we, our collective self, that is enacting all things at one time, in the the actions and avoidance of each particular one of us.

e. e. cummings said:

we do not believe in ourselves

until someone reveals

that deep inside of us

is someone valuable,

worth listening to,

worthy of trust,

sacred to our touch...

once we believe in ourselves

we can risk curiosity, wonder,

spontaneous delight,

or any experience that reveals the human spirit.

It is this dance to which we are invited. The great partnership of 'we.' Perhaps this is what moved Jesus when he looked out over the city from high on the hillside, and simply wept. Wept for it all ... the joy, the laughter, the life, the death, the sorrow. For it is in all those things that we discover 'we,' become 'us' - the unbreakable community.

zjm

Choice

when one offers lodging to fear

its power grows until blindness

makes one unavailable

 to the power of love ~

zjm

The thing is...

If we think of ourselves as old

talk about ourselves as old

we become older than our bodies

we become old in spirit

old in heart...

then we court

death

with our hearts still beating

zjm

What is real, what is sanity?

On Monday this week, at Columbia University, Professor Emlyn Hughes stripped to his underwear in his Frontiers of Science class. This video speaks for itself, but I recommend you watch it until the very end, paying close attention to the spontaneous comments made by a young woman sitting near the camera, and to the remarks by Hughes afterward ~ zjm

Afraid In The Night

Oscar Pistorius, Olympic and Paralympic star runner, first man to compete in the Olympics running on two artificial legs, was arraigned in court today in South Africa, on charges of premeditated murder. Shot and killed his girlfriend on Valentine's day, he says, because he believed her to be a prowler in the house. A lone judge will decide his fate.

When my now 31 year old daughter was just a few weeks old, I awoke in the middle of the night, hearing a noise in the hallway outside my bedroom. My daughter's mother was not in bed next to me; I could hear her rocking and singing to our daughter in the room adjacent to ours. The noise in the hallway moved out into the living room, then out to kitchen. By now, I was convinced I was hearing footsteps, that a prowler was in the house. The steps then started back from the kitchen, and stopped in front of the door to the bedroom. Very slowly, the door opened, revealing a hulking figure back lit by the hall light. I screamed out in terror, only to discover it was my daughter's mother returning to our bed.

To this day, I believe, had there been a handgun next to the bed, I would have shot my daughter's mother, for I was certain there was a prowler in the house endangering my family in the next room.

Good fucking reason not to have a handgun in the house!

No one will ever know what happened in the Pistorius household that night, irrespective of any verdict of law. What we do know, is that some kind of fear took possession in that house. And when fear takes hold of us, in the night, or in the bright light of noonday, bad stuff tends to happen.

Good reason to master our fears.

Jesus Returns!

Valentine's Day...

Time for fresh air ...

First Light

A walk through the trees along the river at first light carries the possibility of a restored clarity. Perhaps like the simplicity of standing before a judge and receiving a death sentence:

“On this day, at dawn,

you shall be hanged by the neck

until you are dead.”

Or as Bruce Cockburn’s lyrics put it ~

‘You can die on your sofa

safe inside your home

or die in a mess of flame and shrapnel

we all in our time go’

A knowledge that ought to produce gratitude for another day, one would think. Though on most, I confess, it does not shake me free from the ephemeral disquiet swirling around inside of me.

Today,

for a few rarified moments,

it did…

zjm

Father's Day

My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard.  Mother would come out and say, "You're tearing up the grass."  "We're not raising grass," Dad would reply.  "We're raising boys."  

~Harmon Killebrew

Vision

"Those who cannot see Christ in the poor are atheists indeed. " 

— Dorothy Day

GO BRUINS!!!!

Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people 

to account for the curious attractiveness of others

Oscar Wilde

Beatification a conspiracy of disgrace: At best, a "Patron saint of looking the other way.’’

