How Good Writers Influence us—a parable, then examples

Another dead-beat dad abandoned his family before his son was born. Do these tragedies ever end?

A Parable: The small boy clung to his mother, but then she died of breast cancer when he was 6. In mostly bad foster houses where he grew up, he found solace and hope in books, safe at the library. Books gave him wings to escape dysfunction, loneliness, and the death traps of having no father.

When he reached young adulthood and became a writer, after graduating from the University of Michigan, he searched and searched for years looking for any trace of his absentee father, (while still grieving for his gone mother).

Finally, 3 decades later after years of diligent effort, a hire-detective located the man who was now living in Portland, Oregon, married to another woman with 3 offspring who he was ignoring, too.

The fatherless son drove across our troubled, divisive land of the U.S. to Portland, Oregon, where violent protesters were attacking businesses and police. He avoided all of that uproar and hatred, intent only to get past that craziness and tragedy, anxious to meet his unknown dad.

But when he got to downtown, he felt ambivalent and sat down in a graffiti-scrawled park, where vandals had burned the base and statue of a large elk, wondering whether he really wanted to meet this ‘father’ who had deserted his mother and him so many years ago.

Out on the rough dark waters of the Columbia River, huge ships and small boats moved by. Fog shrouded the opposite shore of Washington State.

Following directions, the investigator had given him, the adult orphan took a taxi to the luxurious address soon after dawn, on a drizzly morning, and walked up and down a wide, slick sidewalk out in front of a large mansion. The man-boy kept staring up at the immense locked door wondering if his absent father was in there.

Suddenly its owner--evidently his father--came out slamming the door behind him, and hailed the orphan’s waiting taxi, not even looking at the stranger in front of his gate, got in and sped away. Not so different from years ago.
--

Again, that abandoned son of so long ago was left. Only now that orphaned boy is an accomplished writer.

The abandoned son: "I stood there at the gate for hours. Only delivery men and the mail carrier came by.

After remembering years past, I reflected on that man's build. It was all wrong, stocky and overweight; and he had walked with a lunge, as if about to attack some invisible enemy. His face was grim, and with a large nose.

Not at all like me—with a skinny frame and my face with prominent cheeks and a pudgy nose; I must have gotten my body from my mother.

Suddenly, a deep knowing clobbered the seeking boy within me. That grim stranger may have spermed me, but he wasn’t my dad, not my actual father, never had been.

I may have gotten a genetic link from this total stranger, but my real father—fathers are the good writers I read growing up in those dysfunctional foster houses.

The authors who are brilliant, creative thinkers who guided me when I had no father and had lost my mother."*

*Idea for story from educator Jim Burke
--

My Response:
Unlike this orphan, I did have a very dear father, one who used to take me fishing, hunting, and traveling, and guided me as to what was right and helped me later with major decisions. A man who stood by me, a real friend.

And a warm idealistic mother, (very hard-working like my dad, too) who gave me and my sister a deep sense of equality and justice and diligence.

But in another sense, some of the authors I have read over the years have ‘fathered’ (and/or 'mothered') me. Maybe even more deeply than my father and mother who gave me birth and guided me when I was young.

For instance, think of how many scientists got their start as star-eyed kids because of love of and inspiration from science fiction and speculative literature.

And think of famous humanitarians and Enlightenment justice advocates who were first inspired by idealistic heroes in suspenseful stories as children.


For good or for ill, for joy and zest or sadness and despair...as some thinkers have stated, envisioning is the creator of our humanity’s future, not mere matter of facts.

Facts are only building blocks to create what isn’t yet. Our creativity and hopes and goals are the schematics, the structures for bringing into being our creative future.

Where would we be without Verne, Wells, Kant, Descartes, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Voltaire, Jefferson, Paine, Shakespeare, Eliot, Huxley, Orwell, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Hugo, Basho, Blake, Whitman, Owen, Twain, Melville, Conrad, Kafka, Bradbury, Gandhi, Hegel, Marx, Hume, James, Locke, Darwin, Sagan, Gould, Rustin, King, Farmer, etc.?

