Journal of a Soul 41

Thoughts on the Eve of 2014

A very wet Lungomare, Soverato, Jan 2nd 2014

I remember once reading in the works of the great Victorian theologian, scholar and writer, John Henry Newman, that essentially how (not why) we believe was as much a mystery as how we remember.  And indeed, memory is one of those great mysteries in life.

As I write this post here in Isca Marina (Sullo Ionio) on the last day of the year of 2013, bereft of Internet connections as the rain pours down – almost as inexorably as it does in Ireland – I am indeed awash with memories, most of them random, though somewhere my inner Self (whatever or whoever that is) is giving them some structure and form. Being without any instant Internet connection for the week to come means that this post will not see “light of day” on-line until sometime later than this last day of 2013 - more than likely very early in The New Year.

Is memory (which here I am equating with what many of us have come to define as the Self) really all about nothing more than the random connections and interconnections made by all those millions upon millions of neurons through those even more numerous dendrites that randomly spark off one another through this or that neurotransmitter?  Or is the Self more than a biochemical or even a psychochemical mass?  Whatever, the Self may be it always has a sense of being so much more.  Indeed, every human being wants his or her Self to mean more, to be more, than just a “bundle of perceptions” as the great Scottish empiricist and atheist philosopher David Hume had it.  After all, what client or patient comes to a psychotherapist, counsellor, clinical psychologist or psychiatrist with the complaint that they don’t really feel that they are being true to their “real bundle of perceptions,” or that they have not yet found their “real bundle of perceptions”?  We believe deeply that we are more.  Intuitively we grasp that the whole (Self) is always greater than the sum of its parts, greater than a mere “bundle of perceptions.”

And so for this present post I am defining myself as my memories.  At the end of any year we so love to trace what has happened not alone in the world or the country at large, but what the dying year has made of us.  Even, what all our years to date have made of us as we stand on the threshold of yet another year.

An old picture from 1945 or there abouts.  My mother is at the back on left

Memories crowd my neural memory pathways somewhat randomly, but with some little dictation from some centre of control – some area of “self-awareness.”  There I am, a three year old boy sitting on the dirt lane at the back of our house in Roscrea playing with a toy lorry and filling its trailer with lollypop bags of sand.  The old half-blind cat sits on the line pole, a great comforting presence.  The backyard is full of geranium plants.  The sting of the nettles on my legs as I run through the neighbouring fields. The fading sound of the train leaving Roscrea station with my daddy aboard, click, clack, click, clack, ...  Sad feelings.  Missing him again.  The move to Dublin. No electric light. Just candles till the power is restored.

My grandmother laid out in death in a bedroom in the old Crumlin house. I was ten. So still. Beyond us. Then and now. Only old faded photos remain. Uncle Pat’s funeral in 1970 when I am twelve.  The sound of leather shoes crushing the gravel as we followed the coffin up to its final resting place. The sound of clay falling on the wooden lid. Prayers intoned.  Men in gray coats condoling with my father. My mother comforting him in Granny Saunders’ garden when he cried. I buy ice cream for the same old woman – the oldest woman I have ever known as a young boy.  How I think she might expire at any second.  That horrible big yellow blister on her leg when she spilled boiling water on it. The time she told us that once as she dozed at the fire a mouse had run up here leg.  How we laughed.

The old Christian Brother who takes us for catechism and who tells us stories both to frighten and uplift us, though more of the former.  The smell of chalk dust mixed with stale urine, the steam that rises from wet coats as they lie draped over radiators on a rainy day.  The ice that covers the school yard making it a skating rink.  How we skate free on it before the bell tolls for class and lessons.  The young boy whose name I forget who is knocked clean from his bike to dusty death at only ten years of age.  The black hands of the old wind-up clock with Roman numerals that counts out our education in loud tick tocks.  The old brother winds it up every other day.

And there are so many other memories vying for attention with that self-aware centre of control that they could overpower, swamp and almost smother it at once, if all the controls were off.  Maybe this is the place to stop this wet last day of the dying year that is 2013.  Maybe too many memories have been summoned up.  Some centre of my inner Self has summoned them up, given them life, and shape and pattern.

Indeed how true is the opening statement I quoted from the venerable Cardinal John Henry Newman.  How we believe is as much as mystery as how we remember.  Perhaps a greater mystery is what we remember and how we choose to construct those memories, what shape and pattern, what form we may wish to give them.  That is the mystery of the Self, the centre of our identity which is an on-going construction, ever a work in progress.

Journal of a Soul 40

Mortality

The Lungomare at Soverato, Calabria, a few days ago

Everything is relative, they say.  Very true, but relative to what? Relative to one’s expectations or income or status in life?  A bicycle is a fine means of transport dependent on weather, distance from one’s destination and one’s agility.  A Fiat 500 is a fine car to get one from A to B in a modern town, and it’s also very handy for parking.  A Mercedes Benz is also a fine car and it mirrors the status or ego of its driver.  Indeed, everything is relative.  As an existentialist, I believe that everything is relative to the one only certainty in life, namely death.  Death is the ultimate criterion or yardstick of life.  Let me elaborate.

