[Dialogue] 3/24/2022, Progressing Spirit: Gretta Vosper: Journaling to Ourselves; Spong revisted
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Mar 24 08:46:03 PDT 2022
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Journaling to Ourselves
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| Essay by Rev. Gretta Vosper
March 24, 2022
Left Behind
Following my mom’s death, I became the keeper of several of her journals. I’ve not yet had the courage to read them. Maybe it’s because they seem too personal. Or maybe I’m afraid of finding out what she really thought of me, or how I may have hurt her with my too-busy life and consequent inattentiveness. In any case, receiving them drove me to make a serious commitment: burn your diaries before you die. You don’t want any evidence left behind.
History Saved Through the Day to Day
Journals have long been an important part of our lives and a door into the lives of others. Consider some of the best known which have been published in book form. Powerful wartime reflections: The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank, and her contemporary’s, A Girl's Life in the Siege of Leningrad by the lesser-known teenager, Lena Mukhina. The latter is a tale of sudden hardship that may soon be repeated in a Russia shunned by the world. Mark Twain’s, The Innocents Abroad is a travelogue more than a diary, but very much worth the knee-slapping read. (His Letters from Earth is definitely not a diary but another rollicking bit of fun that is totally worth your time.) Charles Wesley’s journals cover the work he and his brother, John, undertook to spread the gospel both in England and further afield. Some of what Charles wrote about the period the brothers spent in America, however, was written in code and only recently deciphered using the King James Bible as a cipher. What Charles wrote in code was that he had serious problems shaking rumours of sexual indiscretions and suffered not insignificant arguments with his brother. Charles fled back to England within a few months only to have the rumours continue to dog him. Many presidential memoirs are, no doubt, based on diaries of a sort. Recently, we’ve been able to peek into the lives of both Barack and Michelle Obama. And, of course, it’s worth mentioning that Donald J. Trump’s presidential memoir came in the form of a coffee table photo diary, Our Journey Together. There is no end to the interesting comparisons you can make there.
I have never kept a diary for any length of time. I’ve purchased so many beautiful, empty books over the years that were to become diaries and hold my deepest thoughts and darkest worries. But nothing ever took beyond a page or two. I was too busy, I told myself. Or couldn’t think of anything profound enough to dignify by writing it down. (Once, I even bought ugly, cheap notebooks so that I could get over that last hurdle. Still didn’t help.) Maybe I was bored with myself or exhausted. Or maybe I was too afraid that I might get offed by a bus one day before I’d had a chance to burn my most humiliating entries. I don’t know. The whole diary thing just never got off the ground. So now, I have a lot of beautiful, and a few ugly, empty books, the first page or four torn out, awaiting something. Anything.
A Different Daily Log
Three years ago, I started a different kind of journal and I’m completely surprised that I have filled three books and am on my fourth. Really! Amazing, eh? It’s not about my thoughts, though. It’s about the things for which I am grateful. A gratitude journal. Something I don’t worry will be left behind if that bus catches up with me.
I pick the book up each night, just as I’m ready to go to sleep, put on some gentle music and consider my day from a positive point of view. Somewhere, I picked up the idea that writing three things down was a significant goal, so that’s what I started with that. When I mentioned my intention to a friend, they wondered if I wouldn’t quickly run out of things to say. Although I’m certain I’ve repeated myself many times, usually there have been more things I’ve wanted to record than the three slots I allow myself. So much so that I decided about a year in to add another section: WWW. What Went Well.
WWW was inspired by a teacher on Insight Timer, the meditation app that I use. Having already started the process of writing down what I was grateful for, moving into writing about what went well seemed to be a good addition. Sometimes the WWW is about having successfully wrestled through a big problem. Sometimes it’s about getting in some exercise. Sometimes it is about just surviving the day. That’s all. And that’s enough. Only once have I ever written “Nothing”. And that day, it was absolutely true. But for every day other than that one, even the days I’d normally have screamed, “Nothing’s gone right today!”, I’ve been able to find something that went well and been grateful for it. I used to go to bed thinking about all the things that I still needed to do. Now I think about what went well.
And, about a year ago, I added another section, this being a less specific thing for which I am grateful. Something broader than “The movie ‘Ladies in Black’”. Last night it was “The promise of Spring”. Other times “Poetry”, “The feel of water”, “Climate change resistors”. There are always more things to write down.
