Wednesday December 7, 2016
The gulf between micro and macro
By Jim Taylor
Another year end, another statutory holiday, and so I’m under no obligation to deliver a column of 750 words focussed on current events to the local newspaper.
Like most of us, I find myself thinking back over the last year.
Certainly, if you lived in Syria, Yemen, Gaza, or either of the Sudans, it would not have been a good year. And perhaps not in the U.K. and the U.S.A, depending on your political alignment. In the news, too, famous people toppled like ten-pins.
But that’s the macro level. At the micro level, most people I know have had a pretty good year. Stock markets have soared to record levels. Employment has risen, if fractionally. Mortgage rates have stayed low. Even without autopilot features, cars have been getting better and better – economy models now have safety features you couldn’t get on luxury cars 20 years ago.
Here in Canada, we have a federal government that at least seems to operate from an ethical base. Some things move too fast for some, too slow for others. But it seems that we are going to have more humane legislation governing marijuana use; removal of bureaucratic blockage of safe injection sites; maybe even a more equitable system for voting. We already have something closer to satisfactory laws allowing the terminally and hopelessly ill to get medical assistance in dying.
Medical care and treatment have improved. My wife Joan currently benefits from chemotherapy that didn’t exist just 5 years ago.
And over the last year, we have given almost 40,000 desperate refugees a new home. Media reports claim they have integrated about as well as could be expected. It’s not easy, giving up everything you have known to start all over again.
The challenge for the coming year, it seems to me, is to reduce the disparity between the macro and micro perspectives.
On that theme, I think of an article distributed by CounterCurrents, an alternative news source out of India.
“Do not lose heart,” wrote Clarissa Pinkola Estés, a certified Jungian analyst with a doctorate in ethno-clinical psychology. (No, I don’t know what that means either, but I like what she says.)
“Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. It is not given to us to know which acts, or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good.
“What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take everyone on Earth to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up…”
If you’re interested, Ms. Estes best-known book is Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of The Wild Woman Archetype, which was on The New York Times’ best seller list for 145 weeks.
And if you’re interested in CounterCurrents, you can check it out at www.countercurrents.or, or write to editor Binu Matthew at editor@countercurrents.org
Happy New Year!
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Copyright © 2017 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.
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YOUR TURN
I’m giving primary space this issue to a letter from a woman whose own experiences make the points I wanted to make last Sunday much better than I did.
Valentina Gal wrote, “As you know, I am totally blind and have commented on several of your columns from the ‘blind’ point of view.
“I find the article about the brain-injured man, and others sensationalizing the disabled, to be a form of discrimination that is sanctioned by the general public. While I’m very grateful that there are supports and help for folks like me, these articles set the disabled apart as surely as do other forms of discrimination. For one thing, if you are Christian and wish to help, you help because Jesus says, “As you’ve done this to one of these, so you’ve done it for me.” We ought to help the less fortunate regardless of whether they have had an accident or not. By focusing on the most traumatic stories, we diminish the plight of those who have become disadvantaged slowly or by things that are not sensational. We, the disabled, when put on a pedestal for money raising efforts or inspiration, are not accepted when pictured this way. Rather we are still seen as the other, someone that no abled-bodied person wants to be. So whether on a pedestal such as your illustration for your column, or in a pit such as pity presents, the disabled person is perpetually the outsider.
“Many folks tell me that they are ‘amazed’ at what I do – everything from getting dressed in the morning, to ‘actually having a baby,’ to writing my book. What they don’t get is the very point of your article. That is, all of us, including the successful and the disadvantaged, can only live life by making one small step at a time. Each step takes us further down the path that unfolds as it will. Even the paths that seem amazing or wonderful are arrived at one little decision at a time.
“Some decisions don’t affect things much, but others, like my father’s decision to cross the Atlantic on a ship, do. Had my mother been allowed to stay in Belgium till after I was born, I would have had perfect vision. Her illness on the voyage caused my eyes to be deformed. However, I likely wouldn’t have had the opportunities and education that were provided for me by the Canadian government. I couldn’t afford such an education for my own children.