Where would I be without Thoreau, Bonhoeffer, Hawthorne, C. Bronte, F. O'Connor, Lewis, Nouwen, Merton, Tillich, Wiesel, Camus, Poe, Vonnegut, Thich Nhat Hanh,
even writers of the darker side, sometimes immoral and unjust, such as Millay, Kerouac, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Simmons?

Take time to consider: What authors have 'fathered' and/or 'mothered' you in your life?

Compassionate Listening and the Parliament of the World’s Religions

From a news clipping in my files concerning the Parliament of World Religions:

Allegedly, “it was a celebration of religious unity, but last week’s Parliament of the World’s Religions at times resembled a controlled brawl lurching from argument to argument with almost embarrassing regularity. Police had to break up a shouting and shoving match among Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim delegates.”

"The presence of pagans so offended Orthodox Christians that they left the gathering. Later four Jewish organizations followed them out of Chicago, objecting to the presence of...the Nation of Islam. Evangelical Christians boycotted.”
Chuck Lindell, Cox News Service

Hopefully, there was less rancor and more compassionate listening at this year's meeting.

However, “religious disagreement is inevitable...I think what most often blocks friendly disagreement is that we don’t know people of other religions, and we misunderstand them.”
Terry Muck

On the contrary, more often than not, the problem isn’t that we don’t "know people of other religions" and that we don't understand other religions or other ideologies, but that we, oh so tragically,
DO!

As the old saying goes, the devil is in the details.

Outwardly, on first glance, looking at their forward advertising, most religions and ideologies smile and pronounce the usual platitudes--follow the Golden Rule,
be nice,
kind,
and don’t step on others’ blue suede shoes;-)

Repeat--but the devil is in the details!

The horrors are in the very real twisted philosophy and theology of these various belief systems that cause and or lead to so much suffering and harm and destruction of others in our world.

Yes, there are distorted cliches. Once upon a time, before the hurricane of adulthood, most of us were children of hope and innocence, well, naivety.

But even then, there were the generic labeled bad guys--from the communists to the Catholics.

Raised in moderate Baptist fundamentalism, my parents and church taught my sister and I the usual Nebraska 1950 prejudices--that Catholics weren’t Christians, liberals were awful, hard fundamentalists mean, and Pentecostals (which included our dear uncle and aunt) confused.

But as kids my sister and I didn’t know the details. Later as we grew and encountered these enemies, we learned that other worldviews were sometimes much better than the bad descriptions but, too often, actually much worse.

The demon was in the details of the religions' central beliefs and destructive actions.

Real Examples:

God will call you to sometimes commit immoral actions because God is sovereign will and so decides what is good and what is evil.

God created evil.

Malaria and cancer aren’t wrong.

Those humans who criticize our God and our holy book, and our leaders ought to be arrested, jailed, and executed.

God planned the Jewish Holocaust and 9/11.

God is sovereign and before creation planned for the eternal damnation of most human beings. He creates every infant at conception, “in essence, evil.”

Murder and rape and molestation can easily be forgiven but not failure to believe in our creed.

Husbands can beat their wives and women must submit to men.

Women must wear coverings over all of their body and hair.

Little girls should have their private parts mutilated.

Every human is born totally depraved because of what Adam did.

The atom bomb is "God's gift to America."

There are many Gods; there are no Gods.

Killing others for God is good and makes us heroes and "martyrs."

God is both good and evil.

God is only concerned with his own glory and planned all evil to give him glory and "good pleasure."

All other religions are of the Devil.

Etc.

It is difficult to listen with compassionate and empathetic listening, when the person opposite from you spouts horrific beliefs and supports unjust actions which are leading to great suffering, harm, and tragedy for others.

Even seemingly caring religious leaders can disconcert and confuse. Consider this caring quote: “Compassionate Listening is a process rather than a product. It is healing precisely because it does not pretend to ‘have the answers.’ Rather, it engages the participants in processes that have each side seeing the humanity of the other, even when they disagree.”
Rabbi David Zaslow, Ashland Oregon

Sounds so good. But then consider what the Rabbi also wrote! In his book, Jesus, First Century Rabbi, he states that God created evil and is also the opposite of love and the opposite of light!