It seems to me that what ultimately gives anything value is its relation or relativity to death.  Art is art because it is created by mortal beings.  Music is music because it is likewise composed.  Poems are poems because they combine mortal intellect and mortal feeling to such perfect effect in words.  This is the way with all the creations of the imagination of humankind.  Because their original composers are either no longer alive or will cease living at some time either soon or in the future, the works of their imagining is valued highly by society and it builds up and adds to what we call culture.  Meditate on these last statements.  Ponder on how our mortality gives value to most things which we humans do.

As a mental game, or more correctly what the philosophers call a thought experiment, let us ponder the opposite.  Suppose for the moment that any artist or composer or poet lived forever.  His or her eternal existence would lessen the import of their artistic labours.  Their works would now become 10 a penny or a 1000 a penny and so on and so forth.  Our mortality increases the value of our little lives and our little work.  I use the diminutive adjective only in relation to our smallness, and consequent insignificance, when considered in relation to the age and the expanse of the universe.

And so, let me finish with a litany here – an old prayer style used in our Catholic churches many years ago - based on what I have described above:

The Leader (L) leads the Prayer. The response (R) to the litany is: For we are Mortal. Please note that I am invoking no deity here, just humankind’s sheer mortality which is almost the author of his humanity.  It is a humanist prayer in the sense that it is neither theist nor atheist.  This last sentence is, obviously, of the utmost importance for this writer, for he is neither pushing the one nor the other here.

Town Centre, Soverato, Xmas '13

L: For all the works of men and women everywhere and at all times, we give thanks. R.

L: For all the great poets from times gone by who weaved such wondrous words and made us cry and laugh. R.

L: For all the poets from the present times who continue to weave such wondrous words to make us cry and laugh. R.

L: For all the wonderful composers of the past, who lifted up our hearts with music and song, brought tears of joy and sadness to our eyes.  R.

L: For all the wonderful composers of the present times, who continue to lift up our hearts with music and song, bring tears of joy and sadness to our eyes. R.

L: For all the brave explorers who set forth to find a promised land beyond our native shore, we are thankful. R.

L: For all the brave explorers who set forth today and will set forth to find a promised land beyond our present shores, we are thankful. R.

L: For all the carers who give of their love in action for the poor, the lonely, the sick and the aged, we give thanks.  R.

L. For all the dreamers and visionaries everywhere who dare to believe that justice is possible in this less than perfect world we are thankful.  R.

L. For all the beauty in this world, both natural and the work of human hands we are thankful and in awe.  R.

L. For all who weep and tend our graves, we are especially thankful.  R.

L: For the hopes that live within our hearts, we are especially thankful.  R.

Journal of a Soul 39

The Human Condition

Autumn scene, Fairview Park

This title covers a multitude.  It is a phrase I have heard bandied about since I was in my mid-teens.  When I was young I was very certain of what things I really believed in; I trusted instinctively what society in its wisdom through the education system and the broadcast and print media wanted us to accept almost unquestioned; I welcomed almost wholly the accepted truths promulgated by either Church or State.  However, as soon as I got to college I was encouraged to question accepted opinions and beliefs on a cerebral level. However, it was when things began to crumble on a personal level much later in life that I really began to question the old certainties.  Questioning old certainties has always been part of the life of the thinking person.

Daily Reality

As a firm believer in the positive outcomes of such practices as those of various Meditation techniques, Yoga, Zen, TM, Tai Chi, Falun Gong, Focusing (Eugene Gendlin) and so on, and even ordinary everyday physical exercise, I have instinctively in the last twenty or so years almost always listened to the wisdom of my body.  The body, when listened to in any attentive fashion, is a great yardstick of and guide to what is truly real.  Our bodies in a physical way (through pain and the development of the various psychosomatic diseases) "know" much more about us -  stuff we either refuse to accept about ourselves or the world - or are simply unconscious of in the first place.  That's why another name for Meditation is Awareness (Anthony de Mello has written a wonderful book with this very title which is really worth reading) and Mindfulness, still another more modern synonym.  Such practices train us in precisely becoming more aware firstly of our own bodies through concentrating on or being aware of something so essentially and simply human as our very breathing, and then becoming aware of our "real" or "essential" self, or simply by learning to delight in simply being.  Doing versus Being is an interesting polarity, or contrast, or healthy tension, or dichotomy - call it what you will. They are really the two polar opposites of the see-saw of existence as it were.  I will refer to them more fully below.

What is Your Daily Reality?

My daily reality is that of a 55 year-old Special Education Teacher in a Boys' Secondary School where I teach in the Asperger's Unit as well as doing learning support for pupils who have problems in Mathematics.  In between the teaching, or perhaps more correctly, during that teaching I listen to the vicissitudes of the lives of my charges.  One boy who comes in tells me about his suicide attempts and about his friends who have cut themselves.  Young people (that is, teenagers) today have many concerns, not all as grave or as serious as the one I have briefly described in the foregoing sentence.  Others have addiction problems or are perhaps the sons of absent fathers, or of former or current drug addicts, or of abusive parents and so on and on and on. Others are just going through the usual hard and difficult identity crisis associated with their adolescent years.  However, the nub of the problem, that is of the human condition, is very simple really - all they want is a compassionate and non-judgmental adult ear.   In a sense my workaday world is never dull or dry or sterile. It is always gripping and mostly rewarding if at times somewhat tiring. All you have to do, dear reader, is to ponder what your daily reality is.  Perhaps it would be better for you to write it down for yourself, or if you are artistic you might sketch or paint it, or if musical sing it or play it. 

