I am feeling discombobulated, lost, frustrated and great grief. We have a huge gaping wound that is going to kill us if we do not address it. The dominant culture of the US cannot ignore, marginalize, and discount this wound any longer. I speak of specifically of the nine AME church members who were shot in their house of worship. This is nothing more than homegrown terrorism which comes out of this gaping wound in our collective US unconscious. The gunman said he wanted to start a race war. The race war began when Settlers came to the US and it has never ended. The dominant culture has just become adept at the psychological games in order to subvert the conscious addressing of these wars. What happens to a people, when all places of safety are taken away? The streets are not safe. The systems in place to protect are not safe. Places where one works are not safe. Houses of worship, one of the last sanctuaries, and most attacked symbols, are not safe. Many of my activist friends who are black Americans can no longer speak. They are numb with fear. They are experiencing PTSD. They are fearing for their children and grandchildren and no longer have words of comfort for them. I no longer have words of solidarity or comfort as words have become useless when people are dying.
I say all this to point to where I currently reside. I say all of this to ask where are we as depth psychology professionals who are wanting to take depth into the streets? Are we ignoring this gaping wound while representing the dominant culture? We, I, say we want to be more activist and here is an opportunity and yet, I have no ideas on what it would look like, what it mean, to take depth psychology to the streets to address and work with the massacre of nine humans- mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, children, friends- who where worshipping in a sacred place. I am at a loss, yet I feel called to say we must address this as a board and as individuals. These murders cannot be placed into the realm of "shit happens" or any other rock that these acts of racial violence over the years have been hidden under.
I also have some anger at myself for not knowing, for not having ideas on how I, and how we, can, might, should, come into action. And, I do have some fear about exposing myself to others when I am feeling raw and emotional. But, all I know is that my silence is not an option, our silence is not an option.
I say this all to engage, to connect, to have discourse, to have action with my fellow board members, my friends, my colleagues. Where do we go from here?
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Jesse - Thanks for posting this. For me, the most important thing we can do now is to honestly grieve - both the present and the past, and feel the depths of the loss. To “…stand next to the victims and weep.”
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“If you presume that your suffering gives you the right to do evil to someone else, you negate any beneficial effects in your own soul brought about by your suffering.
“For me, the way to work through the past is to stand next to the victim and weep, without attacking the perpetrator. Crying is humble, and no one is attacked. That’s a completely different attitude from saying, ‘Look at the terrible thing you’ve done!’ Such accusations are unjust, presumptuous, and, above all, not helpful” (Hellinger and Hovel, 1999, p. 132).
Hellinger, B, Hovel, G. (1999). Acknowledging What Is: Conversations With Bert Hellinger. Phoenix, AZ: Zeig Tucker & Theisen.
This, as usual, is a complicated topic; what else would one expect when the word "depth" is used? As I see it, the world is not safe, and it never has been, and it never will be as long as duality exists. Every mythology is rife with terrifying monsters, demons, villains, hells and wars galore. The great mythic and spiritual works are always about war: the Bhagavad Gita, the Iliad, the Bible, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars--to name a few of the most prominent. The Chinese summarize their cosmology in a circle that is half light and half night. The Egyptians make it clear that Ma'at, the goddess of order, has no purpose without Isfet, the personification of sheer evil. The Joker makes it clear that he will never kill the Batman because that would eliminate his reason for being. John Keats, dying of tuberculosis at the age of 25, called this world the "vale of soul-making" a "necessary...World of Pains and troubles..to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!" Hillman describes soul, in part, "as the autonomous ability to create morbidity and suffering," calling pathologizing a necessary tool for making souls. The world is not safe, and never will be.
I suppose the question is this: "Is the violence and chaos purposeful or not?" -- you know, Einstein's reference to the most important decision a person can make is whether or not the cosmos is fundamentally friendly or hostile. I see it as both, but ultimately hostile, yet purposeful. Two weeks before my 25 year old son was shot and killed in Afghanistan he sent me a letter that said in part: "Dad, if I am killed, I do not place ultimate blame on the man who kills me or any government; for all I know, the man who shoots me is doing what he deems best from his current life view." This is soul-making. To think that we humans are somehow going to community organize, socially activate, politically legislate or morally coerce people into Utopia reveals a fundamental ignorance of this "vale of soulmaking".