In 1994, seven years before the clergy sexual abuse scandal exploded, Robert Costello sent a letter to Pope John Paul. “Dear Holy Father,’’ it began, “When I was a small boy of about 10 years old, I was sexually abused by our parish priest. The abuse lasted for over four years. At the time, what was happening to me was extremely frightening. I was very battered on the inside and very cold on the outside.’’

Costello was an altar boy at St. Theresa’s in West Roxbury, and a predator in a Roman collar named John Cotter routinely molested him. Cotter would follow him into the pool and put his hands down his swim trunks.

“On the inside, I was dead,’’ Costello wrote to the pope.

Costello felt a shame he could share with no one. He started stealing drinks from his grandfather’s liquor cabinet.

“I think it was the first time I really wanted to die,’’ he wrote to the pope. “I was both physically and mentally raped of everything I knew. My world was dark.’’

He urged the pope to confront the evil in his midst as surely as he spoke out about the evils of communism and totalitarianism.

“What I can’t understand is all of the silence by the Catholic Church,’’ he wrote to the man who was in charge of that church. “This priest admitted what he did. The Church knows he abused sexually, spiritually and mentally many children. He was transferred to another parish where he continued to sexually abuse children.’’

He begged the pope for an audience.

“By us sitting down together you could help the healing process for thousands of people. I would not take up much of your time and it would mean so much to countless others that the pastoral responsibilities of the Catholic Church were making a comeback.’’

Bob Costello never did hear back from the pope, and today in a ceremony in Rome that will put that little wedding in London to shame, the dead pope will be beatified, one step away from sainthood.

“You would think that the institutional church would have learned, would have been sensitive to the thousands and thousands of victims and survivors out there,’’ Bob Costello told me yesterday. “But by making John Paul a saint, and by rushing the process so blatantly, I think it’s pretty clear that the leaders of the church still don’t get it. They still think it’s all about them, not about the ordinary people, not about those who have suffered.’’

There is no doubt John Paul was a great man. He was also a flawed man who presided over a church that was guilty of one of the biggest institutional coverups of criminal activity in history. The pope being rushed to sainthood failed thousands of children and in doing so failed his church and his God.

Nine years before Bob Costello wrote that unanswered letter to the pope, a great priest and canon lawyer at the Vatican named Tom Doyle delivered to the pope a clarion call for action. Priests were raping children all over the world with impunity, Doyle’s report found, and the church risked losing its collected fortune and its collective soul unless the pope did something about it.

Like Bob Costello’s letter, Tom Doyle’s report was ignored.

“Hundreds of thousands of lives were ruined because this pope looked the other way, and now they are falling over themselves to make him a saint,’’ Father Doyle said. “It is self-serving, and it is counterproductive, more evidence that the people who run the church don’t understand that these very actions are driving people from the church. It mystifies me. And when I think of the survivors of sexual abuse, it saddens and angers me.’’

Barry Bonds, the greatest home run hitter of all time, is now considered a cheat who will probably be denied entry into the Hall of Fame. Pope John Paul II is now just one step from entering his church’s hall of fame.

“Major League Baseball has higher standards than the Vatican,’’ Father Doyle said. “And that’s not saying much for Major League Baseball.’’

Out in Western Massachusetts, another great priest named Jim Scahill was on the phone, talking about the lack of humility so evident in the Vatican’s rush to beatify John Paul. Scahill sat with and comforted dozens of victims of sexual abuse. He forced his bishop to defrock one abuser, and then exposed that bishop, Thomas Dupre, as an abuser, too.

Father Scahill was debating whether to talk about the beatification today during his homily at St. Michael’s Church in East Longmeadow.

“I think the kindest thing I could do is not mention it,’’ he said. “The rush to make this man a saint is abhorrent and arrogant. He did accomplish a lot as pope. But to beatify someone who didn’t protect children is a travesty, a continuation of the coverup that damaged the church so much. The money that is going to be spent on this is a disgrace. And in all their pomp and circumstance, the people who run the Vatican are revictimizing the survivors.’’

Some people want John Paul to be the patron saint of Poland.