Lessons to Learn

Autumn Scene, Fairview Park, late November, 2011

There are many lessons we can learn from tuning in to life, from becoming aware or mindful, and I shall attempt to list some of them here.  Pardon me if you have read some of them here before because it is really very hard for me to be fresh and insightful a lot of the time.  When I write here, I often feel like I am repeating myself ad nauseam. However, I take much solace from the answer T.S. Eliot gave to an interviewer who commented that the famous and erudite poet had repeated himself much in his poems and writings that while he may have done so he certainly never said anything ever again in precisely the same way. Anyway, here are some short lessons I have learned from life:

(i) We don't get out of life alive.  This world is not a "dress rehearsal."  We only get one shot at living and we had best make the most of it.  In other words, here we have the context for Horace's famous injunction to us "to seize the day" and forget totally about tomorrow and what it may have in store for us.  Those of you who laboured in the vineyards of the Latin language will recall the actual words of Quintus Horatius Flaccus: "carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero."

(ii) Are we happy in our own skin?  Are we really happy with what we do in life, with our job, in our friends, in our partner and family? 

(iii) Have we really got time for others?  Do we really listen to them?  Or even more importantly do we really have time for ourselves? Do we really listen to our inner "self"?

(iv) Think about, or rather meditate upon that wonderful dichotomy between Being and Doing.  In reality one is not more important than the other.  It is rather the harmonious balance of both that is of utmost importance.  Doing must be challenged by Being, and Being can be  supported and enhanced and  by Doing. There is a further polarity worth mentioning here, too, that of Being and Having.  This existential dichotomy was emphasized and explicated by the psychoanalyst, psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm.  While the Western capitalist system feeds the greed for Having, the Eastern religions emphasize the overriding importance of Being.  While we need to have the basics to survive, and some social economists and psychologists suggest that after an annual income of some 44,000 $ the happiness index goes no higher.   

(v) Carl Jung, following his great friend, mentor and collaborator but later opponent, critic and rival Sigmund Freud, held that “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”  This task takes many long years of work to accomplish.

(vi) Can we live with ourselves, or accept ourselves precisely as we are?  When we make decisions can we sleep easily knowing that we have done our best and have acted from authentic motives?  If we can we are approaching what it means to be true to our core self.

To be continued

Journal of a Soul 38

A Passion for Equality

Frederick Douglass, around 1874

There are few things that move us as much as good oratory, and indeed we would go almost anywhere to hear a good orator speak.  The orators that come immediately to my own mind are, of course, luminaries such as Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill, William Jefferson Clinton, Nelson Mandela and, of course, Barak Obama.  I would go anywhere to here them speak.  Indeed, I had the privilege to hear Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton and Barak Obama here in Dublin when they visited our great city over the last ten or so years.  Needless to say, I was truly moved.  To add a few females to this list Hillary Rodham Clinton springs immediately to mind as does Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).  I have heard these two prominent international figures speak on our media outlets and can truly say they are accomplished public speakers. Our own two former presidents, Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese are also superb orators. You, no doubt can add your own favourites to this list.

Orators are never better than when they are speaking on the great issues of supreme human interest, namely human and civil rights, and about issues of the equality of all human beings no matter what their religion, race or colour. Words, coupled with passion and conviction can and do ring true.  However, we are not interested in hearing mere words, no matter how passionate, unless we know they are also coupled with deeds.  Otherwise, they ring exceedingly hollow. When we listen to great passionate speakers and know that they not alone believe what they say, but that they also do what they say we are truly moved, and moved in such a way as to do something positive or to work for a better world in our immediate surroundings.  We are here right at the heart of what it means to "do the truth", "to live the truth" or what is fundamentally meant by PRAXIS. And so hypocrisy is often immediately clear to an astute and sensitive listener.  We are right to turn away from such bogus oratory and mere rhetoric.  

I write about oratory, real oratory in that sense of linking in with the passion for justice which the speaker evokes in our hearts.  Obviously, good speakers can also evoke hatred in the hearts of his listeners as did the likes of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, but they were mere manipulators of base emotions, not evokers of a passion for justice and truth.  Real orators touch us deeply at a centre of truth, at a centre of compassion, not at a centre of base emotions like hatred and greed, power and conquest.  Sophistry, of course, is even worse, as it is the use of clever but false arguments, especially with the intention of deceiving.

Abraham Lincoln (1809 -1865) said much and did much, but his was never an idle or thoughtless oratory - no, it was oratory in the true sense that I have adumbrated above - his words came from his heart and from how he lived his life on a daily basis, with a conviction always to do his best and to follow the light of his conscience. I like the following words from this great man:

I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.

Or take the words of our own Irish Catholic Liberator, Daniel O'Connell (1775-1847): "Nothing is politically right which is morally wrong."

Abe Lincoln

What put these thoughts on real oratory into my head was reading an article in a recent edition of The Irish Times on the great American orator Frederick Douglass (1818? - 1895), who has links with both Lincoln and O'Connell. The journalist Barry Roche recently wrote an interesting and illuminating article on Douglas in the Irish Times: Douglass was honoured in Waterford some days ago when a plaque was unveiled to mark a speech he gave in the city during a lecture tour of Ireland in 1845.   While here, the great orator met and befriended our great Catholic Liberator, and it appears that O'Connell influenced Douglass greatly especially with respect to the non-violent achievement of freedom for human beings of all colours and creeds.  Barry Roche quotes him in the above linked article, and it is worth re-quoting in full here:

“I am covered with the soft, grey fog of the Emerald Isle. I breathe, and lo! the chattel becomes a man. I gaze around in vain for one who will question my equal humanity, claim me as his slave, or offer me an insult,” he later wrote in My Bondage and My Freedom

President Obama has said that Douglass' Irish experience "defined him not as a colour but as a man."

