This note I wrote to a good friend is in the first place about the Terry Gross npr interview with Elaine Pagels on her memoir Why Religion? But it is really about the issue we keep running into when we examine current political matters -- our inability to see a likely way out of the impending disasters of climate change, pollution and great-powers conflict or the implosion of US civil society and governance due to the ever-rising belligerence levels of our citizenry as well as out leaders. We see causes, but we don't see cures that feel at all practical or likely. We keep concluding that it's hopeless.
Lately, he and I have come to use the expression "moral injury" to describe this condition of ours. We take that from the book And Then Your Soul is Gone: Moral Injury and U.S. War-culture by Kelly Denton-Borhaug:
Note to Friend
I'm thinking aloud about the news article I intend to send with this. I'm using my tablet right now. I want to incorporate the thinking of Elaine Pagels and Tara Brach with my own to help me get to grips with this piece of troubling news and all the rest.
The news as reported by the New York Post is that "An outspoken critic of transgender athletes in women's sports, Riley Gaines, was viciously mobbed and allegedly attacked after giving a speech Thursday night at San Francisco State University."
There is also news this morning of yet another clubbing attack, on what you and I might think of as a regular person in a decent neighborhood of San Francisco by a derelict or homeless person. I say yet another because yesterday it was a wealthy young Silicon Valley type in the same city and I think an even posher neighborhood who was stabbed and killed on the street.
This makes me think of Marjorie Taylor Greene's Alex-Jones style intoxicated speech in her interview with Leslie Stahl. Just a few more button pushes and she'll be swinging a club like those folks on January 6th. Some down and outers may have more buttons and take fewer pushes to blow up and strike out with crowbars. But I dunno...
I take these incidents to be a fine-grain manifestation of the larger picture, where we see the threat of nuclear war and global warming darkening over a landscape of widespread unemployment and indecent distribution of wealth and dignity.
The thing is it seems hopeless. You and I have been here many a time. It feels like an unmanned cruise ship careening along an ever-swifter river towards a catastrophic brink.
I like that image. It's accurate.
But I don't like the way it makes me feel. Helpless.
I feel a deep sense of loss. The world I live in is completely wrong. I have lost the right world I should be living in. And there's nothing to be done about it. It's over.
I see a complete parallel here between my situation with loss and Elaine Pagel's when she looks at first the death of her 6-year-old boy and then a year later the accidental death of her lovely husband falling on a mountain climb in Colorado.
It is simply not right. The death of one boy, one child ,,, all right, but within a year the accidental death also of the husband. This is not the right world. Elaine Pagels lives in deep loss and her situation is hopeless. She is helpless to do anything about it.
In this situation she feels guilty. Strange isn't it? Here's what she says about the loss of her child even before she lost her husband. I think it applies also to us.
I felt just in agony of course ... and yet there was nothing we could do. That sense of helplessness was almost intolerable. And I realized that I felt guilty about it. And yet at a certain critical point ... I realized that the guilt was only masking something much deeper and much more painful than guilt. And what it was masking was the fact that we were helpless, that there was nothing we could do. We had no input. As long as I felt guilty, I felt, well, at least it's my fault where I have some agency in something that matters more to me than my own life. But if I have no agency, I mean, that's almost intolerable. And I realized that I'd rather feel guilty than helpless. It's a choice I made unconsciously. And I think many people do because the feeling that we can't do anything and we have no input is more than we can bear.
Pagels mentions anger later, and that seems to be where most people are today when they look around at this situation and see their version of what you and I see. People feel anxiety and also sometimes anger, less guilt I think. And notice that the core of it which she comes to at the end of her thinking is helplessness. At least by letting ourselves unconsciously convert that helplessness to a strong emotion, we can feel again some sense of the agency that in our hearts we know we have lost. This is how denial is so often at the core of our being.
It is like death. We are helpless to do anything about death. And I am thinking of the theologian Paul Tillich, who says that everyone has a religion; it is their response to the fact of their death. Guilt fear anger, these are notable responses people have to the many hopeless situations they can find themselves in. And the thought rings true to me that these responses are an unconscious way we have of fighting for agency.
It is also like the stories we tell ourselves. I always think of Alex Jones waving his arms in self-intoxicating rage about the cover up in Sandy Hook. These are not conspiracy theories. They are self-serving delusional stories that help us deal with our various and different senses of personal loss and hopelessness. Forms of denial. But they arise, they all arise out of the same place that Elaine Pagel's guilt arose from -- our very deepest sense of hopelessness.
Of course Pagel finds her answer after her husband dies, her answer to that helplessness, in a Trappist monastery in Colorado where she meditates and feels in their ritual a healing communion of caring..
This is the opposite of denial. It is a radical acceptance and discovery of something other. Something other than the reality one had supposed.
Such relief is not a matter of belief but of experience or discovery. It is, you might say, religion in the sense of Tillich. And this is why religion.
Look at the two passages from the Gnostic Gospels that she mentions in this interview with Terry Gross. First, "Jesus says if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you; if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."
What she brought forth was the denial that underlay her guilt. She radically accepted her situation. (A Tara Brach idea. Maybe the basic one.)
The other quotation she uses relates to her experience of meditation with the Trappists. "I am the light that is before all things. I am all things. All things come forth from me. All things return to me. Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up a rock, and you will find me."
About this she says "Now this is powerful - you might call it mystical teaching about the unity of the world coming from a Divine energy before the beginning of time."
It's either that or living the stories we tell ourselves in denial.