The Dark Side
With three years of experience with gratitude, I’ve embarked on another aspect of the journaling project. This one follows from my reading of Matt Haig’s novel The Midnight Library. The midnight library is a place between life and death where all the lives that might have been for a person, every life that, had a different decision been made, would have spun off from the life that has been led in real time - and there are possibilities for innumerable different decisions in every single day – is written out in a book. The library is filled with thousands and thousands of books about the lives that might have been lived by a single person. The protagonist, Nora Seed, finds herself in the library in the moment between life and death and has the chance to choose another book to enter a different life and see if that one would be more worth living. Before she can choose, however, she must read one book, a book that is different from all the others: The Book of Regrets.
You know where I’m going because you’ve been there at least once or twice in your life. You and I and everyone else, except those identified as sociopaths, have regrets. We’ve made mistakes. We intentionally and unintentionally made decisions that weren’t in our or others’ best interests. We been hurt by our decisions. We’ve hurt others. We live with regret, if not every day, at least some of the time.
Over this past year, as my health has taken me to very challenging places, I have sat in those places of regret and allowed them to overwhelm me. It’s not a pretty place, believe me. But it was a place that, at those times, I needed to be. Too often, we flee from regret and avoid it at all costs. Our world, our faith, our belief system, brings us hope over and over again, but more and more, we can grab the hope and avoid the condemnation. Yes, we can access Catholic Confession and Absolution, participate in the Prayers of Confession and Assurance of Pardon offered in many traditional Protestant churches, release our anxieties through emotive self-condemnation in evangelical choruses, or experience the atonement of Yom Kippur though the Jewish tradition, among others. But we rarely face the remorse that we have woven deep into our hearts and, for the most part, hidden there. As the world becomes increasingly secular, even these traditions fade, and regret is no longer attended to as it has been in the past.
I believe this absence of a normalized process for attending to regret is the loss of a significant element of our wholeness, of coming together of out severed pieces into one, the good and the bad, the joy-filled and the suffering. Riven by injustices, bad choices, resentments, callous decisions, our hearts need the healing that our traditions once made available; indeed, the practise of attending to our errors was prescribed.
Attending to regrets will not be an evening, just before bed, undertaking. It needs reflection, engagement, time, and deep appreciation for its reality. My hope is that, as I explore my regrets, they will become normalized. Not in the sense of not worth notice. In the sense of, “This, I recognize. This, I can address. This, I can lift from my heart, hold, attend to, come to understand.” Regret is a part of me as it is a part of you. Finding ways to acknowledge our mistakes, forgive our complicities, release the bloated self-blame we’ve hung onto is important. Just as, if not more important than a regular attentiveness to that for which we are grateful.
Room for Regret
I am so convinced of this need to be present to our regrets that I am beginning to form the concept for a project I’m calling Room for Regret. My intention is to invite others to record their regrets, moving through the process of attention, understanding, and forgiveness or atonement, and to allow me to collect them. Ultimately, I envision a physical and a virtual installation of the project, an ephemeral portrayal of the movement toward the grace we give ourselves, the witnessing of our own becoming whole. We evolve through the work we do in the course of our too-short and too-harried days. Embracing that for which we are grateful is our evolution toward joy. Witnessing to that which went well is our evolution toward self-worth. Acknowledging that which we regret is an evolution toward wholeness. These are the things that our faith traditions have offered us. These are the things we might learn to offer ourselves and others. And through these complex paths, might we find peace, ourselves, and one another.
If you would like to participate in the Room for Regret project, please contact me at room.for.regret at gmail.com.~ Rev. Gretta Vosper
Read online here
About the Author
The Rev. Gretta Vosper is a United Church of Canada minister who is an atheist. Her best-selling books include With or Without God: Why The Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe, and Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief. She has also published three books of poetry and prayers. Visit her website here. |
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Question & Answer
Q: By A Reader
There is chaos and confusion at the Ukraine border. Reports about racism distract the world’s focus on the Ukrainians’ hardship. Racism can’t be in every situation. Do you think it’s all a misunderstanding since patience and tempers would be short?
A: By Rev. Irene Monroe
Dear Reader,Russia has invaded Ukraine. European countries bordering Ukraine have welcomed its traumatized neighbors – an open-arm welcome in stark contrast with Black international students left out in below-freezing temperatures for days without life-saving humanitarian assistance. Ukrainian police and border security officials’ double standard demonstrate that Black lives don’t matter.
A deluge of footage and posts on social media show the mistreatment of Africans: taken off trains and told to walk to the border; chased back from the border in specific countries; hit by police armed with sticks as white Ukrainians were allowed entry; moved to the back of the line and told to wait; or simply flat-out told by border officials they were “not tending to Africans.”
Despite an order that all women and children are allowed to leave Ukraine, Black mothers, many of whom lived in Ukraine for years, were physically prevented from getting on trains and buses.