Our Workaday World

Daniel O'Connell

All of the above is not worth a curse, unless it influences how I live and work on a daily basis, how I treat others, how welcoming I am of all the differences I meet in them. I am tasked as a Resource Teacher with treating all students, no matter what their ability, with equal dignity and respect.  Today, thankfully and wonderfully, indeed, Ireland is no longer mono-cultural or monochrome. Thankfully and wonderfully, it is multicultural and technicolour. Our country has been enriched by the influx of people of many nations since the growth and decline of the Celtic Tiger years.  This is a powerful cultural legacy which will serve only to enrich and strengthen our traditions.  There is much unity in diversity.  Their is no little discovery of what makes us different as Irish and what makes us all the same no matter what the colour of our skin or the shades of our beliefs are.  We need great orators in the sense that I have described them to inspire us to cherish and protect all life, human, animal and vegetable.  When the great orators of the future speak, and speak they must, their topics will be broader than human rights and human dignity.  Their subject will be, I believe, the very survival of our planet.  But that, alas, is a topic for another post.  Let us, in the meantime, ponder the words of the great orators of today and yesteryear and be inspired to work for justice in the world and the equality of all.

Journal of a Soul 37

Ageing

I am on the left above, about 4 years of age.

A colleague at work says he does not mind growing old, quite simply because once you're ageing at least you are still alive.  I recall the great jazz musician, artist and art critic, George Melly (1926-2007) once stating that he took a certain satisfaction from visiting graveyards and looking at the headstones and breathing a sigh of relief that he had managed to outlive so many.  I remember another friend of mine, an old Christian Brother, who had been Provincial Leader of the Northern Province of Irish Christian Brothers for some time remarking that the older brothers used always opine that as one aged it was "either the legs or the head which go first."  Presumably, they were referring to either the loss of bodily motion in the first case and the onset of senility or dementia in the second.  I also remember his remarking that a certain Brother simply "had not grown old gracefully."  

I recall also my Aunt Noreen, who had spent nearly forty years nursing and is still hail and hearty (and playing golf) remarking to me that old age is "a cross we will all have to bear, and a heavy one at that." And indeed, growing old is not nearly so easy a task as one might think. Readers of this wee blog will know that my own mother passed away during the summer just gone at the grand old age of 96.  However, while she lived to such a good age, she had spent the last 11 years of her long life in a nursing home just gradually fading away into a world of very little recognition of anyone around her.  However, her doctors and nurses described her last years as being happily demented, thankfully, as many demented people can become quite angry and agitated.

A colleague of mine, referring to another female colleague, who spends a lot of money on appearing "young", says that this particular person will certainly not grow older or old in a graceful or easy manner.  It is widely believed that this person uses Botox.  However, be that as it may, what is at issue here is humankind's propensity to deny growing old...to our detriment indeed as denial is surely destructive of the inner being.  To deny any truth is to sow the seeds of disillusionment, depression, and even despair.

Acceptance 

Me an my brother.  I'm on the right, about 13 years.

Acceptance is hard task.  Oftentimes we seek to understand what life has thrown at us and what it is doing to us and we drive ourselves to near distraction in trying to come to grips intellectually with it.  However, oftentimes it is the ability to accept what life does to us that may help us through a period of disturbance and turmoil, or through a period of either physical or mental pain.  Now, I am not arguing for blind acceptance here.  To my mind, blind acceptance is useless, as it is a mere fatalism which will simply take no action and let everything happen without any striving to help oneself.  No, what I mean here is that acceptance which acknowledges whatever calamity has befallen us, accepts it as having happened, but which then positively and courageously embraces a future that does not give up on one's inner potential no matter how deeply one has suffered.  The type of acceptance I have in mind is a sort of realism coupled with a large dose of optimism and indeed hope.  I am certainly not arguing for the acceptance shown by Mary Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's wonderful tragedy of a family bedevilled by addiction in its many forms - the opium addiction of Mary and the alcoholic addiction of her son Edmund, if my memory serves me correctly here.  Mary's acceptance is nothing short of fatalism and a passive giving into what life throws at us.  Her lines run: 

"James! We’ve loved each other! We always will! Let’s remember only that, and not try to understand what we cannot understand, or help things that cannot be helped - the things life has done to us we cannot excuse or explain.”  

There is much fatalism and absolutely no sort of realism coupled with the optimism and hope I have alluded to above.  For me, acceptance is like a diving board from which I have to have the courage to launch off into the unknown deep (future).  (See both these posts by two different bloggers on this play and on Mary's character and her addiction: Seven Pillars and Still Point).

Therapy Work

Me, in more recent times, enjoying my favourite beverage!

