We are all so different in this world, still common themes emerge from our shared experiences. From time immemorial people like the Greek thespians performed allegorical comedy and tragedy. Who doesn't enjoy a good laugh? And why is it funny?
How each of us deals with, copes, and and processes the perceived injustice(s) of tragedy is as various as are we, as our senses of humor, and yet similar and general comparisons can be made to some degree. Spilling a drink is not the same tragedy as losing a loved one, although the same processes do occur in a neuro-electctirc-biochemical sense, although on a different scope and scale. Pastor John Stumbo once said at Salem Alliance that: "We feel hurt by those closest to us because they have the most opportunity to do so". This is consistent with the general idea in social psychology and relationships that feelings of inequity are common amongst people, between individuals in relationships. The arising of such unfairness is a function of an accounting error due to exposure, emerging from limited perspective. The more time we spend with others the fuller our storehouse of memories becomes, the relationships become increasingly dynamic , and further emotional entanglement becomes progressively more complex. Intriguingly some individuals simply move on without observable behaviors that would lead others to draw conclusions. The Kübler-Ross model, commonly referred to as the "five stages of grief" claims that when one is faced with the reality of any awful fate, experience, or loss they will experience a series of emotional stages identified as: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and/or acceptance. Some theorists cling to order. Others believe there is no set order or progression for these cognitive emotive states, rather they can be triggered by environmental or internal stimulus. As states and traits that often define individual personalities as we are cycled thru at a moments notice by our thoughts. It can occur years later as remorse, immediately after as revenge, the saudades of wishing one didn't now know what what didn't know then. Minimizing, denying, blaming, rationalizing, and many other defense mechanisms are tied up in those five stages. Many people too are tied up in the entanglement of their memories, finite knowledge, the superiority of their discernment, the distinctions of categorical knowledge as we can conquer the world just because we can read, write, think, do a little math. With capability follows responsibility.
Personally my least favorite of the five stages of grief is acceptance, for when an event is accepted it becomes part of us, engrained in the psyche, an obligation of the subconscious to our chosen responsibility, to our conscious mind. When one accepts one also claims knowledge and discernment of what is best, while also donning the blindness of expertise, just as justice once did as a cowl of darkness reflected in the robes of judges to this day. Lawyers do not accept loss, just as oncologists do not accept cancer, as firemen do not accept flaming communities. Doctors, Engineers, and Loved ones do not accept death. What a person does or does not accept often sculpts their personal perspective, their psyche, just as their socio-cultural beliefs shape psyche. Whittling away at ourselves and our neighbors in cycles of destruction and creation. Some people might conjecture that forgiveness is a form of acceptance, I was raised a little differently. I was taught that forgiveness was a distinct means to deal with tragedy, with injustice, to transmute divine comedy.
Once the history of percussion, oppression, resistance, power, and their eternal struggle is learned as the cycle it is the key to breaking it becomes obvious. The sickle, the psy, the hammer, all tools are implements only in this moment, the beginningless moment that is now shared by you, the reader, and me the writer, despite the transcendence of time. Often iron flows through our bodies delivering oxygen just as tools & ideas flow through time. The picture of suffering and martyrdom is old. An example of just such an idea is the manifestation and central tenet of the pacifist Mennonite philosophical tradition, that is to "forgive and move on." Life goes on. Creation is almost as infinite as imagination. "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law." From Galatians five, there is no law against the supposition of all these things in creation either. To the Mennonites forgiveness is a religious imperative, albeit only of kindness, forbearance, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, love, and peace. "Forgive those who trespass against you", to do so joyfully is to be creative by thought indeed. This theology also happens to be a pragmatic strategy embracing the profound limits to what the formal mechanisms of retribution can accomplish. Over powering forces, authority, and punitive actions of the spiteful whither and die before the faith of joyful forgiveness. A moving example of this occurred during the early Stalinist revolution in Russia when the Mennonites were viciously and repeatedly persecuted. Entire villages were wiped from the face of Eurasia. Hundreds of thousands of Mennonites were shipped off to the Gulag Archipelago, scattered by the winds of change across Siberia. Farms were looted and burned to the ground, many poor farmers fled to the United States and Canada. There was a commercial recently memorializing irrepressible farmers:
And on the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, "I need a caretaker." So God made a farmer.
God said, "I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the field, milk cows again, eat supper, then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board." So God made a farmer.