Now, does that mean apathy or acquiescence in the face of evil like ISIS, or lone wolf acts of terror by white or black racists (home grown if you please) against their designated enemies, or school shooters, or corrupt business persons, or lying politicians etc.? Of course not. And Jesse's soul-making grief genuinely poured out in this forum is an important piece of the larger psycho-spiritual tapestry. I am moved by his passionate response. Soul moves us off of our uninvolved duffs. We must do all we can to actively explore and address these problems. I believe that at the core of our humanity we intuitively know that we are made for unity, fulfillment and joy. There is an archetypal Utopian telos--a field of communal consciousness-- that we intuit to be the goal of this soul-making journey. However, the acts of terror producing grief and outrage may activate reflection, debate, discussion,, et. al. These awful experiences and responses are just as necessary as we develop toward that paradisiacal goal at the end of soul-making. Souls are made in the crucible of disintegration and reintegration. Our gaping emotional wounds are like the comets that hit the surface of the barren earth--terrible catastrophes that supplied the planet with life giving water. My son's death at the hands of a jihadist was the most horrible experience of my life--and together Jason and I went deeper than either of us ever dreamed of going, sometimes together.
I thank God (and/or the Gods) that we Americans live in a nation where we can freely run off in our disparate soul-making directions--left, right, up, down--to FOX news or MSNBC, to a glass of wine or a journal entry--and let the different factions openly and freely fight over the big archetypal ideas. Keats says that this messy conflictual process exists "for the purpose of forming the Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity...[because] As various as the Lives of Men are--so various become their Souls, and thus does God make individual beings..."
Lastly, my biggest fear these days is the gradual loss of freedom. I fear that "social activism" is sometimes doublespeak for silencing the opposition, for forcing a new moral and cultural agenda on the old outdated system. I see much of the current partisan rhetoric as a large part of the problem--resorting to epithets of "racist," "sexist," "Islamophobic," "homophobic," "right wing whacko," "left wing Communist," etc. to shut down the conversations before they begin. The quickest way to draw the whackjobs ouf of the woodwork is to ridicule and silence them. Let the bigots speak. Let them be seen for what they are--left or right. Let them force us to think and feel without resorting to pharaceuticals or labels of ridicule. The Founders of this nation noted that all of the past Greco-Roman Republics failed because they focused on silencing all dissenters. Seeing that this didn't work, they decided to allow free speech and religious expression, the freedom of press and assemblies, etc. to keep the factions out in the open, meeting freely, debating their ideas in order to keep the disaffected from going underground and forming one large anti-governmental revolutionary party. More and more of us are not speaking out for fear of being labeled, dismissed or ridiculed as some "ism". In the past months a variety of books have hit the shelves, written largely by progressives, warning of this new censorship. Bruce Bawer, the gay journalist who moved to Europe to marry his male partner released The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closi.... Liberal journalist Kirsten Powers just published The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech. Steven Pinker wrote an article for the Boston Globe titled "Why free speech is fundamental," taking on the current trend of banning college commencement speakers. Pope Francis was praised for saying that, “you cannot make fun of the faith of others”? The President recently said in a speech at Georgetown University that, “we’re going to have to change how our body politic thinks, which means we’re going to have to change how the media reports on these issues.” Really? You want more terrorism? Force people to report the issues in the "appropriate manner" and the covert acts of violence will escalate. These assaults on free speech ought to terrify people on the left and the right, or middle. Nuf from me.
Thanks Jesse for moving us to engagement, aka soul-making.
Thank you, Jesse, for starting this heartfelt and important post, and to Mark and Michael for responding.
Question for all of us: Posts about this topic are all over social media, yet there is not a single one in the Forum on the Alliance. Why do you think that is...and what can we do about it? In this case, the topic is already "in the streets"--yet not, apparently in the ivory towers of this institution, such as it is. How can the Alliance be an "activist" site when the discussions don't take place?....
Mark, love your idea to open the conversation tomorrow to this. Does everyone agree?
Thank you Jesse. It does feel impossible to be talking about action and taking depth to the streets without responding to this horrific cry from the streets, from our most public and symbolic home of spirit, community, peace, and of course soul--a church. Opening space in the call tomorrow for working with this waking dream and nightmare to an international community of depth oriented individuals could offer some threads of understanding and healing.