I do a little counselling at work as I have done several courses in that area.  I am sufficiently well-trained  to know when to recommend students to see professional counsellors or more specialist psychotherapists.  I also have developed good listening skills over years of practice both at training courses and in my line of work as a Resource Teacher.  One pupil came to me once in a state of complete nervous agitation and with a very troubled sleeping pattern.  I got him to list all the feelings he had over the particular incident with the particular person.  I got him to see how each of these feelings were linked with specific thoughts about both, and how such feelings were quite natural.  Then he wrote the following: "I hate myself!"  I explored this feeling with him and what it meant.  Then we went to the situation and the other person who was involved in the situation and I asked him was that feeling really based on a very acceptable thought.  He agreed that it was based on a very irrational thought: "I should be hated!"  "Why should you hate yourself based on what happened or continues to happen?  I see why you are angry, frustrated, annoyed etc etc and these are all reasonable feelings in the circumstances, but hating yourself, what basis has it at all in the situation you find yourself in?"  This type of clarification of his thoughts and feelings worked as the boy came back to me the following day and stated: "My situation has not changed one bit, but I feel a little better!"  In other words, I will work with him by listening to him when he comes to me for help.  I will attempt to help him accept certain facts that he can do nothing about. However, I will help him to see that he can choose how to respond to any situation he finds himself in.  I will empower him insofar as possible to see that sometimes (possibly not in every situation as that would, I think, be unrealistic and would set the client up for a fall) he can choose to decide how he feels about X, Y or Z.  One thing, I never do, nor would any counsellor worth his/her salt, is to offer any type of "ideal" or definite solution to the problems brought.  I merely listen and say that what we will try to do together is to understand as best as we can what is going on in the situation and to see if there are any ways we may possibly improve the situation.  I normally point out, because it is not always obvious to the client, that there are certain things about the presenting problem which one will not be able to change.  I normally ask a question like, "Is there anything you can change at the moment?"

Proactive Acceptance

Let me name here what I attempt to do with my students in the above situations as "proactive acceptance."  I started this post talking about ageing, and indeed all of the above is really about that even if it seemed that I went off the point somewhat in talking about acceptance in general. There are indeed many good things about growing old: growth in knowledge of all types, growth in wisdom; a certain peace of mind that you have worked hard to earn all that you have achieved to date, and a great pride wells up in one insofar as one has earned all that by the sweat of one's own brow.  There are times when I say to myself some such understandable nonsense like: "Jesus, I wish I could go back to 1980 and start teaching again with all that I know now!"  Of course, I know that this an utterly ridiculous wish, though thoroughly understandable.  Age is the price we pay for experience; the price we pay for wisdom; the price we pay for whatever success we have eked out of life over the duration of our so far allotted years.

And so there are many times I moan about the stiffness of my arthritic bones and joints in the morning as my two alarm clocks rattle me awake from dreamland.  Yes, there are times one wishes one could lie longer in bed/  Yes, there are times one feels like throwing in the towel.  I have mentioned in this and other blogs that I suffer from clinical depression and have been on a relatively low strength antidepressant for the past 15 years.  However, in all that time I think I may have missed one or two days at most from work.  What I have learned is to be good to myself, to rest as much as possible, never to take on tasks that drain me and which I hate, to say "no" at least as often as I say "yes", to exercise regularly, to eat well, to think positive thoughts, to meditate, to engage in activities that I enjoy, to read and to write and to do as much soul work as I possibly can.  All of this can be called my "proactive acceptance" of my mental health situation.  I never let any debilitating self-pity creep in as that is simply soul-destroying.

The Truth That Sets Us Free  

If one studies any of the great religious traditions of the world and strip away the more denominational attire one will arrive at a very positive psychology. (Admittedly, you will have to prune the likes of the Old Testament and the Koran with a strong secateurs, but the task is worth doing.)  Basically, they are all about being true to the self (or soul).  Let's call all the religious language mere metaphor and simile.  There can be no self-acceptance without facing the bare truth about the naked self, that is the self stripped of its many masks and the uniforms of its different societal roles.  As an old friend said to me once about making any important decision in life: "If you can live with your SELF after that decision, then it is a good one."  

As I mentioned the great play Long Day's Journey into Night above, let me finish with an ad rem longer quotation from it in conclusion: Once again it is Mary Tyrone who is speaking:

I don't blame you. How could you believe me – when I can't believe myself? I've become such a liar. I never lied about anything once upon a time. Now I have to lie, especially to myself. But how can you understand, when I don't myself. I've never understood anything about it, except that one day long ago I found I could no longer call my soul my own. (2.2.132)

Journal of a Soul 36

As if People Mattered

People who matter: Two of our Spanish students at School

If the reader has been following these musings in this blog, s/he will know that the above title is in fact the subtitle of a book alluded to in my last post, viz., Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (1973). In Ireland, at present, we are facing into yet another austerity Budget on Tuesday next: our Minister for Finance Michael Noonan has said €2.5bn is to be taken out of the economy in the Budget and not the projected €3.1bn. This is, of course, no reason to celebrate because, after five years of austere budgets and growing hardships, the Irish Exchequer is still spending a billion euro more every month than it is collecting in taxes.  Whatever way one looks at it, these figures simply don't add up. It is, indeed, hard to square this huge economic circle.  And yet, it is important to state loudly in answer to the contention of the late great Brian Lenihan, Jnr., our erstwhile Minister for Finance,, that many of us simply did not party while The Celtic Tiger was roaring.  However, it is also unquestionable, indeed, that many others did party.  Some "Paddy Irishmen" took to their new-found wealth through unlimited credit and unsecured loans like a an addict to alcohol or drugs.