God said, "I need somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn colt and watch it die, then dry his eyes and say,'Maybe next year,' I need somebody who can shape an ax handle from an ash tree, shoe a horse with hunk of car tire, who can make a harness out hay wire, feed sacks and shoe scraps. Who, during planting time and harvest season will finish his 40-hour week by Tuesday noon and then, paining from tractor back, put in another 72 hours." So God made the farmer.
God said, "I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bales, yet gentle enough to yean lambs and wean pigs and tend the pink-comb pullets, who will stop his mower for an hour to splint the leg of a meadowlark."
It had to be somebody who'd plow deep and straight and not cut corners. Somebody to seed, weed, feed, breed, and brake, and disk, and plow, and plant, and tie the fleece and strain the milk, . Somebody who'd bale a family together with the soft, strong bonds of sharing, who would laugh, and then sigh and then reply with smiling eyes when his son says that he wants to spend his life doing what Dad does. "So God made a farmer."
What history's wicked authorities corrupted by the foolishness of power didn't realize is how deeply this cultural artifact is sown into our collective souls. The strength of forgiveness is not in acceptance but is in fearlessness. No amount of punishment, enslavement, wickedness, or authority can force another to do what farmers, Mennonite and otherwise, choose joyfully to do in love for their families, neighbors, strangers, and fellow Samaritans. Life goes on, and so do some individuals, some cultures, when wronged we turn the other cheek and walk away. Some religious movements have their great heroes as warriors or prophets. Some speak truth to power, others allow actions to speak louder than words, compassion for the enemy, the Mennonites have the martyred Anabaptist Dirk Willems. Mr. Willems was arrested in the 1500's for his beliefs and was imprisoned in a tower. When winter came he planned his escape. With the aid of a rope of knotted rags he escaped by lowering himself down from the window and bolted across the frozen moat. A guard gave chase, while a starved Willems made it safely to the other side. The fat and well provisioned guard did not. Falling through the ice into the freezing water. Willems stopped, went back, and rescued his pursuer. His reward for this act of compassion was to returned to prison, tortured, and then slowly burned at the stake as he repeated "Oh my lord, my God" seventy times.
What is often forgotten by authority is that their power must be legitimate in order for behavior modification techniques to have affect. Those individuals who realize everything is God's gift, God's grace, God's blessings experience a profound freedom from suffering, fear, and control because their's is nothing to lose, to be lost. Such psychological freedom is not limited to the Menonites, the Amish, or the religious; it is available to you and to me, to anyone who appreciates simplicity of faith without fear. Think like a wave, act like a particle, be yourself, in that way we are all a part of the same ocean. We are all of the same universe.
The question then is turned to what we are becoming, and what kind of person would be a good person to become. A more satisfying answer can be found in the works of Soren Kierkegaard, who was a theist, and proposed the idea of different personality types that men develop at in different times of their lives, according to the choices they make and the desires that they have. Kierkegaard argues that, in order to fully personalize those values that we consider to be universal - values such as freedom, equality, or justice - our choices will lead us through three stages of existence he classifies as the aesthetic stage, the ethical stage, and the religious stage. It is the leap from the ethical to the religious that is most problematic to this modern trend of universal values education, and Kierkegaard uses the story of Abraham to illustrate this dilemma more fully.
Sartre and Kierkegaard are most fully in agreement on the human freedom to make choices for oneself, despite existing external pressures. Kierkegaard has been quoted as saying, "The crowd is composed of individuals, but it must also be in the power of each one to be what he is: an individual; and no one, no one at all, no one whatsoever is prevented from being an individual unless he prevents himself - by becoming one of the masses"
Thus we all make choices, and those choices determine our direction and personal growth. According to Kierkegaard's stages of life, we begin at what is called the aesthetic, or romantic, level of existence. James Valone, Jr., author of The Ethics and Existentialism of Kierkegaard, introduces the concept when he says, "Although we normally reserve the term merely for art, Kierkegaard uses it in its broader sense of anything that refers to the sensual or immediate. Aesthetic means the immediate life of the senses which is the starting point of all human activity.
We are all born as sensual creatures, intently interested in the here and now. These are the primary concerns of the aesthetic individual. Kierkegaard is not satisfied with simply classifying an individual with a single label, either, but introduces several characteristics and levels of aesthetic practice, beginning with sensual immediacy, which can progress to doubt, which can then progress to despair. Valone further explains that "Kierkegaard has given us a two-fold development scheme. We can develop and move from one lifestyle to another, making the transition perhaps to the ethical. But even within a lifestyle...we can move or develop from one phase or mood to another. In the
Taking the next step to an ethical lifestyle, in contrast, means that an individual needs to be "transparent to himself...does not live [thoughtlessly] as does the aesthetic individual...He who lives ethically has seen himself, knows himself, penetrates with his consciousness his whole tangible self...does not allow indefinite thoughts to potter about within him, nor tempting possibilities to distract him with their jugglery...".