Poland might as well erect America’s classic Jim Crow “white only” placard, since its double standard toward Africans has been on full display. Polish nationalists have attacked Africans and made false claims of theft and crimes. “One group of Nigerian students having been repeatedly refused entry into Poland have concluded they have no choice but to travel again across Ukraine and attempt to exit the country via the border with Hungary,” according to a Twitter account representing the presidency of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The hashtag #AfricansInUkraine arose on Twitter to draw attention to the double-standard and mistreatment, because mainstream media hadn’t been covering the abuses.
Anti-Black racism is global. When wars erupt in European countries, African diaspora Blacks have difficulty being safe or getting back to their home country – especially if the country they are in is anti-America.
Russia’s Ukraine invasion helps the world see what our inhumanity toward each other looks like. Also, it highlights the persistence of a global racist social order even in a humanitarian crisis. Sadly, anti-Black racism will also be part of Ukraine's war narrative, because everyone has the right to cross international borders during a conflict, notwithstanding their religion or racial identity.~ Rev. Irene Monroe
Read and share online here
About the Author
The Reverend Monroe does a weekly Monday segment, “All Revved Up!” on NPR's WGBH (89.7 FM). She is a weekly Friday commentator on New England Channel NEWS. Monroe is the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail, Guided Walking Tour of Beacon Hill: Boston’s Black Women Abolitionists. A Huffington Post blogger and a syndicated religion columnist; her columns appear the Boston LGBTQ newspaper Baywindows, Cambridge Chronicle, and the Boston Globe.
Monroe states that her “columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American, queer and religious studies. As a religion columnist I try to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people.” Her papers are at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College’s research library on the history of women in America. Click here to visit her website. |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
“Think Different - Accept Uncertainty” Part VI:
Understanding the Source of Evil
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
March 15, 2012Bad theology is inevitable when it is based on bad anthropology! That is, the way we understand human life always determines the way we understand God. This becomes very clear when religious people begin to grapple with and to try to explain the source of evil.
One does not have to argue today about the reality of human evil. Stories documenting that reality find daily expression on the front pages of our newspapers and are the lead stories on all news telecasts. Though an evil presence is all but universally acknowledged, defining what constitutes evil can, however, still vary widely and explaining the source out of which evil flows has been a major debate throughout the ages. The source of evil has been portrayed in a variety of mythological ways. All people, however, seem to know intuitively that there is something deep in our lives, out of which hostile, spiteful, defensive and sometimes killing impulses flow. The depth of this reality oft times surprises us. It is as if it overwhelms our cultivated self image. Many of us are hesitant to own evil as something that is part of ourselves.
St. Paul, for example, saw evil as an external force that somehow held him in its grip. He explained its presence by saying, “It was sin, working death in me through what is good.” (Rom. 7:13). Later, but in a similar vein, he explained that when he knows what is evil and still chooses to do it: “It is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me” (Rom. 7:17).
In Persia, where the Jews first ran into a radical dualism that divided the whole of reality into two realms, one good, one evil, another definition was operating. Creation was a mixture of two competing and eternal powers, not just the beginning of God’s good world, as the biblical story of the Hebrews had maintained. Life was a mixture of good and evil, light and darkness, spirit and flesh and heaven and earth. This dualistic idea found a major place in the writings of Plato, who describes human beings after the analogy of a charioteer being drawn by a pair of horses, one representing the higher aspiration of the soul and the other representing the lower yearnings of the flesh. The task of the charioteer was to steer these competing forces so that the higher nature always led the lower.
Deep down in this theological divide that separated dualism from the biblical witness was their mutually exclusive images of God. For the dualists good and evil were equal divine forces contending for dominance. This counter force might be called the devil, Satan or evil, but it was portrayed as possessing a status equal to and independent of God. For the Jews, to whom God was both ultimate and one, evil was not an independent power, but a corruption of the original goodness of God’s creation. This Jewish conviction was expressed in the Shema, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one,” and it was grounded in the Commandments where it was written, “I am the Lord your God…You shall have no other Gods before me.” This meant that for the Jews evil had to be understood as a corruption of that which is good. So, in the Jewish tradition, Satan was not an independent creature, but a fallen angel cast out of heaven by God for leading a revolution against God and human life was not evil in its origins, but became evil through an act of disobedience that corrupted the goodness of God’s creation forever.
Although these ideas were present in the mythology of the Jewish stories of their origins, they did not get developed in a systematic way until the fourth century of the Common Era and then by the hand of the most significant Christian theologian in the first twelve hundred years of Christian history. His name was Augustine. He was the bishop of a North African town known as Hippo. Today he is canonized, both in fact and tradition, and is widely referred to as simply St. Augustine.