Can Economics be Ethical?

People who matter: Myself and two senior students at school

Human beings are more than economic units, much more.  There is more to happiness and success than the amount of one's earnings or the size of one's bank account.  That money does indeed buy privilege of all sorts goes without questioning.  Middle class parents can buy their children grinds for State Examinations and they do so readily.  One young boy I know had five separate teachers coming to his house to get him through his exams.  Now he did, indeed, get the results.  The point I'm making here is that the children I teach who attend a disadvantaged inner city school can often not afford the price of their school books, never mind pay for grinds. The Vincent de Paul often advance some of our pupils the money to go on school trips or tours, and the ones we go on are not terribly exclusive.  However, the real fundamental question behind all these anecdotes I am recounting here is the question in the above sub-heading: Can Economics be ethical.  Our Uachtarán, Micheál D Ó hUiginn believes it can.  Speaking at a public lecture (Wednesday September 11, 2013) in Dublin City University on the topic of "Toward an ethical economy," he stated:

(M)y Presidency.... seeks to develop an ethical discourse that places human flourishing at the heart of public action.... I would like – tonight – to focus in particular on the relations between ethical reasoning and economic thought...

This speech proceeds like a third level lecture, replete with learned quotations and references to contemporary academic sources.  That it was delivered before a university audience is possibly the reason.  Our President, or Uachtarán is a scholar and academic as well as a former (Labour Party) Minister. He has always been renowned for his commitment to social equality issues and for his defense both of civil and human rights.  He is also a very passionate individual who speaks with compassion and conviction as well as with erudition and reason.  He continues in this lecture to adumbrate his concern for the well-being of citizens.  To this end he praises Martha Nussbaum's exposition of the teachings of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, especially his ethical teachings as they appear in his Nichomachean Ethics. I have mentioned before in this blog Aristotle's defining "happiness" as "eudaimonia" as the "flourishing" of the human person.  Such flourishing is above and beyond mere economic concerns, while firmly based on such concerns.  Let me add to our President's reflections by suggesting a Maslowian hierarchy here.  Once a human being's economic needs have been met, and this is the firm foundation, other more human concerns are further solidly built upon it.  However, what happened to us Irish during the Celtic Tiger era was to continue greedily to remain at that foundational level only, forgetting all the other human values which both sustain and enhance the human enterprise of "flourishing."  It is, then, that I was somewhat overwhelmed by the President's call for Philosophy to be a subject on our curricula at school.  Perhaps.  However, I'm more convinced that adding a philosophical dimension to each subject might be more beneficial, given the overstretching of today's curricula.  Anyway, let me quote him more fully here:

Our schools’ curricula and pedagogical methods reflect the kind of humanity our society seeks and nurtures. The society we so dearly wish for will not take shape unless we acknowledge the need for an education of character and desires, the need to encourage and support critical reflection and a more holistic approach to knowledge. Specifically, there would surely be considerable merit in introducing the teaching of philosophy in our schools, which could facilitate the fostering of an ethical consciousness in our fellow citizens. (See President )

He then proceeds to quote professor Kathleen Lynch and her colleagues from the School of Social Justice in U.C.D.  These latter put great emphasis on the provision of care for the person in any human community.  That cold Economics allows for this depth of care is a question for disputation.  In any civilized society it certainly should.  Let me quote from the President's speech once more:

As Lynch puts it, “bonds of friendship or kinship are frequently what bring meaning, warmth and joy to life… They are both a vital component of what enables people to lead a successful life and an expression of our fundamental interdependence”...To reflect on the demands of care, love and friendship is to replace the categories of utility, efficiency and self-love with the values of mutuality, long-term commitment, trust and responsibility. It is to conceive of the Other as an end in himself, as a source of non-reciprocal responsibility, in the sense of Emmanuel Lévinas. (See link above)

The President's lecture continues on with multiple references to other learned scholars, but his contention that all human beings have a right not alone to endure on this wonderful blue planet, but also to flourish in the broadest meaning of that concept.  The reification of human concerns by a focus on an Economics, which is heartless and soulless, must be surmounted if we as a community of caring individuals are to do more than merely surviving, if we as a community and as individuals are really to flourish. 

Finding Meaning:

I have stated here many times that we humans are meaning-making creatures and our goal is our self-shaping which we can really only do within the mutuality of a community.  Such meaning can only be found if we work for our mutual flourishing.  This essentially entails that we have a vision for our future; a real hope in the possibilities of tomorrow; a true concern for the well-being of all sentient creatures as well as that of our beautiful Blue Planet, Mother Gaia; a passion for our work to bring this vision about; a conviction and a belief in the worthwhile-ness of the human project, which is always more than mere survival, more than a mere river of genes that flows ever onwards into an unknown future.  No it is more.  It is a mystical, mythic and visionary dream of what we can be, and no less real for all of that: the flourishing of a human community, replete with all those human values that cold economics can not envision, though enhanced with values, can certainly support.