Those who are ethical are more disciplined than those who live an aesthetic or romantic lifestyle. They set goals and achieve them. They are bound to rules of law, both making them and upholding them. They are those who create order in society, and enable the functioning thereof. The ethical demands self-knowledge, while the aesthete demands silence. However, not all people choose to leave the life of the aesthetic for the ethical, citing the "stuffiness and staid character" of the ethicist, as well as the tendency for the ethicist to "become excessively legal in his/her attitude and excessively narrow in his/her view of morals. One upholds the law merely for the law's sake, because it is the law...doing the moral thing for duty's sake..."
Kierkegaard clearly felt that, in order to live a more fulfilled life and to benefit society at large, a move from a purely aesthetic worldview to an ethical worldview is necessary, yet we cannot kill the aesthete within us entirely, nor would we want to. One author points out that "in Either/Or...the basic point is that aesthetics must play a necessary and important role in the life of the ethicist; the aesthetic dimension of life is preserved on the ethical level, but in a transformed version." The ethicist must still have the love and human contact that aesthetics demands, but now finds fulfillment of it in the commitment of marriage instead of several love affairs in sequence. The life of the ethical brings order and control to the chaos of thought and experience that lays open to, but can never be fully enjoyed or utilized by the aesthete because of his lack of discipline and control.
Yet Kirkegaard does not end his evaluations with the ethical. The leap of faith for which Kierkegaard is well known refers to the move from an ethical worldview to a religious worldview, where one's own knowledge and desires are sublimated to a power higher than one's own, namely God. In making this move, we are faced with a tremendous paradox, which Kierkegaard personalizes in his book Fear and Trembling. Johansen tells us that "In Fear and Trembling, he wants to make space for the religious dimension, again in terms of a conflict, this time between the ethical and religious spheres of life." Evans gives us some historical background with which we can understand Kierkegaard's deep need to write this book. "The work is a polemical effort to contradict and combat certain culturally accepted misconceptions about faith: those prevalent in philosophical Hegelian circles, and those unthinkingly accepted by the populace of Denmark that had made Christianity a matter of cultural conformity rather than a radical means of authentic existence".
In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard lays open the story of Abraham from the Bible, who is required to sacrifice his son on an altar of the Lord instead of the traditional lamb. Kierkegaard points out that, to someone at a level of aesthetic or ethical understanding, Abraham's action is a monstrous, unforgivable crime, made even more monstrous by attempting to justify it with religion. "...efforts to ethicalize Abraham's conduct fail; Abraham is not a moral hero...according to (some), Kierkegaard holds not just the wrong but a dangerous view, that a morally reprehensible act can be justified by religion"
Yet Kierkegaard does not regard it as such. Under his pseudonym of Johannes De Silencio, Kierkegaard expresses in Fear and Trembling his admiration for the tremendous courage that it took for Abraham to obey the commandment that he received from God to sacrifice his son, and admits his own inability to reach such a height on his own. "...my courage is still not the courage of faith and is not something to be compared with it. I cannot make the movement of faith, I cannot shut my eyes and plunge confidently into the absurd; it is for me an impossibility, but I do not praise myself for that...I do not have faith; this courage I lack". It is this religious level of sublimation of one's own will that Kierkegaard regards as the pinnacle of human development. "The sign of childishness is to say: 'Me wants, me-me'; the sign of youth is to say: 'I'-and 'I'- and 'I'; the sign of maturity and the introduction to the eternal is the will to understand that this 'I' signifies nothing if it does not become the 'thou' to whom eternity unceasingly speaks, and says: 'Thou shalt, thou shalt, thou shalt'"
Could an individual, living at only an ethical level, who is concerned only with values and ethical living, endure a test that Abraham was called to endure? Will teaching values alone without the background of worship of a Supreme Being grant the necessary strength for these values to be lived in abstraction? Arthur King disagrees. "Kierkegaard reminds us more firmly than anyone else that the sacrifice of Isaac is the example that shows religion to be deeper and more important than any morality that may emerge from it....Abraham had absolute faith in God, and therefore felt free to do what God told him to do, even though it seemed to be directly against what he thought God's teachings were...Morality is concerned with deliberate reference to principles to find out what to do. Religion is concerned with spontaneous correct action". What Kierkegaard is trying to say is that the daily living of faith is what makes values work and become automatic in our lives. Making the change from an ethical worldview to a religious one means placing your faith, all your trust, in God and what He tells you to do, and the ethical worldview is then subordinate to the purposes of God, whatever those purposes may be. This presupposes that one has a belief in God, an understanding of God and His purposes, that one has communication with God, and that this communication is sufficiently clear to be able to understand when a message is from God, or from another source. This level of trust is very difficult to reach, and for some, impossible or even unthinkable, because even the very existence of God is still debatable in some philosophical circles.