Augustine had an interesting personal history before he was converted to Christianity. Much of that history he has chronicled in a book called “The Confessions.” He was captured, he says, by “the lure of the flesh.” He had many lovers and lived with one of them long enough to father a son by her. He identified himself as a Manichean, which meant that he was a follower of Mani, a Middle Eastern dualist. Finally, however, inspired by the witness of his Christian mother, whose name was Monica, and under the influence of a Christian leader named Ambrose, he became a Christian and put his enormous intellectual gifts into the service of his newly-adopted faith. He assumed that it was his task as a Christian theologian to explain all mysteries. One of those mysteries to be explained was the source of evil in a world that Christians believed was created by a good God. To accomplish this task, he went to the scriptures of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which he believed, as the Christians of that day did, that these words were the “Word of God” and, therefore, that they held the key to the understanding of all things. Augustine knew nothing of the source or background of these scriptures, but assumed it was his job to mine them to discover ultimate truths.
In that sacred text Augustine found two quite different stories of creation side by side in the book of Genesis. They were actually written in two different eras about 500 years apart and under very different circumstances. He blended them, however, and used them as his starting place in the definition of evil. From the first story (Gen. 1:1-2:4a), he took the idea of the perfection of creation. This was the “seven day” story, which suggests that God, the source of all that is good, created out of nothing the earth, the sun, the moon and all forms of living things from plants, fish and birds to the “beasts of the field” and “every creeping thing that creeps upon the face of the earth.” Then late on the sixth day, to complete the act of creation, perhaps as its crown and jewel, God made human life. God made this human life both male and female, presumably as equal expressions of the divine image. To this newly minted couple God gave stewardship over all things and commanded them to be faithful and to multiply. This story ends with God pronouncing everything that God had made to be good. There was no dualism here between good and evil. All was good, all flesh, all desires, all creatures. Because creation was now complete it was assumed to be perfect. Nothing can be perfect if it is incomplete or still evolving.
Completeness was established in this narrative when it announced that on the seventh day of that first week, God rested from all the divine labors and thus established the Sabbath day of each week thereafter to be a day of rest for all creation.
This familiar narrative was a product of the period in Jewish history known as the Babylonian captivity, which would date it in the late 6th century BCE. It was written to accomplish two things. First, the writer, who was a member of a group we now refer to as “the priestly writers,” wanted to have a Jewish story of creation that could be placed as a contrast alongside the Babylonian story of creation. Second, this writer wanted to establish the peculiar Jewish Sabbath day custom as a defining mark of all Jewish people and to cause that practice to distinguish the Jews from all other people. The Jews must become, this author believed, people who refuse to work on the seventh day of the week and, in the separateness of that existence, keep themselves from losing their identity by intermingling and ultimately intermarrying with members of other ethnic groups. Only in a strictly observed separation could the continuity of the Jewish people be guaranteed and only in separation could they fulfill what was, they believed, their God-given vocation, namely to be the people through whom all the nations of the world will be blessed. That was their calling, their messianic role and their divine, historical destiny. This hymn of creation was designed to affirm the oneness of God, the goodness of creation and to justify the stance of separation in which their hope of survival as a people rested.
When this group of “priestly writers” later compiled the sacred scriptures of the Jews, an action that also took place in and following the Exile in the late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE, they placed this story of the earth’s beginnings as the first chapter of the first book of their sacred story, the first chapter of what they would later call “The Torah.” This meant that it had to push a much earlier story of creation into a secondary position.
That displaced story of creation, which was written some 400 to 500 years earlier, was much more primitive and reflected its more ancient origins. It was quite different and even quite contradictory when compared with the newcomer that now preceded it. In the first story, the creation of living things came in an orderly manner from plants to animals to human life. In the second story, the man was created first out of the dust of the earth and even after God had created a beautiful garden in which the man could live. Then came the creation of all the animals, which were designed to give the man companionship, and finally, when none of the animals seemed capable of meeting the man’s needs for companionship, God created the woman. The woman in this story was thus not coequal as in the earlier story. She was quite secondary, made out of the rib of the man. She was created to be the male helpmeet and support person. The man had the power to name her as he had named all the other animals, which meant that he had the power to control her. The names of this man and woman were Adam and Eve. The garden in which they lived was called the Garden of Eden. In both stories the perfection of creation was asserted, but how evil entered this paradise was yet to be told. The Jews would come down on the side of evil being the corruption of that which was good. St. Augustine would put these two stories together and make them the basis of his explanation of evil and just why it was that all human beings were corrupted, why they died and why they needed to be rescued and saved by an intervening deity. I will turn to that story next week.~ John Shelby Spong |
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