Journal of a Soul 35

As if People Mattered

People who matter: Teachers and Students in my School

In the Comment and Analysis section of today's Sunday Business Post the prophetic economist, commentator and author David McWilliams maintains that "(W)here the nuns and priests led, Irish business should follow." He argues that the trends in the poorest parts of the world are strikingly positive and that "Africa is going to be a major economic growth region in the very near future." (p. n19) These words evoked the following thoughts:

Economy

We definitely lost our way as a nation during the years of the Celtic Tiger.  Greed became the chief deadly sin of which most Irish people became both consciously and unconsciously perpetrators. A friend of mine says that this greed was, in part, an unconscious reaction to the sufferings and many losses we underwent as a people during the Great Famine era.  Poor Paddy was no longer depicted as an ape-like creature who was either inevitably drunk or wielding a shillelagh to knock the brains out of the next person to cross his path, but rather a world-recognized entrepreneur with vision, power and newly gained wealth.  

Many years ago I read, as all idealist young people did at the time, that wonderful little classic Small is Beautiful (1973) by by the British economist E.F. Schumacher.  The title "Small Is Beautiful" became a catch-cry for idealists and romantics rather than for entrepreneurs who always subscribed to words like "maximum", "big", "huge" and "great," especially when coupled with the noun "profit."  The catch-cry "Small is beautiful" is often used to champion small, appropriate technologies that are believed to empower people more, in contrast with phrases such as "bigger is better".  The subtitle appealed further to the humanitarian and Romantic in me:  "A study of Economics as if People mattered."  The "as if" has always stuck in my mind as an idealist who saw that entrepreneurs and those in power invariable did not put people first; that they didn't really believe that people mattered despite their many loud declarations that they did; they merely acted "as if."

As a teacher of secondary pupils who are on the Autistic Spectrum and as a Learning Support Teacher for the less intellectually able student, I see the effects of the recent cutbacks on my students.  Not alone are students not getting adequate supports, but many simply cannot afford to pay for their books.  As we now are monitored so closely by the troika of EU, IMF and ECB and are asked to cut ever more meat more from the "national joint" despite the fact that we are practically down to bare bone." "Economics as if people mattered" indeed.  Why, indeed, are we not convinced that year after year of further austerity will work.  You don't have to be a mathematician to see that the figures will never add up.  So who's fooling whom?  Why play such an obviously disingenuous game? Why even believe all these obvious lies we are told?

Tradition 

Old Black and White pictures from the "Old Days" - Tradition

Tradition is something vibrant and living.  It is never stagnant.  It is not something that we solely inherit from some isolated period in the past.  Rather it is something which advances and grows naturally and organically.  For sure, the nuns and priests who went out to Africa and other far-flung missionary territories were imbued with Christian fervour and a desire to help the less fortunate.  Modern missionaries are more attuned to the cultures among whom they work and realize the importance both of inculturation and of working collaboratively with other Christian and non-Christian religions.  The old concern with converting the multitudes is long since dead and gone.  Now the emphasis is on working collaboratively to create a better world under the Christian vision.  I remember, in a recent televised documentary, one wonderful religious sister in the heart of some African country insisting that even if God did not exist she could not leave the work she was doing as she felt she had a duty to help others.  So religious motivation can also be human motivation.  And in the words of the Angelic Doctor St Thomas Aquinas, "grace builds on nature."  Even though I'm quoting this medieval theologian, I am going to take my own meaning out of his words. Now, I do realize that I am reading a meaning into his words which he could never agree with way back in the thirteenth century.  What I am getting at is that deep down our ordinary human experience can lead onward or deeper into religious experience, that in that sense "grace builds on nature."  And yet, if one loses one's belief in this or that idea of what or who God may be, you might fall back on the common denominator, i.e., that humanity in its essence and in its existential manifestation really matters and that it confers its own dignity upon itself from within, not from without.  In other words, in a world of many and various systems of belief and indeed of none, the human being matters, really matters, and is its own conferral of meaning. 

We in Ireland have a wonderful spiritual tradition based on the twin principles of (i) hospitality and (ii) welcome.  A visitor who came to the door was always to be seen as an "alter Christus" or "another Christ."  The Celtic Christian, therefore, welcomed the stranger into his/her house and shared whatever little they had with them.  Both hospitality and welcome are still cherished widely among the Irish.  No wonder Ireland is also known as "Ireland of the Welcomes." 

David McWilliams article is good and the editor has illustrated it with a wonderfully large coloured picture of planet Earth, of great Gaia herself.  The picture speaks of wonder, hope, beauty, truth, stillness, purity, lack of pollution and defilement, of a fitting home for humans and indeed of animal life of all kinds.  It presents a fitting contrast to the underlying greed of economics hinted at in the main article.

Maybe someday, as children of Mother Gaia, we can muster the courage to promote an economics as if people and animals and the earth really did matter.

Journal of a Soul 34

Shocked

Grey clouds will come....

There is nothing quite so sobering as a shock, a deep existential shock.  Let me explain.  I was chatting with a fellow staff member over lunch one day during last week, which, as it turned out, was a rather enjoyable, though tiring, average working week as would occur in any busy school, when she told me the following story about a student I once taught.  Let us call him Luke so as not to identify him and also let me paint in just a little of the background. Luke worked part-time in a well-known retail outlet while he was at school and continued to work there full-time after he left school.  One day in November 2006 he doused himself in petrol and set himself alight in the toy department of that store.  His burns were so horrendous that he died practically immediately.  I'm sure the customers in the store that fateful morning must have been disturbed, deeply disturbed.  I had previously heard a rumour that Luke had ended his life, but had refused to believe it, writing it off as idle, if dreadful and disgusting, gossip as my experience of this boy in the classroom, on a school tour to France and in the retail outlet was always pleasant.  He could have been no more than early to mid- twenties at the time of his suicide.