“In short, all of us have triumphs and tragedies to deal with. Some are visible and others are not. Nevertheless, no matter what we have to encounter, we all have to do it one decision at a time. And we all have to deal with each of them as their consequences dictate.”
Marion Loree got hooked by my central premise, that God can fail. “I have to disagree. God does not 'fail' -- God just is. I see God as the Life Force of the Universe that animates all things including people. What each of us does with our life is solely up to us. Unfortunately many things influence us for good or evil along our way.
"Every child born has the potential to become a Christ. What will 'make or break' each child is the circumstances they grow up in, what they are taught, and the influences of other people who directly affect them.
"''God' is the potential and possibility, the spark of good that lives within each of us and, when nurtured, frees us to become all that we can be. If every child were loved and nurtured and raised with the idea that they were (are) a special and beloved child of 'God', what a difference it would make in our world.”
Peter Scott didn’t like some elements of my Christmas message: “Your Christmas non-column includes some of the classic nonsense we humans keep telling ourselves, especially in the church, to help ourselves avoid the reality and the seriousness of our situation as a species. .. In a world with over 7 billion people, every one of those 353,000 daily births is another nail in the coffin of the human race. We, with our wonderful intelligence and our limitless arrogance, have decided that human life (in particular rich, white, western human life) is worth saving at any cost.
“What we fail to recognize is that balance, not life, is what is sacred. Life must be in balance with death. Death is not an enemy or a mistake or a punishment. When any species tries to overwhelm others as the human species is currently doing, then ‘God - whatever that is’ steps in to restore the sacred balance. That is what is happening on this planet today…”
Further correspondence elicited this comment from Peter: “What triggered my tirade about the little catch phrase ‘Every birth is a chance… to get it right’ is that I believe most people unconsciously live by such phrases and build their belief systems around them, and this one, taken literally, could encourage more births in the hope that this child would be the one to ‘get it right’.
“I am so tired of hearing that other little catch phrase ‘if this drug, technique, tool, etc.... will save even one life then it is worthwhile.’ (Of course the speakers mean human life). It is burned into the human psyche so deeply that to question it is heresy of the first order. It has become part of the ‘gospel’ of our day because it is a catchy phase, that operates at a subliminal level encouraging the human race toward the cliff of extinction.
“Maybe the human race must be saved one death or one prevented life at a time. Who would ever dare to say that aloud or in public?”
Peter had made similar comments in a previous week’s letter. Mary Elford replied, “His words about billions too many humans trouble me. I know there are no easy solutions. Do we euthanize/kill certain people at birth? Do we sterilize them? Who decides, with what criteria?
“I worked with mentally handicapped people in a large facility, some years ago. Just looking at them, lying on mattresses in boxes, or sitting in wheelchairs, one might think they had nothing to offer… They were individuals, with personalities, [but] they might not make some 'cut'. Perhaps we might try to do the best we can with what we have.”
James West connected my last two columns: “My prayer is that we are given the faith to endure an incredibly difficult time in the ‘civilized’ world where there will be no objective truth only opinion. This time around the One Who Is Truth will need to do the Revealing. We as a society have failed to distinguish fact and opinion. That is why this is really a Merry Christmas. Only in our brokenness can we receive a God who is both intimate and transcendent at the same time. Most assuredly we are broken and there stands among us One whom we do not know who will restore us in our brokenness.”
Several letters responded to last week’s letters. R. Gay disagreed with Laurna Tallman’s analysis of the U.S. presidential election: “The vote in the U.S.A. was not about rural/urban, north/south, or even about educated/uneducated. It was about race. Study the actual details of which groups voted for whom, and you will see it was white people who elected Trump. White people. Period.”
And Judyth Mermelstein took issue with Steve Roney: “On the subject of disinformation, Steve Roney was being disingenuous (at best) by painting everyone on the left as a doctrinaire follower of Marcuse, not to mention Heidegger and Nietsche. I don't recall Marcuse rejecting math and science.
“We all know people who reject any evidence that weighs against what they want to believe, while they'd swear an impossibility (‘Pizzagate’ or a 5500-year-old Earth) is absolutely true.”
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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