What would be the rewards of such a level of enlightenment? Hoffman touches on this point when he discusses the modern debate on whether or not our emotions are something to be disciplined and harnessed in such a way that a religious level of living would be possible. He states that this debate was not always what it is today. "...The common ancient assumption is that emotions are themselves intelligent...To say emotions are intelligent...does imply our desires can be examined, developed, educated, and integrated in more or less salutary ways. In Furtak's words, the 'cardinal virtue' of this 'renovated ethics would be nothing less than the readiness to be always affected in the right ways, based upon a care for the right things,' with the goal of having "earned the right to trust oneself in becoming passionate.'" Even within the religious worldview, there are still the qualities of the aesthete and the ethical, finding their highest expression within a still higher framework of the religious. Johansen also echoes these sentiments as he discusses Kierkegaard's idea of faith, the necessary step to lead a religious life. "Faith, according to Kierkegaard, is a double movement in which the first movement would be infinite resignation and the second movement is faith...described from a certain distance, it is not difficult to understand the double movement of faith as exemplified by a person who is confidently present in the world and occupied with its contingencies, but whose confidence and trust is neither an expression of naïve immediacy nor human calculation, but an expression of faith in God." Again we see all three expressions of the personality - the aesthete and the ethical being "confidently present in the world", but expressed without the drawbacks of "naïve immediacy" or "human calculation" inherent in these worldviews Living a religious life would be the highest possible expression of either stage of life.
It is beneficial to teach and model those values in society which will universally lead people to ethically better and improve themselves and others, but by itself it is insufficient to stand against danger or aesthetic despair. The development of a religious life will not happen spontaneously through association with others, and so Kierkegaard means through his writings to encourage individuals - for only individuals can choose what is in their own best interests - to "work for himself, each for himself...for the development is...a progress because all the individuals who are saved will receive the specific weight of religion, its essence at first hand, from God himself". Just as Abraham stood alone and carried his trial alone before God, so each of us as individuals must make those choices that will bring us to the point where we can no longer, by our own efforts, continue forward alone in our progression, when "the cruelty of abstraction makes the true form of worldliness only too evident, the abyss of eternity opens before you, the sharp scythe of the leveler makes it possible for every one individually to leap over the blade - and behold, it is God who waits. Leap, then, into the arms of God".
This freedom is free to all who accept its tenets, from Abraham and Noah, to Moses and you, the reader. The Amish often endured subjugation shoulder to shoulder with the Mennonites. In the book of Amish Grace there is the story of a young Amish mother whose young child was struck and killed by a speeding car. As the investigating officer placed the driver of the car in the police cruiser to take him for an alcohol test, the mother of the child approached the car to speak with the officer. With her young daughter tugging at her dress the mother said: "Please take care of the boy." The officer, assuming she meant her critically injured boy, replied: "The paramedics and doctors will do the best they can, the rest is up to God." The mother pointed to the suspect in the rear if the squad car: "I meant the driver. We Forgive him."
This is how the young learn, not by being taught, or being told. Not by being threatened or being punished. But through consistent actions of their community members. By the behaviors of their society and culture. Your emotions are your responsibility, a result of your choices, beliefs, thoughts, and experiences. Accountability starts with yourself and the situations you have traveled to, the friends and conversations you have had, the actions that speak louder than words or thoughts. Please, release loathing for self and others, taste not bitterness, drop your remorse, forgive another, forgive yourself and be changed. Do not accept it, change it through forgiveness.
"Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from the inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harms we do, we do to ourselves." ~ Mitch Albom In order to forgive others we must first seek harmony within ourselves as experienced through our lives, it is only once we have learned to forgive inside and out that we might spread forgiveness, like peanut butter. The forgiveness of peanut butter fills the hungry, mutes mouthy desires, satiates the glutton, and sticks to the bones of those who are able to need and absorb it, harmony is like peanut butter.
