The Human Machine vs. The Human Garden

Popular Psychology, the kind practiced by most people, sees the Human Mind as a machine. We have buttons that get pushed, triggers that get pulled, or whatever else that might get our pistons going. It is often our excuse. “You caused me to lose my temper!” As I have grown older, I find the analogy fails. It fails primarily in it's effectiveness in our relationships. We often hear people describe themselves as "incompatible" as if each was a piece of hardware. It's an easy way to remove culpability from either party. The truth is that the situation is always much more messy because the situation is much more organic. Instead, we should think of the Human Mind in terms of a garden. To be sure, each mind is fertile for certain weeds just as it is fertile for certain flowers. Therefore a mind is not a thing to be “fixed” but a thing to be tended. When the weeds of corruption grow, we can’t look for a broken gear. We have to look for our gloves. We have to tear them out. Sometimes the weeds overcome us. Sometimes we become lazy and let them grow. Sometimes we deny they are weeds at all and promote their growth. But the analogy holds. My love for my wife has been a tree in my garden for many years. Before I knew it, weeds were all around that Tree of Love and I dealt with them the best way I knew how. I did not know what I was doing. I often thought of it more as an act of the will or a wall holding back the oceans that threatened to drown us. At times, when the walls were cracking and the floods were threatening, I could only invoke Kipling’s words and say,

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

knowing, as Kipling said, that this is what it meant to be a man. It still is. What I wish I had known from the beginning was that the oceans and armies were of my own making. I wish that I had known that it wasn’t the world that threatened us. It was the weeds. I realize that sometimes we make it look easy, and when that tree is strong, it really is. Try not to read into this any extraordinary marital problems. We have our share but not as bad as some. However, would be a lie to say that it is always easy. And what’s more it wasn’t easy because I let the tree be covered in vines. Sometimes it seemed like it might actually topple. But they were my vines. I always had the power to tear them out by the roots. I do not say I had the power to eradicate them. I am fertile ground. But I should have always kept them in check. At the first shoot I should have torn them out. Now I know. And what do we do when the ground is dusty, the good plants are turning brown and our crops of fruits are threatened? We do what every good gardener does. We pray for rain. And that is how I have finally come to understand what Grace is. Let it rain.

Forgiveness: Hurting Together

Forgiveness is a tricky thing. It’s a difficult thing to do and there’s a lot of misunderstanding when it comes to defining it. Like Charity (because it is a kind of Charity) it violates our sense of Justice. It involves giving someone something that doesn’t belong to them. It’s part of the reason why we have trouble owning our trespasses. When I offend my brother or sister, however unintentional, I do not deserve their love.


Another side of the coin is that on some level forgiveness requires co-suffering. We cannot merely forget the offenses made against us. That is simply impossible. We cannot pretend that it wasn’t an offense. That is dishonest. We cannot seek to understand and empathize with it. That only excuses very real grievances and condones evil. We must stand in the full storm of ours and their own pain and decide that we love them anyway. We want them anyway. We will give ourselves to them anyway. It is the only kind of forgiveness that actually heals. This is not to say that we should not empathize with each other and understand one another’s weaknesses. Nor does it mean that at some point we should not begin to forget. It means that first it has to be owned.

Today’s Gospel reading was that of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32). My spiritual father pointed out that this story was first told in a culture far different from we hear in modern America. The cultural context insists on a “Communal” understanding of the forgiveness extended by the father. In forgiving and welcoming his son, he shared in his disgrace and humiliation. In charity, we share in our brother’s poverty and are enriched. In forgiveness, we share in our brother’s shame and we are both redeemed. This may be a somewhat simplistic way to understand forgiveness and only applies to a specific situation (i.e. the offender seeks forgiveness) but I find it useful in my life at this moment and wished to share. God bless.

Abortion Is Now Safe

Today, while scrolling through my Facebook, I discovered an article from Huffington Post by a gentleman named David A. Grimes, author of Every Third Woman in America: How Legal Abortion Transformed Our Nation. The title, Deniers of Science: The Anti-Vaccination and Anti-Abortion Movements, raised an eyebrow. Upon opening and reading it I could not pass up the opportunity to unpack and parade the ignorance, arrogance, and erroneous contents.