Anyway, Luke was a good average student who seemed to get on relatively well with his fellow students and who did well enough in his Leaving Certificate to continue on in a "middle of the road" course in college, though to my knowledge he never pursued any academic route.  I taught him both the Irish language and Religious Education.  He had a brother in the school who was far more problematic insofar as this particular lad was almost totally lost in his own world and was almost completely uncommunicative.  This boy would now be diagnosed as belonging somewhere along the ASD spectrum.  In those days we had no ASD unit in our school (and knew very little about special education) - we do now, and I am a trained Resource teacher who specialises in that disorder among other educational disabilities.

As I shop quite regularly in the retail outlet where Luke worked I did miss him, but thought merely that he had moved on, got a better job, or gone to college.  Hence the above story shocked me to the core.  In short, I experienced a deep existential shock.  I have one memory of Luke and me playing basketball on the one team against another teacher with some other pupils somewhere in France on a school trip.  For some reason I can still see Luke visibly in my mind's eye on that basketball court.  He was a good gentle soul and a reasonably good looking smart young man.  What could have led him to such a lonely and excruciatingly painful end?

Beyond Debate

Compassion is needed

For those of you who are loyal readers of these posts you will have read my previous ones on the "beyond debate" nature of many existential themes.  You will have read my thoughts and reflections on how human existence is such a complex reality that it can never be reduced to the parameters of an intellectual debate. This is my big theme, the central theme, indeed, of this very blog.  Existence cannot be reduced by dry logic and be summed up in a clinical equation as my above horrific story illustrates.  The human being is a complex totality like a diamond with many faces: the social, the personal, the emotional, the intellectual, the moral/ethical, the interpersonal, the spiritual, the cultural, the rational, the non-rational, the irrational, the aesthetic and so on and on.  It would seem to me that narrow debaters forget to their detriment the sheer complexity and wonder of the human entity and the sheer heights and lows of the human spirit.  I remember reading somewhere in the works of that wonderful Victorian theologian, John Henry Cardinal Newman, that to seek to comprehend the human being in his/her breadths, heights and depths was nothing short of trying to  "quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk." (i)

In the great universal scheme of things we are minuscule ants on a minuscule anthill called earth, lost in the infinity of space.  How do we cope with the fact that we as thinking and feeling subjects will come to nothing in the end.  Let us hear the words of the great Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard: "I stick my finger into existence - it smells of nothing. Where am I? What is this thing called the world?  Who is it that has lured me into the thing, and now leaves me here?  Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?" (2)

Existential Beings

In short what I am stressing here is that we are exceptionally complex beings who have had existence thrown upon us.  In that very "throwness" (Heidegger) and randomness of life, we are left with the task or project (Sartre) of making some sense and meaning of our little lives. Again, let me argue for the complexity of life that would allow, to our dismay, shock and terror the horrific nature of Luke's painfully lonely act of suicide. This latter topic was always central to existential literature from Dostoevsky to Albert Camus.  Both of these authors had scaled the heights and plumbed the depths of life's sheer complexity, though I hasten to add that neither took that fatal and final choice.  Let me put it this way.  They were both sensitive souls who embraced life in its totality and sought to make it as meaningful as they could for themselves.  As you will observe, I'm leaving their more philosophical musings to one side here.  However, what these authors of this rather amorphous Existential Group of philosophers (I am, like most commentators, loathe to call it a school given the great divergences from the admittedly common themes like alienation, individuality and anxiety to name but three) do offer us is a grappling with the big issues of human existence and considered reflections thereon.  Indeed, a wonderfully real school of psychotherapy has grown out of their grappling and reflections, namely the Existential School of Psychotherapy. Ironically, it is by acknowledging the painful and almost meaningless (note the adverb here please) nature of human life that some meaning is embraced in the client's life. Acknowledging the problematic nature of life, naming it in its sheer nakedness, stripping away all the superficial coverings which only hide and deny the real problems is the road to recovery.  Somehow on the road to recovery, with the help of other human beings we are healed.

Luke's death has shocked me deeply, and the picture of him, larger than life, in his sports outfit, playing basketball lives on in my mind's eye.  These thoughts are my tribute to him. Unfortunately, there was no one there for him to reach out to in the sheer hell of his lonely tormented mind.  Each day that I teach my poor needy SEN students I will think of Luke who had no one to listen to him in his pain.  For me philosophy will never be a game, or an intellectual pursuit alone.  It is and always will be a way of attempting to make even a little sense and meaning of the mystery which human life confronts me with - in its highs and lows; in its heights and depths; in its joys and sorrows; in its apparent randomness; in its occasional serendipity and rare synchronicity; in its rich bounty and supreme splendour; in its littleness and greatness; in its strength and in its brittleness.  St Augustine of Hippo says somewhere that life is a hospital and that it is our duty to care for one another and help heal the wounded soul and the wounded body of our fellow travellers.  In so doing, we are in fact engaged in making it meaningful and allowing a little light of understanding in.     

(i) The full quotation is from The Idea of a University and goes: "Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man." 

(ii) Quoted Lavine (1984, p. 322)