Then Zaslow quotes “God says, ‘I form the light, and create darkness. I make peace, and create evil. I the LORD do all these things” (Isaiah 45:7 in the Jewish Bible). According to him, “...and always the satan is sent by God for us to overcome.”

Now, Zaslow does backtrack and contradict himself in later pages, but such initial statements are still troubling and confusing—definitely not helpful toward compassion or good listening.

Evidently, he emphasizes the extreme statements to shock the reader, but he also really believes them!

How so unlike other modern American Jewish leaders such as the endearing, caring Rabbi Albert L. Lewis, in Have a Little Faith by Mitch Albom or the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who focused on the positive and abhorred what is wrong.

Declaring God started evil and sends evil! That is very troubling.

However:

“Do not be too quick to assume your enemy is a savage just because he is your enemy. Perhaps he is your enemy because he thinks you are a savage. Or perhaps he is afraid of you because he feels that you are afraid of him. And perhaps if he believed you are capable of loving him he would no longer be your enemy.”
Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation
--

And:

A January 2002 Interview with Gene Knudsen Hoffman
(1919-2010)
Gene Knudsen Hoffman, founder of Compassionate Listening, after being influenced by Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk who was nominated for the Nobel Prize for his work with opposite sides in the Vietnam War.

Interviewer: "What is the nature of nonviolence?"

Hoffoman: "I don't like the term nonviolence any more. I feel closer to Gandhi when he says truth force, God. I'm a Quaker and I've been involved with peace for fifty years."

Interviewer: "What makes peacemaking so slow a process?"

"First of all, people don't believe in peace, in my opinion. We have never known peace. We don't even admit that we have been in many wars, so why should we make peace? We have talked about ourselves, at least Americans, as being a peaceful people until we believe it no matter what we do. It's a shocking thing. It's a practice of denial."

"Just not facing the reality. We are always calling other people war criminals, yet we're the ones who dropped the first atom bomb."

"We don't live with that reality. It is always the other person, like an untutored child who is always blaming someone else. We're in great denial about it."

"I discovered something in 1985 as I was going around the world looking for new peace initiatives and touring peace centers. I went to a Quaker meeting in London and outside the meeting was a huge sign, 'Meeting For Worship For The Torturers And The Tortured.'"

"I'd never heard of anything like that; I mean, listen to the torturers? Then I decided that I was going to listen to everyone and everything. I started listening to both sides. We can never make peace until we can listen to both sides. No matter who is the enemy."

Interviewer: "If then peacemaking is such slow work because it is the continual struggle to face reality, and also a continual struggle with self-interest, how do you get opposing people to listen to each other?"

Hoffman: "I maintain that we must listen to the oppressor as a human being. The oppressor has grievances, suffering, and we have to listen to both sides. An enemy is a person whose story we have not heard."

"In the beginning you have them listen separately. They get their anger out. They get out everything they feel. They talk about it for a year before they do anything."

"What happens is that as you listen, you change. It's a transformation. People are never listened to as much as they need to be, [especially] children and certain criminal types. It doesn't mean the oppressors are right."

"It doesn't mean you agree with them, and the people have to know this before you go in. It doesn't mean you agree with them, but you look for the truth. You have to discern the truth. It's a process of discernment and intuition and listening."
http://www.peaceheroes.com/PeaceHeroes/jeanknudsenhoffman.htm

So am I willing to listen to those who claim God wills evil, who predestines most humans to eternal torture, who consider little infants, "in essence, evil," who are prejudiced against women, minorities, and other humans as inferior, who advocate that nuclear weapons are good, that life is meaningless and purposeless, that ethics are only "personal preference," etc.?

I try. But it's difficult!

Because I've lived where Muslim jihadists shot up innocent people, personally known many individuals who tragically suffer and are allegedly eternally damned by others, have seen the destructive results of prejudice, injustice, and human rights violations and saw the destructive results of determinism and of the denial of objective ethics by various religious and ideological groups.

But we do need to listen, or we become in our own way, like our enemies.

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

Despair and the Ultimate

At tragic times in my life, when disastrous circumstances overwhelm and all hope seems lost, I drown in despair. And I feel, unbelievably, even worse, because as a Friend, a follower of Jesus,I am supposed to be one living in hope and joy.