For one, the Anti-vaccination and Anti-abortion movements are two different things in kind and substance. The Anti-vaccination movement is a complex social movement with a variety of motivations and players, but the most reasonable position that can be distilled from the movement is as follows: Vaccines contain chemicals which are bad for people and the war on disease has been mostly won, therefore the risk of vaccination outweighs the benefit. I am in agreement with Mr. Grimes concerning the error of both premises. Vaccines have been shown to be safer than peanut butter and disease is not eradicated but only held in check.  We do forget the horror of disease.

Then Mr. Grimes makes a jump so huge, so mind bogglingly fantastic that I have trouble believing it even exists. He asserts that the Anti-Abortion Movement is fueled by the same sort of ignorance as the Anti-Vaccination movement. Here he associates “Fraud, Celebrity, and Apathy” with “Junk Science, Patriarchal Dogma, and Apathy”. A reasonable assertion if it weren’t complete rubbish.

Junk Science

            The Anti-abortion Movement is not based on science (gasp). It’s based on definitions. What is the result of the combination of a human sperm and egg? A human being. Even when that combination fails and miscarriage follows we are still discussing the advent of a human being. While the movement may, on its fringes, grab onto whatever junk science may support the end result of convincing everyone else of this basic fact is as irrelevant as all the junk science Abortion proponents use to try to set some arbitrary point at which it becomes a human being, whether it is at 8 weeks or 8 months. At the end of the day it is nowhere near a scientific question. It is a philosophical question. What is a Human Being?

Patriarchal Dogma

            What. The. Heck. Whether it is Patriarchy, Matriarchy, Oligarchy, Plutarchy, Anarchy, or whatever archy is irrelevant to the question of whether Abortion is a moral positive.  Dogma is here used in the pejorative with the obvious ignorance of the fact that he is invoking his own. It seems to be a dogma of Mr. Grimes’ that dogmas that are held by Patriarchal philosophies are inherently baseless and backward. Patriarchy is, simply, the authority of the father. Matriarchy is the authority of the mother. At the base of either is the authority of the family. Both are opposed to abortion because they are proponents of the family and abortion is opposed to the family. All questions are ultimately religious questions and here Grimes gives us his answer. Religious definitions have no relevance whatsoever.

Apathy

            Grimes asserts that opponents of abortion are naïve about the days of unsafe, illegal abortion. He asserts that before Roe vs Wade, the state of abortion was just awful. In his words:

Again, apathy derives from naiveté; many adults today did not live through the "bad old days" of unsafe abortion. Legal abortion has become a victim of its own success, and our nation has become complacent as a result. An entire generation of Americans has grown up unaware of the danger of unsafe abortion.

            I doubt that Grimes has any wish to understand the position of us Patriarchal Dogmatists on the matter, but I invite the reader to replace every instance of “abortion” with “theft”, “heroin abuse”, or “rape” and see how it reads. In fact, I invite him to insert the word “murder” because that’s what we hear when we hear the word “abortion”.

Progressive Dogma

            We religious folks are familiar with the terms “Providence” and “Prophecy”. We accept them because we believe in a Power that governs such things. Our dogmas are relative to each other and find their foundation in a Prime Source. Progressive dogma is without foundation because there is no reason to believe we are marching into a brighter future. Who will cause it? Mr. Grimes has the audacity to speculate that the fashions that he happens to be caught up in today will be seen as the shining milestones of Progress in tomorrow’s history books. Eugenics was supposed to be the same thing by now. Abortion is the Holocaust of our day. This fashion cannot become a faux pas soon enough.

The Hidden Message

            What I have allowed and played along with, but will now dismiss, in this response is Mr. Grimes’ use of the term “Anti-Abortion”. Are we now presupposing that pro-abortion is the default and that its opponents are in a negative “movement”? No. Pro Life is not a movement. It is a moral and philosophical assertion. It is the default position.