Tom Doyle, the good priest who was ignored by the pope, has a better idea.

“John Paul,’’ he said, “should be the patron saint of looking the other way.’’

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com

Congruity

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself.

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

~Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1892

Presence

Don't touch me! Don't question me! Don't speak to me! Stay with me! - Samuel Beckett

Borges

"I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart,

I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat."
— Jorge Luis Borges

Saturday morning thought ...

apostles creed on Baybayin

Astounding to me, yet no longer surprising, are the lengths to which we humans will go to step outside of the complex yet simple experience of being human ... by creating systems of belief and worship, always with the promise of a better life, a truer meaning of life, the change of our lives.

Into what?

We reduce wonder into measurable creeds that we can export, call people to, and most importantly, sell, turn into profit. Doesn't matter what shape or color of religion, philosophy, metaphysical science, provable or speculative.

At what price do we trade the mystery of watching an ant scale a blade of grass?

~ zjm

Perspective

This Morning

by Raymond Carver

This morning was something. A little snow
lay on the ground. The sun floated in a clear
blue sky. The sea was blue, and blue-green,
as far as the eye could see.
Scarcely a ripple. Calm. I dressed and went
for a walk -- determined not to return
until I took in what Nature had to offer.
I passed close to some old, bent-over trees.
Crossed a field strewn with rocks
where snow had drifted. Kept going
until I reached the bluff.
Where I gazed at the sea, and the sky, and
the gulls wheeling over the white beach
far below. All lovely. All bathed in a pure
cold light. But, as usual, my thoughts
began to wander. I had to will
myself to see what I was seeing
and nothing else. I had to tell myself this is what
mattered, not the other. (And I did see it,
for a minute or two!) For a minute or two
it crowded out the usual musings on
what was right, and what was wrong -- duty,
tender memories, thoughts of death, how I should treat
with my former wife. All the things
I hoped would go away this morning.
The stuff I live with every day. What
I've trampled on in order to stay alive.
But for a minute or two I did forget
myself and everything else. I know I did.
For when I turned back i didn't know
where I was. Until some birds rose up
from the gnarled trees. And flew
in the direction I needed to be going.

Che Guevara's motorcycle companion, Alberto Granado, dies at 88

Alberto Granado, close friend of Che Guevara. Photograph: Javier Galeano/AP

Argentinian Alberto Granado, who travelled with Ernesto "Che" Guevara on a journey of discovery across Latin America that was immortalised on-screen in The Motorcycle Diaries, has died in Cuba aged 88.

Their road trip awoke in Guevara a social consciousness and political convictions that would turn him into one of the iconic revolutionaries of the 20th century.

The two travellers both kept diaries, which were used as background for the 2004 movie, produced by Robert Redford and directed by Walter Salles. Granado was born on 8 August 1922 in Córdoba, Argentina, and befriended Guevara as a child. As young medical students, they witnessed deep poverty across the continent, particularly Chile, Columbia, Peru and Venezuela, and their stay at a Peruvian leper colony left a lasting impression on the pair.

They parted ways in Venezuela, where Granado stayed on to work at a clinic treating leprosy patients. Guevara continued on to Miami, then returned to Buenos Aires to finish his studies.

Guevara would later join Fidel and Raul Castro in toppling the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista on New Year's Day in 1959.

Granado visited Cuba at Guevara's invitation in 1960 and moved to Havana the following year, teaching biochemistry at Havana University. He had lived in Cuba ever since.

In his biography of Guevara, Jon Lee Anderson wrote that Granado was "barely five feet tall and had a huge beaked nose, but he sported a barrel chest and a footballer's sturdy bowed legs; he also possessed a good sense of humor and a taste for wine, girls, literature and rugby".

According to Cuban television, Granado requested for his body to be cremated and his ashes spread in Cuba, Argentina and Venezuela. Funeral arrangements have not been announced.

Guevara was captured and killed by soldiers in Bolivia in 1967 as he tried to foment revolution in the Andean nation.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

American 'King's Speech'