The Good News of Christian hope is the answer for the world of despairing humankind, of those who suffer in agony. So why am I still caught in suffering and despair?

In the last several years of my life, I've reached a final nadir, lower than my own worst pessimism could have ever imagined. Keep in mind that I don't have terminal cancer, haven't lost loved ones in a tsunami like the one in Asia that killed hundreds of thousands, haven't lost my home...

No, my own despair is in the midst of the relative comfort of California where most citizens live with more physical necessities and amenities than 99% of humankind ever had.

But my particular despair is still genuine and debilitating and
destructive, keeping me often from accomplishing more in the world to reduce others' suffering.

However, rather than dwell on the ugly facts, let me hasten to a wondrous discovery that came to me one day deep in my bereft hopelessness.

It suddenly dawned on me that Jesus, though the messenger of God--is here with me--with all of us who suffer and agonize. I am not talking about his triumph but of his own despair, his cry from the cross--"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
Matthew 27:46

In the past, I had read that verse umpteem times in my life before, but they had been words to study, to ferret out their literary relationship to previous texts in the Old Testament, to understand their abstract theological meaning...

But now, suddenly, they were words for me, to me...words that made me realize Jesus has been where I am, has felt that hopelessness that totally empties and yet gluts one with agony. He has gone deeper into hopeless despair than any drowning of my own, down more into the abyss of loss.

Not only did he lose his career, his relationships with others, his family, then was betrayed, and finally endured excruciating physical pain--he suffered all of those--but in the end he was executed, numbered with the criminals, the terrorists, the rejects on a cruel Roman torture device where the pain was unbearable. In Roman justice only the worst of the worst were assigned to the cross.

And with this shocking discovery--that the son of man experienced ultimate despair and felt totally abandoned--I realized that there is still hope for me (and for all others who suffer much worse than myself).

And then there came back to myself historical memories of the many spiritual leaders who also at times lost any sense of hope, who felt abandoned by the very One who was center-most in their lives: George Fox, John Wesley, Mother Theresa, Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen...

It never ceases to trouble and shock when I re-read in the Gospels how even John the Baptist, who had first announced Jesus as God's Chosen One, later in prison became so devastated in his grief, so hopeless, that he severely doubted Jesus was truly God's answer to human suffering and evil.

From the "dark night of the sou" of St. John of the Cross to the present, so many Christians who have lived for hope have gone through the abyss when all assurance has seemed lost. George Fox at one point spoke of how he experienced an "ocean of darkness." As I recall, he suffered with despair for at least two weeks, so bereft that he lay in bed unable to function.

Now at this point in my reflection I could launch into the traditional good news message of salvation that energized the first Quakers so deeply they traveled across the known world to share their faith--and I do, very deeply, have faith in that wondrous story--but my intention in this meditation is of a different sort; it's to communicate the vital truth that no matter how deep our loss, how terrible our agony, how absolute and ultimate our despair, God is there for us, with us, within our terrible loss.

Indeed, God suffers all that we deeply and so ultimately suffer; God carries within God's essence the pain and suffering of us all, indeed of all the pain and suffering of the Cosmos. Before God saves, God loves, identifies, experiences, suffers with us.

Of course, this makes no sense from a scientific or mathmatical point of view. It is spriitually discerned, an ethical truth not a sense observation. God is not an object that can be weighed in objective scales. God is the source of all being and becoming, so can only be known subjectively.

Furthermore, such incredible hope does seem when looked at rationally to be absurd.

Still, I think we ought to seek to love God with all of our mind, even though ultimately God is beyond human comprehension.

But the wonder of wonders is our hope that Ultimate Reality actually cares and suffers with us and for us--we finite beings, conscious primates on a small planet in minor solar system in one small edged swirl of the cosmos.

Despite the ruthless nature of the observable world, the good news is first and foremost that Ultimate Truth experiences what we experience and most deeply loves us even at our worst.

Despite my best efforts, I've never been able to give myself to God ultimately, except in fragmented inspired moments. But thankfully, the Divine in contrast, has given ultimately to us.

Hope in the Light,

Daniel Wilcox